There were dozens of enamel wash-basins, towels by the score, and huge mosquito nets, almost young houses, made from cotton material that we at once tore into strips to make sheets and night attire. We shall be quite well stocked and living in comfort in a few days’ time when the Allies come. All this must be the contents of the Red Cross parcels promised us early this year.
Shortie and I were allowed one day of freedom, then we were both put very smartly into hospital, fuming at the thought of missing the fun and games now going on. As we were admitted Jess and Iole were discharged so we could have their bed-space. We were told by the doctors it was to give us a rest before we started on our journey home. That sounded good enough for us, so in we went.
The thought that home is really in sight at last is almost too much to grasp. Home, the place we have had on our minds for the last few years till we have gone nearly crazy, is now a certainty this year. All of us can say now that we shall be home by next Christmas and know we are right this time. Last May I was chatting with one of the Indonesian women as we were doing our washing in the creek, and she told me then that we would be in Australia in September this year. Oh, I do hope it is true and we are all taken out of this deathtrap quickly!
How lucky is a Dutch woman in hospital here! She was brought in early today suffering an agonising pain. Her trouble was diagnosed as a ruptured gall bladder; the four women doctors immediately got in touch with a Japanese doctor and demanded instruments, anaesthetic and other medical supplies and a place to operate.
A Dutch doctor was brought to a house up on the hill in the German settlement there. A room was prepared and an operation performed successfully. If this had happened a few days ago nothing could have been done – Japs never would co-operate. Two of our girls set up the operating theatre and assisted with the operation.
Amana, the guard, had the nerve to come round and call us to tenko yesterday morning. He got a very poor reception; we did not expect it and were not standing in two lines for him. He was furious and screamed at us, but we took no notice of him. Later Mrs Hinch reported him and he was punished in front of us by his superior officer. This freedom is going to be good!
Chris Oxley’s luck is outstanding. For months now she has threatened to sell her four back teeth on their little gold bridge so she could buy food. As she was quite penniless she gave them to an Indonesian guard a few nights ago to sell for her on the black market. Next day we were told we were free. Poor Chris! We couldn’t help laughing at her luck, and she laughed, too, but today the guard returned them to her. We were all quite surprised, because she said she didn’t know which guard she gave them to and had really said goodbye to them.
August 27th, 1945. Most of us have been numb for the first few days of this freedom, but what really brought it home to us was when the civilian men from their camp a mile or two away on the same rubber estate walked into our camp to see their wives and families and took absolutely no notice of Siki. How we enjoyed seeing that! They walked straight past the Jap guards and did not even look their way.
There were very few British men left alive, but we were just as excited as anybody else to see real men at last and dressed in white shirts and shorts, after seeing nothing but bandy-legged monkeys dressed in khaki running around for three and a half years (and two weeks). These huge six-footers from Holland and a few of our own men have come here for the last three days and taken complete control of the camp. They have formed into working squads, chopping down trees near the kitchen to save carrying wood longer distances, into kitchen squads, food scouts, and so on. Last week our vegetable ration sat in the sun and rain for days, the best of it was picked out and fed to the pigs, the remainder to us. This week we have so much rice we can’t cope with it all! The scouts have found a good supply of carrots. The kitchen today is full of rice and carrots.
We have had meat each day for three days now. Some of the men go out in the jungle and shoot wild pigs or deer, and they promise to keep up the supply. Instead of our usual little ration of gristle and skin we now have thick pork stew and plenty of it. As Shortie and I were in hospital we were given liver soup made specially for the patients. It was superb.
The men have also found lots of papayas, which are given to everybody in camp. This fresh fruit is going to work wonders for us all. They tell us the fruit is rotting on the trees outside the camp, and to think these nasty little Nips wouldn’t let us have any! We should all be well again in no time.
One thing I forgot to mention – the very first thing the Japs gave us all, the day after Siki’s speech, was a lipstick! One between two people. About an hour after that we were given a bottle of scent and a bottle of Chinese hair oil, also to be shared. It was most amusing to see women dashing about with crimson lips. It seemed to make their eyes shine, and we all looked so well! The scent is a bit overpowering, so we are not very interested in it.
Today ‘Dutchy’ arrived on the door step of Hut 13. We have not seen Dutchy since February 1942. He was taken prisoner when we were at Muntok, and he helped us there quite a lot by ‘acquiring’ food for us when we were so terribly hungry during those first two awful weeks. The girls said he arrived laden with food and announced that he had come to cook all day for the whole group of Australian nurses. At the moment I have only half finished a huge lunch he sent over here. The rest will have to wait until later on in the afternoon. It is fried rice and chicken, wonderful.
Yesterday the men brought more goods which they had found somewhere, and we were given half a bar of Jap soap, awful stuff, and one small cake of our own decent civilised soap, three packets of Japanese cigarettes, also a four-ounce tin of Australian butter. Shortie and I are to share the butter, but as we have had so much good, rich pork in the last few days, we thought if we opened the butter that would probably finish us off. After all we have not had any butter for three and a half years.
Today we were able to buy a ‘koekje’, a small sweet biscuit, so we opened the tin of butter and put some on our cake. It was good! We also had a teaspoonful of bacon given to us, which we ate as soon as we got it.
All I want now is home and mother, a bottle of icy-cold lemonade, and some bread and jam. It is almost too much to believe that this may all happen any day.
Still August 27th, 1945. I have written this diary spasmodically for three and a half years, but now it is written almost hourly because good things are happening so quickly. Hell has turned into heaven almost overnight. Thank goodness this diary does not have to be hidden any more, it looks a wreck.
The men are here in hordes to mend our leaking roofs, cutting firewood a decent size, making bridges at the hospital doorways to save us walking and falling in thick mud and water, and doing the cooking. They even send round a menu! This is in Dutch, of course, but that is easy to read when you are longing for a change in the diet. Now at 4 p.m. comes the message: ‘No more money troubles, the Dutch Government will send in food and will pay for it.’ What a relief that is, after living on our wits, more or less, all this time, trying to earn money to buy miserable bits of food to keep body and soul together!
August 28th, 1945. The men have organised us properly and their kitchen staff are doing a wonderful job. They cook and serve food properly and it is still hot when we get it. Our kitchen staff had been too tired to be able to do it properly, and there were few people well enough to help them. They must have shouted for joy when the men arrived to take over. Today our lunch rice was fried in pork fat and had little pieces of pork through it; yesterday we had curried pork with our rice. Apparently the shooting efforts of the men in the jungle are most successful. Thank you, men. Fowls and eggs are now beginning to appear on the scene.
I have never thought much about the hair on men’s legs before, but at the moment a large Dutchman is working just outside the hospital doorway, making a decent path, and his hairy legs are a delight to gaze upon after seeing shiny, hairless, bandy yellow legs for so long.
Stop Press. Sister Palm is said to be
at Benkoelen, about one hundred miles away, not in Sweden.
August 29th, 1945. Did some bartering with a native today, so the Malay we have been learning really works. He gave me 15 bananas for a few Jap cigarettes. Tomorrow he said he will bring me ten eggs for ten cigarettes. We shall all be able to have an egg.
The natives wander through the camp now with fowls and bananas. They want clothes. They must be hard up if they want our clothes, which were old when we got them. They also want cigarettes.
Today we all had half a cup of milk, the first for years. We are getting bacon and papaya each day. It is a wonderful feeling not to be ravenously hungry all day long. This is fun being a patient, quite a change from nursing.
August 31st, 1945. It is Queen Wilhelmina’s and Pat Gunther’s birthday today and we have had an absolute feast day. The natives gave us a huge bullock and the men skinned and cooked it. We had our first taste of real beef for three years and plenty of it, too. It was as good as any I have had. It is such a novelty to be able to bite on something and chew it after rice, rice, rice. This meat each day is working wonders on us all. We have also had more butter given to us, and we are definitely beginning to feel more human and less like drooping lilies.
September 3rd, 1945. Out of hospital again, thank goodness. When I was discharged I walked over to Hut 13 and found all the girls sitting there chatting to Australian and Dutch men, the girls looking quite dashing with their lipstick. As I walked in all the men stood up. It quite startled me, it was so unlike life in the camp to see civilised manners again.
Things are coming in each day now. They have apparently been here for ages – things we have asked for over and over again, medicines we begged for and were refused, so our women died. To think they had so much stuff so close to our camp – blankets, mattresses, more boxes of medicines, materials for dresses, undies, silk stockings – and more hair oil! Butter is coming in each day; we were given a pound tin each today, so we are all letting our heads go and having it with every meal. We were also given a good ration of Jap tinned meat, it is quite good.
September 7th, 1945. Today we have all been issued with Japanese military shirts, shorts, hobnailed boots, and their army-issue black rubber boots, which we call sneakers. We look like a lot of tough guys, but it is a grand feeling to have something on our feet at last. The girls say the leather boots are comfortable, though very heavy, and are a great help getting through the mud. Shockingly coloured cotton materials are coming in, so we shall soon have a wardrobe.
3 p.m. The Allies have arrived!!!
Two very young Dutch soldiers and a Chinese military man arrived today as advance guard to the Army of Occupation. They had been dropped by parachute a few days ago and were most impressed with our camp apparently, their first English words being, ‘What a bloody mess!’
They said they had never seen such awful conditions, and were amazed that anyone could live like this. It is not easy. Those men will be staying at Loebok Linngau, 12 miles away, and with their radio will report to their Headquarters in Colombo.
We are very interested to learn that Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten is Supreme Allied Commander in this theatre of war, and is in Colombo. Of course, we don’t know anything yet.
September 9th, 1945. The Dutchmen made the Japs take them to all their local storehouses and one was found to be packed to the ceiling with large five-pound tins of Australian butter, which was transferred in trucks to our camp storehouse, a place never used by us as we had nothing to store. I was helping our rations people to divide the tins into so many per block, when over in a corner of the storehouse I saw a piece of newspaper sticking out. The thought went through my mind, ‘If that is not a piece of Melbourne Herald I’ll go he!’ I pulled it out, and there it was, the Herald, Thursday evening, with a date in August 1943. It was the page advertising the programs of suburban picture shows, including the one nearest to my home. I took this piece of newspaper back to our hut and found it to be most popular with the Victorians. We sat down and read every word.
Our Dutch paratroops came into camp again today and had quite a long chat with us in our hut. They have great hopes of getting us all out of here fairly soon. What game men! They had a revolver each and that is all to protect themselves.
September 11th, 1945. Cheers and more cheers. We have been discovered by two young Australian paratroops who visited our camp today and came straight past everybody until they landed on the doorstep of our Hut 13. Viv, who is usually unmoved and very quiet, came rushing in, face positively crimson, and panted, ‘Australians are here!’ They were about five yards behind her. To see that rising sun badge on a beret again! It did us more good than anything we have experienced so far.
One fellow said he was ‘Bates, from Thornbury’ and the other said he was ‘Gillam, from Perth’, and the first thing we noticed, after their youth, was their very white teeth. We made these boys sit on our bali bali and then we fired our hundreds of questions.
We told them we had heard that ‘the King of America’ was dead – this from a Chinese when we were out water-carrying one day. Did it mean Mr Roosevelt had died? Who won the war? Who won the football final in Melbourne? Will we be home for the Melbourne Cup? Is the Royal Family OK? Is the Queen Mary still afloat? We were interested in this because most of us had sailed to Singapore in her in 1941. The answer came pat, ‘Yes, they both are.’ How and where are the 8th Division prisoners? Who is Prime Minister of Australia? Is Mr Churchill still Prime Minister of England? What are the latest songs? Australia could not have sent two men better equipped with all the answers. They told us of ‘swoon’ men, and that Bing Crosby was the number one film star in Hollywood. Our remarks here were choice; we thought Bing was on the way out before we were ever taken prisoner. They told us of cold permanent waves, and we all thought we had better have one of those as soon as we could. They spoke of huge aeroplanes, ‘Liberators’, ‘Boomerangs’, ‘Mosquitoes’, ‘B24s’. We are hopelessly out of date and we can’t think when we shall catch up with all the news of the last four years.
These two boys also told us of a bomb dropped on a Japanese city which killed thousands of people and reduced the place to a shambles. We were horrified to think one bomb could do that. They then said another similar bomb had been dropped on another Japanese city that did the same thing. What amazing progress has been made while we have been Rip Van Winkles!
September 13th, 1945. Two huge four-engined planes, the largest and most powerful we have ever seen, flew at tree-top height over us for nearly two hours this morning. We could see a man dressed in white standing in a doorway. What glorious planes they were! They were dropping parcels into the men’s camp, we are told. The plane markings are different, white and blue, no red at all. It is such a thrill not to see that horrible red blob under the wings. There is quite a strong rumour in camp that they dropped bread! Wonder what bread tastes like? How marvellous!
September 14th, 1945. It was bread, and made at Cocos Island that day. We had half a slice each with butter and Vegemite, and it was like sponge cake. With it we had a bowl of cocoa, thick with sugar, and we all sat on the step in front of the hut at 7 p.m. and felt completely satisfied with life.
Quite a large quantity of food was dropped – boiled sweets, powdered milk, cheese, powdered egg, Vegemite, etc. Sealed dixies containing 24 hours’ ration for one person were dropped. Hundreds of South-East Asia Command newspapers, telling us about the war in Burma, were also dropped.
We are bartering with the natives the pieces of thin coloured material the Japs gave us. They are too ‘Tamil pink’ for us. We are all making quite pretty nighties from the mosquito-net material given us last week. It is thick cotton material and would have made hot, airless nets. We are also bartering the Jap shirts and shorts, since we can’t get them clean, for fruit, vegetables, eggs, chickens and ducks. Dutchy comes every day, bringing his friends, and they do some of the bartering. We buy three chickens, alive, at 11 a.m. and have fried chicken for lunch at 1 p.m.! C
hris, Flo and I are the executioners. We have at least four visitors for lunch every day now, and are leading quite a social life.
The natives are looking quite smart in their khaki shorts and shirts bartered from this camp. They are so smart, in fact, that they look like our own people until we see that their faces are not familiar. We are certainly all the same colour! These natives are getting harder to deal with each day and must be doing quite well for themselves.
September 15th, 1945. Wilma and I are the family cooks today, since Dutchy did not come. Some girl bartered her material for a huge pile of real French beans! Jess Doyle could not resist some duck-eggs a native was trying to sell her. Jess was dressed in her old ‘Black Bottom’ shorts, one of the seven pairs Win made from a nun’s gown and now worn solidly for three years, which the native definitely had his eye on. He told her she could have five eggs for the shorts, so Jess, in a desperate moment, told him to nanti while she dashed inside and removed the shorts. Then somebody took them outside to the native and collected the eggs. Really, these natives should pull themselves together!
TO KOKODA
Tarakan, 1942
Geoffrey Tebbutt
Geoffrey Tebbutt (born 1906) was the Melbourne Herald and Sydney Daily Telegraph correspondent who found himself in Borneo after escaping from Singapore and Java. Tarakan, an oilrich island, was captured by the Japanese from its Dutch defenders in January 1942, and was retaken by the Australians in 1945. Tebbutt reported from the north coast of New Guinea, at Buna, Gona and Sanananda at the end of the Kokoda campaign to January 1943. He wrote his untitled book in July 1943. It is full of fine description and astute observation – but perhaps didn’t capture enough actual action to see the light of published day during or just after the war as did those of Osmar White and Chester Wilmot.
Eyewitness Page 20