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OK Les I just wanted to ask you about the aircraft recognition course that you did. Can you tell me did you have to go to actual classes or is it something that you did within the family?
Oh no it was done within the family and it was done all from manuals and bulletins that were sent to us from the air force, although in doing the recognition
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course that I showed you the certificate that I got – the officer that came down to see us at periodical times, he came down and I said I was ready to sit for the examination and he gave me the examination – an oral written examination at the house, at – it was
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all – I did all the study off the bulletins and off the magazines and that sort of thing that they gave us.
Did you do any testing with each other amongst the family?
Not a lot, no because it, no I don’t think so, although if one of the other family members wanted to know something and you knew it, you’d help them. But the books were available to them too, so it was just a matter of reading up
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if you were interested enough, and if you’re not interested well of course you wouldn’t do it.
Did anyone else actually get their certificate within the family?
I don’t think so. I don’t know about my younger brother – he may have, but that’s the only certificate that I’ve seen that – I got that one and the other one. I’ve only got – only retained one. I don’t know where the other one got to. Another thing that they did issue us
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with was a badge, it was supposed to be – well it was a secret organisation and yet they gave us a badge – a lapel badge with Volunteer Air Observers Corps on, and observer underneath, and one was chief observer. But if it’s an organisation you weren’t supposed to talk about, I don’t know why they gave us a badge that we could wear on our lapel.
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Is that something that you’ve been able to wear in years since?
Well I haven’t but I’ve still got one there. I can show it to you later. But I’ve got one there, but I didn’t see any point in wearing it out really.
Not for Anzac Days or anything like that?
No, not really. I didn’t – I felt as though we did – we did it for the right reasons and – oh I s’pose I could’ve worn the badge, but …
Have you ever had an opportunity
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to meet with other air observer corps?
Yes – recently, oh within the last six months or so, there was a chap from Victoria who put an advertisement in the Townsville paper asking for any people that’d been involved in the Volunteer Air Observers Corps during World War II, to contact him because he wanted to write a history of it, and he’s being
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assisted or assisting the history of the RAAF and this department of the RAAF for the war memorial people in Canberra. He – and I answered his letter and I’ve had correspondence with him half a dozen occasions. I haven’t heard from him for the last
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couple of months, but he asked me about – he had most of the service bulletins that were published, and he asked me for some that he didn’t have, and I was able to give him a couple. But the majority of them – as I’ve said I’ve given to my nephew in Proserpine, and he got them. But I sent this other fellow some recognition books that he hadn’t seen or hadn’t heard about, also log books
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and also he was appreciate of that in, and he told me that he hoped at the end of this year to have a book out on the history of the AOC. But I haven’t contacted him so I don’t know how far advanced he is with the book. But he’s the only one that I’ve had any contact with. There were a couple of families around here that had connections with VAOC and other areas, but I haven’t
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talked to them about it. I haven’t contacted them at all.
There’s no association or organisation to link people?
Well not now. There was post war apparently, but we were a bit isolated here. But apparently post war in some of the cities and areas in New South Wales and Victoria they had associations,
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but I’d never been invited to join one or I never joined one. But some of the posts apparently had twenty or thirty volunteers. So you know – but of course we’re talking over sixty years ago now. So unless you were a reasonably young person you’re no longer with us. The – well the war’s
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1939, sixty five years now isn’t it? So …
And you never got a chance to meet the Americans out at the base where they were …..
No, no – they never invited us and we weren’t – I did meet some Americans, but they were from the base down here at their RDF station. I met some of them but we didn’t discuss is because as far as I was concerned I wasn’t going to discuss what we were
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doing and I don’t think they were going to talk about what they were doing. But I knew who they were and what – whether they knew us, I don’t know. But I met them more or less socially.
Can you tell me about meeting them socially?
Well there again, as I told you before my father had the carrying business with the trucks, and I used to help him some afternoons, and go down to the railway station, and the American contingent
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that was supplied from their headquarters, and their food’d come down on the train that we used to meet to get some of our stuff off, and there’d be an American truck or two there with several of their drivers and they’d be there to meet the trains most afternoons and we got to know them and met them socially – as far as that’s concerned you know – and that’s how we got to know them.
Were they big Negro drivers?
No they –
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most of them were white in this area. But half way between here and Townsville at Giru, there was a camp and there was a lot of American Negroes there, and there was a lot of them driving vehicles and around transport vehicles and that sort of thing. But the contingent that were here – most of them were – all of them were white. There were a few American Negroes came down here on leave at different times, but they were never working in this area.
Do you recall what you discussed with the
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servicemen that you did meet?
Well, yeah – one of the things that a couple of the black Americans told me was that they’d never see the United States again because the white ones didn’t want ‘em back in America and they’d sink the ships rather than go back. I don’t know whether they knew what they were talking about, but they – they said that white America didn’t want ‘em. But – they seemed …
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Les could you tell me what the base, the American base that was near town was specifically for? Do you know what they were up to?
Yes. They were – as far as I know they called themselves an RDF station – it was a radio direction finder, and it was reporting aircraft, and also it was on the coast, but I think they were sort of coast watchers as well as aircraft plotters and that sort of
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thing. They had – it was, we’ve got a small beach resort down there at Alva – probably a hundred or so houses, and they closed the area off and wouldn’t let anyone down there, and confiscated three of four of the houses, or half a dozen of the houses and they were just an army unit round there and they – but you weren’t allowed to go inside the perimeter at all. It was fenced off
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for a few miles around it. But as far as I know it was radio direction finding and coast watching and aircraft reporting.
OK, I didn’t realise that was specifically what they were for.
Yeah, I think so.
A few of the guys we’ve spoken to up in far north Queensland here have talked about the infrastructure that came through with the Americans. Apparently they’d put in a lot of new roads and stuff like that for their vehicles – did you notice – were there changes to the
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local area in terms of roads or infrastructure?
Not a lot in this area, but I did notice that when the Americans decided to do something, there was very little red tape – they just went ahead and did it, irrespective of whether they were stepping on anyone else’s toes or not. You know they just went ahead and did it, and I think they recognised that it had to be done and they
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just went ahead and did it.
Did they put a few noses out of joint, locally?
I think they did. But we didn’t have a lot of ‘em here. A few of them came down on leave and that sort of thing, but that was – that Alva beach contingent was the only real American base that was here. Most of them were stationed around Townsville and round the Garbutt airport, because Garbutt was a very important airport as far as the defence of north Queensland, because the
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majority of aircraft that flew over for the battle of the Coral Sea left from Townsville and Charters Towers – all the bombers, they – most of the aircraft and it was the main northern base.
And what sort of activities would there be for them to do when they came down here on leave?
Well not very much. There’s – there was only the movies and dances and that sort of thing, you know – the old time dances but
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– and frequent the hotels, I s’pose. But that’s all they really did. ‘Cause I was only a boy as I’m talking about – I wasn’t mixing with them as men – you know.
Was there any trouble with local young ladies disappearing with any of them or getting caught up with them?
A few of the young ladies here married and went to America.
Did you know any of them?
Yes, I
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knew a couple of the girls, yes. But they – no a couple of them – the men returned with their wives after the war and lived in the town.
Yanks did?
Yeah, returned with the Australian brides, yes and as a matter of fact there’s one or two of them I know now that their children and grandchildren of the
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American servicemen that – but ….
Les I will just ask you about that. You were mentioning off camera that you heard of some trouble between a couple of Yankee MPs [Military Police]?
Yes, apparently the story I heard – it was only second hand information of course, but apparently one of the American – white American
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MPs tried to arrest a black American serviceman, and the black American MP took exception to it, and they had an altercation and as I say – it came down to – like the ‘OK Coral’. They drew their six guns and – or revolvers or whatever they had and fired at one another. I don’t know – I don’t think there was
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- there was certainly no deaths. I don’t know even if there was much damage done except that it happened in one of the local hotels and there was a couple of bullets in the bar or something like that. But I don’t think anything hit flesh. But that was one – one of the stories going around the place.
You came in contact with a few Yankee servicemen: did you have any contact with any British or
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Dutch servicemen?
No. No, no we didn’t see any. No I can’t recall, no.
And just be contact with Australian servicemen would just be fella’s who were back on leave?
Yeah, fella’s who were back on leave because there was very, very few actually on army business in the town, you know because it was only a small town and no army camps near it really.
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Would transport convoys come through at all?
Oh yes.
Up from the south?
Talking about transport convoy – towards the end of the war, I think it was 1945, there was damage to the railway bridge across the Burdekin River in a flood, and they sent an army contingent down here – a transport contingent and – with local carriers who my father was involved with,
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they transported lots of goods across the Burdekin on the road while they repaired the bridge and they called it the coordinated service – they coordinated between the army and the civilian situation, and there was quite a large contingent of the Australian transport and they were in the showgrounds here for quite a few months. They
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brought that – they unloaded the – a lot of the goods in home hill, transported them across by road to Ayr around the Burdekin – damaged Burdekin bridge, and them reloaded them on trains here, and the transport people did a lot of that. There was some hilarious incidents apparently coming across
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there because some of the goods to be transported were bullocks, and they bought some bullocks and the bullocks broke away from the – in the back of the truck and got out into the bed of the river, and it – I believe there were some funny things happening trying to catch bullocks in the bed of the river to get ‘em back into the trucks. But that’s as it may be.
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I imagine there was quite a lot of traffic coming along the Bruce Highway as well – just convoys of army trucks one after another.
Yes, but the trains came through – troops trains were endless coming through here.
Did they ever stop?
They stopped for meals sometimes, and there was a few enterprising businessmen that opened small shops down near the railway
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station too, and in the watermelon season and that sort of thing they did a lot of business selling watermelons and so forth – at fairly inflated prices some of them too, you know but – particularly to the Americans. But there were lots of troop trains that went through.
I imagine a lot of those AIF [Australian Imperial Force] guys would’ve been pretty rowdy as well, knowing that they were on their way north?
Yeah they were on their way north – knowing that you were going into
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the – you were getting into battle, I s’pose they’d have their last wild flings, but they mainly just were trains, that’s all.
And you mentioned a lot of the local girls who, you know – hooked up with American servicemen, but were many of the local young women going into the services that were available at that time, the women’s services?
Oh yes there was quite a few. Yes there’s quite a few. Mainly the
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air force – there was quite a lot, the RAAF, yeah – not a lot of army girls, but there were a few, and I think a few of them joined the land army too, but it’s hard to know just how many did.
You didn’t have any family friends who joined the AWAS [Australian Women’s Army Service]?
Yeah my brother’s wife, my sister in law – she was in the air force, yeah. WAAAF [Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force] as they were, and there was
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a WAAAF station – I don’t know what their purpose really was, but it was down on the road between Home hill and Bowen – Charlie’s Hill, and there was a RAAF station there, and she was stationed there at times, but I think they were more or less a reporting station too.
And there wasn’t any army bases in the near vicinity for women to sort of join as AWAS?
No, no.
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I’m just interested a bit more about the sort of entertainment and recreation that was available during those years. You mentioned the cinema.
Yeah – yeah the cinema and I just recall that some Sunday nights the comforts fund and the Red Cross would run concerts, and some of those American boys that were in the
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Alva Beach station used to come up and join the entertainment. One – I remember one was a tap dancer and a couple of singers, and a few instrumentalists and that – they joined in on that, and the proceeds of those – a lot of those concerts that they ran on Sunday nights was given to patriotic
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funds and when a lot of the servicemen were joined the service or went back on leave, were given a wallet with money in it or something like that, or contributed towards something like that. That was – they called it the patriotic fund. I don’t know whether other areas had the same thing, but local artists and – as I say the Americans down there always supply a few artists and made
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a concert out of a Sunday night, you know?
Where did they hold that?
In the theatre – in the theatre when the cinema wasn’t on, on a Sunday night – we had the stage as well as the theatre and they…
Describe that for me – a couple of hundred seats in there or something?
Well probably – yes well I don’t know whether you’ve seen the cinema – they’ve rebuilt it. But it was, I s’pose – would’ve been three or four hundred seats in it, and a
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quite a substantial stage and it was a theatre for most nights of the week, but you could have concerts or something like that there.
OK so and it wasn’t a permanent movie screen, it was just a screen they’d bring in to project movies onto?
Oh well it was a permanent screen but it could be shifted back off the stage, and there was an orchestra pit in the front too, of the stage so that you could have an orchestra.
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But there was – it was a movie theatre, but it could be used as a theatre as well.
And were those concerts a good opportunity for people to let off a bit of steam?
Oh yeah.
Were they popularly attended?
Oh yes, yes, yes – well there wasn’t a lot of entertainment, and you’d pay your shilling or two shillings or whatever else to get in and it was a good nights entertainment.
Were they family events? Could you go? Were – people under eighteen
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could go?
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah – you’d go with your family, yeah. Yes they were – all of us couldn’t go of course, someone stayed home.
Did you mention that your sister worked at the cinema?
Yeah she worked – two, both sisters worked there. The eldest one, again because of the shortage of manpower, she was one of the first
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women to be an operator – you know the film operator, that they – the projectionist, she was the trained and she was one of the first around, to my knowledge around the country anyhow, that was out and the other worked in the ticket box, and did a bit of ushering, as well you know – or usherette.
I always thought that a projectionist would be a good job wouldn’t it? Sit there and watching movies all day?
Oh – all I can ever remember about it was it was devilishly hot in there, it was –
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no air-conditioning in the box of course, and with those old theatres – the arc lamp that used to be on the film – it was very, very hot and apparently those old films were quite fragile, and every so often it’d snap and they’d be feverishly trying to feed it and what did they do? They fixed it with a sort of an acetone or something to resplice it – they called it splicing –
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they’d splice the film again so they could run it on.
Did she actually let you in the room on occasion, did she?
Yeah, yeah but I wasn’t supposed to be I don’t think.
OK we won’t tell anyone. And was there local sporting events that went on? Was that sort of a release through the war?
Yes, but there wasn’t a lot of sport played because I remember we played a bit of football, but you couldn’t buy football jerseys, and I don’t
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know, but in Queensland there was a small bag of sugar was about a thirty kilo bag – it was made out of jute and that sort of thing – and for football jerseys we used to cut the holes out of those and a neck, and pull them over and use them as football jerseys, and one of them would be dyed blue and another one would be dyed red and the reds’d play the blues, and that was our football jerseys. But there was no football jerseys or socks or anything
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like that. Cricket balls were at a premium. You couldn’t buy cricket balls. We’d have a – you could get a hard rubberised ball that used to be a composition ball that we used to play cricket with, but it wasn’t a good leather ball or – and there was – there wasn’t a lot of cricket bats and cricket gear about. But we make do.
We hear a lot of stories about,
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with the tension and the conflict of the war – also being a fertile ground for romance to spring. Is it – did you have any experience of that during ….
I was a little bit young, but….
You were getting onto eighteen towards the end weren’t you?
I was eighteen when the war finished. Two days after the war finished I was eighteen. Yeah, but I think there was quite a bit of romance about, because
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as I say in this town there was a shortage of men of course, because all the young men had gone in the army and there were very few army men here in camp, so there was a lot of young women with no male companionship, so I s’pose there was a lot of romance that went on between visiting servicemen and that.
Are you telling me a dedicated spunky young man like yourself wasn’t getting any of that
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attention?
No, not me.
I think you’re lying.
But no!
Right, well what about news of the broader war developments? Were you getting much news of what was going on in New Guinea and up through the islands?
Not a lot because we were – we’d listen to the war news, seven o’clock, eight o’clock news in the morning and seven o’clock news at night – the ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation] or some of those
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you know very few commercial stations and mainly the ABC. But that’s all the news we ever got and limited news in the newspapers because it was all censored, and even the news in the boys’ letters home – they were limited to what they could say in their letters. I don’t know – apparently they were censored, but anyhow they didn’t write anything that was,
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wasn’t supposed to be in it.
Did you write to your brothers?
Mmm. A little bit. Yeah.
I s’pose you couldn’t tell them what you were doing either could you?
No – well they knew, yes they’d know. ‘Cause they did come home on leave on a couple of occasions.
That must have been good for you though – for them to see that you were doing your bit as well?
Yeah, yeah, yes oh yes and yes you’re proud that you’re
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helping.
And what did they tell you about what they were experiencing, what they had experienced?
Well from my recollection they didn’t talk much about the war itself. They spoke about the social side of things and how they – their mateships and that sort of thing, or you know their – the good times they were having, sort of thing. Whether that was deliberate or not, I don’t know so that you wouldn’t be worried about them, but they never spoke
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much about the bad side of war.
Did you find that even at home here in Ayr that humour was an important means of sort of coping with the stress and the inconvenience of the war?
Yes, yes, yes. You had to have a sense of humour, I think. It helps, yeah.
And you told us that you were on the receiving end of a couple of rumours, but were rumours quite widespread through the war
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about the sorts of …
I think so yes, yes. But well I think so. If there is something suspicious, people seem to make it worse than it was, you know elaborate on it. But I don’t think we were under any danger from people, but it’s just that they thought, what the devil were we doing? Were we doing it something for somebody else rather than the allied forces?
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Can I ask you – a bit earlier in the war, I imagine it was around the time when you began doing the air observation – the bombing of Pearl Harbour. How did you hear about that?
I think we heard about it about – I think it was about that night. I think it was pretty well as soon as it happened. It was only a few hours
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after it happened I think, and if I remember rightly, Pearl Harbour was the Sunday morning, wasn’t it?
I think it was.
Yeah, well I don’t know whether we heard about it on the Saturday night – late on that Saturday night, or Sunday night – Sunday night or Monday morning, I can’t remember. But I can remember them saying, and I can remember in a few weeks after there was Movietone Newsreel showing some of the battleships that were sunk and on fire
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there. It was quite graphic and it was frightening really, because we thought they – the Americans were indestructible sort of thing, and they lost most of their Pacific fleet in one Sunday morning.
And do you think as a fourteen year old you had a sense of the implications of the Japanese now being in the war?
Oh yes,
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but I think we thought, well I didn’t think that Australia would be in danger. I thought that the Americans and the British – particularly Singapore and the Philippines – they’d stop the Japs before they got nearly this far.
So what about hearing the news of the fall of Singapore?
That was devastating because we understood that Singapore was impregnable, that it couldn’t happen,
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that there’s no way that that’d happen, and we thought the Japanese would be stopped at Singapore and they’d be stopped at the Philippines – wouldn’t get this far. Then they got to New Guinea and it was only the Coral Sea that stopped them from getting here – the battle of the Coral Sea.
Do you remember what sort of
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talk there was, whether it was within your family or in the news, in the papers, about the fall of Singapore?
Well all I can remember is people found it difficult to believe, because we always thought that Singapore was impregnable, that was going to stop anybody from getting any
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further, that you just wouldn’t be able to take Singapore. It was too strong. Something similar to the (UNCLEAR) in France. They just, was gonna stop the Germans going into France, but it didn’t work out like that, did it, and I thought the Americans would have no trouble in defeating the Japanese
Took a lot longer than you expected eh?
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A lot longer. More powerful than I thought they were, and of course we thought the Japanese were about five foot two tall and had thick glasses like the bottom of coke bottles, and you know they were the inferior race and they couldn’t produce anything – the only thing they ever produced was cheap reproductions of everybody else’s material;
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that’s what we all thought didn’t we?
I don’t know – where did that come from, do you think, that argument?
Well before World War II, Japan’s exports were all toys and inferior made replicas of somebody else’s inventions, you know – and we all thought, well ‘Made In Japan’ was a saying that meant it was inferior. Well it’s made in
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Japan, and we thought they were all – because the characateurs or the papers all showed the Japanese as a short fellow with glasses and not much brains or anything like that, and we thought – you know it wouldn’t take much to stop them or to beat them. We were wrong though, weren’t we, and they’ve proven that they’re not just copiers of anybody
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else. They can – they’re pretty smart in their own right and pretty good at producing things.
So do you think your impression or your attitude towards the Japanese changed over the course of the war?
Oh well we disliked them intensely because we heard of the atrocities that they’d – they’d done, you know?
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They certainly weren’t flavour of the month, and I think when we’re at war with somebody we dislike them anyhow don’t we – really?
Do you recall news of the atrocities filtering back through?
Yes, but not as much as there was until after the war – that’s when, but there was talk of
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the atrocities and how – ‘cause a lot of it came out of China didn’t it – a lot of the atrocities, and we got some of the words of that. But we didn’t hear a lot about the atrocities in Malaya and Singapore until after the war.
Did you experience any collapsing of the feelings towards the Japanese onto the other Asian migrants who were
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in Ayr at the time – the Chinese or..?
There wasn’t a very big population of Chinese or Japanese in Ayr. But no I don’t think so. I think the Chinese were considered a different race completely as the Japanese. There’s only a few Japanese in this area. No – they were working at one of the sugar mills, and there wasn’t a – very many of them,
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and I don’t know – I don’t think there was any – I don’t think we associated the Chinese with the Japanese. I didn’t anyhow.
Could you tell me just a little more about the sort of work you were doing on the – with the vehicles out at the sugar mill? You said after an initial period of working on the, of being fitter and turner on the equipment in the actual mill,
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that you started working on the vehicles, and you were creating the – or making the adaptations onto gas?
Well that was to do with the shortage of petrol during the war, and I spoke to you before about the cane inspectors, the cane inspectors were the people that went round the various farms and coordinated the cutting of the cane and the transportation and distribution and all that sort of thing of empty trucks and so forth,
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and they had to get around. Well they had to have a vehicle, and there was just a shortage of petrol – you couldn’t do it. So I don’t know who invented this gas system. It was – came from, oh I don’t know – it was imported from somewhere else, I don’t know. But they – there was this building of these generators and fitted onto cars, and all it was, was the gas that was generated by the
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combustion of this coke let off this gas that was combustible and was able to be used in internal combustion engines. So if you started the car on petrol you could switch it over to this producer gas. But it wasn’t nearly as satisfactory as petrol. The top speed of the car was probably halved and the pulling power of the engine was halved and it was difficult – if it stopped it was difficult to start, and
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it had a lot of things against it, but it could be used. So we had to use it.
Now these inspectors who were going out to the various farms, they represented the mill did they?
Yeah they represented the mill, yes and they….
Who owned the mill?
Well CSR [Colonial Sugar Refining Company] owned – well actually the mill I worked at was a company called Australian Estates, but then CSR bought the out in the 1970s.
And they would dictate and coordinate the harvesting of the cane rather than the farmers?
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Oh yes, yeah. Well if the crushing season was going over six months, you couldn’t have it all in there in the first couple of weeks. It had to be so much continuity of supply so that you’d be crushing twenty four hours a day, five days a week, and also at various times of the year,
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the sugar content of the cane is better than at other times. Around about now – July, August is the peak period. Well you – everybody couldn’t send it into the peak period. It had to be rationed and allocated at various times and then the biggest farm couldn’t send all his stuff in and let the smaller farm wait, it had to go in proportion so that you took five percent off there and then you took five percent off him and
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then you took five percent off him, and after the five percent was gone, the next round they’d take ten percent or fifteen percent till – and so that everyone was getting a proportion time of stuff, and the cane inspectors organised that, and then they’d have to go into the farm and they’d be cutting the cane, and they’d say, “Well I think, I estimate that there’s a hundred and fifty tons there,
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so we’ll have to allocate the two ton trucks – we’d have to allocate seventy five trucks to come in there to shift that hundred and fifty tons of something, and so that was all organised by the cane inspectors. You couldn’t cut a hundred ton of cane and only sent in ten trucks. You’d have to send in the amount that would get that back, and then the mill could only
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crush so much cane, so you couldn’t send in more than they could crush, and if the mill was having trouble in breakdowns or some other way they’d have to go round and stop them from harvesting any more until they got the mill going properly again – and all that sort of thing was all organised by the cane inspectors.
Makes sense when you spell it out like that. Were those trucks – just quickly, were those trucks running on the same system?
The train line.
No on the same system of
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coal burning gas, of coke burning gas?
The cane inspector’s vehicles?
No, the trucks.
Oh no the trucks I’m talking about are tramway trucks.
OK, right, which were towed by trains?
Were towed by the train, and the trains worked on coal.