Australians at War Film Archive

Ian Murray - Transcript of interview

Date of interview: 8th October 2003

http://australiansatwarfilmarchive.unsw.edu.au/archive/1043

Tape 1

00:38 So Ian, if you would just like to tell us about your early life?

How early? To start off with, what I was doing before the war and where I went to school and all that sort of thing, is that what you want?

Where were you born, where did you grow up?

Oh, well, I was born in Toowoomba on the 19th

01:00 of November 1921. My people were on the land but I went to school in Toowoomba at the Boys’ Prep [preparatory school] and the Toowoomba Grammar. And after that I went jackarooing and I think I was doing that for about three or four years anyway, at western Queensland.

01:30 I used to work for a big firm called Clark and Tate and they owned a lot of properties in the west. And it was a good job because they used to change you around and you had a change of managers and bosses and all that sort of thing. Anyway, I, ‘41 I decided I’d join up.

Why did you decide to join up?

02:00 Oh I don’t know. It wasn’t patriotic or anything like that, I’d never been that way at all. I thought, ‘Well, everybody’s having a different life so of [what about?] me.’ So I settled for Toowoomba, which is sort of my home town sort of thing, and I met a friend who used to go to school with me, and I was intending to go to Brisbane to join the navy, I don’t know why the navy either,

02:30 but we were having a few beers in the pub and this recruiting officer for the air force turned up and he shouted us a few beers and so we signed up, we weren’t for him but we did sign up with him for the air force. So we went to Brisbane the next day and had a medical and my mate failed so he left me on my own to go in. Anyway, they found something wrong with my nose and I had to have an operation

03:00 before they confirmed they’d accept me. So I went back out to Blackall where I was working and I eventually went down to Rockhampton and got this bit of bone taken out of my nose and then, anyway, I had the certificate to say it’d been done so they said, “Right you’re in.” Then they sent me on correspondence courses for six months or more. You know, a course

03:30 in navigation and all sorts of stupid things like that. And we had a Morse key – do you know what a Morse code key is? – and I used to have to go into the Post Office every couple of months and get the postmaster to get the speed of transmission. I didn’t go very fast, about three words a minute or something. But anyway, they eventually called me up and I went down to

04:00 Brisbane but the course had closed, at Sandgate in those days, which was the initial training school, but it was full up. So there were 10 of us that were dispatched to Bradfield Park in Sydney by train and they were a wild mob, like I knew a couple of them. Anyway, we played poker all the way down and

04:30 two-up in the train with this corporal or whatever he was supposed to be, escort or whatever you call him. Anyway, we were pretty good at it and by the time we got to Bradfield Park he had to borrow a tuppence [two pence] to ring up to get a tender to come and collect us. And they we were in Bradfield Park and just marched around and did all sorts of silly things like

05:00 discipline and marching forwards and backwards. And from there they decided, well, they asked me what I wanted to be, you see, and I said, well, I had no preference about what I going to be, you see. So this old fellow that was the recruiting officer, he was in the Royal Flying Corps at one time and he was also a polo player and he thought anybody who rode a horse could fly

05:30 a plane so his recommendation on this thing [was] that I become a pilot. Anyway, they took his recommendation ‘cause I’d been with horses all my life, sort of thing. So I was sent out to Narromine to fly on Tiger Moths. And I forget what the course, how long it was there but anyway, I eventually get through without any crashes or accidents or anything. And then they ask you again what you want to do, ‘Do you want to

06:00 be, do you want to fly on fighters, single engine or,’ you know, ‘multi-engines and bombers?’ and what have you. So I said, well, I didn’t have any preference, so they said, “Oh well, you’ll go on the multis.” So then they sent me to Point Cook and from there I was flying Airspeed Oxfords, you know, twin engines. And this instructor on those things was an old time pilot, he used to go gold mining in the Northern

06:30 Territory with a [Tiger] Moth or some damn thing, he was as mad as a snake but he was a very nice bloke and he taught us to fly pretty well, actually. But, anyway, I got through there. When you do your service flying you get a rank then, I became a Sergeant Pilot, and you lose your little white thing out of [your] hat, which indicated you were aircrew, because you weren’t aircraftsmen second hand

07:00 in those days before you started off. Anyway, I got my wings at Point Cook. They again asked me what I wanted to do, bomber command or transport or coastal command, or whatever it is now, and I said I didn’t have any preferences. I’m not one of these people that put my foot in it, let somebody else make the mistake, you know. So I said I didn’t mind, so they said, “Well you can do coastal command.” So on

07:30 I went, down to Barnsdale in Victoria for this coastal course, you know, the Naval Reconnaissance Course they called it.

What did that involve?

Well the idea was, they were all pilots down there but one pilot flew the plane today and he navigated the plane, like, the next time, so you were learning, as a pilot, all about navigation which you had to deal with, you know, in coastal command, apparently.

08:00 And anyway, we were flying Avro Ansons, which were terrible old planes, you know, when you took off you had to wind the wheels up yourself or get somebody else alongside you to wind them up and let them down. And when I finished that course, we use to have to, the course consisted of trying to learn

08:30 by, you were, a silhouette all the ships in the Japanese, the German, the Italian and American and British Navy. And, of course, I never, you know, I could tell a three funnel battle from a single one but that’s about all I could do. Anyway, from there we got posted to Bundaberg in Queensland on 66 Squadron and again flew Ansons.

09:00 And we had three in the crew, a pilot, a navigator and a wireless air-gunner. And our job was, from Bundaberg we’d go out with this old Anson with two World War I depth charges on and machine gun, a .303 machine gun out the back, and we used to go out and meet convoys and escort them up the coast from, you know, fly round and round all day and come back again after about four or five hours,

09:30 that’s about the capacity of the fuel we had. And we used to operate that from, the base was Bundaberg but we used to go as far south as Evans Head. We’d escort a convoy or something down there and then we’d land there, spend the night and refuel and then catch another convoy and go right up, we used to go, right up to Townsville we went, swapping over.

10:00 And when the Americans started arriving, we used to go and meet these American convoys coming in, they had soldiers and things on board, you know. And you couldn’t go anywhere near, they, they’d shoot you down if you got within about 20 miles of them, they’d let fire, even if you gave them the signal of the day and everything else. So we were wasting our time, we were going round and round, it was too far out to see anything. Anyway,

10:30 a funny thing happened at Bundaberg one day, they gave us some practice bombs which, they were smoke bombs and you used to have to carry a couple just for practise. And they used to give you some aluminium sea markers which, you drop them and they burst and they put a big aluminium patch on the sea, for half an hour, I suppose, and you used to pretend that was a submarine. My navigator dropped the thing down

11:00 and my wireless operator would yell out, oh, you know, “Submarine!” or something and I used to turn round and try and find the submarine which was this aluminium sea marker. We thought it was a silly idea. One day there was an old ship wrecked on Fraser Island, called the Maheno, I think it was Japanese or something, but anyway, it got wrecked on the sand there. So we thought one day we’d have a proper practice bombing so we went over [with] this smoke bomb and I

11:30 was, oh, about a couple of hundred feet up, and I let this bomb go and I turned round and looked and here’s this smoke coming out of the chimney. And I thought, ‘That was a terrific hit,’ and I was wandering around there and I saw this washing hanging out on the deck and I thought, ‘My God!’ and it was, the VDC [Volunteer Defence Corps] were camped on it. Fortunately, it went down the funnel and didn’t hit the people. But anyway, I avoided them seeing my number but, anyway, they found out I was the only one out there that day so they knew who did it.

12:00 And anyway, I got a sort of a roasting but nothing really much happened, they don’t knock too much out of you, you know you’ve got to be stupid. Anyway, when the Americans got here in full force we were sort of supernumerary because they had their own convoy protection all the way up the coast and there were not too many Japanese submarines about in those days. So we got 12:30 a sudden call back to Melbourne, no, they sent us down to Sale, East Sale, and we were supposed to be converting onto Beauforts. But at that time they grounded all the Beauforts for some problem. They used to call it Death Valley down there for training on them, you see, because every now and again you’d be going around in the thing and then suddenly go straight into the ground. Anyway, they did find out the

13:00 trim wire on the tail trim had a turn buckle, do you know what a turn buckle is? Well, there’s a left right hand thread in it and you put a screwdriver in the slot and you turn it and it pulls it and puts tension on, so you adjust it. Well, apparently these threads used to strip out and then of course you didn’t have any tail trim and that was bad. Anyway, we didn’t do any flying there. We suddenly went to Melbourne and

13:30 then we were put on an old Liberty ship, a cargo thing which the Americans had made especially for the war, and we went to America via the South Island of New Zealand, over the bottom to Chile and up the coast, ‘cause we weren’t escorted, we were keeping out of the way of submarines and God knows what. And it took us about six or seven weeks to get to San Francisco in that thing.

Can you describe the journey over on the ship?

What?

Can you describe the journey on the ship?

14:00 Oh, terrible. Terrible place. This cramped up thing, it was made, it was all welded and it was made purely as a wartime cargo thing and they’d clipped some bunks in this cargo hold, you know, they put some stretchers up and you slept in there. Oh, the food wasn’t too bad but it wasn’t all that good either. But it was boredom and nothing to do. And anyway, we sort of, I suppose we got a bit

14:30 of a shock on the ship. We had an Australian Service Police Guard thing to keep us, you know, in proper trim. But compared to when we arrived in San Francisco, we went out, we all mutinied, so they arrived with all these American service policemen with guns and everything on the deck, and anyway, some Australian

15:00 fellow was stationed in New York, family of transport officer or something, he found out and he came down and he said, “Oh no, no, don’t do something like that, get the band and play ‘Waltzing Matilda’,” and of course the band arrived and played ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and we all got happy again. And nothing happened, we didn’t mutiny or anything, but the Americans sort of thought it was going to be real trouble and, you know, sent armed guards along. If they’d done that it would have been bedlam.

Can you just describe the tension building up to that

15:30 ‘cause I kind of, like you say you were going to mutiny, but can you tell we what the conditions were that led to that?

Oh, well I’ll tell you, boredom and absolutely nothing to do except whittle or something, or, you know. You can’t just stand around all day, forever, for six or eight weeks sort of thing, it was just boredom, I think. And there was no library or anything like that, nothing

16:00 to do except turn up some heels and very cramped space.

You said the food was quite good, what sort of food was it?

Food? Oh damn good because it was American, it was a lot better that ours, you know, they had really good food, ice cream and everything else. And that’s the first thing Americans have, was an ice cream factory and everything, they go in and must have the ice cream. And I don’t know whether you should say that, but anyway.

16:30 What were some of the other meals that maybe you weren’t used to?

I can’t remember exactly what they were but I know that they were much better quality and more variety and everything than the Australian serviceman, in those days, anyway. And they used to, oh no, the crew, the American crew were all prime fat with, you know,

17:00 three lots of ice cream a day and all that sort of thing. I don’t think that’s a very important issue. Anyway, when we got to American, San Francisco, we had about a fortnight sitting there waiting for transport across to New York. So, oh we were allowed out to town all the time and that sort of thing. Nothing very much happened. A couple of us went down to Hollywood for

17:30 a trip and had a look around and I think it was, we met Ava Gardner I think her name was, ever heard of her? She used to act in one of those Tarzan things, you know, where she swung from rope to rope and all that sort of thing, in a leotard or some damn thing. And we thought she was terrific but she thought we were pretty good too. And anyway …

So how did you come to meet her? Where were you?

Oh, I don’t know because

18:00 we went to Hollywood or whatever the place was, I forget who she operated for, Movietone or something like that. Oh they give you a good time if you’re an Australian, the Americans in America, they were terrific people for hospitality and things. Goodness me, they’d do anything for you, and everything. And …

Can you describe some of that hospitality?

Hey?

Can you describe some of those experiences?

What in?

18:30 The people?

Just the hospitality of the people and where they took you and what you saw?

Well I can tell you one case of, I think, a mate, we learnt to fly together and we’re still together there, and he came from Brisbane, George Longland. And George and I sort of got around together all the time, and when we got to New York we somehow, I forget how, we managed to get a couple of girls that take you along to the Latin Quarter.

19:00 The Latin Quarter is one of those very high-ranking sort of nightclub things in New York at the time. So we took them along there, and I can’t think if anything much happened there, but anyway we put these girls on the train, they went home to New Rochelle, or somewhere, which is a fair way out of New York. And the next thing we know, their father wants

19:30 us to go out there and play indoor bowls and he’d hired this, the whole of this damn bowling alley for indoor bowls. And I figure what happened, well, we never turned up. Gee, I was totally concerned about that. This fellow has booked all this thing, and they do those sort of things for you, marvellous people. From Angel Island, it was a sort of a place where they put all

20:00 the troops, I think they put jailbirds and things there now, I’m not sure, we were there for quite a long while, we would go into New York and poke around. And the, we got this American, it was an American liner that, you know, normally had tourists, and there were 30,000 Americans on the ships and about two or three hundred of us.

20:30 A bit overcrowded to heck but they still managed to feed us very well. We arrived in Liverpool during an air raid which, of course, I’d never seen before.

Can you describe that to me?

Describe it? Oh just these bombers up there and all these fellows running round, with flak and guns going off and bombs going off in the distance and it’s the first time I’d even seen anything like

21:00 that except in the movies. And anyway, it didn’t concern us a great deal, we said we wouldn’t miss out. And from there we went to a little place outside Liverpool, sort of a holding camp for people, and from there we used to go to, catch a train from London and all over the place, till eventually I went

21:30 off to Scotland to a couple of courses, what they call Advance Aircrew Training, sort of thing, and that was learning a bit more about how to dodge flak and goodness knows what.

Can you just talk in a little bit more detail about that training?

22:00 Well, funnily enough it was up in the north [of] Scotland and I went back on to flying Oxfords, Airspeed Oxfords, for this course, you see, and then I did another course after that, it was Beam Approach Training and you learnt to bring an aircraft into land without being able to see where you’re going. Some bloke who was there about three storeys down, looking at a screen, told you what

22:30 to do and how to fly the plane until you got about 50 feet up and then they’d say, “Take over.” Well you used to pop your seat up; you used to put your seat down so you couldn’t see out and you’d pop your seat up and take over. I was surprised that every time I was dead on the runway, you know, absolutely right in the middle of it, better than I could have done on my own. And I used to notice all those fellows down there doing, doing that sort of thing.

Was that hard to get used to,

23:00 putting your faith in someone else?

No. Well you’re pretty well trained, you do what you’re told and it isn’t until when you get really at operations they leave you alone, nobody tells you anything, what to do, how to do it, it’s a wonderful system that you’re already sort of trained to take notice of what people say. Right from the start they do

23:30 that, you know. I still now walk up the street, somebody in a certain voice yell out, “Halt!” I’d know which foot to halt on and everything. And stays with you forever, that, but you’d have to have a drill instructor’s voice though. And which, we’ve got a couple over here in Tewantin, we’ve got that. And, but I think there’s a lot of fellows working Anzac Day there, it’s a long time since they’d march and of course I can’t march at all now, but anyway. 24:00 No, this was a very handy thing because later on, it’s terrible weather over there, we used to fly all the year sort of thing, it wasn’t just nice sunny days or something, we were flying in the snow and ice, and having done that course, it was terribly, terribly helpful for me because I had enough confidence in this bloke down below and you really needed him because you couldn’t even find the air run [runway?], and the

24:30 low clouds and goodness knows what. It wasn’t very good flying times, ice, ice on your wings. You’d come in to land and they’d run out with this icing fluid they’d put [it] up the strip, you see, just before you’d go to land they’d run with a thing and spray the stuff on it, defrost the ice, only temporary. Well, the trouble is they didn’t have enough, they only did the first

25:00 quarter of the strip and nobody ever landed on the first quarter of the strip. So everybody, you’d just land the thing and as soon as you go to put the brakes on, away you go around in circles everywhere. And then a fellow came out with a little truck, a little tender thing, and said, with lights on it, saying ‘Follow me’. And, of course, it’s in the fog and you’re trying to catch up so you could read his sign and he’d think you were going to run over him so he’d go faster.

25:30 It was quite a disaster with that sort of thing.

Were there many accidents?

No, we use to … well I’ll tell you the stupid thing they did. You’d taxi in, in the soup, you know, the fog, you couldn’t see where you were going and there’s some bloke in the parking area with a couple of lights, you know, and you’d try to see, and you’d land her, park your plane in there and you’d just tip the other fellow’s wing, the plane alongside you, see,

26:00 just tip it. Five pound fine, it wasn’t my fault but the pilot has to pay. Even the ground crew, you could tell them to pay half anyway. No, they used to have those stupid things like that but then someone you did more than five pounds worth of damage but the fine was five pounds, and that was a fair amount of money in those days. Anyway, no we didn’t. We had a lot of

26:30 crashes in (UNCLEAR) [the squadron], fellows would get shot up and come back with no landing gear and all that sort of thing and so they’d crash land, some of them didn’t walk out but most of them did, you know, walk away. They were very tough airplanes these Beaufighters. Anyway, after all this training business, I was posted

27:00 to this Australian Beaufighter squadron but before that I had to learn to fly the Beaufighters and so they put you on Beauforts, which has dual control in it so you had an instructor, and you do circuits and bumps and flying around in this Beaufort and then you get into the Beaufighters. The instructor would take you up in a Beaufighter

27:30 and you’d stand behind him and he’d tell you where all the parts are, you see. And out he gets and you get in the seat and take off on your own and you’ve never flown one before, but the worst part was, you would change hands with your throttle, your controls. In the Beauforts you used to use throttle with your right hand and your stick with the left, and when you got to the Beaufighter, that changed over, the throttle was in your left hand

28:00 and the stick in the right. So the first few take-offs use to be, you know, pretty hair-raising while you sort of coordinated, which is hard to do really. And, anyway, I managed to get off and fly the thing. And we did a lot of rockets and cannon fire at targets and what have you and the Beaufighter used

28:30 to carry eight rockets, they had four on each wing and it had four cannons in the fuselage, you know, 20 mill [millimetre] cannons, and they were very powerful, it was tough to aim at somebody, you know. And some of them even had eight machine guns in the wings too. But they only had us

29:00 with a pea rifle, .303 World War I machine gun out the back, which wouldn’t be helpful. They were originally built as night fighters and they were very successful with those night fighters ‘cause they had all this power up the front, and they didn’t really want any guns in the back because they were mainly after bombers, you know, coming over with bombs at night. And they put a big

29:30 exhaust, you know – oh, what [do] you call them? – back on each engine and it had a lot of little holes in it, it was a very big thing, and it meant you didn’t show any flame at night time and normally there’d be, exhaust pipe would just go straight out and the flame shoots out everywhere and this one, it covered up the flame because they didn’t want the bombers to see them. And they didn’t make any noise either and when they used them out here in Australia, the Japanese

30:00 called them Whispering Death because they used to come in over the trees before they knew they were coming. And they used to come down low and they’d do about 270 mile an hour or something. So, anyway, it didn’t worry us whether they could see us or not because it was … but our job there was

30:30 flying to Norway and trying to attack these iron ore ships coming out of Narvik. The Germans were buying this Swedish iron ore and running it down the railway line down to Narvik which is a very short distance actually and they’d load these iron ore ships up with stuff and take them down to Germany. And they used to 31:00 hide in the fjord during the daytime and, you know, sail at night and, particularly, you get a nice foggy night and they’d be all coming down by the hundreds. But they used to hide them from the fjord in the daytime and they usually hid with a lot of flak ships and things with, there might have been three or four cargo ships and all these, what they call a flak ship, was just a ship with anti-aircraft guns on them.

31:30 And they used to hide right in against the side of the mountain and they’re five or six thousand feet high and the fjord is sometimes 100 yards across, so our job was, we went in trying to shoot these things and they used to fill the whole fjord up with flak and all sorts of things, even parachutes that had bed legs and wire weights attached so that you’d run into them.

32:00 Let’s see … no, we never got a sort of a, well one day we’d caught one, that had stayed too long at night time, in the daytime and it had froze and he was way up the fjord and it was easy, the poor fellow froze and he couldn’t move and he

32:30 was sitting out the middle of the fjord and that was my first effort actually, I thought it was pretty easy to because they didn’t have any flak ships with them or anything like that. But if you ever went near a submarine, they were, oh, they used to have everything to protect submarines. Anyway, we got

33:00 shot up one day with six German Focke-Wulf 190 fighters, we’d just come out of a sort of a job, and on the way home, and these six fighters caught up with us and we were on our own, unfortunately, and the only way we got out of it, we got hit to billy-o, everything was blown up and shot off

33:30 and, you know, one 20 mill shell blew up in my parachute, which I sat on, another one came in over my shoulder and blew the instrument panel out and another one blew the hydraulic tank up that was about 18 inches from my head. All it did was fill the whole cabin up with white smoke and, anyway. So the only way out of that was to go for low, we went right down the deck; we went up streets of little villages

34:00 on the wing, you know, side on, and the idea was to keep in as close as we could to the hill because they couldn’t get a deflection shot on you. You know, if they put a deflection they’d aim ahead of you for you to run into, well they’d run into the hill. It took us 10 minutes to get away from them …

Can you go into more detail about that, how they were chasing you?

How was?

Can you go into more detail about that?

34:30 You said it took 10 minutes.

Oh this is the part, I don’t know but I find [if] I did more detail [it’s] sort of crowing a bit or something, making out you …

You see, the thing with the archives, though, is it’s all about detail and you’ve got to think, in 200 years someone will want to know these details because everything will be completely different, so it’s very important that you do it …

Well,

35:00 what the detail’s about, because the rest of the force went off in another direction and I was the last man in and when I got out I couldn’t find any of them, so I sort of set off on my own. And all the Mustang escort fighters had gone with the main force so I didn’t have anybody with me. And my navigator, he fired his little peashooter thing out the back and hit one of them, which was, you know, a pretty

35:30 good effort. And he was the most calm bloke I’ve every come across, he was absolutely brilliant. And when I, he gave me directions because I can’t see anything behind, and I got, if you’re trying to fly in amongst the hills you’ve got no time to look in the rear vision mirror, so he used to tell me which way they were coming in, where they were, so I could take the right action and that sort of thing. And he was just 19.

36:00 And he lives up here at Gympie, which [means] we see [him] every fortnight, he comes down. The funny part about it, after the attack we were in a bad way and, you know, I was flat out keeping the plane up because she was sort of all jiggered. And we went from the Shetland Islands, which was the closest bit of non-hostile country, you see,

36:30 I could transmit on the radio but I couldn’t receive, they’d blown the reception part out, apparently. And I was giving everybody a complete description of everything, you know, yelling out, “Mayday!” and goodness knows what. Mayday was the distress signal in those days, I think it still is somewhere. But anyway, and they’d say, “Well where are you?” and I’d never heard them. And so I got to the Shetland Islands,

37:00 place by the name of Sumburgh it was, there was a bit of a strip there but it was just covered in fog. The wind-sock was sticking out of the top of the fog but I couldn’t see the road and so I had to, “Oh well, we’d better try and make base.” We’d gone out of our way to go over to the Shetland Islands. But anyway as soon as I said, “No, you’d better give us a course and we’ll see if we can get home,” this young fellow said to me, “Oh good,” he said, “we’ll be able to show the boys all the holes.” I was that (UNCLEAR)

37:30 didn’t like it, I nearly burst out laughing when this young fellow said, “We’ll show the boys all the holes.” And anyway, we got up, I kept signalling, sending out on the transmitter, but I didn’t know that it was even going but I thought I may as well do that, you know, I’d give them a message and say, “Over,” and nothing would happen. And they heard me all

38:00 right and I told them what sort of problem, that I had no instruments and, you know, you could see holes in everything. So they sent a bloke out to meet us and he came alongside and tried to give us some idea what a normal approach speed was. Anyway, it wouldn’t stay up at that speed, it just sort of, you know.

38:30 So I abandoned him, I told him run off, he was no use to me, sort of thing. Anyway, like the navigator on that …. Well, as I was saying, this chap came alongside but I couldn’t use him. So I made one approach at a speed that the plane would stand in the air

39:00 but it overshot to billy-o, so I went round again and this time I …. Unfortunately, the poor unfortunate crash wagon and the ambulance and everything get down there at the runway and chase you up the runway and, of course, by the time I’d turned round and come back again, they all had come back down the end again. Anyway, this time I went way out to sea and I got down about five or six feet off the sea and I actually flew the plane onto the ground, you know, I was still

39:30 flying when I hit the ground, and anyway it was pretty good, a lot of dirt and stuff come up on the windscreen and …

How nerve-racking was that?

What?

How nerve-racking was that, coming in and crash-landing?

Oh look, I’m surprised, it doesn’t affect me at all, it never did. I don’t know why but anyway.

What about your

40:00 navigator?

No, it didn’t worry him either.

Do you remember what you did after you’d dusted yourselves off?

Well when we came to a halt I had a look out and no fires but I pressed the two extinguishers on either motor, sort of thing. And then I sort of, everything was stopped and I thought, ‘Oh well.’ I was busy collecting all my maps and things you see. And the next thing, my navigator’s jumped out

40:30 of his canopy at the back, he’s in a little canopy thing but he’d let it go before we crashed actually – you’re suppose to do that, you see, but the pilot can’t get out – he jumped up on top and opened the emergency hatch at the top and he had me by the throat, trying to pull me out and I still had my straps on. Anyway, by that time everybody arrived and the crash wagon and the ambulance and the CO [Commanding Officer] and all the,

41:00 you know, people running around when they have a crash, they flock from mile, they come from miles when you have a crash. I remember very distinctly coming in …

41:17 End of tape

Tape 2

00:34 What was the wash up of that crash, like what did you think when you got out and had a look at the aircraft?

I don’t remember thinking terribly much about it at all. I wasn’t sort of shaking or anything, it just was, it was crashed and that was it. I then had to go and get debriefed. We used to get an intelligence officer and half a dozen other people

01:00 question us about the whole damn thing. And then we, well that was the worst part, it took about two or three hours to discuss the whole thing with these chaps, the intelligence officers, sort of thing. And eventually I got loose and we went and had a beer. We went down the pub and had a beer and that was it.

Did you ever go back and have a look at the plane and the damage that was done…?

Oh yeah, I got Fred to go and see everything.

01:30 Yeah, I sort of, it’s usually left on the ground there for probably a week before they get around to towing it away somewhere. And what happens to that aircraft?

Oh it would be a write-off, they would probably pull the compasses and a few other things out of it, then I don’t know what they’d do. I didn’t see any fires or burning or anything. But no, it would be a write-off. Anyway, the,

02:00 we went exactly a week later and got done over again by two Messerschmitts that time but fortunately these Canadians, I think, in Mustang fighters, they sort of rescued us and chased these Jerries [Germans] off.

Did they get you to do a solo flight first after the crash?

Oh,

02:30 well they do that if you do something courageous. Oh not courageous, but the worst thing in the world, they pop you on two days [after] this crash to do a reconnaissance flight on my own, no fighter escort, you were out on your own, you’ve got your navigator. And they give you a route, you’ve got to go up and down these fjords and try and find targets, you see.

03:00 And the whole time you was, you don’t look for targets, you look to see if there’s any aircraft coming. Anyway, we didn’t get into trouble and we eventually got back. But that, to my mind, they say it was a good thing to do because after I’d done that everything had relaxed and I didn’t think any more about anything, but I thought it was stupid. Anyway, the next time we,

03:30 oh, we attacked a submarine down the fjord and there was only two of us that saw the submarine, and you went in on an attack on a submarine, you know, they wanted to know down in Admiralty all about it too, see. They’d get all sorts of interpreters up and cross-questioning and goodness knows what, seeing if you know what the colour of the captain’s eyes was.

04:00 Anyway …

In a normal sortie, when you go out on a sortie how many aircraft are in that?

Twenty or thirty, that’s on an attack, plus probably 10 or 12 fighter escort. And trailing is an Air Sea Rescue Warwick. They used to drop

04:30 sort of lifeboats with three parachutes, you know, and they used to land, hopefully near the bloke and the wind didn’t blow it away. But I don’t know of anybody that ever got, I’ve see a few blokes, witnessed some ditching, and they ditched all right and then one of them would get in the dinghy that used to fly out of the wing just on contact, but then they usually froze to death. And they didn’t

05:00 sort of …. Anyway, the Air Sea Rescue Warwick used to come along and hopefully save somebody. I think they did save a few German crews though, which was lucky. Anyway, we did a few more trips, that was on the 14th of April, that one when we got the submarine, and the war finished,

05:30 I think, on the 8th of May in England.

How did you engage that sub?

How?

How did you engage the sub once you saw it?

Oh, just go in with your cannons and your rockets and it’s tied up against the wharf, or something, down there in amongst the, well, a submarine, they’ve got what they call flak ships, they were any old tug boat, but they mount anti-aircraft guns on it and they …. Oh, tremendous,

06:00 you know, you see all this … and they used to come right up the windscreen and the tracer bullets would just go around the side and sometimes you didn’t see the one that hit you, but never mind. No, I didn’t like tracer bullets much, I think it’s much fairer …

What was the noise like when all that stuff is going off around you?

Oh, you didn’t hear that, you only heard you own. But when you fired off the, in a Beaufighter you had these eight rockets

06:30 and you could regulate it, you could fire two at the time or four at the time, or whatever, till you see, or eight at the time. Sometimes the switch didn’t work on one side and it did on the other. Well then, when that rocket lit it, you know, it pushed itself off the rack underneath, but until they went off, you’d fire your rockets and then

07:00 you’d get another 20 mile out of the plane straight away, it was a rocket ship until they took off. And the other thing’s, you had these 20 mill cannons mounted just down alongside the pilot, and when you let them go four at a time the plane used to pull up about 20 mile an hour with the recoil, so you’d want to fire your guns just on the stall or you would go, you’d go for a burn or something, but it’s quite a tremendous din and all, 07:30 these 20 mill shells used to sort of fill up the cockpit behind, and smoke and God knows what, but dear, it made an awful noise. But they were very, very, they were very effective on, you know, keeping the air gunners down, they didn’t like them, and the worst part of it was, the last man in used to cop the lot because when they saw there was nobody coming they’d all jump back up and fire again at him and the last man in had

08:00 a terrible job because he got all the stuff.

And when would the camera operate, would that operate automatically?

You could fire it yourself on purpose or if you fire your rockets or your cannon the camera goes off automatically. It wasn’t a movie but they got so many frames per minute or second or something that they could tell if you were going to hit or not, you know, even if they got to a

08:30 rocket going on its way down, sometimes you’d get the rocket on its way down, sometimes you’d get the rocket when it hit and sometimes after it hit. But they …

So how did you go with that sub?

Oh I think we hit it but there was two of us doing it and I don’t know. Nobody ever claimed anything, you know, because it’s one of those things. Like they used to

09:00 shoot all the aeroplanes down in the pub and rape all the WAAFs [Women’s Auxiliary Air Force] in the air, it was one of those silly stupid things people do. Anyway, we finished up doing the last flight for the squadron, my navigator and I did,

09:30 we were out looking for lost fellows in dinghies, or something like that, and it was the last flight of the squadron. And actually I was on leave on VE [Victory in Europe] Day, I was down at Kent, and these people I used to stay with down there, he had something from somewhere because he got extra petrol tickets, and we drove up to London and we stood outside the gates of Buckingham Palace and, you know, thousands

10:00 of people turned up and it was quite amazing. It was an amazing thing to see those people in London. And the first time I went down there on leave, they had these doodlebugs – I don’t know whether you know what a doodlebug is? It was a flying bomb and it had a rocket motor on them and the Germans had them, all these bases along the French coast would fire them off on ramps. And they were worked out, you know, when to stop the motor,

10:30 and then they’d stop and nosed on into London and a big percentage went in to London, some of them went wrong and went out in the bush and killed a rabbit or something, they reckon. But the first time I ever saw one of these things going over and I thought, ‘What the heck,’ you know, ‘a flying bomb?’ but nobody’s, walking about, they’re all just walking around, no trouble, no. But then when you hear the motor cut out, oh boy, you see them go down the, you know, the

11:00 tunnels. Londoners were amazing people for, they got used to it and they didn’t sort …. Then a lot of people used to get ‘bomb happy’ they called it and they used to send them out in the scrub, their kids, they’d send them out and hire them out to families and things to get them away from bombs. Anyway,

11:30 when the war finished, oh, they sent me off on an Aircrew Officers’ Training School course ‘cause I’d just become an officer, I was a non-commissioned pilot all the action and then they were going to make me a pilot officer. So I went to this school and they wanted me to join the RAF [Royal Air Force] permanent.

12:00 Anyway, I didn’t, but I went to this thing and they went back to marching and all this sort of procedure, like which hand to pour the wine with, which I thought was absolutely silly. And here am I, the only bloke, all the rest were young fellows back from Canada who’d just learnt to fly and the war finished so they were included in this lot, and here am I, walking around with, you know, scars, battle scars all over

12:30 the place and it just was terrible and I didn’t take to people telling me what to do in those days.

But how many sorties did you fly before the end of the war there?

Oh, I think it was 27, 28.

And how did you hear about Victory in Europe?

Oh it was on the, oh everybody knew about it, you know, it was on, BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] told you,

13:00 and I was on leave. As a matter a fact, I used to go down to Kent and stay with people, right from the very start I got onto this Lady Frances Ryder Scheme, and the Lady Frances Ryder Scheme was organised by Lady Frances Ryder and she had, a lot of her fellow British peers and things volunteered to take Australian troops in on leave, you see. Not everybody,

13:30 my sort of navigator and everybody else went to Blackpool and whizzed around on those stupid, you know, whiz-gig things, you know, but that wasn’t in my alley, that sort of thing. So once I got to go down to Kent and I’d stay with these people. I used to ride horses and just walk around in the scrub with the bushmen and countryside (UNCLEAR) they call them. And we’d call into the little Fox and Hound pub and have a few beers and talk

14:00 to the locals.

How did you find out about the Lady Ryder?

Oh they’d give you a thing as soon as you arrived in England, they’d hand them out to overseas troops. I spent all my life in the bush and I didn’t want, you know, I thought Luna Park in Sydney was a stupid place and I still do. Probably

14:30 what’s ‘er names, Australia’s zoo, I’m not into that sort of thing. So I used to, when I was on leave I used to hire a horse and until this fellow down the stable, he used to breed racehorses but as a bit of an income he used to hire horses out to go riding, and people do that, and I could ride pretty well myself, being on the land

15:00 all the time. Anyway, he gave me this young racehorse one day, and to get out of his stable you had to go up the main street of this little village, you see, and all these convoy trucks came past with flapping tarpaulins and things. Anyway, he’d spent most of the time going through shop windows and up on the footpath and everything. When I got back, I said to this bloke, “I should charge you for riding that horse, don’t you charge me.” He said, “Why?”

15:30 I said, “The bloody thing took off down there and it wasn’t, you know.” He said, “Oh well, next time, any time you come back, it’s free.” So every time I came back I used to get free horses and he didn’t charge me. We used to just go, you know, rides in the countryside.

You said earlier that one of the flight instructors reckoned if you can ride a horse you can fly a plane, do you share that opinion at the end of your flying career?

Was that the end of it?

No, no did you share that opinion

16:00 that …?

Oh, to some extent flying has got a lot to do with balance, you don’t actually, particularly if you, you know, you get a turbulence or something and the wing drops, it’s like on a horse, if he shies at something you go with it and you’re able to do that. I think a horseman would be a good pilot. But anyway, I don’t know, I suppose

16:30 there are plenty of other fellows that, well a lot of people I knew had ridden a thing and they weren’t horsemen and they never came back and I don’t put that down to being a horseman or not. No, my best mate, he went in very close towards the end of the war. Poor chap he was, as a matter of fact I can show you

17:00 afterwards, there’s a, like a, I’ve still got my 1945 diary and I decided to copy some of the things out of it and I’ve got a list like that of who didn’t come back and what happened, you know.

Did you see him go in or did you just hear about it?

Oh no, you know about it, you see them, you see blokes you know dive, you see them ditch, you see fires suddenly start up in an engine or something.

17:30 Although I never did, I always feel very sad for the fellows who didn’t come back, it doesn’t worry me, but it’s, terribly sad about it. ‘Cause I went to see this George Longland’s people when I came back and

18:00 they didn’t want to know me. I knew they were distressed over it but it was terrible. And that’s the worst thing I ever found being in the air , they just sort of, well you’re just lucky you’re here, he isn’t, you know. And then on the squadron

18:30 that I was on down in Bundaberg, there were quite a few pilots from there that got transferred with me into that same squadron and I’m the only one that got back. Anyway, on the, when the war finished and I’d done this Officers’ Trainee’s Course sort of thing,

19:00 and I didn’t feel like signing up for the RAF, they sent us all home. And we arrived in Melbourne and we pulled in there, we were on our way to Sydney but they pulled in Melbourne to let the Melbourne, Victorian people off first, sort of thing. And someone had written across the wharf in big letters across the roof of the wharf, ‘Welcome home Jap dodgers’. You know, I just wonder who the heck

19:30 did a stupid thing like that?

I wonder what they thought you were doing?

Huh?

I wonder what they thought you were doing, you were off fighting the Germans? Oh, dodging the Japs, never mind.

So was there a thought, victory in Europe and you were in England, was there a thought to get back home and get into the fight against the Japs?

Well we had to, there was no way of getting back here. As a matter of fact, the Australians’ air force didn’t do much after the Americans got here, they just took over.

20:00 And I think that’s why we went to the UK [United Kingdom] because the Americans had their own coastal commander and God knows what. They were terribly well equipped, the Americans. They came in the hundreds and thousands and, you know, if they sent one bomber out they sent about 50 escort fighters with it. And it was the other way around, you’d get 50 bombers over in the UK and one escort fighter goes with you.

20:30 Anyway, I got my discharge in Sandgate, Brisbane and they gave me a three months’ rail warrant, First Class rail warrant, to go anywhere I wanted to go. So another friend of mine, who I knew in the UK and I knew him beforehand, he was also a jackaroo beforehand, and so we went on this

21:00 trip around Queensland on this rail warrant thing, we had a good time actually. We went everywhere the train would go and then mail cars in between. And then we went, we got back and I sort of went on the land, got my own place down at Texas, do you know where that is? And I was there for 30,

21:30 36 years, I think it was, on the place. I gave it away to come down here. I became the Mayor, or the Shire Chairman, out there and a few other things like that, on the UGA [United Graziers’ Association] and the Grain Growers and went to Adelaide one time with two loads of live sheep that the wharfies wouldn’t put on the …

What happened there?

Hey?

What happened there?

Oh, they were loading these live sheep in those days,

22:00 I don’t know what the dispute was but the wharfies refused to load them, see. So this United Graziers’ Association, they decided to send a team down and load them up. By that time, I’d left the UGA I belonged to the Cattlemen’s Union, because some of us had a bit of a row with the United Graziers Association, we formed the Cattlemen’s Union, we

22:30 were a bit of a militant mob, you know, but anyway. Very kindly I, the fellow still running the UGA in the area, he’s a good mate of mine, and he said he was short a man and I thought, ‘Oh well, I’ll go with you.’ They paid me a fare down and everything. But the funny part about it, when these other fellows knew I was the Cattlemen’s Union, they didn’t like me very much ‘cause they were at loggerheads, the two. On the way down

23:00 I was following along and I tipped the hostess girl, I said, “Listen, would you go up the front and ask the captain up there whether he would radio down to Adelaide Airport and see if there’s a certain fellow on duty there?” And he was a navigator on our squadron, you see, so anyway, the hostess went, it was about five or ten minutes, and she came back and she said in a fairly loud voice, “The captain wants to see you

23:30 Mr Murray, in the cockpit,” and everybody looked at me and they thought, ‘What’s he going to do up there?’ see. And anyway, he got me up there and they had this bloke on the radio and he was surprised to hell that I was coming down so he said he’d meet me. So when we landed at Adelaide, over the loud speakers, “Mr Murray’s wanted at the Duty Pilots’ Tower,” or something, you see. And, oh,

24:00 they all looked around to see if I was letting the wharfies know or something, you see. Anyway, it was this guy and he kept me up till about 4 o’clock in the morning driving all around the place meeting all his friends and his family and God knows what. And he was the Chief Air Controller in Adelaide in those times but he was a navigator on one of these Beaufighters. And then I, oh we loaded the sheep, I went down

24:30 the pub drinking with the wharfies, there was nothing wrong, it was only the Union Organiser fellows were in trouble but the wharfies were quite sensible sort of people, they couldn’t care less, they only did what they were told, they said. So we drank beer in the pub with them, we put the sheep on and they just stood there and watched. But then, oh, there was another fellow

25:00 that’s still alive, he learnt to fly with me on Tiger Moths and Oxfords and then he got sent to be a second pilot on American Liberators or something, so I never saw him again until this day in Adelaide. And I was waiting in the place there and I see this man coming in line and he said, “What are you doing here?” (UNCLEAR) He said, “Would you like to come with me?” I said, “Where?” He said, “Back

25:30 to Sydney.” I said, “Well, I’m on this aeroplane.” He said, “Never mind, we’ll get off early.” You see, he’s got an aeroplane, you see, a Cessna thing, a pretty good one too. And anyway, he said, “We’ll go straight to Sydney and you can pick you plane up at the airport there,” you see. I told a few people that I wouldn’t be on the plane and went with him. I flew the plane across from there to Sydney, sort of thing. And the funny part about this, the fellows just

26:00 outside Adelaide who breed all those Melbourne Cup winners, I forget his name now, but had a beautiful stable out there and beautiful country, just really was, so we stayed at 100 feet up until we got out to this place and all the time this air traffic controller wanted to know where we are, ‘Why weren’t we up at 5000 foot height?’ “Having a look at the stable and the horses,” anyway.

26:30 But Keith Robey’s his name, I’ve kept more or less in touch with him, I saw him again after the war, when I first got home, and he ran the Bankstown Flying School for years and years, as a matter of fact, he still does, but he’s 86 now, he’s older than I am, and he got his licence taken off him the other day for age.

27:00 But his wife is one of those, another one of those ‘around Australia female flyer’, sort of thing. And, like she’s still working there, Sonya is her name. And I always called him George because Robey, you know, George Robey, the old time American, British comedian fellow, so he’s always George to me. But anyway, George is coming up here before long.

27:30 How long had it been since you’d flown in the Beaufighter until you jumped into that Cessna to fly, what was the break?

Oh I don’t know, a few years I suppose, oh it must have been, yeah, be five or six years.

And what was it like getting behind the stick again?

Oh no thrill, no nothing. No, I sort of …

Was it like riding a bike,

28:00 come back to you?

Oh well, you know I could still fly one of them, I’m pretty sure of it, you know, if need be. But my reaction and my eyesight mightn’t be good enough nowadays but, you know, it’s, it was all, once you got it by the book it was the natural thing to do. You know, if wanted to go that way you just went that way, you didn’t just decide, ‘Now

28:30 I’ll push with the left foot,’ or something, you know.

But did you enjoy flying or did you just see it as a job? How did you approach it?

