by Mike Carlton
‘See you at Christmas.’
‘Good luck, mate.’
‘Say hello to the Poms for me.’
Young Elmo Gee was saying his goodbyes. His parents, God-fearing Salvation Army officers, Captains Napier and Alice Gee, had christened him Allan after his birth – the fifth of their six children – at Beechworth, the fabled gold-mining town in Victoria’s Ned Kelly country. But somehow ‘Elmo’ had come along as a navy nickname and it had stuck.
His childhood had been a bush idyll among the old workings at Silver Creek, a hamlet a short ride out of Beechworth, not far from Chinaman’s Flat and Madman’s Gully. It was beautiful country, a landscape of ragged purple hills, forests of pine and gum, the low valleys crossed by creeks and waterfalls and swimming holes to take the sting out of burning summers. Kangaroos and wallabies and wombats roamed the grasslands. In winter, hard frosts settled on the paddocks. Elmo would cherish the glow of these early memories all his days:
Our old weatherboard house at Silver Creek consisted of two front rooms, with a verandah attached to the front and a lean-to at the back. About ten feet behind the house was the kitchen, which had an adjoining room where Hannah, a girl my parents had taken in, slept. On the right hand side was the entrance to the stable.
The fire burned continuously for as long as I can remember. The kitchen had a double fireplace and was the warmest part of the house. I also remember a long table with a big bench on one side next to the wall, and a stool on the other side. There were two chairs at the head of the table, where my mother sat so she could dish out the food. Dad sat on the chair next to her and Hannah sat at the other end. Grace was said before every meal. We kept a sow pig, so we always had a ton of bacon, which Dad cured and salted himself. We put stringy bark poles across the kitchen to hang up sides of bacon and ham. There was always some beast or other soaking in brine on the verandah.4
A Salvo family lived hand to mouth, never quite knowing where the next few shillings might come from. Captain Napier turned his hand to farming his few acres and following the bush tracks in his sulky to sell Griffiths Bros tea to bring in a little extra. When the Depression hit as the twenties turned into the thirties, there was back-breaking work for him in the timber camps, clearing gum trees for a forestry company planting pines. Captain Alice took in boarders and washing. But somehow the Good Lord provided, even if it meant shooting or trapping some of His creatures. Rabbits made a good meal, baked or boiled with the potatoes and pumpkins stored in the shed, and Alice was a dab hand at preserving apples and pears for the pies she made year round.
Young Allan had his reading, writing and arithmetic drummed into him at the local state school, walking barefoot there and back. There were Bible readings at home each evening, and Sundays were given to the Lord in hymns, prayer and fire-breathing sermons. The Salvos taught him to play the cornet, a skill he would bring aboard the Autolycus. The navy could always use a bugler.
Like many a country boy before and after him, Allan discovered a world beyond the bush at the local picture show. One film he saw clattering through the projector in the smoky dark would stay with him all his life. Brown on Resolution,5 a grainy black-and-white swashbuckler made in 1935, starred John Mills as a bold British Jack Tar who more or less single-handedly took on the Kaiser’s navy of the First World War before dying a heroic death on a remote Pacific island. Thrilled by the deeds of derring-do, Allan Gee decided there and then that he would join up and go to sea. The navy accepted him on 9 March 1937. He was just 17.
He loved it from the start, taking to his new life like a duck to water. It was freedom from Silver Creek, and the world was waiting. His training began at the Flinders Naval Depot at Western Port, east of Melbourne, where he found the drill and discipline strict but not oppressive. In time, he began to enjoy it. The food was plain but plentiful, and in the hours not spent learning seamanship, gunnery and signals, or how to pull an oar on a warship’s cutter, there was rugby, Aussie Rules, hockey and boxing, and, once, an interesting lecture on how to avoid venereal disease. There was mateship, too, accompanied by the wickedly un-Salvationist pastimes of smoking, billiards and cards.
After passing out from Flinders just before Christmas, 1937, Ordinary Seaman Elmo Gee’s first ship was the old cruiser Canberra. On a run ashore in Sydney, he discovered the pleasures of the Big Smoke:
We used to leave the ship at nine in the morning and head straight for the pubs at the lower end of George Street, where I ended up spending a lot of time with writers from The Bulletin magazine. They used to go there for a beer during their morning break. They seemed to accept me because I read a lot, and I was invited to some of their dos. I was also very fortunate at that time to meet Norman and Daryl Lindsay, who were fascinating people … I went to some very bohemian parties and met a lot of academics, poets, writers and painters.
Most of them were probably 20 years ahead in their thinking, but I remember those times with extraordinary warmth. I also met a charming woman called Lorna. She was a sculptress and a true bohemian and had done sculptures for Luna Park in Melbourne and Sydney. She was an excellent artist, but sometimes she said she was having a rest period. This meant that she went on the grog for a few days …
I travelled everywhere by tram and often went to the Olympic Pool at North Sydney, which was great fun. There were always lots of girls there.6
Perhaps he had been one of the semi-naked males on the trams who had so frightened Sydney’s respectable women folk and earned the ire of Granny Herald. But now, on this autumn morning, with Silver Creek and the George Street pubs behind him, Able Bodied Seaman Elmo Gee – bugler, bohemian, standing five feet 11 inches, brown haired, blue eyed and fresh complexioned – was ready to join his new ship and to serve his king and country wherever they might call. He was not quite 20 years old.
Soon it would be time to go. Kisses, embraces, handshakes, smiles, tears. So much to say and so much left unsaid. At this moment of parting, the true sailor is torn between the call of the sea and the sadness of leaving those he loves. Those who love him in return are also torn, for they will bear the burden of a life at home that will continue to play out its domestic dramas in his absence. Babies are born; a grandparent dies; a sick child; an unexpected bill; a lost dog; a dispute with the neighbours or a landlord; a flood or a bushfire; perhaps a love goes cold or strays: any and all of these occurrences must be managed at home as best can be. And, for the sailor, there is the reverse of the coin. He might miss the birth of a child, the happiness of a family Christmas, the comfort of a lover, all the simple pleasures of home. A naval farewell has been that way for centuries, in peace and war. That is the compact sailors and their families make.
Australia was still at peace as the Autolycus made ready for sea on this sunny autumn Saturday, but her departure was haunted by the fear that war might lie not far ahead. In May 1939, every adult on that wharf at Circular Quay had felt the winds of war blowing from far-off Europe and, closer to home, from an ever more aggressive Japan. Month after month, week by week, the newspapers and newsreels carried the gusts to Australia. When you went to the pictures to see Errol Flynn in Dawn Patrol or Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby, the newsreels that flickered alive when the crimson curtain parted revealed images of Adolf Hitler snarling to his goose-stepping legions massed at Nuremburg, or the frog-faced Benito Mussolini strutting his Fascist fantasies atop the Vittorio Emanuele II monument in Rome. More ominously still, for a nation where the White Australia policy and fears of the ‘Yellow Peril’ were still articles of faith, there would be reports of the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) spreading through China like a flood tide, leaving a trail of atrocities in its wake. The theatre screens were filled, all too often, with tanks, diving warplanes and marching battalions in strange new uniforms. The peace was fragile, uncertain, buffeted by the ambitions of dictators who would enchain as much of the world as they could grasp. The men about to sail on the Autolycus and those there to farewell them were small
figures in a world moving inexorably, yet again and so soon, to the edge of an abyss.
‘Say goodbye to Daddy.’
‘Look after Mum for me.’
Reg Whiting was a chief electrical artificer, which meant he was a senior petty officer, a tradesman skilled in the workings of a ship’s gyro compass. Born in 1901, in Launceston, Tasmania, Reg had always been near the water. As a youngster, he had joined the local rowing club to race an eight on the long and silent reaches of the Tamar River, and he had enlisted in the fledgling navy of Australia in 1923, at the age of 22. The service itself, officially formed in 1911, had been just 12 years old when he entered the gates at Flinders to begin his apprenticeship.
His naval record showed sea-time spent in the old cruiser HMAS Adelaide and the fleet flagship, the heavy cruiser HMAS Australia. In the column headed ‘character’, his officers had consistently marked him down as VG, very good, and his abilities were rated either satisfactory or superior – qualities that had seen him rise through the ranks in a service that had shrunk in size through the unsteady peace following the First World War.
The navy and marriage had given him a purpose and steadied him down, as it did with more than a few young men in those cruel years of the late twenties and early twenties. Plenty of good blokes were out there on the track, begging for work, queuing for the dole, hungry at the soup kitchens. The navy meant a job, money, security, prospects.
Blonde and slender Alice Irene Walsh, daughter of Mr and Mrs J. A. Walsh, owners of Walsh’s Globe Family Hotel in Launceston, was the love of Reg’s life. He married her at St James’ Catholic Church in the Melbourne suburb of Brighton in 1926 and she moved with him and their two boys, John and Brendan, as his postings took him around the Australian east coast. On this day, Alice – Allie – hatted and gloved like the other women, trim in a two-piece suit, had brought the boys in from their semi-detached cottage in Spearman Street, Chatswood, on Sydney’s Lower North Shore, to say goodbye to their dad. Brendan was just four years old; many years later, he would redraw the story of his father’s life from some old photographs and a few faded letters and telegrams found hidden away in an old red cedar box.
Reg Whiting, and a handful of senior ratings like him, would be the backbone of the new ship’s company. Rowland George Roberts was another one. Born at Ascot Vale in Victoria in 1909, he joined the navy in 1924, a boy of not quite 15 and somewhat less than five feet tall. He must have scraped in. An early recruiting booklet specified that boy recruits at the age of 14 years and six months should be no less than four foot ten in height, with a chest measurement of 29 inches. ‘They must be of very good character,’ it explained. ‘Boys who have been in prisons or reformatories are not received. Specially desirable boys of good physique and education may be occasionally entered under standard, with the sanction of the Naval Board.’7
Specially desirable or otherwise, Rowley Roberts soon found himself on board the training ship HMAS Tingira8 for a year of learning to become a sailorman. He was rated as a boy 2nd class, the lowest of the low, and paid the less-than-handsome sum of seven shillings a week.
Tingira had been built in Scotland as a three-masted clipper ship named the Sobraon, launched from her slipway at Aberdeen in 1866 to spend 24 years carrying cargo and the more genteel class of passenger from England to Australia. In 1912, after the coming of steam had brought an end to her glory days, the infant RAN commissioned her as a training vessel. Her towering masts were cut back and she never moved again, spending her remaining years swinging on a mooring at Rose Bay in Sydney Harbour. Life on board was a spartan regime of instruction in seamanship and gunnery from dawn till dusk, punctuated by vigorous physical exercise and its attendant cold showers.
‘The boys will undergo a discipline that should inculcate in them valuable habits of promptitude and exactness, factors making for the building up of character,’ the recruiting booklet advised sternly. ‘Then, as a result of their Naval training, many boys would doubtlessly form loftier notions of all that is conveyed in the words “Duty”, “Honour” and “Conduct”, so preparing themselves for the praiseworthy discharge of their obligations of citizenship when they arrive at a man’s estate.’
Rowley survived that and the cold showers and left Tingira to join the fleet as an ordinary seaman 2nd class. Promotion came slowly in a service crippled by the savage budget cuts of the Depression years and beyond but, by 1939, he had risen to the rate of leading signalman, a rank equivalent to an army corporal.
Signalling was one of the navy’s most demanding skills, for officer and sailor. You needed a sharp eye, a quick brain and an iron constitution. In many respects, it had changed barely at all from the days of fighting sail. Long after the advent of wireless, which could be listened to by an enemy, much of the communication between ships by day was still done with flags, clusters of them sent soaring up halliards attached to the ship’s foremast. Over shorter distances, there was the semaphore system, where a signalman could send messages with a flag waved in each hand, letter by letter. And, on top of all that, the signal staff would have to be fully conversant in another language by night: Morse code. Signal projectors, similar to a searchlight, flashed and blinked their messages to and from far, starlit horizons, or through lowering storms that might reveal only a flickering pinpoint of light.
Young Roberts had laboriously mastered a bewildering array of multicoloured flags shaped as rectangles, triangles or swallow-tails to represent each letter of the alphabet. There were more flags for numerals, and a complex international code employed by every ship at sea – warship or merchantman – plus the specific naval codes and recognition signals to grasp. All up, there were 201 flags and pendants in a ship’s locker. Each had to be instantly recognised, and the possibilities for confusion were countless. The most famous signal in naval history, Nelson’s legendary ‘England expects that every man will do his duty’ at Trafalgar in 1805, had required 31 flags flown in 12 separate groups.
The codes had been simplified several times since then, but Rowley Roberts would find that transmitting messages or orders from ship to ship was still an exacting job, even on a calm sea in clear sunshine. Receiving them was more testing again. In filthy weather, on a rolling and pitching signal deck, with eyes red from sea spray and his binocular lenses smeared with salt, a signalman would strain to read small scraps of colour flying on another ship several miles off. The task became nigh-on impossible in a storm that blew those distant flags directly away from him, or on a howling night when the dots and dashes of a signal by lamp could so easily disappear in the gloom. But somehow it was done, for the safety of the ship might depend upon it. At best, a simple error or too long a delay in reading or sending a signal would bring down the wrath of the Captain or the Officer of the Watch. At worst, a mistake could be fatal, and occasionally it was. The job was both art and science. ‘Bunting tossers’, the signalmen called themselves. They were the eyes of the navy, proud of their abilities and entitled to be so. On the dock at Circular Quay that Saturday morning, Rowley Roberts was one of an elite.
The Autolycus was due to sail at 11 am. At the foot of the quay, the clock in the grandly Italianate Sydney Customs House counted away the minutes and last goodbyes, but the crowd was in no hurry to part.
Jack Lewis and Joan Flynn were sweethearts, engaged to be married. She was just 19, a pretty girl with laughing eyes and the slender figure of a ballet dancer, which was how she had come to meet him. Her best friend, Ivy Lewis, was Jack’s little sister. They went to the same ballet class. One day, Jack had turned up to collect Ivy after lessons, wearing full uniform. Joan took one look at the strapping young sailor with the grey eyes and the shock of auburn hair and fell head over heels. So did he.
In 1939, Jack Lewis was 25, rated as an engine room artificer (ERA) 4th class. He had been in the navy less than a year. His working life had begun as a boilermaker in an engineering shop in Wollongong where they made giant crucibles for the iron and steel industry, and the skills
he had learned there had given him a head start when he’d decided to go to sea in the wake of his father, who’d also been in the navy. Jack’s job as an ERA in Perth would be deep in the roaring heat and oily reek of the engine spaces below the waterline, tending the boilers and the turbines that could deliver 72,000 horsepower to her four massive bronze propellors.
Jack and Joan began to go out. She worked for a photographic firm in Sydney, Liberty Studios, colouring and retouching portrait pictures in the laboratory, taking the tram home at night to her parents’ cottage at 10 Pidcock Street in the respectable working-class suburb of Camperdown. Sometimes on weekends, when Jack got leave, she would join him – properly chaperoned by his father, Tom, and his mother, Bessie – at a little holiday cottage the Lewis family kept at a place called Dark Corner in the remote beachside hamlet of Patonga up on Broken Bay, north of Sydney. Best friend and sister Ivy would be there too.
Music brightened their lives. Tom was a Welshman, a big and muscular boatbuilder, with the love of singing common to so many of his tribe. Jack played the piano. And so did Joan: