Carefree War

by Ann Howard

  Cassie Thornley, whose father was from Austria, remembers how displaced loyalty affected her sister.

  Marie, whose father was Austrian, came home in tears from school (Katoomba High), a group of children had decided the family was ‘German’, and she was being ridiculed and ostracised.

  Norman Longmate in his book How We Lived Then, page 75, tells the story of Robert, who aged three, had been sent to live with three elderly spinsters in Devon in the UK. ‘He shocked his mother when she eventually visited him. At bedtime, he knelt down by his bedside and prayed,’ Oh God, don’t let this woman take me away; she says she’s my mother but I want to stay here with my aunties.’

  Chapter 17

  Changing Lives

  We didn’t want to go, we were happy at the Mission, welcomed by the local community and I loved Penrith High School. I was the class captain and I wanted to be a doctor.

  – Joyce Dukes

  Tomatoes! Hundreds and hundreds of tomatoes! Stan Gratte in Western Australia was a schoolboy volunteer to grow tomatoes to help feed the troops, Americans as well, and civilians. Aged twelve, he was allocated to a man he liked, a good gardener, who patiently explained how to grow things. Stan said that had a major effect on his life and he became a market gardener. Countless people’s lives changed when they were evacuated, and some discovered a career path.

  Grace Perry expressed her feelings of loss and abandonment as an evacuee in many poems, which her father, a journalist for The Age arranged to be published by the Consolidated Press. Entitled Staring at the Stars, her books sold for one shilling and she gained a following. Her books were sent in food parcels to Australian troops in the Pacific.

  Grace was born in Toorak in 1927 and moved to Brisbane with her family when she was six. Aged thirteen, she moved with her family to Sydney, where her father, by now a published author, became Secretary to the Minister for Public Works in 1940. Grace was educated at St Gabriel’s School, Waverley, near their home and in 1942, she was evacuated to Goulburn. When the imminent danger of invasion was over in Sydney, Grace returned, completed her Leaving Certificate and enrolled in Medicine at Sydney University.

  As a married woman with three children and a career in medicine, she found it very difficult to find time to write, describing herself as ‘a hologram’ reflected in ‘too many mirrors’. Somehow she managed to start writing again in 1961, and ran Poetry Australia for over twenty years, helping emergent poets like John Tranter and Les Murray. She published many volumes of poetry, received an Order of Australia in 1984 and the NSW Premier’s Literary Award in 1985. Grace over-committed herself to her work, was refused funding, and crippled by arthritis could no longer walk to the post office. Feeling abandoned, she took her own life aged sixty. It is clear that her early experience as an evacuee had a huge influence on her work, with its echoes of loneliness, although she had a sense of humour, as can be seen in this excerpt from a poem in Winter Diary from Berrima:

  ‘each night I face myself

  and fear to pass

  the hand-tooled tiger

  made of brass’.

  Sue Mackenzie recounts how her father changed careers:

  I am the granddaughter of Robert Rolph, whose father started the Launceston Examiner, and I was living with my family at Manly in the 1940s. Manly Beach was covered in star posts and my father still has a big scar on his leg from falling on a star post (he wasn’t supposed to be playing near the wire). In 1941, my father decided to evacuate my mother, sister, grandmother and me to Wallgrove Camp at Rooty Hill. My mother worked in the kitchen. Dad got a job with the horses. The American servicemen used to come up for RnR. They loved riding. Dad became so good with horses that he became a jackaroo.

  Kerry Packer was a high profile and dynamic figure whose life was changed by being a child evacuee. His mother worked with the Red Cross and served as co-president of the Australian Women’s Weekly Club for Servicewomen. During the war her adored only brother was killed and she herself was hospitalised with an undisclosed illness. It is said that his parents were inattentive and uncaring about him. Aged five, Kerry was sent to board at Cranbrook, near the family home. Not long after, following the midget submarine attacks on Sydney Harbour, he was sent to live with an aunt at Bowral in the Southern Highlands. While there, he contracted polio and pneumatic fever, spending nine months hospitalised in an iron lung before moving to Canberra for two years to recuperate. The polio left him with the left side of his face palsied. When he finally got to school, he was well behind in his studies and had a form of dyslexia, causing his father to refer to him as ‘boofhead’. Broadcaster Phillip Adams, recalls: ‘He never talked much about his mother except to point out that neither mum nor dad had much time to visit him when he was suffering from polio’. Out of this lonely, disrupted childhood, belittled by his father, who seemed to have favoured his older brother, grew a man desperate to prove himself. His first opportunity came in 1972 when he and Ita Buttrose launched Cleo magazine. His father never believed in the project so its instant success provided an enormous boost to Kerry’s confidence. Eighteen months later, his father died and Kerry inherited the company, which became the base for his empire. His evacuation to his aunt’s undoubtedly set his life on a changed course.

  A group in society whose lives changed course, and for the better were the estimated 25,000 ‘half-castes’, as the term was then for children of Aboriginal and other race parents. There were about 11,000 of these children in New South Wales. They had been regarded as ‘a problem’ and were easily identified by authorities, because they lived mostly in camps or on mission stations. Those to be thought in danger from an invasion force, or occupying premises that were needed by the military, were sent to centres all over New South Wales and South Australia by army transport. The war was to change the life of many of those who came south, because they were a focus in the Press, and much to everyone’s surprise, assimilated well with other children and achieved in sports and school subjects.

  The profile of indigenous people generally improved as thousands helped in the war effort, as servicemen and labourers and were belatedly publicly congratulated and recognised for what they did. Sergeant-Tracker Alexander Riley was first Aborigine to receive a King’s Police and Fire Service Medal for distinguished service in Canberra: Reginald William Saunders becomes the first Aboriginal lieutenant in the Australian Army in November 1944.

  Alec Ross spent part of his life at Alice Springs Telegraph Station. His great grandfather was explorer John Ross, a Scottish bushman who chose the site of the Telegraph Station in 1871. Alec was born at Mosquito Creek in 1936. At the age of three, he was taken from his mother and taken to ‘The Bungalow’ at Alice Springs, a home for ‘mixed race’ children. First set up in 1914 for a part-aboriginal woman Topsy Smith, who drove a horse and buggy into Alice Springs with eleven of her children and a herd of goats, after her husband’s death at the Arltunga mining fields, The Bungalow was moved to the Old Telegraph Station in 1932.

  Alec Ross remembers the height of the military build-up in early 1942, when more than fifty trains a week were arriving in Alice Springs. Aboriginal people were employed to help foster the war effort by loading and unloading trains, sinking wells, building fences etc. and the Telegraph Station was needed to house these workers. So the children were moved out and transported north to a Methodist Mission on Croker Island, off the coast of Arnhem Land, 200 miles north-east of Darwin. ‘Once we got on the island, it was just go mad. I thought it was paradise, truly. When I grew up, I think it was the best place I had ever been. We grew all our own food and grew everything we wanted. And we had horses, wild horses and ponies and pigs and goats, all running wild.’

  After school each day, the boys learned farming, while the girls did baking and housework, as well as milking the goats. Three weeks after they arrived, the Japanese bombed Darwin. ‘They flew over us every morning. The Japanese raids intensified and a message came that a boat was being sent to evacuate the Europeans but the chil
dren would stay until after the wet season. Three young women missionaries, Margaret Somerville, Jess March and Olive Peake chose to stay behind with their ‘half-castes’. Suddenly accommodation was found near Sydney for the children. The Methodist Mission boat Larrpan arrived to take 95 children, missionaries, some lay people and a newborn baby to the mainland.’

