Carefree War

  The movie was enormously successful at the box office in Australia and England; by February 1947 it was estimated 350,000 Australians had seen it, making it the most widely seen movie about Australia of all time. And a successful endeavour for the Australian government in war propaganda!

  Chapter 15

  Tasmanian Fears

  People just thought it was pretty sensible. A lot of people got their kids out of town if they could.

  – Vera Fisher

  Tasmania has a recorded awareness of invaders since the coming of the Europeans. In their history as a colony, Tasmania was automatically at war with Britain’s enemies and European rivals, such as France. Hobart Town was a vital supply stop for whalers and sealers, and a hub for the British ships. By 1942, 12 permanent defensive coastal batteries, (now boarded up), linked with tunnels had been built, starting with the use of convict labour in the nineteenth century.

  During WWII, there were concerns Tasmania would be invaded by the Japanese, largely because of the state’s zinc industry, vital to the war effort, but the official Australian stance was that Tasmania was an unlikely enemy target. Japanese advances made Tasmanians more keenly aware of their geographical isolation, in the uncertainty of the times, but as a small island off a large one, isolation became its strength. Fear of attack from the sea increased when German naval raiders Pinguin and Atlantis laid mines near the River Derwent mouth. After Tasmanian soldiers left for the North African campaign with the Australian 6th Division, Hobart was closed to shipping. Bass Strait was closed after a mine sank the British steamer Cambridge in 1940.

  There was more alarm when HMAS Sydney was sunk off the Western Australian coast in 1941, as Tasmanian soldiers left for Malaya with the Australian 8th Division. A Japanese submarine-launched seaplane flew a spying mission over Hobart in March 1942. After this, two anti-aircraft guns were positioned on nearby hills, but the Japanese never returned to Tasmania.

  Sir Robert Cosgrove, the wartime Premier and his government cooperated fully with the Commonwealth in putting Tasmania’s economy on a wartime footing. Tasmania’s economy was emerging from the Depression and ammunition factories in Launceston and Hobart, employing 1,600 workers were welcome. Wooden boats, prisms, textiles, metal works and other essential pieces of war equipment were also produced.

  Evacuation plans for the civilian population were developed, and air raid precautions included building shelters, slit trenches and casualty stations, regular drills and ‘brown outs’, which intensified when the Japanese overran South East Asia and bombed northern Australia in early 1942, culminating in a trial blackout of the whole state in mid-year. Air Raid Precaution services were staffed by 14,000 voluntary workers and a Volunteer Defence Corps of 4000 men manned coastal and anti-aircraft defence positions. Civilians became used to the sound of artillery practice. There were at least four military aircraft crashes. Civil Defence Regulations 1941 on the front page of the The Mercury newspaper gave instructions on internal and external flying glass in the case of bombing. Trenches were dug around schools, for instance at the AG Ogilvie High School, where fathers were required to be at the school from 6 pm to 8 pm, Monday to Friday and 8 am to 12 noon Saturday, ‘for the purpose of digging trenches for the protection of their children.’ Tea was very kindly provided each evening for those coming directly from work.

  Vera Fisher:

  We didn’t have any evacuation plans at our house, but Gran and Grandpa at Fernhurst had an air raid shelter in the back yard. Grandpa was bedridden by this time, and he was on a banana lounge by day, ready to be wheeled down, so it had to be the width of the banana lounge to get him into the air raid shelter. Pam Davis, who lived at Pawtella, was attending Hobart High School, but her parents brought her home because she’d be safer up here. So she used to go to the Oatlands Area School in the Hobart High uniform. Then Fahan School took over the boarding house at Interlaken, and the accommodation house was totally Fahan students.

  In 1942, the private girl’s school Fahan was evacuated to Interlaken, on the Central Plateau for two terms, recalled as an idyllic time by students in the school yearbook. One of the teachers, Dr. Winifred Mary Curtis AM, PhD, DSc, FLS has been described as ‘the botanist whose texts have defined Tasmanian flora.’ She commuted every few weeks between the school and the university, to teach, with brief detours to National Park where her parents had rented a house. The journeys were adventurous because the wheelbase of the small family car was not wide enough to fit the ruts of the unmade roads.

