by Ann Howard
I cannot be sure of dates when I was brought home, but it was before the war had ended, because I can clearly remember the joyous celebrations of peace in the streets of Morisset town. I figure that it was about 18 months that I had spent at Lawson school and I finished out my primary learning at Morisset.
Lance Roper:
I was born on 4 July, 1932 and lived in Lewisham, Sydney. I had an older brother and sister. My father was a stock inspector and my mother a teacher. In 1942, there was much panic and many people were getting away from impending invasion. All they wanted to do was get away. As a boy of ten, I just did what I was told. The plan was that the eldest boy, who had won a scholarship would board at Riverview, Margot, my sister, would become a boarder at St Vincent’s, Potts Point, and I would be sent to Katoomba, my mother already had a teaching position at Katoomba and I would go to De La Salle, Katoomba. We would board there while my father kept everything going and worked at Homebush, sometimes being on guard, visiting us when he could.
Katoomba used to be a romantic, rather charming place and it changed in the 1940s. The boarding house we were in was full of evacuees. We talked and played Chinese Checkers, and all got on well. The St Vincent boarders stayed at Mount St Marys. My mother taught at the local public school, which was a Methodist hall or church with a curtain down the middle.
I still love to visit Katoomba - it brings back happy memories of the year we spent there.
As children sat swinging their legs at the kitchen table, eating Vegemite sandwiches and Aeroplane jelly, they would be told they were going and that was that. They thought they were going on holiday, often to Grandma’s or an aunt and uncle’s place, where they had been before for holidays or during the Depression. Fortunately, most children did not realise what was at stake. Everywhere in war zones, mothers calmed their children, making light of the situation.
War is a time of severe dislocation, pressure, sadness, elation and definitely of change. The men who went overseas were often young, naive and full of adventure, with no idea of what awaited them, lucky to escape unscathed and often traumatised. Men who were unfit or in protected occupations now had additional responsibilities to support other civilians. Everyone was under pressure. People in voluntary organisations worked harder than ever. Women found themselves with careers and responsibilities they had not dreamed of. Children who were evacuated were also changed. The little ones, who can hardly remember anything, were safe and happy in the company of their relatives and friends, with their brothers and sisters and sometimes mothers, so life went by in a golden dream of sweet sleep, happy games and laughter. Children who went away by themselves were more likely to experience feelings of dread that would stay with them throughout their lives.
Jean Macleay gives us a child’s view of the war:
I really hadn’t thought that there was anything interesting about my early childhood, but being reminded that it was somewhat different from the way things were both pre and post war I have been remembering some of the things that affected me. I think like most children I assumed this was just the way things were. The actual war was some strange distant happening that really didn’t have anything to do with me. Moving because of the danger of living near the coast appears to be not uncommon. We moved from Burwood to Eastwood. These days that doesn’t make a lot of sense but then, in 1940, Eastwood was the back of beyond, a rural area of dairy farms, chook farms and we had a brick pit behind our house.
My aunt lived at Bondi and saw and heard the fuss when the Jap subs came into the harbour and Dad felt that shells could possibly reach Burwood being an inner western suburb. Trenches were all the go and something of a status symbol as to how fancy they were. I remember our neighbour over the road had a state of the art job with roof of which he was very proud. Dad wouldn’t have any of that. He said that if he was going to die as a result of bombing then he would do it comfy in his bed … besides it would mess up his very productive vegie garden and fruit trees. Trenches were also dug at Eastwood Primary School, cut quite deeply into the Eastwood clay. At first we were lined up and marched into them carrying a little bag that mum had to make. I can remember there was a peg to bite on (what for?!) and I think something like a gas mask.
We had a summer storm soon after they were dug and the trenches filled with water and didn’t dry out until after the end of the war. Dad was over 40 and a solicitor at the Registrar General’s Department so he was never called up but he did join the VDC. I can remember his coming home after all night out on training expeditions just in time to don his suit and go to work. Apparently they used to stomp around the paddocks where Macquarie Shopping Centre now stands in full uniform and waving guns. Dad’s gun stood in our hall beside the telephone table!. One of the farmers came out one night and told them they were mad as he had rabbit traps set in his paddocks and they were lucky no one had stepped into one. Really children my age had no idea what a war really was, only that the Japs might get us. The only inconvenience I can remember experiencing was that I couldn’t have enough butter on my toast as a result of which I have too much to this day. I can remember mum having ration books and complaining bitterly about not have enough cigarettes and also complaining that I was growing too tall and took too much material (it must have also been rationed) to make me a dress.
Glebe residents felt exposed by their location with, 164 factories employing 4,496 people. Lola Wooley’s father was employed there in the war:
I was eight in 1940. We lived in Glebe, where Dad was the worker s manager for D Hardy and Sons, Timber Mills. At that time there was a lot of industry there - a sugar refinery, oil. My dad decided to send my mum, granny and myself to Katoomba to safety. I had an older brother and sister who had left home by then. My mum had been born in Katoomba and her house was still there. We lived in another little house, (often freezing), for about two years. We couldn’t go to the school, we went to the Town Hall, down from the Carrington Hotel. It was so cold, no heating, we kept our jackets, mittens and ‘pixie’ hoods on all the time.
At the school, they dug trenches. Dad visited us when he could. I got toothache. Dad said to mum to bring me back down to Glebe where my dentist was. Would you believe it, it was the day the subs came into the Harbour! There was a special room at the Mills in case of invasion, with supplies in and we spent the time there.
Peter Andrews Coles has good memories of his childhood wartime experiences:
I went with my sister and grandmother to their uncle and aunt’s farm, Garthowen. I, as a child, was not aware of the gravity of the time or the community concerns. The thing that stood out in my mind and has remained with me was the change in our settled life at Penrith and the excitement of the adventure to the country. The evacuation for us was in no way a distressing experience as we were fortunate to be moving to be with part of our loving, extended family.
Martin Dobson was only small, but can think back to the early forties:
I was a little lad and we lived in Middle Street, Waverley. My father worked at the gasworks. We went to the Blue Mountains for about seven months, Katoomba, I think. I remember going in to where they were vaccinating the kids and they were all screaming. Next door was the Christian Brother’s College, and they had a huge basement in their building. When the Japanese subs came into our Harbour, all the neighbours in our block took shelter in the basement for three or four hours.
Meryl (Johnstone) Hanford had an adventurous time when she left Sydney:
When I was four or five and my brother, Geoff, seven or eight, my mother announced we were ‘going on holiday’ and my father drove us to a wool property called ‘Willowmouth’ near Coonabarabran, which belonged to distant relatives. I remember I had my tonsils out two days before we went and everything seemed very hasty. My father returned to Sydney and my mother and I slept in one room and my brother alone in another room. My mother was worried about Geoff and got up early to check on him. His bed was empty. She went downstairs and he was sitting up with the shearers having
breakfast!
It was reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, 19 February, 1942, thirty-one children and six mothers, evacuees from Paddington, arrived at Griffith and Narrandera, followed by a kindergarten teacher the next day. They all knew each other. The children slept on straw pallets, the mothers on beds. The mothers bought the food and kitchen work was rotated.
Mary Moss:
In 1942, my mother took my sister and me from Russel Lea to the Riverina. There were AA guns at Rodd Point near us. We had slit trenches in the back garden and stores of tins of food. My mother went outside one night in the blackout to look at the searchlights and an air warden came and told her she should be inside. She told him she would decide when to go inside. The adults were all frightened, but my mother told us exactly why we were going, and I was excited. A widowed aunt of my mother’s had two rice farms started on a soldier’s settlement from World War 1. We went up by train. The names on the stations were blocked out.
We went to a little school with one teacher and seventeen children, from kindergarten to sixth class. We walked to school, a long way, in often 100 degree heat, and back home again. There was one man in charge - the others were all away fighting, - so everyone lent a hand. I sewed up the chaff bags with a big needle. My mother stayed with us. My father had electrical burns before the war. He had been knocked back for service in World War 1, because he had a heart murmur, (but he lived until he was 84!).
Bruce Whitefield only has happy memories:
I was born January 1934, in Sydney, and by 1941-42 Dad was in the army and somehow Mum and I were evacuated to Condobolin. I don’t recall much of it except that it was a good time - we all (even us kids) learned how to weave camouflage nets and our Mums seemed to enjoy it all. It was a happy time for us kids.
Norman Owen left Rozelle for Griffiths:
Our family lived at Rozelle and my dad was a truck driver for Dunlops. When the Japanese bombed Darwin, Mum took me and my sister, Pat up to Griffiths by train to an orchard owned by an uncle. It was fun there and the food was good. We went to school about two miles away. I doubled my sister on my pushbike. We helped pick, sort and stack the fruit. It was like a holiday. We stayed a few months and we didn’t see Dad until we went back home.
Joan (Elson) Bourke was close to the shelling at Bronte.
I was born in 1930 at Bronte. I was the youngest of five - all the others were older - from six to 18. Dad, from England, was a bricklayer, too old to join up. He was a warden and patrolled the streets to see no lights were shining. When the Japanese invasion looked imminent, we knew about them because we were close to Clovelly, so the shells were about a kilometre away. One of my sisters had a young baby. Father decided we had to get away. Mum didn’t want to go. My brother’s children aged four and six went to a tiny place called Derriwong, outside Condobolin, to my sister-in-law’s auntie. In the end, my sister and her baby, my mum and myself went to Windellama - about 25 miles out of Condobolin. Dad always got the Herald, and he saw this ad:
* * *
The Sydney Morning Herald, Monday, 12 January, 1942
To Let Half House to mother and children, Mrs F H Boreham,
Buburba, Windellama, BOOKER BAY - Cottage.
* * *
It was a long trip up to these people and we stayed there with Mr and Mrs Boreham and their son and daughter for about four months, from January 1942. It was a farm with chooks and cows. The one-room school had a red dirt playground with a map of Australia on it. It was two and a half miles across the fields to get to it. The mailman came three times a week by truck. There was no general store, you had to go to Condobolin for supplies, just a Post Office and a school. My sister’s husband made the long trip up by train and then rode his bicycle the 25 miles every Friday night. One night he didn’t arrive and we were all worried. He had come off his bike in the road and was found next day with a fractured skull. He eventually joined up, which he should not have done after his head injuries and came back after the war a changed man. After my brother-in-law’s bike accident, my sister didn’t care what dad said and we went back to Sydney. After about two weeks, the Japanese submarines came into the Harbour. Dad said I had to go to the same place as my sister-in-law at Derriwong. My eldest brother took me. There was another one-roomed school. The teacher lodged in the same house with us. Our hostess, a great-aunt was very strict and had ideas about children which were ‘old school’. As the youngest, I was a bit spoilt and didn’t like being told to ‘eat everything up’ and things like that. I have good memories of Derriwong: rabbit trapping, milking, fruit picking, getting the eggs - all a big adventure really. I missed mum, but I was never frightened. I made friends with the local kids and stayed friends with some of them all these years.
Judy Suttor, (who settled happily in Armidale) was evacuated there:
At the end of 1941, when my parents decided to send me to Armidale I was just five years old. I know that they were sad to see me go, but that year, the first of my conscious memory, was a great experience. At that stage I was an only child, my father was an Oral Surgeon and my mother a professional pianist. We lived in a Federation cottage in Double Bay and my childhood was happy and uncomplicated. The journey by steam train from Central Station in Sydney to Armidale took about 12 hours and I travelled with my aunt and her small daughter and a family friend, actress Queenie Ashton’s older daughter and son.
We arrived to move in on my grandmother, known as Huttie who lived in one half of a rented premises in Brown Street, with my great aunt and great grandmother living in the other half. In the yard of the 19th century house was a detached brick building, perhaps once the kitchen or laundry, (or both), known as Mulberry Cottage for the huge mulberry tree beside it. Here my aunt and the other three children slept, while I had a bedroom in my grandmother’s side of the house. My grandmother and great aunt were both music teachers and my great aunt had the care of eighty-three year old Grandma Wharton, who was in the early stages of dementia.
Grandma Wharton spent most of the day knitting khaki socks for soldiers and my great aunt spent most of the night undoing her work, re-knitting it and adding some. I started school in Kindergarten at Armidale Demonstration School, which was only a block away and I walked there with the two older children. We all came home at lunchtime for a hot meal and scampered back to be in time for afternoon classes. I also had a ‘built-in friend’, the daughter of a Double Bay friend and neighbour who also came to Armidale and was living with friends of my grandmother. Particularly in winter we children often rugged up and went to the picture theatre to the Saturday matinee and everybody always walked to the Presbyterian Church each Sunday.
We walked everywhere, but one lady sometimes picked me up in her little car and took me to visit the children at the Orphanage. I found this huge institution cold and forbidding and was somewhat overcome by the numbers of children, too many to single out anyone as an individual friend. A neighbour took over a vacant block nearby and grew enormous quantities of vegetables so that we and other families were always supplied with fresh food and we used to walk down to the butcher shop on the corner where the floor was covered with sawdust and there was a flyscreen with a sliding window between you and the friendly butcher.
In my mother’s memoirs she writes, ‘We had missed her (me) so much .. . the only way to be able to suffer her absence had been to fill every moment with work. My time was well filled with working for the Dental Comforts Fund and playing at Educational concerts for the troops. Most of these concerts were at Army camps such as Ingleburn and at hospitals, the former at night and the latter during the day. Army cars with chauffeurs were provided but often I would be the last of the artists to be delivered home, sometimes well after midnight.’
She also acknowledged her mother’s ‘magnificent War Effort’ in looking after four children between three and nine years of age. Obviously adaptable and surrounded by caring family and friends and with a minimal knowledge of the hideous happenings of the war, except that my four uncl
es were serving overseas, I had a happy time as an evacuee, with the added bonus result of an enduring love of New England.
RDB (Wal) Whalley, remembers Armidale, where he too eventually settled:
The dark days of World War II in 1941 found my mother, my three sisters and me living at Mona Vale, north of Sydney, while my father was in Malaya with the AIF 8th Division. At this time, an invasion of Australia by the Japanese seemed imminent. The beaches of the Warringah Peninsular north of Sydney, including Mona Vale, were being heavily fortified, in the belief that they formed an ideal site for an invading force to land. As the youngest, I was eight years old at the time and was very interested in all the military activities.
My mother decided to move the family inland so that we would not be in the front line if an invasion did occur. I understand that she chose Armidale because she knew Mr Gordon Hutchinson, Estate Agent, and so she wrote to him asking if there were any possibility of obtaining rental accommodation for herself and her four children. She had a Bachelor of Science degree with Honours in Botany from Sydney University and I also understand that she put her qualifications at the end of her letter. The outcome was that we did move to Armidale and took up residence at 200 Jessie Street. The house (since demolished) was large and rambling, on the southern side of the railway line and overlooked the present roundabout on the southern side of the railway bridge. The slope below the house to the New England Highway, then, as now, was covered with Cootamundra wattle trees. My mother taught biology at PLC (then at Brown Street) and also assisted teaching Botany at the then University College at Booloominbah.
The Fletcher family lived next door to us with Neville (then about 12 and later to become Professor of Physics at University of New England) and his younger brother, Ian. Ian was a year above me at the Armidale Demonstration School (now Armidale City Public School) and he and I spent many hours collecting insects and preserving them pinned to cork in collecting boxes.