by David
One evening, David joined John Reid, the company’s managing director, and another sales rep, Doug Pipe, for a drink. They had been drinking for an hour or so when John asked David what his ambitions were. David answered that it was to take over his position as director of the company, and as quickly as possible. The director laughed, but what he did not know was that David was serious. And within six months David was indeed the director.
John Reid started the Brisbane Ideal Home Show in 1965, and the next year David was in charge of it. David delighted in organising large shows and exhibitions. The company organised all the advertising and the necessary publishing, persuaded all exhibiters to take part, and sold the tickets. David hired squads of students to undertake the heavy work of setting up, running and dismantling these trade events.
Around this time, he also helped organise the Sydney International Trade Fair. It hosted stands from all over the world. France donated its stand to the company at the end of the show.
In 1968 David became the Queensland sales manager for Peter Isaacson Pty Ltd, which produced a host of industry magazines in areas such as fashion, aviation, travel, tourism and the arts, as well as industry directories and registers. Its main source of income was the advertising in its publications.
David was charged with compiling a list of all companies with five or more employees for the Queensland section of a publication called the Kompass Register of Australia. Today Kompass is a worldwide business-to-business computer search engine, but in the 1960s Peter Isaacson produced the print version.
David had to find, meet and persuade every business owner he could to list their companies in the register. The only tools he had were a phone book, a telephone, a car and his skill in getting further leads from those he talked to. For a full four months, David travelled all over Queensland, staying in some of the best and worst hotels around.
Peter Isaacson and David became good friends, and after publication of the Kompass Register David became the company’s trouble shooter, charged with increasing the advertising revenue from its publications. This meant travelling a great deal between Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, so eventually David decided to base himself in Sydney.
Just occasionally David would visit old mates if he just happened to be close to where any of them lived.
One time I was driving from Coffs Harbour to Newcastle, and since I was in no particular hurry, I had the notion that I should look up one of my mates with whom I had spent over a year burying thousands of romusha. Gloucester took me off my route a little but I was looking forward to seeing him; the last I had heard of him was about five years previously. I knew his brother had a shop in the town, and I didn’t have any trouble finding it. I got his address, which was a mile or so out of town at a caravan site.
When I got there I found him living on his own, although I remembered he’d had a wife at one point. I was in the same position, of course. But that was where the similarities ended. The poor bugger had no teeth, and he’d been such a good-looking bloke in his youth. He didn’t invite me in but suggested we go down the road to the pub instead. Fair enough, I thought. He hadn’t known I was going to call.
At the pub, my mate downed only one schooner and was obviously seriously affected by it. He gave me a long story about the pension people refusing to give him more teeth because he kept losing or breaking them. I asked him how I could help, and then he started arguing with me. Why would I want to help the likes of him?
I bought him a few extra bottles and took him home. It really upset me, especially because I knew there were many others in very similar positions.
In the early 1970s David began to feel the need to get back into sales. Yaffa, a Sydney company similar to Peter Isaacson, was very progressive; it produced the most important publication for the advertising and marketing industry, Advertising News – the forerunner of today’s AdNews. David joined Yaffa as a salesman for Advertising News.
He had a little trouble with two salesmen colleagues, who accused him of poaching on their territory. They apparently had a comfortable arrangement about how the client territory was to be shared. This excluded David getting business from existing clients and left him only able to get new business. David was happy to develop new business for the company but was most unhappy about this cosy arrangement among the sales team.
This problem was solved when the two other salesmen invited David for a drink at the local hotel after work. A few drinks into the session, David suggested that they go outside to settle their differences. He was serious but, like all intelligent people, he agreed that first they should have a few more drinks. By the end of the evening, the three salesmen had become the best of friends. And all of them were now clear about how David could work with them. Just a few months later, David was appointed sales manager and got on well with all his staff.
The circulation of Advertising News was limited to the industry itself, although it also sold commercial television advertising. David did his best to increase advertising in the publication but it was challenging.
One day, David Yaffa, the owner of the business, called David into his office. ‘I’m not happy with the recent sales figures, David,’ Yaffa said.
‘Well, neither am I,’ replied David. ‘They could certainly be much better.’
‘So what’s stopping you?’ David Yaffa asked sharply.
‘Right, let me tell you.’ David sat forward in his chair. ‘First, we have to take all restrictions off telephone calls. No more logging of calls and getting permission to make calls. And that’s just for starters. I have to put up with staying in second-rate hotels when I travel – I’m too ashamed to invite any potential client back to my hotel to entertain them. I want to stay in the best hotels. I have to be able to make a good impression. Lift those restrictions, and I promise you sales will improve.’
‘Okay, David,’ Yaffa said eventually. ‘But they had better improve.’
A few years later, David’s entertainment expenses were so great that the Department of Taxation queried them. But as he had predicted, the resulting sales were also far higher than they had been.
For more than a year, David had been trying without success to get some business from television’s Seven Network. He had been dealing with upper management, and while everyone had been polite and cooperative, a substantial account always evaded him. It seemed that every time he managed to come to an arrangement with the managers of various departments, the Seven Network’s director always had the final say. Invariably it was no.
Having spent a fortune on entertainment while trying to get this account, David decided on an all-or-nothing approach. He invited the director of the Seven Network to lunch at the Menzies Hotel in Sydney.
David made polite conversation until the director was in the middle of the main course. He then asked, ‘Are you not curious about why I asked you to lunch today?’
‘Yes, I am,’ replied the director. ‘I presume it is because you have some special deal to offer us?’.
‘Well, you’re wrong,’ said David. ‘I just thought I’d ask you out to tell you that you’re the biggest bastard in the industry!’
The director burst out laughing. No one had ever had the courage to tell him that before, he said. He knew that David had been trying to make a deal with Seven for a very long time. By the time the lunch was complete, he had a better understanding of what Advertising News was offering and eventually David got the account.
It was at about this time that David first met his future wife, Greta.
In 1977 I was at a Christmas party put on by a couple of newspapers in Parramatta. I was with Frank Dormer, one of our salesmen, in this lovely garden setting. The party progressed into the early evening, and Frank and I were standing around and talking to people when suddenly I saw this beautiful girl. She was accompanied by two men, one of whom appeared to be her boss.
Before I’d had the chance to approach her, I noticed that she was about to leave. So I went up to her, tapped h
er on the shoulder and, as politely as I could, said that I would like to see her again and could I please have her phone number. Thankfully, she gave it to me. This was Greta.
David took Greta out to dinner at the Menzies Hotel shortly afterwards, and they were together from that time on. They were married in 1980.
David’s last position before he retired was as manager of the Yaffa Group in Melbourne. His main job was to network and entertain, so that the company’s clients were satisfied and continued to provide their business. He was well suited to this lifestyle. One Yaffa employee later told the tale that when David retired, all they found in his desk was a list of phone numbers and hotel and restaurant brochures. As David explained, ‘Well, they were the tools of the trade!’
David had led a very successful business life, and he’d enjoyed every single minute of it. Although, like many other men, he’d had a terrible time as a POW, in many ways it had strengthened his character. On 15 March 1946, Major Dr Kevin Fagan, a hero of David’s, had delivered a lecture about POWs to the New South Wales Branch of the British Medical Association. His words apply very aptly to David.
. . . the returned prisoner of war is in most cases not only a normal man, except for some temporary physical disability, but one who has had intellectual and emotional experiences which give him a decided advantage over his fellows. He has learned to appreciate the minor pleasures of life. He knows the essentials of existence. He has a high threshold to the pin pricks of ordinary life. He knows man for what he is – his courage, his cowardice, his limitless generosity, his gross selfishness, his nobility and his utter meanness. And if he tends towards cynicism at the discovery of the relation of man’s best qualities to his intragastric tension, he is robbed of all bitterness by the memory of the heights to which he has seen some men rise in spite of starvation, of illness and of every degradation which a malignant enemy could put upon them.1
After David retired, he and Greta bought a four-wheel drive and a caravan. They made plans to tour Australia, but fate intervened and they had to stop when they reached the Gold Coast, where Greta needed to care for her mother.
They found they both loved the Gold Coast, especially its hinterland. In the end, they decided to stay, and they built a beautiful new home at Tamborine Mountain.
Chapter 17
Fighting Again
‘Have a look at this, mate!’ The tall figure of George Stevenson strode across the lounge bar area of the Holiday Inn Hotel on the Gold Coast. He joined David and Greta at their table and handed David a piece of paper. ‘It’s from the Vancouver Sun, and it’s not that old.’
David read the article, which had been published on Friday 20 June 1986. It stated that Canadian survivors of the Japanese POW camps, who had formed a group called the War Amps (Amputees) of Canada, were filing a claim with the United Nations against the Japanese government, claiming reparations for war crimes and gross violations of human rights suffered during their captivity.
David and George were members of the Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Association. They were two among two and a half thousand, including wives, who had gathered on the Gold Coast. Some had come from around Australia and others from Canada, the USA, the UK, New Zealand and Hong Kong, although there were fewer of them than at the last gathering two years earlier, in 1984.
Everyone in this club was at least sixty-three years old, and some were much older. Those still standing were truly remarkable men, and there were also some remarkable women, including a few nurses who had managed to survive their captivity. They had lived through the rigours of war and had suffered particularly brutal treatment as POWs; some had contracted medical conditions as a result, which generally shortened their life expectancy.
The week-long reunion lasted from 12 to 19 October 1986. The Queensland state organisation, and its Gold Coast branch in particular, had worked hard to bring the ex-POWs together. David had recently joined the Gold Coast branch. He had the required qualifications. It was a standing joke among members that no one could buy their way into this club.
The Ex-POW Association had members who had served in all the theatres of World War II, including Europe, Singapore, Thailand and Burma, Indonesia and Hong Kong. Like David, George had been a captive on the Thai–Burma railway.
David had never been an active member of the association. He tended to stay away from meetings, annual get-togethers, the RSL, Anzac Day marches and anything associated with armies, war and the past. He hated war, continuing to see those who joined up as naïve young adventurers – just as he himself had been in 1940. He did not want to be reminded of it.
In David’s opinion, war was an activity controlled by politicians and prosecuted by individuals too stupid to think things through for themselves. When he was discharged in early 1946, he swore he would never do anyone’s bidding under such circumstances again. Any organisation that he might have joined – including the Ex-POW Association – had links to the forces, uniforms, marching, officers and hierarchy, and he loathed all of that.
It was Greta who had urged David to get more involved with the Gold Coast branch of the Ex-POW Association. She knew that he thought a lot about his many less-fortunate ex-POW mates. David had been successful in business and had survived the war with little worse than crooked teeth from his broken jaw. His general health remained good and he knew how to look after himself.
The same could not be said for the majority of others who had survived their captivity. Many had returned home so traumatised that their only escape was through alcohol; as a result, many ex-POWs had died in their forties or fifties. Others had severe mental problems or dietary problems, or combinations of illnesses. They had returned from the war experiences to a society that did not recognise the illnesses – mental, physical and physiological – that had resulted from their prolonged starvation, abuse and torture.
David found it very hard to talk about the men he knew who had died since the war. Many had passed away long before their time. Many had experienced problems that resulted in divorce and estrangement from family. David himself had been divorced. He knew that, for ex-POWs, family problems could be attributed directly or indirectly to what they had suffered during their imprisonment. Talking about mates who had experienced such hard times since the war was extremely difficult – even harder than talking about those who had died in the camps.
Despite his reticence to get involved, David had always approved of the actions the Ex-POW Association took to help their less well-off members. These men needed all the backing they could get, and so too did the association as it fought for better government support. Greta encouraged David to join in the fight, knowing that he was happier when he was busy.
‘This is great news, mate,’ David said, raising his eyes from the article George had given him. ‘The only question is why we aren’t doing the same thing.’
‘Exactly,’ said George. He took back the cutting from David and passed it to Greta. ‘Surely if the Canadians think they are owed reparations, then we are too.’ Greta read the article. ‘So what do you reckon?’ he continued.
‘What would it involve?’ she asked, before making a suggestion. ‘The first thing you could do, right here and now, is find out what the rest feel about making a claim.’
The rest of the reunion that week was filled with discussions about gaining more support for health issues, with meetings with old friends, with story-telling, and with speeches paying respect to those who did not survive the POW camps.
David and George now had another important objective. They probed for opinion and discussed with as many people as possible how they might organise a claim against the Japanese government. By the end of the reunion, they were convinced that most members were in favour of claiming reparations for all Australian ex-POWs of the Japanese, and they had convinced themselves of the worthiness of the action.
George and David persuaded the executive members present at the reunion to hold an informal discussion on the question of reparations fo
r ex-POWs. The result of this meeting came as a shock to them both.
It transpired that the executive of the association was not in favour of claiming reparations. Although rank and file members, almost to a man, supported the move, not a single executive member could be persuaded that it was a good idea. They all had a remarkably similar position about the proposal. Too much time had passed, they said. It would be very costly to emulate the Canadian action; in fact, only the Australian government could make such a claim against another government. Amazingly, they even argued that the push for reparations would not get the support of the association’s membership.
Sir Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop was the best known member of the executive at the reunion. He was president of the Victorian State Council of the Ex-POW Association. He summed up David and George’s proposal as ‘simply pie in the sky’.
For David, the attitudes expressed at this informal meeting were like a red rag to a bull. As he said to George as they left the meeting – loud enough so that others could hear – ‘If these bastards won’t do anything, then we’ll do it ourselves.’
David realised that Weary Dunlop was the leader of the ‘anti-reparations’ group. Always one to meet a challenge front-on, David invited him to meet with the Gold Coast branch members before he flew back to Melbourne. Confident of his ability to argue and persuade, David hoped that by getting Weary among a group of enthusiasts, he might change his position. He expected that Weary would be up for the challenge but was disappointed when Weary explained that his ‘busy schedule’ prevented him from accepting the invitation.
In 1986 the Gold Coast was the place in Australia where one was most likely to meet a Japanese person. Japan was growing wealthier, and Australia, particularly the Gold Coast, was fast becoming its people’s favourite holiday destination. Many Japanese were investing in real estate on the Gold Coast, and Japan had been Australia’s major trading partner since the early 1970s.