Carefree War

by Ann Howard

  The Cairns Post Advertiser described how the war disrupted lives in Northern Queensland. On 6 February, 1942, four thousand women and children moved to safer places in the country after offers of assistance under the state government’s voluntary evacuation scheme.

  Not a House Left. A newspaper article declared, ‘Few Country Homes Vacant.’

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  The demand for houses in Stanthorpe started a month ago with the result that today there is not a home to let. Many strangers have arrived in the town, and the schools promise to be overflowing. In Warwick, because of the influx of women and children, house rentals are soaring. Pittsworth residents have agreed to ‘put up’ as many people as possible. Allora is prepared to take 200 or 300 people, and ways and means are being devised. Clifton has about 20 evacuees from Brisbane, most of whom are staying with relatives. Goondiwindi has received a few inquiries; steps are being taken to shelter as many people as possible, if necessary. Glen Innes has welcomed about 200 people from Sydney and Newcastle, and a few from Brisbane.

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  Fiddes Skardon, miner and drover tried to enlist with a friend but they were cane farmers and needed on the land ‘… if the Japs invaded and the war came, we always thought we’d go guerrilla. I’d bought a .22 calibre rifle in Cairns with 1,000 round of ammo and of course I had all the horses and packs. We could hide in the hills.’

  Babinda and Tully, near Cairns annually compete for the Golden Gumboot award for Australia’s wettest town. Babinda is usually the winner, recording an annual rainfall of over 4,200 millimetres. In 1942, it was a ghost town after evacuation.

  Mary Ford:

  I was evacuated from Tully, Queensland, 140 kms south of Cairns, when I was nine years old, to the Darling Downs, where we didn’t know people. My sister, aged 17, my mother and I went. My father stayed as he was in essential services. We just had time to grab basic luggage - there were police in the crowd at the station. I don’t know how everybody knew it was time to go because not many people had a telephone at home. It was early February 1942. We all knew we were in a war zone. The Brisbane Line was generally understood to mean that the northern part of Australia would be surrendered to invaders, although it was never spelt out, only accredited to Robert Menzies and Arthur Faddon, and referred to once by General McArthur. A lot of the men had gone to fight and guns had been requisitioned after Dunkirk and sent to England. We felt very vulnerable, although the speed with which the Japanese took Singapore and the bombing of Pearl Harbour surprised everybody. We lived up a hill, next to jungle and my mother was terrified that a Japanese parachutist would come down near us.

  We had been wearing camouflaged cloaks to school for some time, and were given cotton wool balls for our ears and bits of rubber tubing to bite on if bombs exploded. School hours were staggered – 8 am to lunchtime, and 11 am to 4 pm. There were often Japanese planes zooming about. Once, on the way back home from school I was caught in an air raid warning. I was frightened and did not know whether to continue on home or go back to school. I decided school, being on flat ground was the better option and scampered back, in the noise of the ack-ack guns, throwing myself into a slit trench in the school grounds.

  My mother was not happy on the Darling Downs and we were one of the first families to return home. In May, I remember the boom of the guns in the Battle of the Coral Sea.

  Schooldays at the beginning of the 1940s were punctuated by air raid sirens and practice drills, students sent running to trenches, crouching low, pulling their brown and green capes over their heads with pegs between their teeth in case of a bomb blast.

  David Tranter, who lived at Eacham on the Atherton Tablelands remembers the troops:

  Early in 1943, I was packed off to boarding school at Charters Towers. Innisfail Railway Station was packed with Australian soldiers and when I came home, I learned that the Atherton Tablelands had become a vast military encampment.

  Hellen Bradshaw:

  I lived in East Innisfail with my parents and my brother. In 1941, he was sixteen and I was eight. My father was in an essential service and a volunteer ambulance driver. A friend of his was driving to Brisbane and my father was anxious to get us out of the area because of a Japanese invasion seeming imminent in North Queensland. We could go to my mother’s sister, Aunt Jess. It took ten days to get there on dirt roads, without bridges, (we had to drive through creeks, clutching our suitcases). The road signs were down and we continually got lost. When we arrived late at a little township, Miriam Vale, 464 kms north of Brisbane on the Bruce Highway, we booked into the local hotel and during the night cowboys arrived on their horses and were drinking under our windows. Mother and I went for a shower in a tin shed separate from the hotel and our driver came and said, ‘Get out of there quickly!’ The owner was peering in at us. I don’t remember my brother and I being frightened at all - I don’t know about mum.

  Hilary Walker:

  Our family was evacuated from a sugar cane farm outside Gordonvale in North Queensland in February 1942. Advice to evacuate was first given by a local policeman. We did not go. An order to evacuate was later delivered by the local policeman and we did go. My parents chose to go to a remote corner of the Atherton Tableland, close enough for my father to be able to continue farming. We set out in a truck with some furniture. Mother, father, three children and the neighbour’s young girl. The drive up to the Tableland involved careful timing, as we had to go up to the Gillies Highway, which was a one way gravel road with a speed limit of 10 mph. We had to be at the bottom gate at a set time, and then leave in a convoy of vehicles. Number plates and time of entrance were noted and telephoned to the top gate. Vehicles were checked out at the top gate and times noted. One hour was allowed for the trip and if a vehicle came out sooner, they could be fined for breaking the speed limit. If they did not arrive, a search party was sent out, as many vehicles went over the side. The final part of the journey was along a track full of sticky, red mud. We had arrived at Topaz, a small community of dairy farmers, almost cut off from the outside world.

  There was no electricity or running water and only one party line for the telephones. Our house was really a shack that had been uninhabited for some time, and infested with fleas that blackened our legs. I remember the copper being boiled and the water being poured all over the floor and lime being sprinkled on under the building. That took a lot of hop out of the fleas. Every house in this district that I visited had fleas. We more or less settled in with my young brother, who was about five months old, hanging from the rafters in his cane bassinet, just out of flea hopping distance. I enrolled in the local one teacher school on 9 February, 1942, and Ethel, who had come with us, a few days later. The school was on high stumps with shelter underneath, which was useful as it seemed to rain nearly every day. A horse paddock was next to the grounds. Children either walked or came on horse. Some horses arrived with a sugar bag on their back, plus two or three children. I found the children daunting. They were serious and shabby, and of course had no shoes. Of course they were different from the children I had previously been to school with. These were marginal farms with parents struggling to make a living. Many of the children would be up before dawn to help with the milking, which was all done by hand, and then home for the second milking after school. I found that Mr Fischer, the teacher, did most of the teaching late in the day as quite a few of the pupils dozed off in the morning.

  There is always plenty of simple amusement in the bush. We used to take a sugar bag into the rainforest, then called the ‘scrub’, and collect purple passion fruit that then grew wild. Closer to home, we caught interesting things. I can remember catching a centipede which we somehow chopped up and put in a billy. Much to our fascination, it was still marching. There were plenty of black snakes, which we did not catch. Our connection with the nearest town was the cream truck, which came twice a week to collect the cream and take it to the butter factory. The milk was separated in hand turned separators and had to maintain a certain speed
to work. When the operator reached a correct speed, a bell would ding. This speed had to be maintained with the regular dinging keeping the operator at it. The cream was put into metal containers ready for pick up. There was no refrigeration to keep the cream cool, but the butter from the local factory was fine. The skimmed milk was put into containers and fed to pigs. I remember great blobs of solid sour milk being poured into the troughs.

  We stayed for six months and it was memorable, and as time went by, I was able to appreciate how tough the living was for these farmers. At the same time it was a tight knit community. There was a community hall where local dances were held and a couple of tennis courts that were much used.

  In Brisbane, by day the river bustled with merchant shipping and small naval craft. At night children, peered from behind blackout curtains at Australian warships and US submarines returning or departing. Children became quick at identifying Beauforts, Wirraways, Tiger Moths, Kittyhawks, and Flying Fortresses in the bright blue Brisbane skies.

  Alan Galwey:

  I was only five when the war broke out. Father, who had put his age up had survived WWI and Gallipoli, and as an old soldier, he was aware of what war was all about. We left Brisbane and rented a house at Toowoomba, my brother, myself and our parents. It was alongside a railway and we watched the troop trains coming and going. Mother baked apple pies and took them out to the trains for the soldiers to say thank you. My father got a job at the butter factory and we stayed about eighteen months. I was the youngest and to me everything was a game, I didn’t appreciate the danger. I remember the family driving into Toowoomba and having the most delicious scones and jam from the Red Cross.

  Ian Murray Wilson:

  I was about eight when the war started. We all thought the Japs were going to invade and I was aware of the chance of being killed. My Dad joined the army, but he never left Australia, he was too old really. He was a clerk at Dalgety’s and helped break the wharfies strike. He stayed in Brisbane. Mum and I and my sister went up to Dalby, about two hundred kilometres from Brisbane, to Mr and Mrs Marshall, dairy farmers on the rich soil of the Darling Downs. They had a place between Dalby and Tipton. I took my fox terrier, Mackie. One of my jobs in the morning was to wash the mud off the cow’s udders, ready for milking. I had lovely warm water, the cows didn’t like cold! We went to a one teacher school about a mile and a half down a gravel road. I was running along the road by myself and I jumped over a hollow log, looked down and there was a snake in it. I ran along in the air like they do in the Tom and Jerry cartoons. We got on very well with the Marshalls and kept in touch with them until they passed away. I’m not sure how my parents found their farm. I think the authorities arranged it. We had an air raid shelter in Brisbane. Mrs Dunn next door had a much fancier one.

  W.B. (Bill) Martin:

  During the bad days of WWII, I was a child in Townsville. My uncle, Captain Greenwood was the Port Superintendent in Darwin. He had lots of trips to Canberra, Sydney. He advised my family to get out of Townsville, as the Japs had said they were going to sterilise all the males and breed with the females and in three generations all the white blood would be neutralised.

  The Brisbane Line was an overwhelming fear in North Queensland. So I was sent to live in Brisbane with my aunt, Mrs C E Cox at Oriel Road, Clayfield, Brisbane. At the time, I was attending the Ascot State School. Owing to the shortage of school teachers, we only attended school for half a day. One day, my cousin, Harry Cox and I had to take my cousin Leslie’s lunch to school, as she had forgotten it. It was quite a step to the Clayfield College, where she was a student. On our way to the college, every air raid siren in Brisbane sounded off. Harry and I ran for our lives to the school. Ladies on their front steps called to us to run as the Japs were coming. Two little kids running for their lives! When we got to the school, all the kids and teachers were in a huge air raid shelter under the school, lit by hurricane lamps. The girls were singing to keep their spirits up. It was the day of the Battle of the Coral Sea, which we won and saved Australia from invasion. Some say they had no intention of attacking Australia. If so, how come they had invasion money printed to be used by the Australian people after they had taken over.

  My aunt had an air raid shelter under their house, as most people did at the time. The air raid shelter was full of food in case of an invasion. Most afternoons, Harry and I would raid the shelter and pinch tins of condensed milk, tins of sardines, bully beef, etc. to snack on. When the war was over, Auntie Lottie said we had better get the food out of the shelter. No tins where left. Harry and I were in strife over that. Auntie Lottie ‘said’ what would have happened if the Japs had invaded.

  A Reverend Rix declared in the Morning Bulletin, April 1946, (and this was widely reported), that it was by a miracle that when the Japanese invasion was threatening in 1941 it was the driest Queensland season in the memory of both white and black man, thereby enabling the Americans to build runways for attack in the decisive Battle of the Coral Sea.

  Rear-Admiral G C Muirhead-Gould, formerly officer in charge of the naval establishment in Sydney, at a Press conference at the British Ministry of Information in London, August 1943, claimed that allied sea power saved Australia from invasion. He said that the Japanese did not attack Australia probably for the same reason that Hitler did not invade Britain after the fall of France, and that both Tojo and Hitler, despite the great victories that they had won, had not destroyed allied sea power and they knew that if they stuck their necks out too far allied sea power would defeat them eventually. He asserted vigorously that Australians should become more sea-minded and should never forget that their very existence depended on the British Empire’s control of sea communications.

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  I hope that Australians realise ‘ what a weighty decision had to be made in the Admiralty in London to provide the great liners that brought their troops back from the Middle East and what vital sacrifices had to be made in other theatres to provide supplies, equipment, and ships and all other material which enabled those magnificent Diggers to meet the Japanese on equal terms in New Guinea and to impose on the Japanese the first resounding defeat that they had suffered.

  We could never have accomplished all that if we had lost-control of the sea. The Japanese could at that time always produce a locally superior fleet, but sea power did not depend on far-flung fleets but on the British Battle Fleet. Tojo had every reason to fear The British fleet. Australians must become sea-minded. They live on the most wonderful sea in the world - the Pacific and the New South Wales coast is one of the most beautiful on which to live. The sea is all round them and in future they must show their pride by all-out support of their Navy.

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  Bob Taylor and his sister Joyce lived at Trebonne, a small township, about 100 km north of Townsville:

  North Queensland. My father, also Bob, together with my mother Matilda, owned a typical country store and during the war, Dad was the local Air Raid Precautions (ARP) Warden, one of 51 in the Shire. I understand he was exempt from military service, because he owned a store, but a brother served in the AIF in the Middle East. My mother’s sister Ann Boyd lived in Townsville with her husband, Percy, running a boarding house, so Percy was also exempt from service, but an ARP Warden in Townsville. They had had two children Joan and Eric. His brother also served in the AIF in the ME where he was killed.

  During 1942, the area north of Mackay had been declared a war zone, I was seven, my sister six, Joan ten and Eric nine and our parents decided to evacuate us to Richmond, western Queensland, where our mothers were born, to live with our grandmother and three spinster aunts. Four of Gran’s sons had enlisted, two in the AIF (one in the ME) and two in the RAAF. Ann Boyd and her children went first in early 1942, but Ann returned to Townsville to help with the boarding house. Shortly after, my mother, Joyce and I joined the Boyd children, but Mum stayed on for a while before returning to Trebonne.

  My sister and I spent about six months in Richmond, but the Boyd’s st
ayed longer and their mother visited them occasionally during their almost twelve months away. We four attended the Richmond State School across the road from Gran’s, and whilst I do not remember much about this period, I vividly remember the flies!!! To enter the classroom, two students had to do duty on the screen door, brushing flies off each child before slamming the door shut after each one. I do not remember much of the time spent at Richmond, but I do not ever recall being frightened. We were pampered by Gran and our aunts, and it really was one big wonderful experience.

  Gordon McFadden, (Don):

  I was 13 years old at the time of the Pacific War, living with my parents, who had a plumbing business in Queensland, and unlike other evacuees, I was sent from the bush to the coast. The only time I remember being scared was when war was declared in Europe. My parents were away on holiday and coming back by ship and I was thinking they could get torpedoed! At home we had a big map, six feet by four, and we’d sit around the crackling short wave radio and put pins in where the battles were. We were always looking for petrol permits. At Toowoomba, the country boys brought food rationing coupons in because they didn’t need them and swopped them for clothing coupons.

  My father was a Captain in the Voluntary Defence Corps. His job was to blow up the bridges in his area if the Japanese invaded. Ammunition was stacked ready. My mother was busy running the plumbing business. Our employees fixed the pipes in ships damaged in the war. We never knew when they would be coming or going and we’d get calls in the night to pick up employees. My dad went over t Stradbroke Island with two mates to defuse three incendiary bombs on the beach. One exploded, killing one of them and dad was badly burned. Downlands RC School had been evacuated and taken over by the American Army for a hospital and he walked across the paddocks to get there for treatment.