  The evacuees were lucky to have her because she was appointed University of Tasmania Senior Lecturer in Botany in 1951 and Reader in Botany in 1956, the most senior position held by a woman at the university at that time.

  Chapter 16

  I Want to Go

  After about two and a half years, our parents came to get us, and there was a family row. Aunt Eileen could not have children and she said bitterly to my mother, ‘You can always have some more’ … Aunt Eileen sadly referred to us two as ‘my boys’ for the rest of her life.

  – Peter Daley

  Cassie Thornley:

  My elderly cousin is 91, physically challenged but still bright. She says, ‘We all knew the children were going to the country, people got together and organised it between themselves, and they went to relatives. An awful lot came down from up north.

  As far as I know, there has not been an Australian film about the emotional turmoil caused by interfering with bonding between a mother and her children - an Ealing Productions film The Divided Heart, 1954, based on a true story, demonstrates clearly the unbearable emotional burden put on children and their mothers by separation caused by war. This story is based in Germany and Yugoslavia, but it also happened in Australia.

  Peter Daley:

  There were eventually six children in our family at Wollongong. At the beginning, my brother, who was older than me by less than a year and myself, born in 1939, were the only ones. We were brought up as twins. We were always close - I lived in his shadow. Dad was working at the steelworks and Wollongong and Port Kembla were fortified and considered dangerous. He was a trained fire officer and in a protected industry so he was well aware of the danger. Dad had a married sister, Eileen, married without children living at Cessnock and my brother and I were taken up to their house on a huge block, backing into the bush. We had our tonsils out just before going up and I remember eating junket and jelly to sooth the soreness.

  My uncle went shooting most weekends - kangaroos, for the meat that he fed to his six hunting dogs. We were given one each for our own. I’ve kept dogs ever since. We pulled the blinds down at night and there were local searchlights.

  Eileen’s husband was a coal miner. He got killed in the pit when I was about eight. They were always good to us.

  I remember my uncle getting bitten by a redback spider. The grownups used to talk about the ‘Brisbane Line’. Everyone had chimneys and steel ovens and got their coal cheap and there was a special smoky odour right through the town’.

  It’s about 300 kms to Cessnock, no phone, so communication was only by mail. I don’t remember if our parents wrote to us or visited us, because we were so small, but later in life I found out that after about two and a half years, our parents came to get us, and there was a family row. Aunt Eileen could not have children and she said bitterly to my mother, ‘You can always have some more’. This is what Mum did - four more in fact. Aunt Eileen sadly referred to us two as ‘my boys’ for the rest of her life.

  Margaret Elizabeth Joiner (nee Nancarrow) was homesick even though she was treated well:

  I was 11 years old and lived at 430 Darling Street, Balmain. It was an old Victorian style cottage which was divided into two flats. A doctor and his niece lived in the other one. My aunt and grandmother (always known as ‘Granny’), had a flat in Birchgrove Road opposite the Cockatoo Dock. My father enlisted on 11 June, 1940, and went to the Middle East and Tobruk. When he returned and the air raid sirens were being tested he would
hit the decks at top speed. My mum came home from her work at DJ’s department store one afternoon to find that her sister, Peg O’Donell and brother, Charles O’Donell had organised for Granny to go to stay with another sister who lived further inland at Carlton/Kogarah and for me to go to Leeton to stay with the Dunns, a family friend whom I had never met.

  I was put on a train pretty much straight away – children did what they were told in those days so I didn’t argue. I recall the train being very crowded (with civilians) and that it took forever because the train was often shunted onto side lines in order to let the troop trains through. I had just started at Fort Street Girls High School. I don’t recall being scared, or any of my friends being sent away.

  The Dunns had a big house and they took in boarders – often girls who worked in the local bank. Quite often the girls were late home for tea because, in those days, they had to stay at the bank until they balanced their day’s takings. The Dunns had three children: two girls and one boy. The older girl was about 18 and had gone to Sydney to do nursing and the other two were more my age. Mr Dunn worked for the council as a water bailiff – Leeton being a big irrigation area. He was in charge of turning the water on and off for the farmers. Often the farmers would give him peaches from their farms and I recall how good they were. It was in Leeton that I also had my first taste of mushrooms which I love to this day. Mr Dunn would collect them from the paddocks when he was out visiting the farmers. I recall getting mumps shortly after arriving at the Dunn’s. They were very good to me – couldn’t have been nicer - but I was so homesick that I started walking in my sleep and even got as far as the front lawn on one occasion. It was a night that the Dunns were entertaining the shire president and it was freezing so it caused a bit of a stir. I also recall getting chilblains for the first and only time whilst living in Leeton and recall placing my hands against the concrete walls to try and cool them down.

  My parents wrote to me and I recall the beautiful script that my father had. I have happy memories of spending time by the Murrumbidgee River and being awed by its size and beauty. I would ride the bike that the Dunn kids had given me and taught me to master. My parents couldn’t afford to buy me a bike so it was rather wonderful to learn that skill and to have the freedom that the bike afforded. At the Leeton school I was unable to continue my Latin studies as the Latin teacher at the Leeton school had joined the army. Each evening a troop train would stop at Leeton and I recall going very excitedly down to meet the train as it was usually full of American soldiers who would throw chewing gum to the kids. I stayed in Leeton until just after the Japanese entered Sydney Harbour. I think it was about six months. My father had returned by then too so it was decided that it would be best if I went home as I was still fretting. The return train trip was very similar to my original trip – crowded and slow. Sometime after my return home, I recall my father taking me to town one day to see the Japanese submarines – or what was left of them. I was fascinated and he bought me a piece of copper pipe (a piece of the submarine) as a memento which I thought was pretty special.

  Judy Grieve, as President of the Armidale and District Historical Society, told of one of the few sad stories that surfaced after the war:

  I received a letter from a lady who had been evacuated from Sydney to Armidale in 1942 during the war when she was around eight years of age. The letter was a request to know what school she would have attended. Based on the fact that she had been utterly unhappy, she had blotted out all memory of what was likely to have been a year of her life and she was trying to recall some of that experience. All she remembered her tearful father at Central Railway Station when she was bundled into a steam train carriage in a confusion of numerous other children and distraught parents on the railway platform. She moved into dormitory accommodation on arrival at her new home. In an effort to assist her I found that the CWA in Armidale was requested to find suitable accommodation in private homes for evacuated children and to report to a committee of Council, clergy and citizens. Newspaper reports from the schools in early 1942 indicated a massive increase in enrolments and that the girls’ and boys’ boarding schools were filled to capacity. I could not establish which school this lady may have attended, but did establish that a large home near a public primary school, leased by a teacher may have been a possibility and the names of both the home and the school gave her some glimmer of recognition. This lady’s life was never the same, as by the time she returned her father had died and her mother had moved to a totally different locality and on talking with her on the telephone, she was still, in her seventies, profoundly sad.

  Most children had a carefree war. John Martin says it was the happiest time of his life:

  We rode horses bareback at Casterton, at Grandma’s place, about 40 miles from Mount Gambier. We used to yodel like Tex Morton, the yodelling boundary rider, go rabbiting with ferrets, and my cousin, who was about 7, had a .22 rifle. It wasn’t until after my parents were both dead that I realised I had been evacuated. They never talked about it. I suppose once the war was finished, they threw up their hands and said, ‘thank goodness’ and that was the end of it.

  Judy Thurgood’s husband, Arthur, living at Haberfield has also recently realised why he went north. She says:

  In talking with my husband, we’ve realised that the war may have been the reason his mother took him north to stay with relatives on dairy farms on the Richmond River near Lismore in 1942 (he was 5 years old in the June and started school in the district at Pelican Creek. His father was away in the Air Force at that time – he’d always assumed his mother just chose to stay with relatives.

  However, in the 1940s, children would whisper to each other in their beds, listening to fragments of adult conversation, trying to make sense of it all. They must have seen their mothers weeping, sighing, staring out of the window for a long time, or into the fire, talking in low tones to their relatives and friends; children see everything, although they do not always understand. Some felt nervous but they didn’t know why - they just felt the tension around them. The whole family was affected by things done far away and out of their control. 44Some people have remarked that it was difficult to know how other child evacuees felt at the time, because you did what you were told. You were not part of the decision making process. Mary Lark said she remembers her brother being sent away:

  My brother, Bill Woodside, was sent from prep school in Toowoomba to Southport in 1940, when he was in Grade 6. His school was part of General McArthur’s headquarters. We were on a farm at Guluguba and nobody talked much about the war, nothing was said about the war, so I don’t know if he was happy or unhappy.

  It was very hard for mothersombed Pearl Harbour and Australia camombed Pearl Harbour and Australia cam to let go of their children when it was impossible for them to go with them. On London stations, at the beginning of evacuation, relatives were allowed to say goodbye to children as they boarded the trains, but some snatched their children back at the last minute. Tearful mothers were eventually stopped by big black concertina gates at the end of platforms, hands stretching through, desperate for a last glimpse of their children, trying to be brave and pretend they were going on holiday.

  Some people told me they weren’t frightened, just unsettled. Anne Taylor went to Muswellbrook, but wanted to stay at home with her family at any price:

  In the Second World War, I went to Muswellbrook to stay with friends of my parents. I was twelve years old and not happy there, I couldn’t settle. I insisted on coming home to Tamarama. I remember shells going over, but I wasn’t frightened - even when woken up in the night and put on a mattress under a table in the hall with two young neighbouring boys.

  In Australia, even teenagers, when they were used to a happy family life, could feel a bit lost, like Myfanwy Coleman.

  In 1942, I was living with my Aunt Kitty, at Manly. She took fright at the idea of a Japanese invasion and went to stay at Picton with a friend, taking her youngest daughter. Her older daughter went to s
tay with an aunt at Collaroy. I was 21 and going to work on the ferry. I felt abandoned. I had to find somewhere to stay.

  Fay Sulman is keenly aware of the damage that war does. Her mother had a full and happy pre-war life. She worked at Nestlé’s Chocolate Factory near Abbotsford, Sydney and went on several cruises. She married a handsome young man in uniform and had a baby daughter. And then the war came:

  My mother had a worrying nature and was very frightened by the events of the war. I was her only child and she was incredibly protective. I was born in 1940 in Newcastle, where my father was in the Army at Fort Scratchley. He joined up when I was eight months old. He was in a Japanese POW camp. He came home when I was five, and it was never any good. My mother had worried about him so much when he was away, but his war experiences had ruined his life and I was frightened of him, especially when he was violent towards my mother. She always spoke about the war times but he never did. I don’t think she ever confided in anyone. During the war, my mother moved around a bit, Newcastle to Abbotsford to be with her sister. When the Japanese came in, she was at Bondi. She was scared. Another sister said, ‘The Japs aren’t coming after you, Ruby!’ Somehow she got a job at Burragorang, on a farm with an elderly couple, where she did domestic duties. She knew my father was in Changi. She said Mrs Jessup, the farmer’s wife, was nice to her, but it must have been lonely, lying in bed by herself every night. My grandmother had three sons in WWI, and they all came home but they were damaged. It must have been terrible for her.

  The suicide rate, which had risen in the Depression, dropped in the 1940s. It has been suggested that the fall in suicide and deaths among young men, typically the largest group in society to take their own lives, was largely due to the fall in road deaths because of petrol rationing, and the fact that they were overseas fighting. Explanations of suicide involve a complex interaction between psychiatric and sociological factors, and it is difficult to explain the drop in suicides at a time of social disruption, when marital stability is held up as a key factor in preventing suicidal behaviour. Looking at contemporary statistics, there is a surge in suicide, especially young males, when a suicide is profiled in the Press. But in the 1940s, all the stories were of death and destruction. There are many contradictions. Other reasons why can only be guessed at: there was more to fight for, with a clear goal, more unity and camaraderie perhaps, as Australians felt united against the enemy, patriotic and realising what a great country they had to fight for. This great threat gave a purpose to their lives.