Well no, well leaving it behind, it wasn’t the flying I missed, the atmosphere, whatever it is. You know, it’s a funny, it takes a lot to get over the, you know, it was like a,

29:00 if you trained somebody to do things it stays there forever more and, that’s the way they did anyway. And that life is something you got so used to, and I still find over here at Tewantin, every Wednesday some of us get together and we have a few beers and lunch, and Norm’s one of them. And there’s another fellow over there,

29:30 he’s an ex Halifax pilot, and all sort of fellows. One fellow was an air gunner on Liberators and he jumped out over Borneo and that same fellow became a physiotherapist, he’s now retired and lives here but he was the physio for four Australian Olympic teams and St Kilda’s football team, and he comes along

30:00 and he has a few beers and lunch and things. We don’t talk about the war, we just, you know, we seem to have some contact somewhere. They’ve got a RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] Association over here which meets once a month for a meeting, sort of thing, but they get some bloke to do a bit of guest speaking or something. But funnily enough, the interesting thing I found, there’s a woman there who was

30:30 actually a Pommy [English] WAAF and she was born in Berlin to English parents and she grew up in Berlin and left there about 18, I think, when the war broke out, they went back to England. And she speaks fluent German and she was based, all during the war, at a place called Montrose which was, you didn’t go

31:00 near Montrose, it was a very secret place and all sort of things. And she used to operate there on the transmitter telling the Germans to go the opposite way to what they were told and things in a very officious German voice. And she turned up the other day, oh, my navigator’s friend, I don’t do those sort of things, my navigator was giving a talk on this adventure with the Focke-Wulf, you see, and

31:30 this Peggy West said to me after, “You know, I heard the whole of that thing from my radio at Montrose.” And I said, “How did you do that?” Well, she said she’d heard about this Beaufighter in trouble and was in trouble for two, three hours, you know, and she said the whole broadcast, I was transmitting but I never heard anything back again but she heard it all. It’s quite surprising that, to find somebody out here that was involved like that.

32:00 No, we get a, oh it’s not the same, oh too much formality and moving motions and seconding this and confirming the minutes and (UNCLEAR) there. Yeah, anyway the …. 32:30 Well, I spend a pretty quiet life, I don’t march on Anzac Day, never have.

Why’s that?

Why? Oh it does things to me. I don’t even wear my ribbons, and a matter of fact, they got pinched the first time I ever wore them, plus my sports coats, so blow them. No, I’m not against anything.

33:00 Why not? I don’t feel like going, why should I?

What are your thoughts on Anzac Day?

I think some people need it; you know, same as Christmas Day or Easter. How many non-Christians celebrate Christmas Day, you know, and spend up big, that’s about it.

33:30 No, I just find, I don’t object to it or anything, you know, I find that some fellows get carried away with it. My navigator comes down here now. He used to be in Adelaide, he lived in Adelaide, born in Adelaide, he became an engineer after the war and he spent all his life in Darwin, he was a main roads engineer or something up there,

34:00 until he retired, and he bought himself a hobby farm up here, Gympie, and his wife died on him, she was pretty crook anyway, so he’s on his own up there. And on Anzac Day he comes down here, he’ll probably stay the night here, we drink a bottle of Scotch and get up at daylight and go to the dawn service

34:30 and then he goes home and, well, you know. I said I work for the newspaper here and I’ve been, I’ve taken every Anzac Day photo since 1980 or something, and so I still take my camera along because I do for the, I’ve got a file on all these Anzac Day photographs, you know, and it’s very handy for the RSL [Returned and Services League]

35:00 Club, the Sub-Branch, to have a look and see things and somebody will say, “Oh, I want a copy of that,” you know, “that’s my old Uncle George,” and, you know. I still do a bit of, you know, I’ve got a camera here and I fire it off every now and again. But I’m not into football and things nowadays. I used to enjoy

35:30 getting some really good photographs of a tackle or something where you’ve got, everything is important in the picture, you know, referee’s put his hands up or blowing his whistle and the other fellow crashing into somebody else. And I used to, on Anzac Day I keep an eye open, I don’t talk to anybody ‘cause I just keep an eye on, I can see things going to happen, you know, which is handy if you’ve got a still camera and you can see it’s

36:00 going to happen, so you get ready. And I learned how to take photographs of, you know, the batsman with the ball that far off his bat and you don’t watch the bowler, you don’t watch him to see the, where the ball’s going, but the batsman gives you the indication where the ball is that’s coming and you can see every reflection of him going to hit the ball and you just leave it and then go ‘bang’ and there’s the ball in

36:30 the picture. And I used to do a lot of that with …. I even said, one day I was taking photographs of a local member of parliament of the Liberal Party, he was making his maiden speech and to give him some support John Howard turned up, you see. And he’s sitting at the table there with him, and poor old Davo’s

37:00 spruiking away and Howard’s sound asleep and I thought, ‘I’m not going to take a picture like that, it would be dreadful.’ And, you know, if you stare at somebody they eventually look at you, you stare hard and you can see them suddenly wake up and they, he woke up and looked around and he could see me staring at him and I say …. And I got the picture, Howard paying big attention to this fellow and …

37:30 Can you tell us about what you told us earlier about the Hasselblad cameras?

What about the Hasselblad? Well I’ve got one but I don’t use it, it’s only a …

No what you were saying about the how the allies and the….?

Oh, you know, the Swedes make the Hasselblad and it’s been a famous camera for years and years and years, a two and a quarter square thing and we had them mounted in the nose

38:00 guns and the navigators and the air gunners all had hand-held ones, all used to have cameras, and the Germans had the same thing in theirs. Whenever a plane crashed, here’s this damn camera in the thing. So the Swedes must have made a fortune out of selling iron ore to the Germans and cameras, we were buying the cameras too, they must have had a wonderful time. But they used to,

38:30 I’ll tell you a funny thing, when I left the farm and came down here I decided to go back over, over to the UK again, you see, and have a look. So we took about four months off and went over and anyway, I ended up, first of all I got to London and that day I made some enquiries and I booked a room in

39:00 a pub in Kent where I used to wander around a bit, you see, and I had it there around about 10 days, living down there, I, but going, you know, it’s not far to go anyway in England. I used to go up London every day or down to Brighton and do something down there. And I went and had a look at this place where I used to go on leave. The house is still there 39:30 but nobody living in it and I knocked on the door and there’s nobody there and I went and wandered around the garden, took photographs of the place, a deserted house where I use to live, and then we went down the pub where I, forget what it is – somebody’s arms or something – went down the pub for a beer on Sunday morning and, I don’t know whether you know but on Sunday morning all the people who

40:00 lived down in Kent have got businesses, solicitors and barristers and judges are in London most of the time but they’ve got these country homes down there and, of course, they all turn up about 11 for the, you know, the Sunday session, and they’ve got these funny fellows there chatting away. So I went in there and, having a beer and I started talking to a couple of blokes there, and the publican, and I seen this little fellow

40:30 kept looking at me, you see, and he’s a funny little bloke, you know, and he kept looking at me and he said to me, “I know you,” and I said, “How come?” He said, “Weren’t you the fellow that used to stay up here with these people on leave?” And I said, “What were you doing?” He said, “I was the gardener.” And then he got absolutely full

41:00 and all, this fellow (UNCLEAR) I’ve never seen a bloke walk around like this, you know, feet up in the air and then put them, up and down, staggered around the place. But then I went to, my trip back to …

41:19 End of tape

Tape 3

00:31 I might just get you to go back to your really early years because you just sort of brushed over that fairly quickly. What sort of things did you get up to around Toowoomba as a young fellow?

Bird nesting is one of the things I remember mostly. Ever heard of bird nesting? You go round and pinch the eggs out of nests. And I used to have one of the greatest collections

01:00 of all times. I used to have all these little birds that used to lay in tunnels in the bank, and magpies, I used to run up the tree and get them out. And we used to go down the ranges at Toowoomba School, the Prep School was right on top of the range and they had, in those days they had a cow paddock, they used to milk their own cows for the kids, you see. And it used to go just straight

01:30 down the range and Toowoomba into the scrubland. And you usually formed little mobs, about four or five of us used to stick together and we did, always go together and whatever happened. We used do this bird nesting and catch prawns, not prawns, crayfish, and there was mobs of them in those days, all

02:00 little springs down there in the range and come to this pool and here are these crayfish.

How big were they in those days?

Oh about eight, nine inches. And they used to supplement our starvation food they used to have at school. No, we used to take matches down and light a fire and cook our prawns or yabbies. And …

So you were a boarder, were you, at Toowoomba, were you at boarding

02:30 school?

No, but I lived not far away from the school and the …. Oh, we had one bloke who was a boarder but he couldn’t always get the same opportunity to get away as we did ‘cause we could go any time after school or during the weekends and things like that, he’d have to go to church, chapel or something, so he wouldn’t be able to come.

03:00 I think we used to …. Sometimes we used to annoy people, I’m sure, you know, they’d come running out of the house with a stick or something and chase you around but I don’t think we were really terrible about anything, you know, we didn’t …

So can you talk a bit more about your parents?

My …?

Your parents?

My parents. Well he’s a, my father was born in Rockhampton

03:30 and his father was a Member of Parliament, as a matter of fact he was a Minister for Railways in 1880 something to ‘02, he was the Minister for Railways and he’s named on a plaque up there at the railway bridge that goes across it in Rockhampton, you know, across the Fitzroy River. Before that you

04:00 couldn’t get to Townsville because the line stopped there, they didn’t have the bridge. So his name is up on the bridge, I think he might have had some interests up there, the road was put in for his benefit, I think. Anyway, he had a lot of pastoral holdings out in the west at one time. As a matter of fact, I’ve got a good photograph there of his sister, this is my grandfather’s sister, married

04:30 Alexander Kennedy who was a, he held the number one ticket on Qantas [Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services Ltd], he flew from Longreach to Cloncurry with Qantas on number one ticket, he was a steward director of Qantas after a while too, they formed this thing, I had a lot to do with …. My uncle was the

05:00 first secretary of Qantas, he was a stock and station agent at Longreach but he used his office as the booking office for Qantas. It was a funny old start actually, and I used to know the list of [(UNCLEAR)] Lester Brain was the first manager of Qantas and he managed it quite a long while, you know, after the war, he was still managing here in Brisbane and he had a brother who

05:30 owned a garage at Cloncurry and he used to fly too. I think they were in the Flying Corps during the war and his brother used to fly round in an old plane, it was sort of Cobb and Co twitches holding everything up and it’s amazing how it went, and he used to leave it out the back of his garage and the birds used to roost on it and then he’d decided to go for a fly so he’d crank it up and away she’d go. Yeah.

Did you use to go and look at it, you and your friends?

06:00 Oh no, I was jackarooing in a place up north of there, but that was the closest town, Cloncurry, but we never … oh, jackaroos don’t always get the opportunity to go into town every day, the manager does, he goes in and boozes up at the pub probably but the jackaroos don’t do those things, not in my day anyway.

So do you think knowing those fellows in Qantas might have been one of the reasons why you were into planes?

06:30 I flew in Qantas planes very early in the piece and I’m one of those people that collect a lot of stuff and I’ve collected the details of all these early Qantas planes and the one I flew in from Longreach to Cloncurry when I was jackarooing, I found out by looking up its serial number and everything else what its history was, and it

07:00 ground looped and crashed into a gully several times in Singapore and it was one of those old DH86 things which were treacherous old planes. They had four motors but they had too much up the front and a very small surface tail fin and the tail fin sort of didn’t do much except steer it in the air but when you got down there was enough surface there to

07:30 steer the plane so if you decided to go that way you had no chance of correcting it with the rudder. Anyway …

So did you enjoy your first flight as a passenger? Do you remember what you thought when you had your first aeroplane flight?

Not much, because there’s nothing to see because it’s all just flat country up there and, you know, all the same colour and everything else.

08:00 But my first trip on an aeroplane was with Kingsford Smith, ever heard of him? He was giving joyrides in the Southern Cross in Toowoomba and I went up, I think about 10 minutes, I got up there for five shillings and sat in the back where you couldn’t see anything, you may as well have stayed … it wasn’t a very impressive trip, but.

So what was your impression of Kingsford Smith as a

08:30 man?

Oh, you know, taller than me when I was a boy and he wore a helmet and goggles. I think there was another fellow in those days, was Allan, and he was one of those old barnstorming, he was flying the, not the Southern Cross, the Southern Cloud, I think it was a, you know, Fokker like the Southern Cross,

09:00 and he did a few trips out from England, I think, in it. Oh it was, you know, well as a kid I knew of Bert Hinkler and all these sort people that just sort of … but it wasn’t why I joined the air force or anything, I don’t think I’d be that mad on aeroplanes. I was certainly never interested in

09:30 car racing and all that sort of thing, I just thought that was, ‘Just do you brains in one day.’ Anybody who drove didn’t have them anyway.

Do you remember what it was like when Kingsford Smith came to town, how the locals were, was it a big deal?

I don’t think anybody was worried about those sort of things. He came to town and in those days they still … if you wanted to go out to the airstrip or the paddock they had there in Toowoomba in those days,

10:00 the aerodrome, I think there’s not one there at all but they’ve got one at Warwick, Oakey, but the one there was just a paddock and a fellow used to come out with a horse and dray with a couple of drums of petrol on to put the fuel in. And we went out there whenever, on a pushbike, you know, it was dirt road all the time. I think there was only two streets in Toowoomba actually had a bitumen surface, the rest were gravel tracks.

10:30 That sounds very old doesn’t it?

Do you recall how the Depression impacted on your family; can you talk a bit about that?

Depression? I think it was very good actually but oh no we didn’t sort of get anything in those days.

Do you remember there being food …?

Well me, may, we probably went to the pictures

11:00 once in twelve months and that was only sixpence. But I didn’t worry about that, you know, I got more interest out of bird nesting and doing things like that than going to the pictures to see somebody else do everything. And I’ve never been interested in, I played football but I’m not a spectator and I think if you don’t play what the heck’s the point?

11:30 No, I’ve got very strong feelings about that, I reckon anyone that, when we get over there on the Wednesday at the RSL and they talk about when Collingwood beat somebody else I think, ‘Well who cares?’ well it bores me to tears but no, I’ve played football and I played in an Australian Services team during the war against Scotland,

12:00 Rugby Union you see. But I think I was the only one available that day and I was the only one, mostly Victorians, they didn’t even know the rules of Rugby Union, they only knew this Australian Rules sort. So I didn’t claim to be an extra good footballer or anything.

So was there always plenty of food growing up?

What?

Was there plenty of food growing up?

Food?

Yes.

Of a sort yeah, but

12:30 you didn’t go to the café or anything, you didn’t have any, well they did have a café, more a milk bar in those days, and an ice cream … but no, we didn’t eat an awful lot of ice cream either, which I’m sure didn’t do us any harm. And we did have to make our own fun as kids and I think it’s one of the big problems today is these kids that are,

13:00 you know, they want some sort of youth centre or something here to entertain the kids to keep them off the streets, well let them on the streets but not make a nuisance of themselves, go out in the scrub and get some bird’s nest and things like that. I’ve never heard, there were more birds about in those days so we didn’t really stop the bird population by pinching the eggs and a number of times the magpies used to bite

13:30 us and peck us for trying to pinch their eggs but we knew all about that. No, I think it’s a great pity we, we had pushbikes and rode ponies and you used to have to fix your own pushbikes and mend your own punctures and you became, you know, self-sufficient in that direction.

So you didn’t really say much about your dad, what was his working life and so forth?

14:00 Well, a jackaroo. Oh, well, do you know what a jackaroo …? You do? He’s an underpaid bloke who now and again goes up the boss’s house and has lunch and plays tennis at the boss’s place but he didn’t get paid much, he was there to learn, learn the trade, he’s not looking for a job, he’s learning the trade.

14:30 And if anybody has to work, if something happens, on Christmas Day, the windmill falls down or something, it’s the jackaroo that does the work, the station hand doesn’t, he only works on most days, five and a half days a week, he had to work Saturday morning. But if somebody had to go over thirty mile away to get the mail on a Saturday afternoon, well it was the jackaroo did it ‘cause he got

15:00 seven and six a week and tucker, but he’s suppose to be doing all the work, but he was, he got all the privileges, if they were doing anything like spaying cows and what have you on these properties, the jackaroo was the man that had to help do it and know how to do it. The station hand only

15:30 shut the gate when they went out and he wasn’t, well you’re trained to be a station manager, that’s all, and they give you all the dirty work but you, you know, when I first started you had to wear a tie to work out at the property and scruff cattle with a tie on and he’s, Prince Harry there, getting around with a bloomin’ baseball cap and no tie, I thought, ‘My goodness me,

16:00 and he’s suppose to be a jackaroo!’

So your dad was like a manager of a property, your dad was like a manager on a property basically, when you’re growing up, is that …? My father?

Yes.

No, no, he had his own place, no.

Oh.

But you never learn from your father. He sent you to somebody else and he looks after somebody else’s son because it’s a wonderful way to not get,

16:30 produce somebody like yourself and have, you know. You could go out and if one fellow’s growing wool and you stay there, you learn how to grow wool, but another fellow’s running cattle, breeding stud cattle or something like that, so you’re learning, you know, how to cope with cattle, sheep, everything, farms.

17:00 So did you work much on your dad’s farm growing up?

No. No, somebody else would do that, no I didn’t. When I left school I went up to Cloncurry actually, that was the first job up there, and the manager up there was an old Major Stoddart and he was in the Charge of Beersheba, the Light Horse, you heard of it, the Charge of Beersheba?

17:30 Well he was the bloke who used to polish you boots every day, even if you’re working in the cow yard you had to polish your boots. And form fours at the cattleyards before he’d tell what you wanted him to do, sort of thing, he was a nice old guy but I’ll tell you, there’s another fellow, have you ever heard of Hugh Sawrey? Hugh Sawrey, the artist fellow? Anyway, Hugh Sawrey was, he’s dead now

18:00 but he, he’s one of Australia’s top artists, you know, really top artist of bush things and what have you, oh, much better than Pro Hart. And when I left that place up in Cloncurry he came after me as a jackaroo and I got in touch with him one time and he was thrilled to death to know somebody that was working on the same place. And now that same

18:30 property has got one of the biggest open cut mines in the world.

What was the property called?

Jessievale in my time. But it was, everywhere you went you’d pick up all sorts of, you know, stone and things and the place is just filled with copper and iron ore and everything, you could see it in the sides of the hills ‘cause they weren’t mining in those days, they were just sort of running sheep

19:00 and cattle.

How many jackaroos were with you?

How many?

Yes.

On that place there were four jackaroos and a head stockman, we called the next bloke up, and then there was an overseer and we all had separate accommodation, you know, we didn’t, we had a housekeeper,

19:30 we used to make your own bed but she used to do your sewing and all that sort of thing and she ran the jackaroo quarters. But I remember they used to have a, ever heard of Pike Brothers? Well Pike Brothers was a big menswear turn out in Queen Street in Brisbane and for years and years and years they had a traveller that used to go out there with

20:00 an old truck, you know, and he used to take all these clothes out, you see, and sell them, a Hawker. Anyway, he’d arrive at this place and he’d put all his clothes out on the table of the dining room in the kitchen, you know, the big place at the back, they used to have about, oh, 18 station hands as well plus a few sort of fellows from the

20:30 outstations that used to fend for themselves. Anyway, this Pike Brothers traveller would come round and he’d put all his clothes out, you see, and they were all sort of menswear, particularly riding boots and jodhpurs and hats and belts and whatever. And they were all very high quality. Even after the war I went back to Pike Brothers in Brisbane, they were still there,

21:00 they had all my measurements on the file from out there, I thought it was really …. As a matter of fact, there’s a fellow down here I go and have a beer with every Friday at the Bowls Club – seems I go and have a beer everywhere, don’t I? – anyway, I’ve been doing that for the last 20 years every Friday, go and have a beer, I go down there three o’clock and leave at half past four, and he used to be the coastguard

21:30 commander here and I got to know him very well too. I photographed him for the paper and things like that. He’s Lebanese and he used to be a hawker out in western Queensland the same time as this Pike Brothers was going out there, and he used to do the same thing. And his father had the, his father was our tailor in Brisbane, you know, tailors would make men’s suits 22:00 to measure and all that sort of thing, pants too small. So he a very interesting bloke and …

So what kind of gear did a young jackaroo get around in if he was trying to impress someone?

What sort of gear ? To do what to impress somebody?

Yeah, what was the trndy sort of…?

There weren’t too many people to impress in those days.

When this fellow came around, what were the sort of things that you’d buy?

22:30 Oh, just working clothes, shirts, very good quality shirts, very good quality moleskin trousers, boots before, what’s his name – of the fellow who makes the boots nowadays? R.M. Williams, the same style of thing as R.M. Williams have got now. Well you didn’t have much. You

23:00 had to wear a coat if you went up to the boss’s house for dinner, which is very, very rare. You had to have a coat to put on, you couldn’t not, even in the middle of summer you had to wear a coat. And you used to go and play tennis there sometimes. He had two daughters which, the head stockman sort of even married one in the finish.

23:30 And the funny part about this head stockman, who didn’t like me, and I was jackaroo you see and he was the head stockman, and he used to give me all the dirty work to do ‘cause he didn’t like me very much. And he married the boss’s daughters, one of the boss’s daughters and it wasn’t until I got to Bundaberg, flying one day, and I had to take up some ground crew, I was doing a test flight on this aeroplane, it had been, it had a big service on it, you see, and you always test flight the things,

24:00 and in here was, this bloomin’ head stockman bloke gets in and he was a mechanic and he saw me, he nearly had a fit, he thought, ‘God, that useless jackaroo and I’m going up with him.’ So there you are. Bill O’Wall was his name.

What would be a typical day for you as a jackaroo? Can you just talk us through a day?

Well the jackaroo had the job,

24:30 he had to get up early before breakfast and get the horses in. They had what you call a night horse they used to keep in the yard, you know. And you’d catch that and saddle up and the, he’d go and get the mob in, which is probably 60, 80 horses, run them all into the yard, those are the ones that go to, like

25:00 each person had about six horses each, they didn’t own them but they were issued six horses. And you had three way out in the scrub spelling [resting] and you’d have three that were in this mob that you’d muster up every morning. So you’d get the horses in and then go and have breakfast. And after breakfast you went down the yard and got your instructions,

25:30 caught your horse. And then you had to go back, if you got instructions to do, this is pretty early in the morning mind you, you’d have to go back to the kitchen and cut your lunch and it was terrible though, because it was very hot and no butter, just this tin loaf of bread, you know it? It was a great big thing about that long, the slices, and about that thick when you cut them, used to cut them with a bread knife. Put a bit of corned beef

26:00 in between, a bit of pickles or something, and that was your lunch. And you had a cookpot which you used to mount on your saddle and you, you know, whatever you were doing you’d boil the billy up and had, used to carry around a tea bag and a sugar bag in your saddle bag, you know. No work, you’d just make black tea and stir it with a stick. When

26:30 you got, oh sometimes you never got home again till well after dark but they were the days when the boss would tell you, “Well go and do it and when you’re finished you get in there and hide, I don’t want to see you about,” because he hates people wandering around doing nothing, you see, so you’d get in, “Get out of the way, I don’t want to see you.” So you’d have the day off, you had to go and read a book or something. That was a petty,

27:00 I didn’t …

Did you have to always eat at the homestead or did you have your own quarters where you ate and so forth?

Oh, you had your own quarters. Oh no, the homestead was a restricted place altogether. The funny story is this, old Mr Gaul he was, Charlie Gaul, he was the manager and this is on one of the places, and the boss, fellow who owned the property, these properties were owned by Clark and Tate

27:30 and the old Clark was dead but Peter Tate was the sole surviving shareholder but Clark’s son was still involved in it, but he was a barrister or a lawyer or something and he didn’t go near the place. And anyhow, Peter Tate used to come round and inspect his properties every two years or something and he’d come round and the jackaroo’s job, my job used to be to

28:00 get the boss’s Buick, the manager’s Buick, they used to, the manager had a Buick, the overseer had a Ford and I don’t know what Peter – he lived at Bowral so I think he probably had a Rolls Royce down there or something. But he used to sit in the back with the manager, you see, and the jackaroo would have to drive wherever they wanted to go, you see, and you’d go round the property and inspect this and inspect the building here and talk to, you know, the backtracker

28:30 or something. But every time you’d come to a gate, when you drove the boss around and you came to a gate, you’d stop and you’d get out, open the gate, got in, drove through and then you got out and shut it again. So that’s the normal procedure and I’ve got the manager in there, you see, but Mr Tate must have been a bit annoyed with this fellow that day and he said, “Stay there Murray, Gaul will open it.”

29:00 Gaul would get out of the back seat, glare at me, poor fellow. I still go, when I left that place, I left to join up. I still got a wallet they gave me, Mr and Mrs Gaul gave me a wallet, I’ve still got the card in it but it had a steel mirror in it to stop the bullets when you put it there, to stop the bullets hitting your heart. That’s good isn’t it?

29:30 How long were you out there as a jackaroo?

Oh just – four years, yeah, a bit more than four years.

And what made you decide that you didn’t just want to be a country boy, you wanted to do something different?

The war, the war broke out, I should have …. Well when it first started, I wasn’t over impressed with it you know.

30:00 Do you remember where you were when you heard that war had broken out?

Well, not exactly, Blackwater, Barcaldine, somewhere out there, because I was on, the same owner had these properties, this partnership owned these properties and they were quite well known and

30:30 there’s a lot of past Clark and Tate jackaroos about, you know. It’s broken up now, it’s not in existence any more. But I had a horse, we got these horses on the property, they were allocated to you, that was your horse until you left the place sort of thing, you know. And you got it straight from the horse breaker and then

31:00 sometimes the horse breaker was good and sometimes he wasn’t any good at all but you got the damn thing. I used to make sort of pets of mine, I used to, “Come on,” I’d crack the whip and all that sort of silly things, well that was all you did. On the weekends, you know, I’d go down and play with my horse, teach it to do things like kneeling and all those stupid things. Anyway, the, this

31:30 one had a bit of pace, you see, so I put it in the Picnic Race meeting one time. And anyway, it won, I didn’t ride because I was too heavy but I had another, little black fellow actually, an Aborigine bloke, he rode it and I forget what the trophy was, it wasn’t a very valuable thing, you know.

32:00 But some old fellow came up to me and he was in the Light Horse during the First World War and he said, “Now a young fellow like you shouldn’t be here,” he said, “I’ll give you fifty pounds for the prize if you’ll join up.” Oh, that didn’t do me any good, I don’t like people telling me what to do. And so I didn’t, I kept it, whatever it was, I can’t think what it was, it wasn’t very valuable you know, a tea set or something like that, which

32:30 is no point in me having a tea set is it? And, though quite a lot of the fellows were joining up, a lot of station hands joined up because it was an opportunity to get away for the first time, away from where they were born and bred and everything else. Another jackaroo who came from down

33:00 Sydney, Bowral he came from, and his mother was very friendly with the boss, Mr Tate, so he was a special jackaroo, he helped us get privileges and things, but, Henry Norton his name was, we used to get along pretty well together. But Henry was, we used to go into Tambo sometimes, we had a bloomin’ dance in the hall, you know, and Henry had been a,

33:30 sort of a slick fellow from Bowral and Sydney and he had no shortage of partners, he used to go up and take them off somebody else, you know. He was a bit of a woman’s man, Henry. But poor old Henry, he joined up pretty early and the next thing I know he went over to North Africa and he got done over in the army there. And another fellow was a head stockman in my time and he joined up and he came to grief over there, so.

34:00 Do you remember what your mum and dad said when you told them you were joining up?

Hey?

Do you remember what you mum and dad’s reaction was when you told them you were joining up?

No, they never had any reaction. I, sure they used to, my mother used to have a bit of a fit, actually, from, you know, I’ve still got, she kept all my letters and I’ve still got

34:30 them and I remember she never said anything about the war or anything. I haven’t said very much about it to my sister even, you know, they sort of, they don’t ask me so I don’t tell them. And I think they’ve got to that idea that you don’t ask people about things in case you bring back bad memories 35:00 and things, you know, so they don’t bother asking, so.

But what about when you first joined up, when you said, “Mum and Dad, I’m going to join up,” what did they say?

They didn’t say anything because I just wrote and told them that I had joined up. And I used to write home pretty regularly, and the funny part about it, I didn’t tell

35:30 them anything about my adventure with the Focke-Wulfs, see, but it made headlines over in the UK, you know. The bloomin’ BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] came along and took photographs and God knows what and it got in all the papers. And my mother was reading a local ‘Tour Chronicle’ one day at home and here’s little passage about this fellow, Ian Murray, that got done over by the …

36:00 that was the first my mother knew about it, so I don’t know what she said about it. It must have given her a fit, yeah.

So tell me about all the fuss that was made over you fellows with the BBC coming and everything?

Oh, well it was, only happened once, I don’t think there would be

36:30 anybody in the world who’s got away from six Focke-Wulfs, six to one, and got away with it and got home. And they, well they arrived on the ‘drome [aerodrome] and I had to put my gear on and go and stand in front of the Beaufighter or something with Mitch, Don Mitchell, he was our navigator, and get our picture taken. And another lot would arrive and you’d put the gear on again and stand

37:00 in front and then unfortunately I upset poor Mitch because he wasn’t enjoying that, but he, there was a camera crew arrived for the ‘News of the World’ or some blasted thing, to mock something up, and I went down the pub with my mate, the pub was about half an hour’s ride on the pushbike

37:30 away and I never went back again that day and the camera crew didn’t get the picture and I thought, “Oh.” Anyway, poor Mitch was upset, he wanted to be on the movies. No, it was, well anything I remember about it was, I didn’t think it was worth a sounding, you know, what else was I supposed to do, you know, except

38:00 try and get away and try and land when I had to and. But I was going to say this thing, when I first arrived I knew some message was getting through because when I came over the aerodrome in the first place, I could see all up on the hill was this headquarters building, you know, where they had all the WAAF and pen pushers and everything else up there, and all the hangars, and they were all swarming out of the buildings, all these people,

38:30 and to see the crash. And I thought to myself, ‘Well, well, well, I didn’t realise that people did that.’ But when I went around again they all swarmed out again, and just to watch the crash, we used to have plenty. And every time there was a crash, they used to all swarm out to watch. And …

So just going back to, you spoke earlier how you did some

39:00 Morse code training via correspondence. Were you still on the property at that time, were you, or why were you doing it via correspondence?

Oh, well I signed up in Brisbane but I had to get this operation done on my nose before they would accept me, but I’d signed up anyway, so they had me anyway, I’d signed my name, so they

39:30 had me. They said they didn’t have room for me at the time, “So go back to work.” So I went back out west and I told the manager what had happened and so, between him and the local doctor, they organised that the manager pay my rail fare down to Rockhampton, the local doctor dubbed

40:00 in something because the ENT [ear, nose and throat] specialist in Rockhampton who did the operation, he owned the private hospital and I got a week or 10 days in the private hospital for free, you know, they done the whole lot for me for free, and anyway, I came back and I sent the certificate down to say I was okay, they didn’t check me, and the doctor signed this

40:30 (UNCLEAR) and all this time I’m doing this correspondence lesson, you know, they send a whole heap of, it was mostly to do with navigation and radio and things like that, and this bloomin’ Morse key thing, and that’s all you do when you first went into Bradfield Park, is book work and on desk and sending these messages and things and, you know, reading it. You had to listen and write down,

41:00 you know, all these things and decoding things and what have you. But you never did it again, once you flew you never knew what a Morse key was, so it was a waste of time but never mind.

41:17 End of tape

Tape 4 00:34 Did you have any idea what your dad wanted you to be when you grew up?

Oh just a bloody grazier, whatever it is, yeah, no, it never …. I don’t think I had any inclination to anything else, I didn’t have any feeling to be a doctor or something although, after working on the land, I thought I should have been a vet

01:00 because I had to do a lot of my own veterinary work, you know, and I’ve got books in there on how to do all sorts of things to horses and cattle and things. No, I’m quite happy what happened, you know. If I was a vet I’d be a retired vet now wouldn’t I? And …

What about with being a horseman, what was your first experience with horses?

01:30 Oh, I got a horse ever since I could walk, you know, ponies and things. God I never, well I won a Central Western Bullock Ride one time but that didn’t impress me too much. And the funny things is, when I went to Melbourne first, then Point Cook,

02:00 I can’t remember this, but I was reading some of the letters I’d written home you see. In them, I apparently went to one of those Wild West shows, you know the Thorpe McConville tent shows, somewhere in Melbourne during the war and they wanted somebody to have a go riding this buck jumper you see, so I volunteered you see, and apparently I wasn’t much good because I wrote back and said, ‘It only pig-rooted around

02:30 and it didn’t impress me much,’ but the trouble is, in my blue uniform and my white Menzies blue orchid [A slang term for Australian air force stemming from their distinctive blue uniforms] thing, I guess the crowd reacted. A whole of bloomin’ soldiers and God knows what, in the tent I suppose, and they saw this man in blue orchid get on this horse and they say, “You’re going to come a gutser,” but still.

So you stayed on?

Hey?

You stayed on?

Well I just wrote my letter, I can’t really remember the

03:00 thing but it was, a pig-root’s a pretty easy sort of thing, if you got a really good, you know what’s the old buck jumper that’s never been, Rocky Ned, have you every heard of it? Haven’t you heard of Rocky Ned? Oh, you know, Tex Ward and all these people wrote songs about Rocky Ned. As a matter a fact, out at Tambo,

03:30 this fellow, Thorpe McConville, ran one of these shows out there and he had Rocky Ned in his team at about 40 years of age, you know, poor old thing, all his hair was falling out and everything else and he said to me would I ride him, “But for 10 shillings you’ve got to fall off,” and anyway, poor old fellow he just humped his back and rutted a few times and anyway, I fell off him, he looked

04:00 back and said, ‘Oh, I can still do it.’ Silly old horse. But anyway, I got the 10 shillings and thought the [(UNCLEAR)] was handy.

So did you think his reputation was well earned?

The old horse, he wasn’t any good in those times, he was full of arthritis I think. No, the kids used to ride him down the boardroom to get a drink before

04:30 they fed him, and the kids got on bareback and rode him down the boardroom and never, you know ….

What did you think of school when you were a lad, did you enjoy it or …?

The what?

School, what did you think of school?

Oh not much I don’t think. I had a, at the Grammar School I could tell you the name of the teachers and

05:00 one old fellow, he used to teach Physics or something and we used to call him old Pudheen and, well, I left school, I was down in one of these, I think it was Point Cook and old Pounce was ground staff, you know, teacher down there, and I remembered him and he remembered me and it was amazing,

05:30 I had a lot of time for Old Pud. There was another fellow, old Dick Hazzler, and he’s in Toowoomba, and he used to referee the football, but he was getting a bit old and he couldn’t keep up with the team so he used to whistle from one end to the other, sort of thing, but he was, he used to teach maths, I think it was. And there was another little fellow, he used to teach French,

06:00 Lindsay something, Lindsay Thompson, but he was also a state cricket player so he used to run the cricket at the Grammar School but I was never, oh I played for the first Prep and I played for the seconds, Toowoomba Grammar, you know, football.

So what was the best thing about school? What was the best thing about it? Oh, I suppose learning, but it didn’t

06:30 impress me a great deal, you know, I don’t regret it or have any remark about it but I sort of, I still remember all the, what these people did try and tell you. There’s an old fellow, old Boss Connell, who was the headmaster of the Prep in my time and he was the headmaster

07:00 of my son when he went to Prep, still going, you know, but he was as old as the hills. No, I sort of, no, school didn’t, it wasn’t the greatest part of my life, I don’t think.

What year did you go through to there? What year did you go through to, what grade at school?

Oh junior, whatever that is, I forget what grade

07:30 that is now. There was a, you did a scholarship at the primary school and then you did three years for junior, I think it was, for then, and then another two years for senior and if you got your senior certificate you went to university or not.

So were you keen to finish junior and start working or did you want to study?

No, I’d

08:00 say that that’s never impressed me much. The things that impress me more than anything is people. I find a lot of people here that, you know, I like talking to, I want to know all about them and how they function and particularly if they’ve got a bit of IQ [intelligence quotient] or something.

Did you think you, did you get that from going

08:30 to these stations and mixing with the folk out there or …?

Well I tried to show you that I found it intensely interesting, these various people, and there was an old Aboriginal fellow there on one property and he was one of these bloke who used to, he sat on his own all the time and everywhere you went he’d be sitting under a tree, just sitting there contemplating and he used to smoke a pipe or something

09:00 and, old Arthur Coombs his name was, and I used to have a hell of a time with him, I used to talk like mad around, you know, he used to tell me all sorts of things. Whenever I got a weekend off or a Sunday off, I used to go kangaroo shooting to make some extra money and what I didn’t learn about kangaroo shooting and stalking from old Arthur, not Arthur,

09:30 what was his name?

It was Arthur Coombs did you say?

Coombsey. He had a brother and this fellow was pitch black and his brother was nearly white and he used to go into town and he hated to see anything to do with his brother, you know. Anyway, I found these blokes terribly interesting. I’ve got another

10:00 bloke here you might (UNCLEAR) It’s a little bloke that comes around here, and I think he represents the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but he brings me some pamphlets but he never talks about it and he comes here and we sometimes sit out there and we talk about an hour, on all his problems actually, and he’s got to the stage where he’s

10:30 sort of, he goes up the Barambah, the Aboriginal camp up there you know, he goes up there fairly regularly. I don’t ask him, he tells me what he wants to, I don’t ask him questions but he spills a lot of beans and, but there’s a little Aboriginal fellow, he was a full-blooded fellow and he was down here and he was painting, and only a little skinny bloke,

11:00 and he was selling his paintings to Qantas for 15,000 dollars to put in their waiting rooms all around the world, you see, and some woman down here had him under control, but he used to drink, and he was doing very well while he wasn’t drinking. But one time, I went up to cover the rodeo at Pomona with the camera and I was standing there waiting

11:30 outside the chute and I saw this little Aboriginal fellow there and, oh God, you know, little skinny black and I thought, ‘My God, that’s Stephen Bullun, he’ll kill himself in the end, he’s riding the bull ride,’ Anyway, out he comes, he wins the bull ride. Oh, he’s been riding bulls all his life, he said. And anyway, he’s now gone back to boozing again. This other fellow that comes round here, he tells me this.

12:00 But he just wanders around with one of those cardboard casks all day long, drinking out of the spout, you know, it’s terrible, but he’s a pretty little fellow. He wanted to, oh, he said would I give him a picture of him on the bull, you see, and I got a good, I got two or three good pictures of him on the bull and I said, “Yeah, I’ll give you one,” and he said, “I’ll give you a painting for it.” “Oh,” I said, “you’ll only give me one of your little

12:30 ones of, no good.” “No,” he said, “you take your pick.” Anyway, I said, “I didn’t want that,” but he gave me, you know, the bottom there, the flower pot tray thing, and he’s put dots and things all round it and he gave me that for the picture. And the funny part about it, this chap that comes round here, he said to me did I know a fellow by the name of Stephen

13:00 Bullun and I said, “Yeah, I used to know him quite well.” He said, “Well, when I told him you were doing this job here and come round, and he said, ‘Do you know Ian Murray?’” and I, fellow said, “As a matter of fact I do,” and Stephen Bullun said, you know, and he remembered me, he said. I met his father one time. His father was really full blood, lovely chap, and he makes

13:30 stock whips and things, but he used to work as a station hand or a drover, way out near Boulia and those places, in the old days, and he’s a real bush fellow but he’s got no gripe or anything about anybody or, and this is what I find, this guy and Stephen are not protesting about white brutality or anything like that, they’re just acting like normal people, which I think’s the way to go about it.

14:00 I hate these blokes that sort of come and make, particularly the ones without experience.

In all of your air force days, did you see any Aboriginal fellows?

I think there might have been a couple of transport drivers that I, they wouldn’t be full blood or anything, but most of the Aborigines went into the army and there were quite a few of them went up into the Middle East and New Guinea.

14:30 Your sisters served didn’t they?

Where you getting all this from? You have got that tape from down there have you? At Orange?

There’s no tape but they tell us little bits and pieces that you’ve told them.

Oh I see. I saw that couple of questions. I thought, ‘Now, hello, where you getting all that from?’ Yeah, my two eldest, they’re both dead now. They joined the VADs [Voluntary Aid Detachments]. I think they went

15:00 over in the first lot in the Middle East and they were working in the 7th Australian General Hospital, I think. But they weren’t nurses, they were VADs, they were just as good as nurses but they were Voluntary Aid Department, they called them. And the elder one, Margaret, she came back here and she spent the rest of the war in Sydney or somewhere, she become a commissioned

15:30 officer in the Australian Medical Service [possibly Australian Medical Corps] or some damn thing. And the other one spent a lot of time up at New Guinea and Morotai and things with the VADs, and when she came back she was private secretary to one of the old home Federal Politicians and she spent the rest of her life in Canberra.

16:00 My mind’s going a bit now ‘cause I can’t think of his name, but anyway.

So why, do you know when you first, when the war broke out and you thought you might join the navy, what was it that led you to the navy, why did you think that was the go?

Buggered if I know, I didn’t know enough about things. Well I could tell you one reason, I thought, well I didn’t know whether I had too much courage, you see, and I thought, ‘Well if somebody ran at me with a bayonet, I’d just go for my life,

16:30 but this way, they fire 20 miles away and you don’t even know what’s hit you,’ so there. And I couldn’t see myself being stupid enough to fly around in an aeroplane.

Do you know what it was, when that recruiting officer from the Royal Australian Air Force, when he was talking to you, do you know what it was that brought you on side to join the air force?

I wasn’t really that badly off, you know, I, it wasn’t like that at all.

17:00 It was, you know, there weren’t any Light Horse so I couldn’t join that and I thought the navy because you get a decent view of the sea which I hadn’t seen for years and, yeah, you see the world, ‘Join the navy and see the world,’ they say and I think that was more likely than having people shoot at you, but never mind, that’s what I thought, tell everybody, and

17:30 when I joined the air force I had, I don’t think I joined to fly or anything, I just joined and …

What was the great promise that this chap gave you that made you think, ‘Oh well, I’ll give that a go’?

Who, the old fellow, the Royal Flying Corps fellow? Oh he, no, he bought us a couple of beers, he said, “Look boys, have a beer on us, have a beer with me,”

18:00 you see, and he used to play polo with my father and I think when he came and talked about all this and things, I thought, ‘Oh, well I’m not signing with them things,’ I was going to join something so I joined the air force. And I think I did the right, I think I might have told you

18:30 about not having any preference of what I did, and I think it was a pretty wise move but, you know, blame somebody else. You told them about how the instructors on the Tiger Moths broke you like horses. Can you explain that to us?

The what?

How the Tiger Moth instructors, how they broke you like horses when they trained you, can you explain that for us?

19:00 Oh they do. You’ve got to have, well first of all you go to this Bradfield Park and you, it’s discipline and you’ve got to, you know, really get accustomed to all their ways and you do it, you know, salute an officer, or don’t salute him or whatever it is because you fear he’s going to shoot you or something. You do it because it’s just a normal thing to do. And I can still, you know,

19:30 remember the first drills of, you know …. You get a whole mob of hoons from out in the scrub and you line them up and tell them, “March!” They’ll be all over the place unless you have some sort of system, wouldn’t you? And no, they, the funny part, or the instructor I had on Tiger Moths was, he was a sergeant, he wasn’t terribly good at flying himself you know,

20:00 but he never, the patter and things like that, and I think he used to be quite happy to get out and leave (UNCLEAR). Anyway, and the next fellow was on the Oxford, he was an old First World War pilot and also a prospector

20:30 for gold and things, he went all over the Northern Territory and things and he was a very interesting bloke. We used to call him Jiminy Cricket and his name was Carter, Jimmy Carter, and we used to call him Jiminy Cricket, he was about 40, I suppose, and he wasn’t, the sooner he could get you up in the air, he’d go back to the mess and have a lie down, the better. So, but he said, oh, this fellow, poor

21:00 Bob Williams, another good mate of mine, he got killed in the finish too. Bob was a big long gangly bloke, you see, and he and I used to be, the instructor would have two to teach in the morning and he’d have another two to teach in the afternoon of the same lot, because that lot that flew in the morning would do lessons in the afternoon and vice versa. And this fellow, Bob

21:30 Williams, used to wander along, a big gangly bloke, and he’d have his parachute hung over his shoulder and he was strolling along and I’d be sitting in the plane with this instructor, you see, and he said, “Oh, is that man, Williams, always like that?” he said, you know, and he was strolling along, “Hurry up, hurry up, oh stroll along.” Anyway, he didn’t, Bob Williams eventually,

22:00 he became a staff pilot during the war and he finished up flying with East West Airways afterwards, and I don’t know what happened to him but he was another bloke from out Winton way. Big, lazy, sort of gangly, you know, yeah, he had a good-looking sister though.

22:30 Can you remember your first flight up in that Tiger Moth with your instructor?

The first ever instructor? Oh not really. You do a lot of, well I used to work in the workshop too, you know, and help them take engines out and things like that until the course started, so I knew what

23:00 a plane was and how they worked and things like that. I think the biggest part is the relief you have of not having him in the bloomin’, he gets out and says, “Now you take it yourself,” and you think, ‘Well thank God I won’t have you beefing me all the time.’ You know, you have a tremendous relief of not having anybody tell you how to do things.

So you can remember your first solo flight?

Oh yeah. Well I,

23:30 I did of something else, I forget what they are now. Anyway, I got CB [confined to barracks] for a month or so, oh, I did a bit of shooting up of some farmer’s place outside Narromine, you know, I knew the daughter and I used to go out there and practise a bit of a shoot up, you know, I used to go nearly low enough to take the heads off the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s and things. And I got caught up with that for a while but that,

24:00 they don’t throw you out, they’re not game to, but you’re not supposed to do those things. You’re endangering other people’s lives, you see. So …

What did you enjoy most about flying?

Oh, well I, look, I’ve never enjoyed it, I simply… I’ve never had a great ambition to do things like that and,

24:30 but I used to do some silly things a bit. We used to take roosters up and throw them up and have a dog fight before they fall down to the ground, you better not tell the RSPCA [Royal Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals] about that. We would throw the rooster

25:00 straight down, terrible.

What other high jinks did you use to get up to? Hey?

What other high jinks did you use to get up to?

Oh, well those things weren’t, like anything, being stupid, you’re going to crash the Government’s plane up, that was, I’m not, you know.

25:30 Like, you didn’t try and stand on the wing when you’re going in like that, that was, you know. But no, we used to, I can’t say I sort of went flying for the joy of it, sort of thing, you know, and I still wouldn’t. I’ve been up plenty of times here to take photographs and what have you and

26:00 just going up doesn’t impress me. But there’s a bloke up here, Sandy Walker, his father used to be a very early real estate agent here, but he’s a commercial pilot and he’s flown for Air Hong Kong and you know, and he’s now become the chief check out pilot for Brunei Airways or something, and he doesn’t fly, he checks them all out

26:30 on the computer. And he sits there and checks pilots out to see how they’re going, and he’s on this computer, and you can put anything you like in it, you know, cloud, landing ground, they’ve got it on the screen, you come up. If you’ve never been to New York in your life, you can put it on the screen and there it is, New York airport from whichever way you want to come in. And he’s the bloke that loves flying but he’s grounded now

27:00 except when he comes home on holidays, he goes down to Maroochydore to get an aeroplane and he buzzes the place around here at about 100 feet, a little tiny Cessna, and he’s used to carrying, you know, driving these Jumbo jets and things around the place. But he hoons around on this little … and I can’t quite understand that.

So, as a pilot, what did you think of the Tiger Moth?

Oh, wonderful thing, there was no other plane

27:30 ever built you could do the same thing with. You could do inverted loops in them which, you couldn’t do that, you could do loop the loops in a Cessna but you can’t do it invertedly by going forward, over, but the Tiger Moth stresses were okay for everything, spin, stalls, everything under the sun. As a matter of fact, in the stall we used to cheat because we used to have to put this hood over, you see, with the instructor in the

28:00 front, and you used to have to take off on instruments and you had to fly, you had to do stalls and stick turns and loops on instruments and it was, if you get in a spin, the standard thing is to push the nose down and full opposite rudder, if you’re spinning that way, you give the rudder that way, full opposite rudder. Well, if you get in a spin in the Tiger Moth,

28:30 you just take your hands and feet off and it comes out itself, and they would never let you do that, you know, you’d get in a hell of a lot trouble. But then I got on these Oxfords and they had a very high wing loading, there were two planes you could go on after Tigers, you know, the multis were the Anson and the Oxford, and the Oxford had high wing loading but it was a smarter, more powerful …

What is that high wing loading, what does that mean?

29:00 The amount of space you’ve got for lift. If you get too much, like that, you get in a glide and you can’t get any speed up because of this tension, you see. ‘Cause the lift doesn’t come from underneath, it comes from above, you know, the air going over the top sucks it up. And, well you had a, this thing, a high wing loading, well the Beaufort had a high wing loading and the only one

29:30 that didn’t have would be an old Wellington or something else, you know, they were slow as hell but pretty reliable. And when I got on the Oxford, it was a tricky plane to fly and my instructor, this old Jiminy Cricket fellow, he never demonstrated a spin until one day I found out for myself, that I

30:00 thought, ‘Well, I better try and spin one,’ and, boy, I did one and a half turns and I was down about 6000 feet, one and a half turns, oh no, I got out of that and I never did that again.

What height were you when you decided to …?

Oh, about twelve and a half thousand and, oh, I didn’t blame them for not demonstrating because they didn’t take kindly to spins, and …

What other peculiarities were there about the Oxford as a pilot?

30:30 Well, I don’t know, I flew in Scotland too, I quite liked them but I didn’t like the Anson because it was so damn slow and sort of, you know, you feel like you’re flying with a shoe box or something. But the Anson, the Oxford was a fairly trim little plane, you know.

31:00 I think they did make them for short range civil aviation sort of thing or, you know, I can’t remember them ever, they didn’t fly them out here after the war, I don’t know what happened to all those, they must have thrown them in Port Phillip Bay or something. At Amberley, out here for years when I was coming down from the bush to Brisbane, you see all these Liberators lined up on 31:30 either side of the runways in five rows, they went for miles. When I went down there was none there. What happened to them all, oh, they took them out and dumped them in Morton Bay. Under the American lend-lease system, they couldn’t sell them because they interfere with the production over there, you see, so they just dump them. Now we haven’t got one left to put in a museum. And,

32:00 yeah, they had a Spitfire base at Oakey, and there’s an old mine there, the Acland Coal mine – do you know it? Well it’s still open now as a tourist attraction. You can go in about 100 yards and they’ve got a wall up it. They maintain there’s a whole heap of Spitfire engines down there in silver crates, but I wouldn’t know about that.

32:30 What about when you marched out as pilots, was there any sort of passing out parade or anything like that?

Oh yeah. Well you get a Wings Parade, you don’t pass out on Tiger Moths, you get sort of a, you’re only a pupil then, you don’t even take your little piece out of your cap because all you become is a Leading Aircraftsman, which is LAC, and it’s equal to second class

33:00 corporal or something. And, but when you go to the, when you finished flying on the service training, that’s the Oxfords, you get your wings and they have a parade there and they get some retired air commodore or something, District Governor or something, to pin them on, you know, and shake you by the hand and congratulate you, and you stand back and smartly salute

33:30 him and he salutes back again. Anyway, they decided I wasn’t going to be an officer and we had a ground instructor, chief ground instructor at some place, and he was an old school teacher or something and I didn’t like him and he didn’t like me either, so he recommended that I didn’t get a commission.

34:00 So how was that selection process conducted?

What?

How was that selection process conducted?

If you gave them some flowers or something.

Were you going to add anything to that about officer selection and …?

No, I became a sergeant and

34:30 it didn’t worry me very much, but when I went overseas I was a sergeant, I was one of the only operating sergeant pilots in the squadron over there because they messed up my papers I think, and I think I could have walked out and they couldn’t have done anything about it because I wasn’t even signed up with them according to them. Anyway, my

35:00 paybook must have caught up somewhere or they must have found it out here and sent it over because I wasn’t even on the list on the boat, you know, and anyway, I jumped from a sergeant, I became a flight sergeant and a warrant officer all on the same day, with backpay, which is rather good because I’d have only spent the money otherwise and I got all this back pay from whenever it is.

35:30 Was there animosity between the blokes that were made up to officers and the blokes that stayed at sergeants?

Not really animosity. It was, well, you know, sometimes I’d flown with officers who were under my direction because I’m the pilot, you know, that sort of thing. But nobody pulled, nobody pulls rank once you get into operations, there’s no,

36:00 you know, I don’t remember ever, except I knew how to do it you see. Sometimes we got called on a burial of fellows they’d recovered, sort of thing, you know, and you’d be carrying this pall bearer business and go out the local grave and they’d put them down there. But then I knew the procedure, I knew how to march properly

36:30 if need be. And one bloke was this George Longland fellow, he was a pallbearer with me, and anyway they put a couple of bars across to hold and put the coffin on then and then they got these ropes underneath, you see, and these men on either side of the rope, four men, you see, and they lift the coffin on the ropes and somebody will smartly move the planks and then you lower it, you see.

37:00 Well, the risk is you’ve got to know the procedure so we don’t start to lower that end too quickly and that sort of thing. Anyway, when you’re a pallbearer you don’t wear your hat, you stick it in your belt or in your lapel, and of course George, when he’s in there and he’s bent down and his cap fell down, well George jumped down on the coffin and got his cap,

37:30 yeah.

Can you tell us about, you went from flying cross-country, doing cross-country navigation to flying across ocean navigation, how hard was that?

Well of course you’re map reading over the ground, you know, unless you’re flying of a night time, it is no different between the land or the sea of a night time, well there is, you can see forms and shapes of things, but

38:00 I mean flying over the sea ‘cause we had some pretty elaborate radar gear you know, you could work out exactly where you were just by the machine. But when we first started cross-country flying, that was at Narromine, you’d fly, I don’t know, up there and around there and back there and home again, you see, and you had to do your own navigation. You usually had a

38:30 thing you used to strap on here, it was a computer and a little map and you used to basically find the river and from there you go to that hill and, you know, around there. And, but when we went down to Barnsdale we used to do a lot of navigation, one pilot would be flying and other one, a navigator, and all over the sea. It was sort of

39:00 half way to New Zealand and back to Tasmania and back again. And we had some, oh, we had this loop, you know, radio loop, that you could tune it into, say, Dalby or something, and it kept the noise level, you could get to Dalby, you see, and it was a circular route because you’re not accounting for the wind. So if you start here and go for Dalby, and by the time you get there you come from this direction

39:30 in here ‘cause the winds were going round, you see. But you still allowed, you know, read the wind and drift and you could see if you aim the nose of an aircraft and you put your compass on dead north and you see how much off straight you’re going, you know, by just looking at the ground. And of course, on Tiger Moths you didn’t have a strip, you just

40:00 had a paddock so you always landed into the wind, you didn’t have any cross-winds or anything like that. But in the Beaufighters you used to have, oh, 90 degree cross-winds and things, which would make it a bit difficult sometimes. You’d have to come in on a slip until you’re just on the ground, then you tip it over and put the wheels down, but you angle up like that to counteract the wind. And, but we used to,

40:30 oh that was another thing, you know the Tiger Moth’s got a tail skin, it hasn’t got a wheel at the back, it’s got a tail skin, and out at Narromine, you know, that fairy grass, it moves up against fences and things. Well, after a bit of flying there is a] great lump of fairy grass on the tail skin, you see, and on fairly rough days the two pupils that were on the ground had to meet the plane

41:00 and grab hold of it while it was still going along the runway, you see, grab hold of to stop it, you know, flipping in the wind or doing something, you see. And this tail skin had not shorted the static electricity out and you get the biggest jolt from this wing, oh, it nearly threw you over backwards, you know, this static electricity bolt.

41:30 End of tape

Tape 5

00:35 I was just wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about your training at Point Cook when you went onto multi-engines?

Oh, I forget what I told you but anyway …

Just go into a bit more detail on the exercises you did and …?

Well, as you know, Point Cook was the Potts Point of

01:00 aviation, it was first aerodrome for the Royal Australian Navy, Air Force and everybody thought if you went to Point Cook you were really, you were doing something. But they had some old Swordfish fighter planes there and they were our front line fighters at the beginning of the war. Terrible old things, double, you know, bi-wings and big radial motor and, anyway, they didn’t fly you

01:30 we just went and observed them in the hangar. There was a fair amount of what you call bull, being the premier training ground for the RAAF. They had a few air marshall and brass used to come round every now and again. But we had some, what they call satellite ‘dromes, we had one out towards Geelong and

02:00 near the …. The instructor had two aircraft and one pilot would use to fly one plane out and he and the other pilot used to fly the other one out, and this is after you’d been going solo and things, and I think he’d spend most of his time sitting round reading books while we do the flying.

Did you mind that?

Hey?

Did you mind?

No, well it was,

02:30 it was right on the bay, you know, the, what they call it down there, but it was pretty easy flying and very flat ground around there and so you didn’t sort of have any hills or anything to get in the way. Seagulls were the worst thing, quite a lot of them. But that’s where we had the 03:00 final parade, we got our wings at Point Cook.

Did you have to learn things about different positions, like different crew positions, like you spoke about learning a bit about navigation but did you have learn about different aspects of the aircraft and different positions?

In that file there, I’ve got the pilot’s manual, you know what I mean, the thing

03:30 that tells you what clock works what and all that sort of thing, but you go through and you learn that. There’s a lot of things don’t apply, for instance, sometimes you got enthusiastic and you’d go down to the workshop and have a look at what the mechanics are doing but I think our job was just to fly them, not to fix them up. And …

How many pilots were there at that time going through?

Gee,

04:00 I’d say about 50 or 60 at a time, you know, one course, and they’d vary courses and you’d start on that course at Bradfield Park and you’d be on the same course right through till you finished flying, training anyway. And some of them got scrubbed, you know, they just didn’t make it for some reason or another, and a couple of them killed themselves. But …

04:30 Was there much competition between pilots?

Much …?

Competition.

No, I don’t think so, no, we weren’t in that sort of, I don’t think we were encouraged into that. Everybody had a job to do and that was it and some bloke used to manage to get leave when there was something important on in Melbourne and others didn’t but that was probably his luck.

05:00 I think there was a bit of …. You know, I did my first solo in a Tiger Moth, probably the lowest hours you could do, you had to do so many otherwise they wouldn’t let you go. But I’d never been flying before but I, that fellow, Keith Robey, he was already, he had wings from the Sydney Aero Club, he’d been flying for years, and

05:30 he and I had the same instructor but they wouldn’t give him his, you know, solo flight because he wasn’t doing it their way and they were very tough on that. The first day he arrived out and he had his Aero Club leather coat with Aero Club wings on it and you could see the instructors look at him and say, ‘Oh- oh, what’s this?’ Poor George, he

06:00 quickly learned not to do it his way. And …

So how long did it take you to go solo?

In the Tiger Moth? Oh, about five and a half, six hours. I think George took 22 but that was, I don’t know.

Can you tell me about choosing your crew, how that came about?

Oh,

06:30 well that was terrible because the, well I didn’t choose my crew out here, you know, with Bundaberg you were just given them. But when we get on these Beaufighters in Scotland, the navigators were already there and they were training and learning all sorts of things in the classroom and some of the more enthusiastic pilots used to look through the window and then go and have a look at the scoreboard

07:00 to see which had the highest marks and put a bid in for him and what have you. Anyway, this George Longland and I to let it all go and we went down to the pub and when we came back there was only two navigators left, all the others had been picked. So I tossed up, or George tossed up, and I lost the toss so I got what was

07:30 left after his, so I got the last one left, which was Mitch. You know, I was very, very lucky ‘cause, oh, some of them were bits of, Dux of the class, sort of thing. Anyway, the first time, oh they used to come down, they were doing the same sort of thing, they’d come down and watch the pilots flying and landing and, ‘Oh, I hope I don’t get him,’ you know, ‘he’s no good.’

08:00 Anyway, the first time I took Mitch up as the navigator, you’ve got to get him acclimatised and you’d got to do a few circuits and bumps and things. And I went away and came back and I couldn’t see the ground properly, I didn’t try and land because everything wasn’t right, you see, so I went around again and then I had another go and it didn’t seem right. So the duty pilots called up and told me to

08:30 go away and come back in half an hour and so I did, they knew what had happened, I’d gone down the pub last night and I couldn’t see properly. What, this is on a grass paddock and what looked like tram tracks to me were the aircraft tracks and I thought, ‘Oh, there’s something wrong here,’ because they were little tiny tracks so, ‘they can’t be right.’ Anyway, poor Mitchy, he was quite happy after that, I managed to get it down and I never give him a bad landing after that. And

09:00 we used to do some, you know, a lot of night time and iced up runways and goodness knows what in the finish. And his friend, the other navigator, he got killed with my friend, the pilot, so.

How did that happen?

Oh, well they got killed on that raid in Norway and got shot down and,

09:30 as a matter of fact, I think I said that all that, 66 Squadron all went except me, which I was very lucky. And …

Did many blokes get air-sick in training?

The what?

In training, did many fellows ever experience air-sickness?

Oh, you could ask Don Mitchell about that because after we had this go in Norway with the Focke-Wulfs

10:00 they decided to give us some, you know, a fighter affiliation, and they send a Spitfire and a Mustang to make attacks on you, you know, for practice and anyway, after my skilful flying in Norway, the Spitfire couldn’t get a beat on me, but goodness, poor Mitch got sick, he got out and he was vomiting. I nearly pulled the plane apart actually because some of the stupid things I did but

10:30 he couldn’t get on my tail so that was a pretty good thing.

What were all the stupid things you did?

Hey?

What were some of the things you did to push the aircraft?

Well, you know they stand a certain amount of G [measurement of force of gravity]they’re not made to, and if you give them too much G, the wings come off. But, and he had been in the tail end of it, I’m sitting in the middle on the pivot seat and he’s in the end doing the, you know. And they not only get up but they suddenly go

11:00 sideways and down in the opposite direction and he was the poor fellow, he’ll tell you about it . Anyway, he was very pleased because we didn’t get a shot for the camera at all.

Do you know of any pilots or crew that used to have lucky charms or be superstitious and do things before they went?

No, I’ve never heard of that actually. I never heard of that except in the movies they take rabbits feet with them or a girlfriend’s handkerchief or something but no,

11:30 I never know of anything like that. Well they could have done but I never experienced it. I can’t remember sort of even thinking like that. No, I didn’t even bother taking my wallet with the steel mirror

12:00 because I didn’t think they can be that accurate.

What did you wear, what was your flying gear?

I flew just in, well when I started in Tiger Moths they had a canvas suit on because it’s mighty cold up there, you know, scarves and all sorts of things on, big boots, you know, fur-lined boots. But the Beaufighter was heated to

12:30 whatever you like ‘cause it’s only heat from the engine, it’s not electrical heat, it’s just heat from the engine. And I found that a lot of fellows used to fly with little thin shoes, sort of things, but I found that the ordinary boots that I marched up and down in, I flew in them all the time. It wasn’t too wise, I suppose, because they were lace-ups and if I ditched I’d have big heavy boots on. But never mind, I found it very easy, comfortable that way,

13:00 just get out and go for a walk and, you know, not having to change your boots or anything. They were hobnails, you know, the steel heel caps and things on, but I got used to them so I was fine. And they used to, oh, we had what they called a Mae West, it was an inflatable jacket, waistcoat thing and it had a

13:30 gas bottle on it so if you went into the water you’d just pull this thing and the gas bottle opened and filled this thing up with air so you, life jacket thing. And I used to fly with that, you know, it’s all deflated, and so that kept you pretty warm too. But the cold didn’t seem to worry me very much.

Did it worry Don out in the back?

Oh, no,

14:00 he wasn’t out the back, he had his own air conditioner down, hot pipe or whatever it was. They weren’t (UNCLEAR) in them, they were just ordinary, you know, one thickness of skin, they didn’t have a lining or anything, but if you’ve got enough air blowing in on your feet or your hands, he was working with his hands, but he’d come in there so he could work his pencils and things. And

14:30 we used to have gloves but I don’t remember wearing them much, I found that just the normal cabin temperature was good enough for me, but I don’t know if I’d have enough if I ditched or landed in the snow in Norway or somewhere, I’d have been mighty cold because I didn’t have any preparation for it.

Was it ever in your mind that you might have to ditch one day? Like is that one of a pilot’s greatest

15:00 fears, that he’s going to have to bail out? Is that something that’s always in the back of your mind?

Oh I don’t know. I think every time you go up there you’re aware that things can happen. But I don’t know of anybody ever sort of lying awake at night, you know. They used to tell you, used to go down the crew room and there’d be a board with chalk on it and you’d

15:30 know that you were going to be on next Thursday and what time and everything else, you see. Quite often it was scrubbed because the clouds came down and you couldn’t get there but you had …. And I don’t know of anybody ever didn’t turn up, you know, you went down and saw what time it was and you were there and sometimes you had to even organise – I used to quite often go

16:00 over and leave about 3 o’clock in the morning and just get to Norway as daybreak and of course you’ve got to have some breakfast before that, so you’d go order your meal at the cookhouse, so you’d go down at half past 2 or 2 o’clock and you’d get your breakfast or whatever you call it. And, but no, I find we were very responsible, when, if I can go back to the

16:30 time we were going across America in the troop train thing, we again shunted in the middle of Chicago Railyards and there’s about five miles either way of just railway lines and we were parked in the middle of them, and I don’t know why they did that, but anyway, we got sick of that so we decided we’d go to town so we all got out and marched across these lines and went into town, to Chicago, you see, and nobody had any idea

17:00 where we’re going or how we’re going or anything else. Anyway, after you’d been there for a while there’d be an American service policeman, military policeman, come up and he said, “Are you with the Australian mob?” “Yeah.” Well he said, “Would you be at Platform something?,” you know, “at the main station at 6 o’clock?” “Okay.” He would never arrest you or anything, and not one bloke didn’t turn up. And that’s how the Australians operate, you know, they never let

17:30 the side down, you know, no, they’re very, very reliable on a thing like that. But the Americans couldn’t understand that, you know, they thought that we were going to, they’d be chasing us around with squad cars for days trying to catch us all. They all got on the train that night, ‘cause we were easy to see, you know, we had blue uniform on and everybody knew you were an Australian because of the uniform.

18:00 Some people thought we were the Australian Military Band with this blue uniform, because they used to wear a blue uniform in their band you see and so we were all the Australian Military Band and we were there to raise funds for the Comfort Fund or something. Yeah.

Did you ever have an experience with wakey-wakey pills [amphetamines] whenever you were flying?

No, well I didn’t.

18:30 No you don’t, you’re always alert, you don’t go to sleep while you’re driving the car if you can help it, do you? I think the longest trip I did was nine and a half hours, but then other people used to do 36 on Catalinas and, but they had a change of pilots and all that sort of thing, but no, it’s not nearly as strenuous as you think.

19:00 The strenuous part only happens for about 10 seconds and then that’s it. And you know, when you go and attack it doesn’t last all day, it’s not like the Battle of Britain, flying around all day. Over there you just went in and it took 10 or 15 seconds or something and you’re out. So I don’t recall getting, I was a bit sort of anxious the first time I went over on my own

19:30 without any fighter escort, but that’s after I was shot up so I was a bit wary of enemy planes, sort of thing.

So they sent you to do something on your own, so Don wasn’t with you?

Oh yes he’s with me, yeah, no, but like there’s only one aircraft, you haven’t got any fighter escort or anything like that. You just

20:00 go over and I suppose it really is safe enough because at that stage the poor Germans didn’t have enough petrol to be wasting on one plane if they knew they’re going to have to go up tomorrow to get thirty of them down. Oh yeah, pity. The funny part, if I can divert again to when I went back there in 1981, I went to Trondheim up through Sweden and I stayed at this

20:30 little pub in Trondheim and it’s only a little pub, the maximum number of guests would be 12 or 10 or something like that. I was talking to this publican, the Mein Host Cellar, you see, and I thought I’d make some enquiries about this raid we had there and they had everything, they had battleships and everything up there and the flak was terrific and we never did any good at all and we were stupid to even go and try, I think.

21:00 But I said to this fellow, “You wouldn’t know anybody who was here on that day?” You see, I gave him the date and he said, “Oh yes, oh yes, that would be right.” I said, “Well who is he, where is he?” He said, “Well I was here.” “Oh yeah?” I said, “And what were you doing?” He said, “I was a German anti- aircraft gunner.” He married the Norwegian girl

21:30 ‘cause they didn’t harm, some of them, the one about the stories about the nasty Germans, because the Norwegians thought they were nice people, you know, and he married this girl. Anyway, he went back to Germany, got discharged and went back to Norway where she came from and bought a pub. Anyway, we got free board and everything out of that but I just think it’s terrific.

Well what did he tell you about his point of view?

Hey?

What did he tell you about his point of view on that day?

Oh I don’t think we went into it too much but

22:00 he said, well, you know, when he said he was on German anti-aircraft equipment well, fair enough I suppose, “I was one of the blokes up there trying to drop bombs on you.” But they’re, Bergen’s a place we used to fly around but it was a very hostile place, Bergen, beautiful town, and we went back there to have a look at Bergen and somehow another, I got hold of the chief town planner for Bergen,

22:30 ‘cause that’s right, they had on their old waterfront, built in 1200 AD, which is all cobblestone stuff and, you know, two hundred yards from the edge of the wharf into the warehouse, you know, they used to have drays and wagons and all sorts of things running down there all day, and I was intrigued that all these old barns were still there that they used to, you know, they’d have logs in these, and really that was 1200 AD sort of thing. And

23:00 anyway, I was a bit interested in town planning and I’m particularly interested in history and I went round the council and they put me on to the chief town planner and when he saw I was interested he gave me the day, he drove me all around Bergen and took me up in the hills, everywhere. Then he showed me one of these old barns down there on the wharf. Inside was a modern five-star hotel but they don’t

23:30 put the neon sign out or the flash sort of paint on it, they just leave it as it is and now it’s a modern five- star hotel in a big barn, and the place was just full of statues and, you know, artwork, everywhere you go they’ve got something. In Tewantin here, we’ve only got that council one painted, digger, over here on that

24:00 statue in the square, you know, but I can’t understand that because everywhere you went in Europe they had these fantastic artwork, monuments and (UNCLEAR) and Paris is the place, it’s got all the, you know, cathedrals and goodness only knows what. And so’s Norway, Norway’s smallest little towns have got a town hall that looks like it’s been built by some Greek, you know, architect

24:30 or something. And they’re very sort of proud of the thing. But I was going to say that, talking of Norway, this mob who run the Fochabers Museum in Scotland, they’ve got a special war museum covering this Dallachy Air Base, you know, so they’ve got a lot of stuff, I’ve sent a bit of stuff over to them, sort of thing. And,

25:00 you know, they write to me every so often, she’s a nice old lady that runs it and she sent me out a brochure which she’d picked up in Norway, for a Norwegian …. Anyway, we were getting on to the …

You were talking about the museum,

25:30 the lady?

Oh yes, this lady sent me out this brochure all written in Norwegian and of course I can’t read Norwegian and she said she couldn’t interpret it herself, she doesn’t speak Norwegian, but I went, down at the RSL the bottle shop manager is born in Bergen, came out here 12 years old, he’s forgotten his Norwegian, he knows some of it but he’s forgotten most of it, but his

26:00 father’s living up just outside Toowoomba and I sent it up there and he translated it perfectly into English, from Norwegian to English. So I sent this lady a copy of the translations and she was very pleased about that, yeah.

You said before that if you were going out on a mission you’d see your name on a board or whatever saying you’re flying next Thursday. Can you talk us through

26:30 how much time you’d know before you were going out, what sort of things you would do to prepare …? Oh, well it depends. Sometimes, you know, the siren went and you were rushed down and saw you were on the board. But most times, if you, well if they saw a ship in a fjord, you know, one day, then it was obviously going to Germany and then it would be in the next fjord the next day, sort of thing, so they had a pretty good idea.

27:00 Well they sent these Mosquitos out to observe where the target was, and when he found the target he just radioed and you went before he got back, you were on your way over, probably passed him going back. But it was, I don’t know, the funny thing, the photograph I’ve got of the old control tower, which by the look of it it had been used

27:30 as a hay shed, on the wall is a blackboard and it’s still some of the information down there, ‘B Flight’ and ‘A Flight’, you know, and times written down there, ‘0200’ or something like that, but you can still see it in the photograph and it’s amazing after all those years, vandals haven’t done much, but there’s absolutely nothing in it, it’s just a concrete building. I think the walls are about 18 inches thick though

28:00 in case somebody dropped a bomb on it or something.

So could you just talk me through a typical briefing that you’d have before you went out?

Oh, you were always briefed and told what the target was and everything else and given your times and what to expect if you, you know, if they had a …. Most of the times the convoys, when they’re going, are only protected

28:30 by these flak ships but if it was a very important one they’d have German naval ships there, the flak ship was any old useless tug and they’d mount guns on it, you know, anti-aircraft guns on the deck and all over the place, they had a lot of guns on them but, you know, they, though the worst part was the part where they went into the fjord

29:00 and particularly in that important place where they had permanent anti-aircraft guns all the way up the wall of the fjord. Well one fellow said there, when you went in it was like going over the top in World War I, I don’t know whether you ever heard about going over the top in World War I, they used to just, you’ve seen the photographs of them, they’d get up the wall and all fall back in the trench, dead, and all you could see is bullets going everywhere, well that’s

29:30 what, it’s a bit like that, sometimes you were just lucky you went in between them, I suppose.

So what sort of flying tactics would you employ when you were going through somewhere like that?

What was the tactic? Well you can’t use any tactics because you’ve got to be steady with your aim and, well, what you do is, well we had these 20 mill cameras on the

30:00 plane and long before you actually pressed your rockets’ buttons you were firing your cannon, and mainly as you made a splash of the water in front of the ship, that used to frighten the Germans, and if you started hitting the ship with cannon and things, they used to jump down behind the guns and wouldn’t fire, so it was a matter of you just let go with everything you had till you got within the rocket range and about, oh, 8 to 400 yards was the

30:30 time you let the rocket go and, of course, they went pretty close to some of the poor fellows in front of you and so did the cannon shells and I think we might have had a bit of friendly fire there at odd times. And then there’d be sort of a, everybody trying to get out of the fjord in the same spot and some shrapnel would run up the other fellows

31:00 and chop his tail off and glide and, oh dear me, that was the worst part about it, when they did those sort of …. I don’t know how you could organise it any other way, I used to try and think how you could organise it but if you only went in singularly you were too good a target, you didn’t have enough fire power to keep the German gunners down, you know, but if you’ve got half a dozen or so coming in at once and spraying the whole damn fjord with cannon shells, they

31:30 don’t stand up on the deck too long, they sort of jump down a bit and, but then you’re likely to hit the other bloke when you’re going out or coming in or something.

So is there a particular flying formation or strategy that you engage when you …?

Well you flew in formation; you had a leader and a deputy leader and you

32:00 fly about six aircraft in the wing and then have another one over there but all six would be in formation here, but then there’d be another six in formation in this lot, you know, and then you’d have the fighters going round and round, patrolling to stop any enemy coming up. But you seem to, I can’t remember now, if they tell you, your blue leaders, “Go here now,” and you automatically know that

32:30 the bloke on the – I shouldn’t say left side, I should say port side, he follows the leader, then the starboard man comes in behind him you see, they’ve got a routine. This one followed the leaders and that one comes in behind, just make sure you don’t make any mistakes.

So when you’re under that sort of high pressure, going in like that, are there certain aspects of your training that just make you do 33:00 certain things automatically so you don’t have to think about things?

No, I think you sort of, well you don’t take it too lightly, you know, when they say, “Attack,” you get a…. I’ll tell you what, the only time we had the wrestle, my hair stood up, when I got attacked the second time with these, you know, the Messerschmitts and my navigator called out, “There’s a couple of Messerschmitts on our tail!” and my hair stood on end, I’m sure

33:30 of that, have you ever heard of that? You know how a dog can, you know, bristle up and apparently with humans, if they get enough fright they can bristle up too. And I remember my hair standing on end that day and then, but only temporary. No, I think it was, oh I think these poor fellows in submarines used to get underneath for days and then get a depth charge come down and blow them all apart underground and oh dear me.

34:00 No, just as well I didn’t join the navy, I think.

Does everything go in slow motion when you’ve got someone chasing you like that? What’s your perception of time and how are your senses when you’re being chased like that?

Well I didn’t think it was ten minutes, it wasn’t my timing, it was

34:30 the first time I called up, “Mayday! I’m being attacked!” until they called up again and I said, “I’ve got a way through a cloud now,” the ten minutes was their time, the radio people’s time, not mine. And I sometimes sit there and take 10 minutes and just sit there and it’s a long, long while to be lurching round and round fjords and up and down gullies and with bullets spraying around you all

35:00 the time, it’s a long while. But I don’t know, I suppose, you were just scared, I suppose.

But did it feel like ten minutes, though, or did it feel like 10 hours, did it feel like a long time or a short time?

Oh, well that was a fair time because we doubled back on our track several times, you know, you’d go, Norway’s a funny little place, it’s full of

35:30 gullies and little hills and things and you’d go round the thing, I went down one, one little village there and my wing was about four foot off the roadwork underneath you know, going sideways, I had to go sideways, I couldn’t go that way, and I went down a place like that and you’d go round the hill, you’ve got to keep in as tight as you can against the hill because they’d got to aim ahead

36:00 of you to hit you and if they aim ahead of you, well, they run into the hill. And making the decisions, I think, as to whether to turn left or right, go up that gully or this one, sort of thing you know, well I made the right decision, didn’t I? And then in the finish and Mitch said to me, “Look out, they’re going around the other way,” they all decided

36:30 they couldn’t catch me there so they’d come around and meet me head on, you see. And when he said that I just looked up the hill and there was a little cloud there and I thought, ‘Blow this,’ and I pulled her in, up into the cloud and it was when I got in the cloud I found I had no instruments ‘cause I had never looked at them before, you know, I didn’t bother looking at them ‘cause I was doing visual flying. When I get up there I found no air speed indicator, no anything, and I got

37:00 through the cloud, fortunately it wasn’t very big so I hadn’t tipped over or something, but I went round and round it, through for about another five or ten minutes, I suppose, until I made sure they weren’t coming, still there. And then we headed for the Shetland Islands. I didn’t think it was going to last that long, you know, we couldn’t get back to base, that was too far. I think the total trip was over 900 miles

37:30 and I went probably two or three hundred too many by going to Sumburgh at first but then on.

Just hearing you talk about how you got away, it reminds me of the training exercise you said when you made Mitch sick by getting away and doing all kinds of things to the aircraft. Do you think that some of those training exercises probably help you survive that day?

Oh

38:00 it does, because you do a lot of, in training you’re learning steep turns and a steep turn is when you’re right over on your side. Airliners don’t do steep turns, they do about a 10 degree one and take it way around. When you do a steep turn you can come right back, you can come back in your own slip if you’re not careful. And, but they are made for, they were pretty

38:30 manoeuvrable, they responded pretty quickly to, they were 20 tons or something, which is a pretty heavy aircraft, and two big motors and, but they, I never heard anybody complain about the Beaufighter but they used to complain about the Beauforts and it wasn’t a nice plane to fly but the Beaufighter, even when it was out here, it was considered to be a very good plane, you know, New Guinea.

39:00 But I think we used to do quite a lot of low-level flying to get you used to this, and sometimes when you’re going on a trip somewhere, most of our flying over the North Sea was about 30 or 50 feet high above the water and on a very gusty day you’d use your windscreen wipers to get the sea spray off your windscreen.

39:30 And then sometimes you’d have to go up to 1000 feet and you thought you’d stopped, you didn’t feel comfortable up there because nothing was moving fast enough and you thought the whole plane had come to a halt. I think if you went to 30,000 feet you would feel you were sitting in a balloon, you see. No, we were, I think we became, we did an awful lot of low-level flying as training and that was mainly

40:00 just to keep you sort of so you had quick reactions to, you know, the ground and ….

Okay, we might just stop there.

40:16 End of tape

Tape 6

00:33 Can you just tell us all that, what you just told us again?

In these escort Mustangs they had these, there was a Polish crew and they were terribly good, they meant business. If you had them escort you and you came across a German ‘drome, they’d leave you and they’d go down and shoot the ‘drome

01:00 up, they meant to get square with everything. You’d see these tanks drop because they had these tanks underneath it that had fuel, long range fuel, and you can’t fight with a tank on so they’d drop them, and when you see the Mustang start to drop their tanks you can bet you life something’s going to happen. And we had RAF and Canadians were, they had this squadron of Mustang escorts and

01:30 we went over, that’s one thing we did, you know. If you wanted to go your could borrow a plane, ask your CO for a plane, and you could fly over and visit them, you weren’t allowed to go to the mess and booze up or anything but you could fly over and have a yarn and have a look in their aeroplanes and compare their notes and things.

The 455 Squadron was also, had a fairly big mix of nationalities didn’t it?

02:00 455? No, purely Australian.

Was it?

We had a couple of navigators were English, we had a compass adjuster, ground crew, well quite a lot of the ground crew were English, they were you know. But all the flying ones were Australians.

Where was it that you were mixed up with some of the sort of Canadian and Rhodesian fellows and those sort of fellows?

Well they were on the ‘drome but you didn’t, like we were on this side of the ‘drome, our

02:30 squadron was sort of parked there and somebody else parked over there and another one over there. We never sort of really formed a relationship even though we used the same mess, sort of thing, you sort of, they drank up their end and we drank up our end, there weren’t any fights or anything going on, it’s just that we, I suppose you get, well I didn’t associate with everyone in the squadron, I had my few particular friends and that was it.

03:00 And no, it would be the greatest way of mixing. But our CO was quite a brilliant bloke, he got a DSO [Distinguished Service Order] and Bar which is pretty hard to get.

What’s his name?

Col Milson, and he joined up, he was a bushy from out, way outside of Boulia. And

03:30 he got in there fairly earlier because he was flying Blenheims in North Africa and he also went to Murmansk in Russia, they sent a mob up there trying to get the German submarines who were attacking the convoys going to Russia but that didn’t succeed. I don’t know, I don’t think we were very popular with the Russians, I wasn’t there but I don’t think they got on very well with the Russians or the Russians didn’t get on with us or something.

04:00 So they pulled out of that and there was a …. Oh, one bloke who was on the …, he used to sleep in the same hut as me, a fellow by the name of Peter Ellry, and he crash-landed too, after a trip over. And anyway, he became a doctor in Canberra and because he had this,

04:30 he was involved in, you know, the medicine for that atomic energy place they had in South Australia, and he eventually became an honorary group captain in the RAAF and anyway, he got very keen on the whole thing and he organised this monument or something to be built at the site of this Dallachy Airport, you see, he went over representing everything.

05:00 Anyway, I’ve heard from him a couple of times, you know, in a letter. And this Tiny Fray fellow, who used to be an air traffic controller in Adelaide, I haven’t heard from him in a long while now.

Can you tell us more about the CO, what was he like?

05:30 Col Milson? I found him very good because I was a bushy and he was too and we seemed to get along. He was a wing commander, well way up as far as we were concerned. He was a bloke that sort of took a hell of an interest in you, in what you were doing. When I crashed, he was one of the first blokes over there, in his car too, you know,

06:00 jumped in and caught a light and all this sort of thing, and he jumped in from the control tower roof to get in his car. And I think he was only a young bloke; I think he was a year older or the same age as me. And, but he was a very, when he came back he got a job with Borthwicks Meatworks and he was a meat buyer or seller or something for Borthwicks,

06:30 I don’t know whether you know them or not, they used to have a big meatworks here, and I don’t know what happened to Col but it didn’t suit him, he stuck with it a while and then back to the bush and that’s where he died. He married an English girl and she went out and lived out at Boulia with him. I don’t know whether the family is still there or not, but never mind.

What was discipline like in the squadron?

None.

07:00 None, none at all unless you went and did something wrong. No, absolutely nil. You sort of, they didn’t even tell you to button your coats up or anything, you know, well you did it because that’s drummed into you. You don’t go round making a disgrace of the Queen’s [would have been King’s at the time] uniform, like going into town and, you know, leaving all your buttons undone. But no, we got no, I suppose when you first go in and you’re pretty much

07:30 your own man and you don’t like authority so you don’t come back on time and you spend too much time at the pub and you don’t catch the train back to work, and they quick and lively put you in the clink for that sort of thing. I know the first day I went out in my uniform from Bradfield Park, I went out with this mate of mine who came from Queensland, and we were both walking along with our great coats open, flapping about, I’ve got the photograph of them flapping, and all of a sudden this

08:00 service policeman comes up and tells us we either take those coats off and carry them or button them up. And we were just, that was the first time we ever got leave from being in camp, we both were still bushy, we were nearly going to tell him to shove off but we thought we better not. So we got no discipline at all in the end but your didn’t need any, I never heard of anybody that got too full or played up and didn’t

08:30 turn up for work or anything like that. I suppose if you got full and somebody took your place and they took your place, you’d feel dreadful wouldn’t you? I know I fell off my pushbike in the snow and I forget what happened now, we had to go down and see the MO [Medical Officer] and he told me I was off flying for two days or something and I was glad when my two days were up.

09:00 But they used to have a system there, a pilot, if he got sick, his navigator didn’t have to go with anybody else and Mitch would never go with anybody else. But a pilot could take some other navigator if he wanted, he can’t refuse to take a navigator because he’s, you know, he’s not his own one. So that was one thing it sort of,

09:30 you made yourself, your pilot and your navigator were very thick [close] and, you know, you were sort of …. Like he used to go off on leave to Blackpool or somewhere, he still complains about that, and all I did was go down to Kent to go horse riding, he’d say. And it wasn’t any horse riding I was after but never mind.

Did all pilots and navigators have that same special relationship with each other?

No.

10:00 I know of some cases they didn’t and which I thought was a bit of a pity, that. You know, I’d hate to go with some bloke who didn’t like me and I didn’t like him and, but there were a couple of cases like that. And I better not mention names.

10:30 So what else was so special about your relationship with Don Mitchell?

I don’t think there was any special relationship because he, we both, oh that’s right, we both played bridge when we were waiting to go. Bridge was the game that lasted the whole time, if you played two- up or poker or something it would be a fashion for a while and then it would fade away but bridge was …. And

11:00 Don and I entered the North Scottish Bridge Playing Championship and won it. And we also won the bridge playing championship on the boat coming home. And I must admit we had, I don’t think it was an altogether legal method of doing things but that, what, you’ve got to, you know, if you play with a fellow long enough you know everything he’s thinking about and everything else. And it was a game that …,

11:30 they’ve got a bridge club here because it’s a sort of, I don’t know. Yeah, they have music, people here, you know, recitals or something or God knows what, the trouble is they don’t even listen to the music, they want to stay for about two hours after it, discussing and criticizing it and that kind [of thing], I can’t stand that.

12:00 When you were talking about your cannons before on the Beaufighter, how many rounds would that have, would they have?

Oh, that I couldn’t tell you, but they didn’t last. You could fire them all off but you’re usually right through by the time you ran out, you know, you know you, they would follow you all day.

How many seconds do you reckon you’d have of continuous fire?

Oh well you didn’t, you didn’t fire them for too long because they got too hot, you gave them a burst, on attack

12:30 you might get time to get two bursts in, well you don’t want the plane to catch alight from the heat of these. These shells that used to pop out of this thing and fill the …, they were hot, I can tell you. And we had these eight rockets and the rockets could be exploded, armour piercing

13:00 and ordinary, you know, all the things you use as you hit transport or something. But if you were after a ship you had to have armour piercing to get [through] and you didn’t aim at the bridge or anything, you aimed about 20 feet this side of, into the water, and when they hit the water they’d turn and they’d go straight through the bottom of them and the next thing you’d see, no damage at all

13:30 and the ship sinking. And it would go right through, somebody said they go about 10 times around the engine room and go out the other side. Well they’d get a hoot up.

Whereabouts did you do your cannon and rocket practice?

All at East Fortune. Before I joined the squadron we done a lot of, you know, they have to

14:00 have, other aircraft pulling drones with a thing out the back, about 500 yards of wire, and used to come in and attack that as if you were attacking an aircraft which is, you had to break off before you got too much behind otherwise you’d shoot the poor guy pulling the drone. And, like the rockets, they’d have sort of timber sort of things, by the look of it they were

14:30 same length of a ship and the same height but, you know, they weren’t floating, they were just on the beach, and they used to fire into these things. But they didn’t waste too many of those, I would have liked to have done a lot more of it. But the, see when we were on the old Ansons we had two depth charges

15:00 and you dropped them by guesswork. You got used to working out your speed mentally, you know, and how high you were and how long it was going to take for the thing to hit. And you got very, very accurate at dropping something without a gun sight, no nothing, just say, “Well, I’m just about there, let it go,” and you watched it sail in and hit the spot. But then again, I got above average for bombing

15:30 when I was training.

Well speaking about the Ansons, you were telling us about how you were actually out flying the day the Centaur was sunk, can you tell us about that?

What?

The day the Centaur was sunk?

Oh, the Centaur was sunk at night time but I was out up at Bundaberg, the Centaur was sunk down here near Caloundra somewhere but I was up there flying and got it on the radio about the whole thing but it was no good me going there because

16:00 there were plenty of, planes from Archerfield and Amberley and everywhere else would be there long before me and the coastguard. So anyway, we heard it on our radio which we, I forget when it was now, ‘30, ‘40, ‘42 or ‘43 was it? Do you know the date? I can’t remember.

What sort of things did you see when you were flying up and down the coast

16:30 of Queensland doing convoy support, what sort of things would you see?

You’ve got the best view of a lot of the Barrier Reef and the whales and the sharks and the whole lot, you know, you could see right to the bottom down there. In those days it was clear and you could see the coral reefs and you could see the sharks, no, it was wonderful, you know, should do it now instead of going out on these whale

17:00 watching boats. That was very interesting. We flew most of the time from Bundaberg but we used to get down to Evans Head in New South Wales and that’s where they had a training ground there, you know, for air gunners I think, and we used to go down and pick

17:30 up a convoy coming up and stay with them, probably the whole time. Not, you know, we used to change, you’d go out for your time and another plane would take over from you and you’d go round and round until it got out of your hands. But nothing really very startling happened either, just as well I think.

Did you ever get to fly any other aircraft during your air force career?

Other?

18:00 Aircraft besides the ones you’ve already mentioned to us?

Oh yeah. When I, I’ve flown a Wellington, which is nothing spectacular, it’s just a big Anson and frightens the daylights out of you because you look out there and the wings are about 200 yards either side and the thing is going up and down like that and you wonder whether it’s flying like

18:30 a bird, flapping its wings. No, I had another little, it wasn’t an Auster but a little thing like that but I don’t know who or what it was supposed to be but sometimes you could get it and take it, go up in it. I thing the CO or somebody used to fly from one base to another or something and talk to somebody and

19:00 save fuel by not flying the Beaufighter. No, I wouldn’t be, I wouldn’t have had a lot, but they’re all very much the same. They’ve got a certain characteristic of, you know, landing and probably, you know, a Beaufighter and a Beaufort and all the ones I flew were three point landings.

19:30 Well now they don’t have three point landings, they just touch the wheels and then it’s (UNCLEAR), but our job was to pull up quickly, I suppose, and when you, if you haven’t got your tail wheel down when you put your brakes on you’re likely to tip, sort of thing, so you get your brakes on a lot quicker if you do that three point landing. And now, of course, you’ve got these,

20:00 you know, tricycle undercarriage, but do you notice how they always land tail down? They’re doing three point landings really but once the flying speed comes off the nose falls forward. But you watch those big Jumbo jets landing, the tail’s nearly touching the ground and when it stalls it tips up and …. No, I did, when I first came out

20:30 I did go along and see TAA [Trans-Australian Airlines] I think it was, or ANA [Australian National Airways], ANA I think it was, and they were looking for pilots and they didn’t have to train and I thought of doing that and then I decided, ‘Oh bugger it,’ you know, ‘why do you want to keep going doing that sort of thing for?’ I think I was, you know, I couldn’t be bothered

21:00 joining the RAF and carrying on flying although I could have been in all that Berlin Airlift thing, you know, and, but.

Can you tell us about when you first got to England, can you, were you a service pilot for a while delivering aircraft and that sort of thing?

21:30 Staff pilot.

Staff pilot was it?

Well that’s what they called me. You, well whatever plane you qualified to fly, you got to be qualified, you’ve an endorsement in your logbook, sort of thing. And if they wanted a run, to fly, take it from this aerodrome to that one, well you’d got the job of doing it. And that didn’t last very long though, I seemed to get ….

22:00 For a while, well I was doing that for a while and then I got called on to do that beam approach training and then they call them staff pilots, I don’t know why.

You’ve told us a bit about the beam approach, can you just explain exactly how it works to us?

Well there’s a bloke underground looking at a radar screen

22:30 and he can pick you up, know exactly where you are, he knows where the aerodrome is. So you’re going along and he would tell you to turn port or something 45 degrees, so you turn you around and you go across there and then he tells you to turn again and descend at 500 feet a minute or something, put your flaps down, put your wheels down, and there you are, right on the end of the runway without being able to see it. And he

23:00 can’t even see you in the plane so it’s a wonderful idea for, I went on a few when a squadron’s actually done that thing, they helped me a lot, I might have got a few jobs out of it I suppose, you know, nil visibility, sort of thing. And sometimes the cloud was down to 200 feet or something and you couldn’t even see the aerodrome,

23:30 they’d bring you through that and tell you when to put the flaps down, when to turn and when to reduce your speed and that was quite a brilliant idea.

Did you ever get the opportunity to go down into that room and see those guys working?

Oh, no, you weren’t encouraged to do that. No, you didn’t poke your nose into too much things, I never went near the control tower and all those sort of things. 24:00 No, the, I don’t think I even went around the back of the cookhouse to see how the cook would feed you.

And how was the food there? Like I know the rest of England was on fairly strict rationing?

Oh yeah. Well we got a lot of, aircrew got two eggs a week and other people never got any and but apart from that I used to, I had a pushbike

24:30 and I suppose I used to go for rides on the pushbike and go about 20 mile up into the heather and come across a dairy farmer there and I’d give him a hand with his cow and then he’d give me a dozen eggs and a big feed of milk. And they used to make this great big cake because it came in blocks and they ate it by dipping it in this bowl of milk

25:00 and you soak up a bit, but to get the water, you get the sheet and bang it like that on the table and you break a piece off it, but they’re big. And I used to enjoy that and ‘cause I was, people thought I was pretty good when I arrived home with a dozen eggs. I didn’t tell anybody else where it was.

You probably told them you were bird nesting did you?

But I tell you another good story up around Inverness in ‘81

25:30 when I went back over there. I was breeding Angus cattle you see, and I thought I’d go and look at the world’s greatest quality Angus cattle, you know, the origin of all Angus cattle, American ones and everywhere else. And this fellow by the name of Grant owned it so I thought I’d go and have a look at them, you see, while I was over there, and he was very pleased to see me and took me round and showed me all his cattle and all these things and then when we finished he said, “Now

26:00 would you like to come and have a look at the distillery?” “What distillery?” “Mine,” he said, “over here.” Here’s this dilapidated old thing and then he went in there and he’s making, you know, Grants Whisky and – what’s the one’s name? I can’t think of the name, you know, the top whisky in the world is Glenfiddich, have you heard of it?

26:30 Well he gave me a big bottle of that. It lasted me, oh, the rest of the trip I think. But it was very interesting to see the, they sent this whisky around the heather or the heath in old wooden logs, I don’t know what for, he said it was to get a bit of the highland dew in it or something, but it used to go round this bloomin’ log drain or something and back in the distillery and then they’d bottle it or something, but all these silly old ancient things. Oh, and his

27:00 equipment was so old and dilapidated; I suppose he had a better one somewhere but yeah.

You spoke of East Fortune before, what was that place like?

Well East Fortune was sort of south east of Edinburgh, right on the border of England and Scotland, it was used in my time purely as a conversion

27:30 course from, it converts you, you fly Beauforts there and then you convert to Beaufighters, and I can’t remember how long it took but not very long, but that’s where you pick up your navigator and he’s also down there studying hard. And it was far out of Edinburgh actually. But I had these cousins there and the

28:00 old fellow was a Doctor Finlay, not the Doctor Finlay [fictional and television character] but he was Doctor Finlay and, like the woman was a cousin of my mother’s actually, and so these girls and this other bloke would write mystery stories, he’s a second cousin or something. But my, the girl that runs the art thing in Edinburgh and Hollywood,

28:30 she came out here to an art conference and rang up from Sydney and said can she come and see us, so I said, ‘Righto, come and see us.” But she got up here and got off the bus and I met her there and she said, “What I’d like to do while I am here is catch the bus out to Blackall,” she said, and, “in time to get back to Sydney on the plane,” you see. I said, “Catch the bus from here to Blackall and get back in time?” “Why?” she said. I said, “It will take you a day and a half to get there, let alone

29:00 come back again.” “Oh,” she said. I said, “Why do you want to go to Blackall for?” Well she said, “My mother,” that’s the cousin of my mother, “her father was the first doctor in Blackall.” So when I went a trip around, oh a few years ago, I called the hospital and I took photographs of this plaque with ‘Doctor Hugher’ written up on it, ‘The first doctor’ and everything else, and sent it over to her and she was thrilled to death and

29:30 it’s amazing isn’t it? But the bloke is, like they’re not penny dreadfuls, you know, the old murder mysteries and things like that, and he’s pretty well known, in Scotland anyway, for his book writing, and drinks whisky.

30:00 What was the town of East Fortune itself like?

Oh there wasn’t a town, just an area. If you went anywhere you went to Edinburgh, it wasn’t very far out of Edinburgh, there was a train there and I think it was only the name of the aerodrome and probably the village next door to it or something. Because quite often the villages are right alongside the, as a matter of fact, well at Dallachy they, you know, the 30:30 village was inside the aerodrome area and I don’t know what they did for a living but they must have done something.

Were any of the airfields that you were stationed on in England, were any of them ever subjected to air raids?

Subject to …?

To air raids, to bombing raids?

Not in my time, no, because the, that …. Well I didn’t get there until

31:00 ‘44 and by that time they weren’t having bombing raids on London, they were only these doodlebugs and then they had the V2s – remember those? – it was almost a rocket, by gee, they used to make a lot of noise and bang when they went off, and so I can’t remember ever seeing any

31:30 enemy aircraft over London or over England while I was there, but plenty of these doodlebugs and things. But there’s a lot of, like the Germans all shot up over London, and by these Hurricane fellows, and I had a bloke out here the other day and he was a Typhoon pilot

32:00 at the end of the war. And a Typhoon was a really hotted up Hurricane and it fired rockets and they were the most dangerous job in the war, flying. Their casualty rate was terrific but they said you’d go train busting and things and attacking gun emplacements and tanks and goodness knows what. They do [it] all about 10 foot up in the air and I don’t know how this poor fellow, but anyway,

32:30 he’s not too well now, as a matter of fact, his daughter lives here and she said he’s not very well at all, but poor fellow.

So you’ve told us early about your appraisal of the Tiger Moth and a couple of these other aircraft. What about the Beaufighter?

Well I suppose there’s only one aircraft. Now the Mosquito

33:00 used to do the same job but it was made of plywood, it wasn’t hard and tough, it didn’t weigh as much so it had a lot more speed. As a matter of fact the Focke-Wulfs couldn’t catch it if it was on a reconnaissance, you know, unloaded, you know, and the pilot and navigators used to sit together and sit one behind the other. And they had these Merlin engines in them and, no, they were probably,

33:30 you know, the best ones I’ve seen, well the only ones I would have liked to have been in beside the Beaufighter. Well I wouldn’t go for, you know, all these, oh you know, Norm and his Sutherland and things, he’s a funny bloke Norm.

Was it true that they were the most heavily armed?

Yeah,

34:00 forward, it had more firing power up the front than any other fighter, oh the Mosquito had just about as much, and they used to carry rockets, but the Beau used to carry torpedoes, we had one squadron on our ‘drome, New Zealanders, and they had the torpedo plus the armaments up the front to protect themselves, but the Beaufighter could be, you could convert them very

34:30 easily to carry torpedos, rockets, depth charges, anything at all.

You also mentioned earlier that some of them actually got, had wing-mounted machine guns as well?

It did have, yeah.

Were there any of those in the squadron?

No, no, the .303 went out of fashion once the cannons got there, you know, the .303s have got about 200 yard range and a cannon’s 1500, 2000 yards and,

35:00 but I think at night time, if you snuck up behind a (UNCLEAR) Jerry bomber and then you hit him with the lot, he would be in trouble. They had a, the only thing I think was wrong with the Beaufighter, you never got high enough to parachute, you usually didn’t need a parachute.

35:30 The way we used to fly, you had no chance in the world of jumping out with a parachute, parachutes don’t open until about 1000 feet and, but to get out of a Beaufighter in an emergency you couldn’t just parachute, there’s only one way out. Your chair’s here and you can pull a lever and it will tip backwards and then there’s a trap door

36:00 in the bottom of the plane, where you get in actually, this trap door opens up all the time and you climb up this ladder and pull the trap door shut but a quick lever and the trap door would flip down again. But you don’t, you back somersault out and I wouldn’t even back somersault even if I had mattresses underneath ‘cause I reckon you would hit your head on the side or do something stupid. But navigator’s all right, he had a 36:30 he had a trap door too plus a thing he could open, he’d put the cord and hold and a canopy would fly away and he wore his parachute, we hung it on the wall, he had his harness on and all he would do is reach over and clip it and jump. Well the pilot sat on his, you had to first of all carry it out of the, you took your parachute into the parachute section every time you went up and

37:00 I think they used to unpack them and do them up again, just in case. So you’d go and get a parachute and you’d hang it over your shoulder until you put it in the seat and then you’d climb over the seat and sit on the parachute and then do [up] your harness]. But you kept your parachute on all the time because you didn’t, you know, in a panic, you’re trying to do these buckles up in the air… they were a very quick release button here, used to bang and everything used to fly open and all the,

37:30 I think the four plugs would hold the suit on, and then you had this, a thing you used to pull from here, I think you used to pull a pin and the parachute opened. The navigator’s parachute was on his chest and he pulled this handle and it undid the zip fastener or something and flew out.

So parachuting from a Beaufighter was not a good idea?

38:00 Were there any blokes that just decided no point in them taking it up?

Yes, yes there were some and they become POWs [Prisoners of War] in Norway. They jumped, I don’t know how but they must have been up pretty high.

Were there blokes that just decided they wouldn’t take their ‘chutes with them ‘cause they thought it was pointless?

The what?

Were there any pilots or navigators that decided not to take their parachute with them because they thought it was a pointless exercise?

Oh no, you didn’t do stupid things. No, you didn’t do stupid things. If there was a rule for that, you did it.

38:30 You don’t muck about. Yeah, some navigators might throw the thing in a corner like that but there’s a place to put it on, the navigator’s table is here and the parachute’s there and you grab it and clip it on, you don’t go wandering around when it’s slip-, up the back of the pilot somewhere and you can’t find it.

How did you normally enter and exit the aircraft?

Through this thing underneath.

The same one?

Yeah,

39:00 you could get out. When I crashed landed the thing I got out through the top over here and jumped out on the wing. But it was on the ground then and …

How much useable space was there in the fuselage of the aircraft?

Space?

Yeah.

Well you saw the photographs, there’s not a lot of room, they’ve got a lot of gadgetry, getting into it you climbed up and you put your parachute on the seat

39:30 and then you sort of crawled round the top and stood on your parachute to get in and you were surrounded by gadgets and what have you but there was a bit of room in between. As a matter of fact, on my last trip I took this ground staff fellow with me and he had to stand up behind me because you’ve got no place for him to sit, and he went on a nice

40:00 trip to Norway and God he was thrilled, you know, it was approved, I didn’t sneak him in there. But he thought it was marvellous, “Jacksey, you’ll get a trip to Norway.” I think he was a air frame fitter or some damn thing. But he had to have a parachute, he had to have it on, you know, it was a navigator’s parachute but he had it clipped on, he couldn’t sort of pick it up off

40:30 the wall or something because there was no place to do that. And he had to stand on the door that actually fell down when it opened up. So all he had to do was pull the lever and he could go straight through. Yeah.

Did you ever feel like you would have like to have flown a Spitfire or Mustang or anything like that or …?

Well I suppose

41:00 you would, but, I mean, I didn’t think too much about it because I wasn’t a … no I was never a, what you call a mug lair, I didn’t do too much stupid things, you know, just to create havoc, sort of thing. No, I 41:30 didn’t envy these foreign forces Mustang blokes, you know, how they, if they’ve got engine failure they’ve only got one engine, but they were Merlin engines and, boy, they didn’t fail too often. But if they got hit they were, had it, you know, if they got hit in the motor it was hooray because I think they did have a dinghy attached to the parachute when they jumped out and they usually didn’t jump out, they turned it over

42:00 and fell out.

42:03 End of tape

Tape 7

00:32 You spoke a little bit before about briefings before you went out. But what sort of debriefings would happen when you came back in?

Came back in where?

From being, like when you’ve been out and you’ve taken photographs and so forth. Did you go see the intelligence guys or did you have a debriefing about what you had seen or what you’d …?

When you came back from a trip? Oh yeah, you got debriefed, you went into a place and the intelligence officer

01:00 wrote down things and somebody else typed them up and, yeah, they just, anything you saw they took note of, God knows what they did with it but it all goes to London I think.

What were some of the typical things they’d ask you?

Oh, the weather, what sort of ship it was. And I always used to answer, “Well have a look at the camera,” you know, I wouldn’t know what sort of ship it

01:30 was and I had more things to do than that. Well they wrote the report and then, and if you like to have a look in those books you’ll see some photocopies of the actual reports and how they asked and what it was all about and what they put in them. And they’d put the pilot, the crew’s name, the number of the

02:00 aircraft and then the time and the date and then they give details of how many ships were there, what you told them anyway, they just typed it all up.

Was it just the pilots that were debriefed or would Don, your navigator, be debriefed as well?

Oh yeah. Both of you got debriefed, separately though, you didn’t sort of …, ‘cause I think they used to ask him more questions about the reception or something about the radio and I wouldn’t

02:30 give a damn, I wouldn’t knew about it at all.

Would those debriefings happen as soon as you got back?

Did they?

Did the debriefings happen …?

Yeah, as soon as you got back. They went out, you parked your plane, then a, what they call a lorry, not a truck but they’re all lorries in England, that had to come along and then you climb up the back, it’s got canvas and

03:00 some seats in it and, you know, they’d pick up as many of the crew and then take them in the Operations Room and dump them off there, you’d get a cup of coffee, sometimes you got a rum. And you only got a rum if you ran into (UNCLEAR) they were pretty stingy.

How often did you get a rum?

Oh one or two times, I suppose. But

03:30 if you weren’t flying any more you could have a few more when you got up the mess.

How were your planes camouflaged? What colours were they painted?

Oh, khaki and green and something else but the underside was all sort of pale blue, hopefully when you’re looking from underneath they’re against the sky and they, when they’re looking from above they’re against the sea background, you see, so they’ve got a different colour underneath to on top.

04:00 And I don’t think it did much because I think they had the same camouflage for Beaufighters operating in Africa as they did in Norway but, you know, it was operating over snow and unless you painted them all white or something on top, I don’t know but. I think the camouflage is too much trouble because we were too low down, they didn’t see much of us until we actually

04:30 got there. We all came around the corner about 20 foot up, you know, you didn’t have much time to finish your breakfast if you [were] a German did you?

What about when the planes, what about leading up to D Day [6 June 1944 – commencement of liberation in Europe], did the planes change how they were painted?

How they …?

Did the painting of the planes change leading up to D Day?

The painting?

Yes.

Well …

05:00 Did they paint them differently?

Well you know we were a different camouflage paint to the bombers and things that went over France ‘cause we were over the sea, and I suppose, well they had some sort of funny pattern on them but it looked more like you could use them in New Guinea for the pattern, you know. And I don’t think the camouflage made any difference at all,

05:30 you know. It might if you were a long way away but I was flying along quite peacefully after this attack, but I was over the water and I saw them, the Focke-Wulfs, crossing over my path and I could see them quite clearly and they saw me. And I said to my navigator, I said, “Shhhh, don’t speak too loudly, there’s

06:00 Jerry fighters up there.” Anyway, the next thing, I know he said to me, “They’re coming in.” And I said, “Oh well, I’ll give it a go.” I gave it full bore and headed for the hills.

What about the black and white stripes, the markings that some of the planes had on them leading up to D Day?

Oh that was a universal thing, all allied planes.

06:30 I don’t know whether they painted them overnight or not but they all finished up with those stripes, mainly because there was such a variety of planes and Americans had stars on them and we had the round balls and the French had something else, or the Free French, so they decided to put these black and white stripes on the wings and fuselage, just to tell the ground air gunners and everybody else that we were

07:00 an allied plane, because when Australia first went to war here with the Japanese they had the red piece in the middle of the roundel and they had to take it out because people who didn’t know much, they thought they were Japanese, and if you saw a red dot on the plane, you fired, you didn’t worry about the rest of it.

What else can you tell us, from your point of view,

07:30 that you saw about the build-up to D Day?

Well the build-up was going on for quite a long while even before I sort of, I was in England before D Day, but there were American troop ships arriving by the hundreds and all these convoys, you know, with anti-aircraft gun trailers, and they were all heading for Southampton or somewhere where they were setting up for this

08:00 invasion force, you know it all happened, they’d all got together down the south of England and then on D Day they just moved them all across, landed on the beach in France. And I didn’t, being in Scotland I didn’t get much to do with D Day, only, you know, heard about it on the news and that was it.

Do you recall what your last flight was, your last mission?

My last flight?

08:30 Yeah, well I went, I went out on a trip to look for submarines that had come to the top. When the war finished, they radioed all the submarines’ captains and said, “Look, come to the surface and fly a black flag,” and anyway, we come across this submarine

09:00 on the surface but no black flag, you see, and we sort of signalled them and said, ‘What’s going on here?’ or something, and he didn’t answer, so we went down and crossed his bows and sprayed a few bullets in just to splash the water and then he comes up with an alders lamp, “What’s all the bloody panic about?” Here’s a German telling me, ‘What’s all the bloody panic about.’ And anyway, he apparently didn’t have a black flag or a black sheet or anything to fly so he didn’t bother. And,

09:30 but that was the last trip that our squadron made.

So can you tell us how you came back to Australia, how and when you came back? Did I what?

How and when you came back to Australia after the war?

Well I did various things in the UK after the war. I did

10:00 several courses and what have you. And then we got on the boat at Liverpool and I forget what, the Union Castle I think it was, and we went down, went down through the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal and I think we stopped in Ceylon for a couple of days or something. And then we

10:30 went to Perth and anybody from Western Australia got off the boat there and then they went to Melbourne and all the Victorian people and South Australians, they got off at Melbourne. And then they came round to Sydney and everybody else got off and I was, you know, Queensland, they didn’t come up to Brisbane or anything, they just stopped and we got off there and that was it. A very sad occasion.

11:00 How was it sad?

Oh when you, you know, you say goodbye to, well Mitch got off at Melbourne and if it wasn’t for me going down and loading live sheep again I wouldn’t have seen him again. And when I went down to load these live sheep in Adelaide I ran into this Don Fray who was also in the squadron, he was an air controller in Adelaide Airport.

11:30 And then Don went up to Darwin and spent most of his life up there as an engineer. I saw him a couple of times, I forget what was the occasion, but anyway he decided to retire up there and come and live near Gympie and the poor fellow’s got a hobby farm now and trying to breed cattle, he’s got about 15 cows or something, fifteen, and

12:00 I tried to persuade him not to breed because, you know, you get in all sorts of trouble, you’ve got to have a bull and to keep a bull happy with 15 cows is not on, he’s over the fence and looking for the rest of his harem. Anyway, he’s retired he could have got AI, there’s a vet in town would have put AI in his cows, Artificial Insemination, and I want him to

12:30 grow a few steers, go to the sale yard and buy a few young steers and grow them, ‘cause his country’s not all that good and if he got into trouble with the dry weather or anything, he just sells them and starts again when the rain comes in, and once all his little ones are grown up soon. Oh no, he wanted them, wanted to breed.

So when you parted did you have the best intentions to keep in touch or what was it like?

Oh no,

13:00 I don’t think we wrote letters or anything. I know when I was on the land his father came up one time to see me and, oh, he stayed with me for about a week or ten days or something like that and he went off again. But I hadn’t met him before and he was an old

13:30 World War I chap, you know. He had a car sales business in Adelaide I think, you know, garage, and he used to sell Holdens or whatever when the first Holdens ever came out. Anyway, he’s dead now too. I think Don has a sister still down in Adelaide and he’s also got a brother but I

14:00 never, but I did meet him once but that’s all. But now I see Don every fortnight and I see this fellow Jack, Jack comes up. We go to have a lunch somewhere, Caloundra, Maroochydore, Nambour or somewhere, probably two or three times a year. And Jack was on the squadron with me, he’s another pilot,

14:30 he come from Melbourne. And he’s a funny fellow, Jack, he joined the army at 17, he was a truck driver, transport driver in the army, he went to the Middle East and he was in Libya, Greece and Crete and Lebanon and Syria and

15:00 then came back to Australia and transferred to the air force. So he did his initial training at Melbourne and then they packed him off to Canada and then he spent whatever time it was air training in Canada as a pilot and then he arrived over in Scotland then and joined the Beaufighter squadron. And

15:30 his navigator was a very well-known civil engineer in Brisbane, I think he was also an honorary professor at the University, of Engineering or something. But unfortunately he died about a year or so ago of cancer and so poor Jack’s on his own.

How hard was it for you to settle when you

16:00 got back and said goodbye to all your mates and you attempted to get back into civilian life?

Oh not long. I went straight to work, apart from this trip I did on the free rail warrant.

Who went with you on that trip?

Hey?

Did anyone else go with you on that trip? Yeah, this fellow I’d known, well he joined up with me, he was the bloke with me when we didn’t do our overcoats up, you know. He went to

16:30 England but he was an air gunner on a Lancaster or something, but he survived and he came back. And I met him again on the troopship coming back and then we decided when we got discharge we’d both went up to, he came from Rockhampton, and we both got these rail warrants and we decided to go for a little trip around the place. He was also a jackaroo before he

17:00 joined up and he came along with me to the places I’d been on and I went with him to the places he’d been on.

Was that trip good, just to sort of relax and put everything behind you?

I don’t think it put anything behind me but I …. You know if you’ve been somewhere, you want to go again and see it before you die or something, oh not before you die but, I mean, you know,

17:30 I had a desperate need to go back to Norway. When I came down here in 1980, I immediately started booking a trip for Europe, and when I got to England, I didn’t bother with France or anything, I went straight through to Sweden and then right up the top of Sweden to this

18:00 wonderful iron ore mine they’ve got up there and I said to them, “Where’s the iron ore mine?” and they said, “Do you see that black hole in the side of the hill in the snow?” “Yeah.” “Well it’s down there.” And it’s the biggest iron ore mine in the world, sort of thing, you know, high quality iron ore steel. And then I went down the railway line from the Swedish border down to Narvik, which was a big port during the war for all this iron ore, and the scenery

18:30 is so fantastic and the engineering to build that line up the side of all those rocky fjords and things, you know, and the tunnels and the bridges they’ve got there are fantastic. Anyway, I had this Eurail Pass, you see, so I stayed in Narvik for about 10 days and every morning I would go up to the Swedish border on this train and come back again and the conductor wanted to know what the hell was wrong with me, I was, every day I went up there and he would see me again, “Oh you’re doing it again, sir?” And

19:00 I was just so fascinated with the construction and the engineering work, and the scenery was just brilliant, just black it is. I even bought a black and white oil painting that they’d done in Norway, I don’t know where it is at the moment, but it’s a true, it’s an oil painting but just black and white paint and it’s very typical of that country, you know.

Did that trip bring

19:30 a lot of memories back for you in terms of how close you came to not coming home?

No, I went down to Bergen eventually, but what I did, I went as far up as I could to Ubud or somewhere, and that’s the last place in Norway before you go round the top to Russia,

20:00 and there’s no railway line there, you’ve got to catch a ferry or something like that, tremendous matter, all the trips are on boats you know, the trains are only there to carry cargo and stuff but it’s all done by, if you want to go from Totten to Bergen or something, you catch the ferry, you don’t catch the railway line. So anyway, when I went to Bergen I got a, I took the railway line up

20:30 right up along the Sognefjord and then I came down with the ferry ‘cause they used to operate a lot in the Sognefjord, but I couldn’t recognise any of it. I might have done if I was up in the air but I couldn’t from the sea and I couldn’t catch on to a lot of things there. And so that wasn’t a startling sort of thing. But then I went to

21:00 Oslo on the way back after I’d been to Stavanger and a few other places I knew, and I went to Oslo. I went up to the war museum at Oslo, it’s up on a little hill and we’re standing there on this little footpath and looking at things, and you could see Oslo down below and this little museum up on top, we had all these people suddenly gather on the footpath, ‘What’s going on here?’ a tremendous mob of school kids and other people

21:30 came along, and I looked down the track and here’s the Queen of England coming up the track with the Duke of Edinburgh and the King of Norway and his wife and the Crown Prince of Norway, they were all just walking along, there was no FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] or anything there. And I’ve got photographs of the Queen from here to you. And then these little schoolkids said to me, “Would you take our picture?” you know, right, I can do that, no trouble.

22:00 And they said, I said, “Don’t forget I don’t live here, it’s black and white and I go to your home, take the film home and print it all up you see, so give me your name and I’ll send you a copy,” so they did. And then in the mail comes back this big book on Norway and the little kids written in there, ‘Thanks for the photograph,’ and it’s all to do with, the book’s been put out by the Norwegian, Swedish,

22:30 Norwegian Chamber of Commerce and the little girls [had] written in there, ‘This is where my father is the President,’ and, you know. Terrific isn’t it? They love royalty in Norway, they love their king, whatever his name is, and then the Queen is a cousin or something of the King of Norway, so there’s no hope of anybody 23:00 throwing apples at her or anything, she’s got the greatest respect I’ve ever seen for that, and they just wander along the track and nobody gets in the way and they all smile as she comes past and she smiled at them and, but people sort of think I must have had a long range lens on because it’s quite, you know, five or six feet away from where I took the photograph, and I’ve got one bloke there in the picture looking a bit dubious about this fellow with the camera but he didn’t sort of take it off me or anything.

23:30 As you look back on your life, how do you think that your wartime experience effected your outlook on the rest of your life?

I don’t think it affects me a lot. It’s played a big part in it because otherwise you people wouldn’t be here. You know, the one I saw to see about the archives and I thought, ‘Well,’ you know, ‘I haven’t talked to anybody about it,’

24:00 my kids don’t know all about it either and I thought, ‘Well perhaps I should put something in like that, it’s, well the very fact that not too many people have been attacked by six German fighters all at the one time, I think it’s unique,’ and so did the BBC or whatever they were over there, and so I thought, ‘Well I’ll write and tell them about it.’ So I did and I told them about

24:30 Jack and Norm and everything else because I just think those things, you know, those books, I just wish I had the same sort of things [on] the [earlier] wars. You see, I had some uncles in World War I and one uncle didn’t do too well at all, he came back and died of [the effects of] mustard gas and all that sort of thing, but

25:00 we never got any idea what was going on. And I’ve collected a lot of stuff, you know. I know the casualties in the Boer War and the Charge of the Light Brigade and all those sort of things because I’m interested in [them]. And I think one day somebody’s going to find it very interesting to look at it all. And they’re not the only photographs, I got photographs of all sorts of things

25:30 and because working in photography for the newspaper when I came down here, that was a brilliant idea.

Where did your love of photography stem from?

Hey?

Where did your love of photography stem from?

Oh I don’t know, I’d always had a baby Brownie [camera manufactured 1930s-1950s] and I clicked at things, the dog and the horse and my sisters and obviously I was interested

26:00 in football teams and things, I’ve got a lot of photographs of, you know, those sort of things. And when I came down here, how I got onto it, I used to run the, I was President of the Texas Show Society and we used to – well I did anyway – I wanted to spruce it up a bit, so in the finish I organised all sorts of things that

26:30 would cause the paper to publicise, you know, if you’ve got a good photograph of something going on, and the paper was there and they used to cover it for you. You know, you get tremendous publicity if you’ve got the right thing, [but they] don’t stay if we have a record number of apples in the competition or something, that doesn’t interest them at all you see. But I had to try and get, you know, instead of judging the wool with a

27:00 local fellow who thought he knew a bit about wool, you go and get the chief wool classer from the wool firm to come and do it and then the paper used to send photographers and reporters up to make a report about that. I don’t know whether you ever heard of Faye Rolph, have you? The Model Academy in Brisbane or Billy North was one I used to know originally, and she used to run this modelling

27:30 academy and Faye Rolph was one of their top ones, but I had the whole lot of them. I got Billy North to come up one year to judge the fashion on the field, you know, like Melbourne Cup Day or something. And it created quite an interest, all the local people wouldn’t have bothered to get dressed up but they did, they came along with a hat on or something, you know, to win the Fashion on the Field. Then I used to get the Wool Board to

28:00 provide all these fashions you wouldn’t have seen outside Melbourne or Sydney and I even got a mob of these girls from Billy North Academy to get up there and they had a lovely time, there were about 10 of them went up. And to make sure I got the, you know, I started taking photographs for the paper to get the thing out. I covered the, I’ve got photographs of the loading the live sheep in Adelaide because I took a camera with me and I took

28:30 photographs and I gave them to ‘Queensland Country Life’ newspaper and they had a whole page of these photographs, you know, loading live sheep and that.

When you got back to Australia and you went on your train trip, what sort of work did you do after that?

Oh I bought a property, the one down Texas, and I was straight onto it and put my head down and I didn’t do anything except work and then I eventually, oh 29:00 I was on the council, as a councillor for a while, I became the Mayor or the Shire Chairman and I was always the local delegate for the United Graziers. I was on the Hospital Board,

29:30 what else did I do? Oh yeah, I started a sheep stud, no, Corriedales, I don’t know whether you’ve heard of them but they’re big time down Melbourne, you know, Victoria and South Australia and a few of them in New South Wales, you see. But they’re big dual purposing, they make very good fat lambs

30:00 but they also grow a very good quality wool and a lot of it. Anyway, I had this stud and I used to go down to Melbourne and Adelaide and places and attend these conferences with the Corriedale Sheep Breeders’ Association. I became the Vice-President of the Australian association one time and I used to judge sheep

30:30 at Hamilton and wherever. And I found that, you know, I don’t know whether I was mad on sheep or not but I just sort of found it was terribly, I was that sort of person ‘cause I got to poke my nose into everything. It’s the only way, I now consider, in my old age, I couldn’t go on the council here because I just wouldn’t be able to tolerate the kerfuffle that goes on here, you know.

31:00 When you came home, do you recall what it was like when you first went back and saw your mum and dad and your sisters and caught up with all of them?

Yeah, but not in a, you know, there wasn’t a big party or anything, it was just a very normal sort of thing. No well, no, it

31:30 wasn’t one of those things that you rushed around and shared with everybody, I didn’t anyway. I didn’t go to, I went to one Anzac thing in Texas one time and all the townspeople, all the twelve of us, you know, twelve, and they said, “Form fours out the front,” and laid a wreath and that was that. And I thought, ‘Oh dear,’ absolutely …, but never mind. I don’t

32:00 deny, there’s a lot of people get very enthusiastic about Anzac Day and run around and buy a new tie and a coat, and I go to them but I’m an observer and I used to love just taking photographs for the paper, not having to get involved, and so the, no the air force had a big interest to me, I don’t think it

32:30 made me or anything like that, I think it was just one of those things that happened, I was four years in it and that was it. And four years now is not very long, I’ve been here twenty.

Did your sisters talk much about their war experiences to you?

Much of a …?

Did your sisters talk much about their war experiences with you?

Oh

33:00 no. Well I knew what my sisters did, and going to the Middle East and where they …. No, I’m afraid we weren’t that sort of family that goes overboard on all those sort of things, we …. I’ve got a sister up at Stanthorpe now, I don’t write to her or anything, you know, sometimes I might ring her up. When I heard

33:30 about the bushfires up there one time I rang up to see if she was getting burnt out but that was it you know, “No, we’re not getting burnt out,” bang down it goes. And she’s, well she just loves the countryside and her husband is an ex- electrical design engineer for the Brisbane City Council, he worked there for a long while and they’ve gone up there and they’ve got a hobby farm

34:00 and they’re breeding coloured sheep, you know, and they make a fortune out of this coloured wool to all the old ladies knitting and making shawls and things and their kids, one kid there – you might have heard of Liz Bourne, have you? – well anyway, she was one of the leaders in the Greening Australia mob, you know, the saving

34:30 the kangaroos and the wallabies which, you know, if a blade of grass comes up you don’t knock it down, with Liz it’s got its place in the world, and I think there’s only one use for grass and that’s for cows to eat it so there you are, but I’m not a, you know.

We were just talking about staying in touch. How much mail did you send or receive when you were overseas

35:00 and how did that happen?

From what I know I’ve kept, well my parents kept all the letters I wrote and I didn’t always write home, I made sure that they didn’t know I’d gone down with a, you know, they didn’t know that sort of thing, and my mother read about this thing with the Focke-Wulfs not from me, she read it from the local paper.

How important was it

35:30 for you to receive mail though from your family?

Oh, not really no, no, I don’t think we’ve ever been in my mother’s pocket or anything. And I’ve got kids now, I don’t hear from them but they ring me up to see if I’m alright and that’s all and, like I told you, I’ve got one down in Brisbane has won that

36:00 Andrew Olley Bursary and, well they write to me for my birthday and I say, “Thank you very much,” but I’m not sort of, I wrote the other day to her to tell her how pleased I was that she got this thing but ….

Speaking of family, how did you meet your wife?

Beg your pardon?

How did you meet your wife?

Oh, how did I meet her? Well

36:30 which one?

I guess we’ll start with the first one.

Well she was, there wasn’t only the horses in Kent.

Sorry, I missed that.

Well remember I said I used to go down to Kent to ride horses? It wasn’t, you know, she lived down there. And that’s the woman I met and she was the mother of my kids but

37:00 we came to grief.

So did she come back to Australia with you?

Yeah, oh yeah she, (UNCLEAR) you don’t want all that sort of stuff do you? Hey?

Yeah.

Well, I’ve signed your document.

Oh, well you don’t have to talk about it.

Hey?

If you don’t want to talk about it …

No, I don’t think it’s …. Anyway, we’ve got three kids, I think Judy’s (UNCLEAR)

37:30 oh no, I’ve been married to her for 20-odd years now too. And …

So you said early on that when you first joined the air force you didn’t really mind what did. In hindsight, are you glad you ended up being a pilot?

Well it’s the only thing I know about, I don’t know whether I would have been better being an air gunner or a wireless operator or what, you know. I suppose

38:00 the pilot’s the …, he’s more glamorous than the air gunner or something, isn’t he? You know, everybody said, “Oh, you’re a pilot, oh yeah,” and I suppose they do that, you get two wings instead of one, you know, they’ve got a double wing on the badge and …. My first navigator, Gallant Matthews, he had an O Wing

38:30 and they scrubbed that very soon afterwards but when he went through, he got this O which was ‘Observer’ and that was the First World War and the observer was the only bloke that went up with the pilot to observe where positions were you see and send messages back with semaphores to where to aim the guns and things. And he was an observer, you see, and he also did a bit of navigation. Anyway, they recalled them all but he wasn’t going to hand his in, he kept it and

39:00 he’d be probably the young bloke would have an observer’s wing on him now, sort of thing, but he’s not flying now. He finished marrying, Manager [of] Drughouse [?] Australia in Brisbane and I used to see him for a long while. I haven’t been in touch with him for quite a long while now and he could be dead as far as I know.

Keith, can you just

39:30 say that again for us, thanks?

I think the food wasn’t any different, but they sent me, well it’s been the tradition, it’s only just going out of fashion now in the services to have the distinction, you know. In those days the officers’ uniforms were a nice sort of a,

40:00 well capped, good quality material and the ordinary ranks were bits of old blanket I think, they dyed khaki and stitched it together and made uniforms, that was the sort of thing, wrong. The officers never wore boots, they had shoes and they had a different type of cap to us. They had a different badge on the peak – what do they call them? – forage cap,

40:30 they had a sort of an eagle badge on it and we had a round disc thing like that with ‘RAAF’ cut into the tin. But there was no difference in the flying, sort of thing, once you were up and flying you were the boss and no group captain or air vice-marshall can tell you what to do with an aeroplane while you’re up there. And if he’s flying in the, you know, the air gunner’s seat,

41:00 he does what he’s told – and then he gives you hell when you get back again. One he gets his foot on the ground he reverts to be the villain. No, I never worried too much about that ‘cause I can tell you a little joke about that one. I used to go on leave to London, you see, and I used to poke around and I’d look at things. Anyway, I thought I’d

41:30 have a beer, you see, so I went into this Shepherds Inn and the Shepherds Inn was right in the middle of London and the lowest rank there was air commodore or something, brigadier generals and generals and everything, and they’re all drinking at the bar, you see. So in I walk with sergeant stripes on and they all look, standing there and they look at me like this, they all started looking

42:00 at me and then one …

TAPE ENDS