Carefree War
Page 16
When the Japanese submarines came into Sydney Harbour, in late May and early June 1942, and made a series of attacks on Sydney as well as Newcastle, my parents felt they had to do something about us children.
I knew about the war because there were anti-tank pyramids in Heritage Park. We watched the Breakwater Battery being built in 1939 as the headquarters for the defence measures and a coastal defence battery against enemy shipping and submarines. There were up to 120 troops (both men and women) from the Army, Royal Australian Artillery and the Volunteer Defence Corps.
There were two 6 inch Mk Xl guns near the southern breakwater at Port Kembla. In 1942, they built the Drummond battery at Mount St Thomas and Illowra battery, also known as Hill 60 Battery, as a counter bombardment battery. There were also two BL 9.2 inch Mk X guns and searchlights.
I was about eight or nine and in the middle of the family when we clambered into the back of a truck, with my mother’s sister, her two daughters and two of her sons, and a friend and her two daughters. We went to Mittagong and stayed with one of mum’s in-laws at the back of Frensham School. I don’t remember what was said, and I didn’t have a feeling of danger, we all just climbed into the back of the truck with all the stuff. Dad worked at the steel works, a protected industry, and had to stay. The time passed pleasantly for us ten: we went to the local school and the movies and had each other for company’.
Barry Hishion describes a short-lived evacuation to Glen Innes from Wollongong:
At the outbreak of WWII in 1939, my wife Marie’s parents, Hugh and Eileen Costello (nee McClifty), were living in Wollongong where Hugh was a Manual Arts teacher at the Wollongong Technical College; both were Glen Innes people. At that time the Australian Iron and Steel Pty Ltd at Port Kembla (Est 1928), then developing production, soon gained the Federal Government’s attention. To protect the works and the shipping traffic that served it, one six inch gun was installed on a hill in the suburb of Mangerton, overlooking the family home at Coniston. It was named Fort Drummond and as time would show it never fired a shot in anger. Another that was installed on Hill 60 overlooking Port Kembla was named the Illowra Battery. With Japan’s entry into the war in December 1941, the Steelworks was considered a prime target to attack, being cause for local people to become jittery. As Japanese activity in the Pacific increased, Hugh decided to send Eileen and the children to Glen Innes for safe keeping. Taking Marie with her older brother John, they were driven to Sydney by Dr Finlayson the family doctor. He happened to be going to Sydney early that morning and with train timetables restricted, this was very convenient. They left Central Station on the Glen Innes Mail for a 12 hour trip as Marie recalls, with the train being packed with soldiers. As some took to sleeping on the luggage racks this saw their cases being squeezed between the seats, making for uncomfortable seating. Their retreat to Glen was to be of short duration, for not long after Hugh was taken ill with appendicitis, requiring Eileen to return to Wollongong with the children. During their short stay Eileen said that she saw more of the war effort in Glen Innes then than she did in Wollongong or Port Kembla. Daily she witnessed lines of trucks carrying loads of military equipment passing through the town manned by soldiers, heading north to Brisbane.
Lynton Bradford, listening to one of my talks, realised after all these years that he had been evacuated!
I didn’t realise it at the time, but no doubt I was sent to Gerringong after the shelling at Bondi and the submarine attack in Sydney Harbour. Actually I was away from Sydney until after the end of the war, although I was only at Gerringong for about two years until I was due to go to high school. Then I was sent to All Saints Boarding School at Bathurst for about two years, then on to Griffith High School until the war ended. I commenced work at Griffith for about year, but the firm closed, so I returned to Sydney and started an apprenticeship.
He wrote The Fig Tree, a piece inspired by his stay in Gerringong. He has fond memories:
At night it was pitch dark, no electric lights, no neighbours nearby, just the faint, distant sounds of waves crashing endlessly on the rocky shore and on starry nights, the black shadow of a huge fig tree blotted out half the sky. These were among my savoured memories of this special place. It had no running water, sewerage, telephone, transport of any kind a young boy would expect in the early 1940s. Why then do I retain such fond memories of this home? Letters were simply addressed as ‘Boat Harbour Gerrigong, NSW’. The nearest houses were almost a kilometre away.
Boat Harbour had no modern amenities, no electricity, running water, sewerage, telephone, transport of any kind, or any of the conveniences a young boy would expect in the early 1940s.
Lynton:
I lived with my great aunt Grace Watkins, after whom my mother was named. Charlton, (the name was rarely used), was her family home, built and added to by her father, Frederick, as his family of 13 grew. It had never been the subject of any council approvals. In fact, there were no councils in the area when this home was started in the mid-1800s. To have a bath, we opted for the kitchen, where there was a fuel stove to warm the room, and a round galvanised iron tub, requiring many trips to the spring, some 100 metres away, to fill to a depth of about 50mm. Two baths a week were considered ample, considering the effort required. It was a hard, but rewarding life at Boat Harbour. The chores included collecting wood for the big fireplaces, fowls to feed, eggs to collect: walking up to the town for milk and supplies. A large mantel radio used a car battery, which had to be taken to the local garage, about two kilometres away, for charging. It was my job to drag it uphill in my billy cart, with many stops on the way, then collecting it the next day. Consequently, the radio was only used to listen to the news once or twice a week. The lounge room was heavily curtained and so dark you could not see to read, even in broad daylight. There was an organ with pump pedals, which was the only luxury in the house. The beds had mattresses of duck feathers, so deep you sank almost from view, a huge mosquito net draped from the steel and brass canopy over the bedhead. Each room had its china wash basin and water jug and of course a potty. The dunny pan needed emptying about once a month. A deep hole was dug in the vegetable garden and to avoid digging it up again, there was a plan of rotation. Of course the dunny paper was cut up newspapers or magazines. With luck, you could read up on stories by assembling the cut sections while contemplating. However, more often than not, essential parts of the stories were not to be found. The original dunny was very fragile after 90 years and was tied to a large peppercorn tree. Unfortunately, the peppercorn blew down in a gale, taking the dunny with it, so a new one was built. I had a fox terrier called Tinker and we went everywhere together, exploring the rocks and seashore also rabbit hunting, but never caught anything as I recall. The only remaining landmark is a great Moreton Bay Fig tree planted by my grandfather in the mid - 1800s and no doubt nourished throughout its life by the buried ‘treasure’ in the vegetable garden.
Alan Wilkinson recalls two evacuees that his grandparents, staunch Methodists housed on their fruit farm, probably through church connection:
Geoff Northcott and Ian Newton are seen here happily helped on the rubber drive. A neighbouring farmer had a pile of rubber tyres which had been flung down an old well. They were pulled out for the war effort. Somebody offered Mr Yeoman’s rubber bed sheet and there were jokes going around because he was incontinent.
Mrs Shirley Killeen’s family said the submarines in the Harbour were enough for them to pack up and leave:
Just after the Japanese entered the Harbour, five of us went up to our cousins at Cowra, where a new baby was born. We must have come by train but I don’t remember it. Mum must have been upset to leave Dad, but she didn’t show it. Dad was in the police force. They told him that he wouldn’t be able to look after us if anything happened. I was seven when we left home. We all slept on the veranda. It was cold. We had mosquito coils smoking away because we were near a river. The first day at the new school I was sent up to the Principal’s Office because I moved after
the bell went. I didn’t know that you had to stand still. We went down a lane to school and we used to rub our hands on the leaves of the peppercorn tree in case we got the cane. We were well fed. There was a lovely apricot tree in the garden. The railway line ran along the back of the property - which is still there. Albert’s father worked on the railways and he used to throw coal down as he went past. There was an air raid shelter in the back garden with a corrugated iron roof. We used it as a slide. We went swimming in the Lachlan River. My elder sister yelled out there was a shark once, but it was a floating tyre. I think we were away about a year - it’s hard to remember. We had a carefree war.
Chapter 13
Going to Grandmas
I didn’t like it much at grandmas. She got me up at 5 am. I had to feed the chooks and every now and then she’d cut the head off one and it would always be my favourite.
– Richard Featherstone-Haugh
Associate Professor Bev Kingston:
Can I draw your attention to: An Imperial Affair, Monash University Publishing 2013. There on p. 79 John Rickard describes how his grandmother and mother, sharing a flat in Manly while his father was on active service in London in 1941, decided to move because of the fear of invasion. So they moved to a house in Gordon that was vacant because its owners ‘were taking flight to the Blue Mountains’. Not long after the battle of Midway the owners of the house in Gordon decided it was safe to return to Sydney, so Rickard’s mother and grandmother were house hunting again. (p.81)
John Taylor remembers Manly Beach with barbed wire:
We went up to the Blue Mountains to escape the Japanese. Mum took us six kids to a holiday house my grandfather had had at Mount Victoria, a Queenslander style home with six bedrooms, and we were there when the Japanese submarines came into the Harbour in May 1942. Our youngest was aged four and Mary was taking the Leaving Certificate. For 12 months, we went by train to St Bernard’s College (now Katoomba High School), and back to Manly for the holidays. Dad stayed at work at City Mutual and when we were in the mountains, caught The Fish as the train was called then, up to stay with us on Friday night, going back on Monday morning.
Some grandmothers went away. Judy Suttor said the Blue Mountains were a popular retreat:
My grandmother and her sister both had houses in the Eastern Suburbs and they went to the Blue Mountains - that’s what people of their class did.
Bill Deeley lived at Dulwich Hill with his family:
I remember the submarine nets that let the ferries through. When the Japanese came into Sydney Harbour, my parents had gone out and I was with my grandmother. She was the youngest of her family, born when her father was sixty years old. I was about four and a half. We got under the table with a mattress on the top. After that we were sent by train to my grandmother’s sister’s house at Coolah. It seemed huge to us. I don’t know how much acreage she had. Outside the house there was a shed and a water tank. I remember running around in bare feet and getting into trouble. I remember grasshopper plagues - you couldn’t walk without crunching on grasshoppers. The lady of the house had chooks and a turkey. When Christmas came, she killed the turkey and cooked it but we wouldn’t eat it and cried because it was our friend. Her husband lived there but her children were 20 years older than us. He was a foreman in a box factory, a protected industry.
Some grandmothers were taken with their families or grandchildren being evacuated. Peter Coles (Andrews):
Judith, my sister, my grandmother, Grace Williams-Neville and I were evacuated in 1942 to Garthowen to the farm of Frank and Hilda Fragar. They are my uncle and aunt, Hilda being my mother’s sister. I have fond memories of ‘Garthowen’, of Auntie Hilda, Uncle Frank, Lynne and Nessie. In 1942, with the war situation for Australia rather desperate, the Japanese Army advancing in New Guinea, midget submarines entering Sydney Harbour and destroying ships and the prospects of an invasion, mother, in her usual way, made plans to evacuate Grandma, herself, Judith and me out of what she saw as harm’s way. She found a small cottage somewhere where we could go, saved enough petrol or petrol coupons, and her plan was in place should an invasion take place, In the meantime, Grandma Neville, Judith and I went to stay with the Fragar family at Garthowen.
For me it was a joyous experience on the farm, even though lessons had to be completed each morning under Auntie Hilda’s tutorage, but once complete, I was free to join the men. This may mean riding my bike to collect the mail, helping Lynne crotch sheep, witness the killing of a sheep for meat, helping Uncle Frank cut chaff and muster sheep, rabbiting with Lynne - just so many things for a boy to do.
Auntie Hilda conducted correspondence Sunday School and of course I had to be part of this. However, she made it fun with lessons down by the river or panning for gold in the creek and was always able to weave God’s message into the experience. I could go on for a long time as so many things remain deep in my memory of the time with the Fragar family that the time was not one of worry about the war but a unique time to remember and cherish for a life time. 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.
Some grandparents stayed at home, visiting their evacuee grandchildren - taking turns if there were two available. Children were often used to staying with them and after a good scrub down with Lifebuoy soap, clean underwear and a hankie, packed their bags going off happily, blissfully unaware of the reason for going. For worried parents, it was a blessing to picture their children on the rug in front of someone else’s fire, the mantel clock ticking away in the peaceful room, playing ‘Snakes and Ladders’, while they waited for tea. Knowing who would be caring for their children was important. To achieve this, some went two hours drive away, some went interstate, and distance was not an issue, as one woman said:
We went from Sydney to Shepparton, Victoria, because that’s where our grandparents were.
Richard Featherstone-Haugh:
I was in Camperdown children’s hospital aged six and a half, having my tonsils and adenoids out and the nurses put some of our beds out on the veranda, because there were so many children. We were eating our jelly and ice cream when there was a terrible noise and all the lights everywhere around and in the hospital went out. Searchlights moved about the sky and sirens went. It was something in the Harbour. I think we could see across there because there were very few tall buildings. The nurses hurried around taking all the kids into a basement where mattresses were laid out. Kids were crying for their mums and I was frightened. I heard someone say, ‘The Japs are here’. The nurses gave us lemonade for a treat and tried to quieten everyone down. The nurses wanted to get back to their families but the transport had stopped. Rumours were flying, like ‘The Japs have landed at Maroubra’. There was a feeling of panic. The next day my mother came and took me home to Eastlakes. The day after, my little sister and I were put on a train to Orange, with a lot more children and Red Cross nurses looking after us all. The children got off at various stops. My father said he could have bought a house in Vaucluse, Rose Bay or Double Bay for £250. We were going to Grandma’s place and she met the train. I was up there for two years but my little sister cried all the time for her mother and she came up and took her back. I didn’t like it much at Grandma’s. She got me up at 5 am. I had to feed the chooks and every now and then she’d cut the head off one and it would always be my favourite. Dad was up in New Guinea. When he was discharged, he came up and took me home. We were held up near the Victoria Barracks and there was a big brawl going on between American servicemen and Australians, with girls sitting on the kerb crying their eyes out.
Grandma could be a ‘staging post’ whilst one or two of the parents tried to find a place to rent. Bill Willett was eight when they moved away from the bombing:
My family had to move away from Townsville in 1941/2. My father was away with the RAAF and the Japanese dropped a couple of bombs close to Townsville. My father rang my mother from wherever he was and told her
to ‘go as soon as you can’. We walked out of home with just clothes in suitcases. I was the youngest and had three sisters. I went to my grandmother’s farm at Zillmere, with one sister. She had a chicken farm and sold eggs in Brisbane. There was a horse there. The others went to relatives at Highgate Hill, Brisbane. After a while, mother found a rented house at Eagle Junction and we were together once again.
Dad told us that we should evacuate as soon as possible because the Japanese were getting too close and he wanted us out of there. None of us can remember whether they had actually dropped a bomb (bombs), but I can remember being told that they had dropped them. My eldest sister was a young nurse at the Townsville general hospital and it was thought that she should stay as she may be needed. My sister said if the family had a car, it had to be left with a full tank of petrol and nothing other than some clothing was allowed on the train. My sister stayed at the house at West End (which was almost next to Garbutt Aerodrome) and she was looked after by a fellow nurse. I never saw her for a few years, until she arrived in Brisbane. One of my sisters and I stayed at my Grandmother’s farm and the others were at Maleny, just north of Brisbane. When my mother arranged to rent a house, the family got together again and the job of finding furniture, beds and necessities began - all second-hand stuff from auction rooms. The departure from Townsville was 1941 approximately but that is not exact as far as my sisters are concerned. It was a long time ago and for me, I was just a carefree 8 year old boy and did not know what was happening anyway.
John Martin and his sister, Margaret Helen (now Wiseman) went to their grandma’s place near the South Australian border:
My parents must have really thought the Japanese were coming. They sent my sister Margaret, four years older and me to my mother’s mother at Casterton near the South Australia border. They had a farm on the Glenelg River banks, in fact there were three farms all belonging to family members. I was six. I was bewildered but Auntie Dot in the farm next to Grandma’s had ten children, so there was always someone to play with. We stayed for the best part of a year, the happiest time of my life. I still have a wind up gramophone, I like old things. They had a phone, but I only remember it being used once or twice while we were there - I think my parents wrote letters. I don’t think they ever rang. My uncle used to yell into it because it was high up on the wall. None of the three farms had electricity or cars and tank water. I don’t remember seeing money, they traded rabbits, and ate pigeon pie and vegetables. They had cows for cream and milk. Auntie Dot never left the kitchen. She just went from the bedroom to the kitchen and stayed there all day. On their veranda was the biggest bath I’ve ever seen, and all the kids got in it and the water was so dirty that my sister and I walked on past and got into the river, luckily not far to go! Dad had a butcher’s shop in Cliftonville, out of Melbourne, so food was never a problem. Mum was the cashier. We had a delivery boy for the butchers shop, Martin, and he would ride around Collingwood with his basket laden with parcels. Sometimes I’d get a ride on top of the parcels.