  Alec describes how the mission boat went to Barclay Bay and they walked to Pine Creek, mosquito infested country, drinking water from muddy holes and buffalo wallows, cooking on kerosene cans over an open fire, eating mostly rice and jam. They had to cross the South Alligator River, putting the Chevrolet Ute, with supplies, on a small punt and the kids clambered on, with some older ones swimming alongside. Margaret Somerville, who helped take care of the kids, was only twenty years old. She wrote about the trip in her book They Crossed a Continent. The American soldiers stationed at Pine Creek did not know she was a missionary, she was so sunburnt. ‘Gee, she’s well educated.’ they said. At three in the morning, they were put on uncleaned cattle trucks to Larrimah and then to Alice Springs by road. At Birdum they were put on Australian Servicemen convoys and each soldier took one or more kids under his wing. At Alice Springs, they stayed at the Old Telegraph Station for a few days. A number of Aborigines suddenly appeared in the hills surrounding the Bungalow, all painted up, and just standing around. The children went on The Ghan to Adelaide then up to Sydney. Alec and the younger ones went to Otford, the older ones to Wollongong. They stayed from 1942 to 1946, when 69 of the original 95 returned with Margaret Somerville, on the Reynella. They were all so excited to get back to Croker Island, because that was their home. Alec stayed for another five years before he was told to go out to work. ‘For the remaining five years I was at Croker, we did fencing, building houses. We had three or four hundred head of cattle to feed us. I mean, you couldn’t wish for a better man than Rupert Kentish. He was a lay missionary. Hard worker. He taught me how to work and I can tell you, he worked the guts out of us really. On the island, when I left school, Mr Kentish or someone said, ‘you’ve got to go to work.’ So they took me to work. And from then on, I never looked back, really, because he taught us how to work hard. I remember getting flogged once for forgetting to feed the chooks. But then, I only thought later, he did it for my own good. He said, ‘How would you like it if you had no water?’ And that’s true.

  An article in the Australian Women’s Weekly dated 29 December, 1945, says in part, in a slightly surprised tone: ‘Seventy half-caste aboriginal children, innocent victims of fate and war, are soon to start an adventure designed to bring them pride and happiness. They will be the first occupants of a colony for half-caste waifs established by the Methodist Mission on Croker Island, north of Darwin. The missioners plan to educate and instruct as many half-caste children as possible until they can fill an accepted place in Australia’s community life. They are now living at Otford. They were moved in June 1942. They have learned to read, write, sing and paint alongside the white children of Otford’s residents. For three years the white children accepted their new classmates without question. Six of the half-caste girls have attended Wollongong High School, and eight older girls went into domestic service. Many of the children were despised and unwanted waifs. One, Marjorie, a nine year old of Javanese aboriginal blood, was rescued from a sordid opium den in Darwin. Because she was threatened with violence if she spoke or cried, she made herself dumb. When the children first came to Otford, many knew no other names than those the missioners had bestowed on them. Some of the girls changed their Mission Christian names to those of their favourite film stars. One child, baring a striking resemblance to Claudette Colbert, insists on being called ‘Claudette’. Until they began to mingle with the white children, the half-castes did not know the meaning of birthdays. So 70 random dates were chosen for them. Mr Greentree, who taught the half-castes for two and a half years, considers their intelligence is as high as that of any white children. All of them show very high musical and artistic ability. Wollongong Domestic Science School wished to put these girls into a special class, but the Mission authorities suggested they attend classes with white pupils. The half-caste girls had topped their classes in art, physiology and English’

  A Miss Mary Smith, a teacher at Otford, discovered Betty Fisher had a beautiful singing voice and gave her private lessons. Betty won a singing contest on the radio programme Australia’s Amateur Hour for singing Curly Headed Baby. In 1946 Minister for the Interior, Mr Johnson said Betty was too young for a singing career (she was 14) and although she had been offered £25 a week for singing engagements, she should return to Croker Island and finish her schooling. She went back to Darwin and then to Croker Island on HMAS Kangaroo.

  By June 1948, Australians read how Betty Fisher, whom the Press described as a ‘half caste aboriginal singer’, would bring her two month old baby, Shirley with her from Croker Island Mission to stay with a businessman and his wife in Adelaide. They would take her to Melbourne to further her career, to live with the businessman’s sister. The businessman, as her manager, said she was so shy; she would need lessons in deportment. She received fan letters from all over Australia welcoming her chance to sing. Everything was set in place, but Betty suddenly left the home of the business couple and went to a half caste’s compound to wait for Bob Shepherd, the father of Shirley.

  She married in August 1948 still torn between a desire for a career and her daughter and marriage. ‘My daughter means more to me than any microphone,’ she said. ‘There are no firm plans for the future.’ Betty disappeared from the pages of the newspapers. She did not continue on in the limelight, but in those times of discrimination, it was remarkable that she got so far.

  Joyce Dukes, softly spoken, and calm sits chatting with her lifelong friend Cassie Thornley, who lived next door when they were children. Joyce proudly showing photos of her grown up children, all working in interesting areas.

  My father Edward was born at Borroloola, Northern Territory. His mother was a traditional woman and his father a Chinese cook, Charlie Ah’Wong. At an early age he was taken to Roper River Mission, Eastern Arnhem Land and named Herbert. He was also adopted into the Mara tribe. Roper River, now Ngukurr, was established about 1908 as a safe haven for mixed race children, the traditional land owners, who were in danger of being killed by cattle graziers in the Gulf country. My mother Priscilla was born to a tribal woman and her father was a white stockman, Scottish, at the Alexandra cattle station in Queensland in 1908. Her tribal country is Eliott NT and her tribe is Jingilic.

  I was born in 1934 at the Roper Mission and I had a brother, Alfie. We were not allowed to speak any of our traditional languages. The missionaries discouraged interaction with relatives outside the Missions and they used to regularly move some of their flock up to Groote Eylandt, on the Emerald River. They found on one of these moves that my mother was suffering from Hanson’s disease, (leprosy). My brother Alfie and I were at Roper River with our father. At that time, I was eight. My mother was cured in a clinic in Darwin and remained there, becoming a nurse. She was there when the Japanese bombed it. After Darwin was bombed, it was feared the Japanese would invade using Roper River to isolate the top half of Australia by cutting off the Stuart Highway. Thousands of servicemen were stationed in the area.

  I was caught up in this panic and sent away. The last time I saw my father was when he lowered me and my brother into a boat. But first Alfie and I went to see my mother. Actually I could hardly see as I picked up sandy blight on the bumpy ride there in the back of an army truck, and my mother greeted me with a blindfold around my eyes.

  The Alice was so overcrowded that we were loaded onto the Ghan, which only had a few passenger cars. As it was not considered desirable for Aboriginal people to travel in those, we were put into empty cattle trucks, not cleaned out and I remember the smell all the way to Adelaide. I eventually found myself at an historic rectory of St Thomas’ Church, which became the Church Missionary Society’s Half-Caste Home at Mulgoa, ten
miles from Penrith, NSW. My mother found a job at Winbourne Guest House nearby.

  The social experiment of allowing ‘half caste’ children to mix with ‘white people’ worked very well. For seven years, the rectory had echoed to the laughter and footsteps of the children, then the news came from the Department of the Interior that the girls were to be sent to St Mary’s Hostel, Alice Springs and the boys to the St Francis Hostel for Inland Boys at Semaphore, South Australia.

  We didn’t want to go, we were happy at the Mission, welcomed by the local community and I loved Penrith High School. I was the class captain and I wanted to be a doctor.

  Joyce’s mother, Mrs Tess Herbert was reported in The Australian Women’s Weekly of 12 February, 1949, as saying that she had been taken to the Roper Mission as a young child, to work in the vegetable garden and fell timber, but would have liked to be a nurse. Although the children were taken south as a temporary wartime measure, they valued the chances to achieve they would never have had at Alice Springs. There were twenty silver cups on the sideboard, won by the children in athletics and they were planning careers. Tears fell at the thought of leaving their hopes and friends behind. Although a ‘free citizen’, able to vote, and a valued worker, Joyce’s mother was not allowed to raise her own daughter, because Joyce was a ward of the state. There was a lot of protest. Penrith Chamber of Commerce campaigned for their stay. The Teacher’s Federation protested for the first time as an organisation against segregated schooling. The Aboriginal Progress Association appointed Bill Ferguson to liaise with the Church authorities, but they were adamant. The state government sided with the church. Politicians like ex-Labour PM Billy Hughes ‘Doc’ Evatt, and the noted aboriginal tenor Harold Blair, all joined in the heated discussions. Mr P H Moy, Director of Native Affairs said, ‘they were being sent away because they don’t belong down here.’ Joyce: