by Ann Howard
Chapter 20
Aftermath
My father put his arms under my mother’s coat and hugged her and I started crying and bit him on the leg. ‘Leave my mother alone.’ I sobbed. I’m sure this happened to many children.
– Ann Howard
Peace. Everyone wanted to make a noise! Boys on bikes dragged tins around, in country towns a piano was hoisted onto a horse and cart, people hanging onto the sides singing and whooping. Someone belted a rainwater tank with a stick.
Private Siggins was the first mother to join the services. She said:
‘I have two sons in the AIF and a son-in-law POW. My husband is with the Allied Works Council in Darwin. I just feel I am doing my duty. We must all help in this war for freedom and honour, justice and truth. I feel that it is women like me who should do so just as much as younger women. I’ve brought up my family and so now I am free. This is just as much my job as my husband’s. We both feel like that.’
When peace was declared, 66,000 women were demobbed. The first AWAS were posted solely to headquarters and base installations, later serving in intelligence, signals, ciphers, electrical and mechanical training units, heavy convoy work, anti-aircraft and coastal artillery, gunsights and searchlights, as cooks, clerks, orderlies, canteen workers, provosts, butchers, instrument repairers, transport drivers and ambulance drivers. Some were attached to chemical warfare experimental units, some administrators; some fixed marine engines, some interpreters, some entertainers. Some repaired bomb blasted tanks from the Middle East, some were First Aid experts. Women had new ideas, skills and aspirations. Women who had the responsibility of home duties, and women in the war effort were all changed. If they resumed the role of mother and wife without an outside career, they passed on their thoughts to their daughters and when their children were past primary school age, applied for study or jobs.
Did men’s attitude change? Old habits die hard. A taxi driver on seeing a servicewomen’s uniform remarked, ‘Who’s going to do your thinking for you now?’
Women found a lack of real choice in post war Australia. One ex-servicewoman I spoke to had missed a lot of schooling to help with her brother, who was an epileptic, while her parents ran a small shop in the Blue Mountains. An intelligence test the Army gave her revealed her intelligence. ‘You should be at university,’ she was told. ‘What’s that?’ she replied. She did gain a place in university and became an academic, but it was hard for women to receive further training, war had proved a very expensive exercise for Australia. From 1946 to 1947, the amount of pensions paid out from two world wars was fifteen and a half million pounds, to incapacitated members of the forces and their dependants. In 1945, a Medical Benefits Scheme was introduced and benefit was paid for people with TB. Child endowment was raised to 75 shillings a week. Widows with one or more dependent children received seven pounds ten a week. Generous maternity allowances reflected the desire to populate or perish. WWI widows were not allowed to work to supplement their meagre pensions, but WWII widows were. Returning ex-servicemen had priority in regaining their old jobs or getting new ones.
Housing was at a premium and building materials scarce. The government had made no provisions for returning servicemen and women wanting to have a family. People lived in garages, tents, and paid key money for poor quality rented housing. It was almost impossible to save and to exist on a small farm was challenging.
Men returned sadder and wiser, sometimes traumatised. Towards the end of the war Australia’s interests were not served as MacArthur committed Australians to ‘mopping up’ campaigns against the Japanese, of doubtful strategic value, and costly in Australian lives. More than 31,000 Australians were prisoners of war. The German camps were the responsibility of the Luftwaffe and usually the prisoner’s biggest challenge was boredom, although the seriousness of this should not be underestimated. The Asian camps were places of inhuman working demands and unbelievably terrible living conditions, with starvation diets and brutal guards. A third of Australian prisoners failed to survive clearing the jungle and building the 320 kms of railway to link Burma and Thailand. The survivors suffered for the rest of their lives. Australian crowds meeting the rescued men at the wharves fell silent as they saw their emaciated bodies and many wept. Some of them had lied about their age to enlist and were only sixteen years old. There was a lingering distrust of the Japanese when the Australians saw how their men had suffered as they came home as returning prisoners of war. One woman described to me how she visited a friend for tea, who apologised for having a Japanese tea set.
‘We bought it before the war.’
They had been right to fear a Japanese invasion. Women met men unrecognisable as their husbands and were not offered counselling, general practitioners being untrained. GP’s advice was to put on a pretty dress, hum and smile a lot, resulting in domestic violence and divorce. The dog would glance at his master’s face, the first one to know something was wrong, ready to run under the table. Men with really bad experiences were unable to talk about it except to their mates. They retreated into their own world. It was generally accepted that the war should not be mentioned. The children who had been more or less carefree through the war years, found the strange male intruder into their home disturbing, especially when he was violent towards their mother in his traumatised state, when they had lived quite happily with her all to themselves for several years. I was four years old when I met my father, coming home to London in strange smelling khaki, with boots. My Mother and I went to the station to meet him. It was in turmoil, with men pouring off the train, being greeted with screams, laughter and tears, some men walking past their loved ones like ghosts. My father put his arms under my mother’s coat and hugged her and I started crying and bit him on the leg. ‘Leave my mother alone.’ I sobbed. I’m sure this happened to many children.
Wives of returning servicemen wanted a peaceful, happy home, but dealing with trauma is complicated and they were not equipped to do anything but try and avoid confrontation and bear the bad times stoically. There were no professional counsellors or marriage guidance officers until the 1950s. The level of divorce increased by 55% from 1944 to 1947. In 1947, there were 8,000 divorces. Of course this is against the unusually high rate of hasty war marriage, but significant because it was difficult for women to exist alone, especially with dependent children, so they did not leave lightly. It was not socially approved to get a divorce.
Women had been brought up for marriage, not to leave marriage. The high rate of divorce reflects a high level of misery. Some returned servicemen had nightmares, could not bear being indoors, were frightened of open spaces, making it difficult to settle down to work. Children, who had a more or less ‘carefree war’, happy on farms with loving relatives, came home to a very different life in most cases. Couples who were able to greet each other lovingly and settle down were a rarity. The war left a legacy of problems. One evacuee who had no problems was little Judith Thurgood (Andrews), who was evacuated with brother, Peter to a farm near Bathurst when she was three years old:
I caught the measles, or perhaps took them with me. My older cousin put me on a horse with the instruction: ‘Hang on like grim death!’ and we still laugh about that. My aunt took my brother gold panning and he still has a little bottle of gold bits from the Fish River. I never had any sense of being hungry, but after we returned home, life changed dramatically for everyone and there were shortages. Although being evacuated took mum away and we didn’t see much of our father, I was made so much of by my aunt and uncle and cousins, that I only remember it as a wonderful experience.
Australia gained an independent political standing out of WWII. In hindsight, because Singapore was never supposed to fall, Australia had supported Britain in a military sense to its own disadvantage. In 1939 when Britain declared war against Germany, Prime Minister Menzies announced that we were therefore also automatically at war, without any consultative process. Menzies agreed to the Australian Navy being controlled by Britain as pa
rt of their Royal Navy, and committed Australia’s Air Force to British command for use in Europe. Their main role was Australian crews to be used in the RAF, which later severely restricted our capacity to play an effective role in the Pacific War. In December 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbour and then Singapore, Australia declared war on Japan without a British declaration.
The social fabric of Australia changed forever. Migrants were needed for building infrastructure like the Snowy Mountains Scheme. Australia started accepting refugees and displaced persons, post war social policy being dominated by migrants, the population almost doubling to 13 million from 1945 to 1975. Arthur Calwell coined the term ‘New Australians’ trying to supplant terms like ‘bloody Pom’, ‘wop’ and ‘wog’.
It was the beginning of the end for ‘White Australia’ and the start of modern multiculturalism. Australia began communicating with the world and demanding good coffee and creative recipes. Australian war brides went to America and Australians embraced American films. Children sang songs with an American twang.
Another change was the concept of citizenship. During World War II everyone in Australia was issued with a personal identity card and required to report changes of address to the government, to help monitor Aliens (non-citizen residents), particularly non-Europeans and Asian residents. Prior to 1949, Australian citizenship did not exist as we know it today.
Buildings in Australia changed. Small country towns like Cairns had high rise buildings and an international airport. In 1946 James Hardie exhibited models of prize-winning asbestos-cement houses.
Children had learnt many things, some positive, some negative and were wise beyond their years. Some children, when they would have dared each other to jump a stream or gone scrumping, played with the deadly toys of war.
A great source of pride for Stan Gratte was finding himself in the Geraldton Express, 21 November, 1945 on the same page as famous war criminals. On the left of the page, the headline reads: Trials at Nuremberg, Nazi Leaders Arraigned, and The Opening Scenes. Two columns along, the headline says: Missing Explosives, Schoolboys in Court, Warning from the Bench.
Stan and some school mates found a sandbagged dugout with enough explosives to eliminate the radar station next to it. Radar was considered secret at that time as not every power possessed it. In case of an invasion, it was to be destroyed. The air force dumped bombs and ammunition past the Abrolhos Islands in deep water, several times a day, but the army forgot about the dugout.
One day, a boy brought a 1.5 kg slab of TNT to school and I bought it from him for two shillings. I was quite a capitalist as at that time I was working after school at Brandenburg’s Pharmacy for ten shillings a week. The story about the dugout was no longer a rumour and a lot of boys soon knew about it. By the time I got there all the TNT and some gelignite had gone, but there were still plenty of pickings. Some boys must have been there a long time before, as much of the material was scattered about. For instance, I remember red electric detonators lying in the sand almost corroded away. To touch them almost certainly meant an explosion.
I took away fuses, detonators, gelignite and last but not least the plunger. I had some mates whose dad owned a goldmine near Wiluna and they were a great source of information on the technical details…they had introduced me to ‘fracteur’, which is the miner’s name for gelignite, a long time previous. We had become expert demolishers of trees. I did a bit of swapping as I held all the key things, like detonators, which are necessary to explode the stuff, and of course the plunger and fuse. Didn’t we have some fun! A few of us were riding our bikes along Brand Highway, heading for the Greenough River to do some fishing, using gelignite. I had seen about 50 boys scoot up the big sandhill nearby. I said to my mates, ‘here watch this’ Next thing, Woomp! The ground shuddered and a big black cloud of smoke and dust filled the valley. The boys had let off a slab of TNT in Berringer’s old abandoned tannery pits. Those explosions always around the sandhills surrounding our present suburb of Mahomets, shook houses as far away as Gregory Street and no adult tipped what was happening because they had become accustomed to the Army using the area for trench mortar and machine gun practice.
Anyhow, all good things come to an end. A schoolboy hid a slab of TNT under an aquarium stand in his home. His Dad found it. The police rounded us all up. The RAAF was particularly keen to get the plunger. It had a serial number and needed to be accounted for. And I had that item. We appeared before the magistrate. Reformatory was an option. But almost all the explosives had been used and none went into the sea. There were more explosives than were owned up to. Our Headmaster, Mr Evans gave us a good reference and I’m sure that helped. He said we were ‘exemplary pupils.’ It was a great thing for a Headmaster to do for his pupils and indicative of that day and age. I well remember the Magistrate saying, after a long lecture, ‘…this is not the fault of these boys. Any red-blooded boy would have been into this. It is the fault of the men who left this stuff there.’
Last to appear before the magistrate was yours truly, about the plunger. They got that back, so I got off lightly with costs of only four shillings and sixpence. The boys who owned up to using the explosives paid costs of one pound and ten shillings each. We were not fined and we received no convictions, only a severe lecture. The last thing the magistrate said was, ‘you all realise that you go from this court without a stain on your characters’. As the boys filed out of court, one of them said, ‘Thank you Sir,’ that was me. I was well brought up.
Vivid stories from these child evacuees come from looking back over seventy years, to when the war stopped being ‘over there’. These voices from the past will soon be words from the past, but their firsthand accounts will keep their memories alive from between these pages. They were there when Australians watched the great carnage of WWII from a distance and then realised that the fingers of war were stretching out towards their homes. First there was the fear of bombing and shelling. Then it happened. Then there was the fear of parachutists and army boots striking the tarmac of their high streets. They had no idea where or when this would happen (neither did the Japanese!).
They fled from the coast, or steeled themselves to stay, sending their little ones away. Some people involved were famous names, like Queenie Ashton and Kerry Packer. Mostly they were mums and sometimes dads putting as much distance as possible between their children and the point of entry, wherever that was going to be, from the feared Imperial Japanese Army.
This history was slipping away and now they have had a chance to tell their stories within the pages of this book. Many Australians will be totally unaware that voluntary evacuation happened. The militarisation of war history is so pervasive, that a place has not been given to the frightened and threatened civilians of the time. People involved were so glad when the war was over, and had a new set of challenges with their returning traumatised menfolk, that everything was forgotten except building a new future. They had bravely hidden their feelings and smiled at their children.
David Tranter told me.
We were the lucky ones, kids born in 1929/30, too young to go to war but old enough to enjoy all the excitement.
They were the lucky ones, indeed, to enjoy A Carefree War.
CONTRIBUTORS
I interviewed many people for A Carefree War and have reproduced their accounts with their permission. I am conscious that these experiences were an important part of their lives, and I have endeavoured to give them a rewarding and accurate book. I would like to sincerely thank all of my contributors.
Altman, Jim
Atton, Cecily
Ayre, Patricia
Baker, Heather
Baskerville, Bruce
Bassett-Smith, Mrs
Bates, Miriam
Bates, Peter
Berry, Patricia
Bourke, Joan
Bradford, Lynton
Branagan, Gillian
Bretherton, James
Brown, Albert
Campbell, Elsie
Carolan, Ann
Carter, Lindsay
Coleman, Myfanwy
Coles, Peter (Andrews)
Crawford, Bruce
Craymer, Dick
Craymer, Joan
Creer, Jim
Curlewis, Ian
Cusins, George
Daley, Peter
David, Laeonie
Davis, Pam,
Deeley, Bill
Deveacke, Keith
Dobson, Martin
Dukes, Joyce
Ecob, Alan
Euwer, Anthony
Kyle, Andrew
Lark, Mary
Mackenzie, Sue
Macleay, Jean
Martin, Bill
Martin, John
McBain, Myrna
McCashney, Harold
McDonald, Valda
McFadden, Gordon
McKern, Don
Meaker, Arnold
Moss, Mary
Murphy, Kev
Newton, Georgia
Owen, Norman
Paine, Elizabeth
Palmer, Sylvia
Parker, Jacqueline
Piaud, Charmaine
Polkinghorne, Nev
Potter, Geoff
Putt, Jane
Pye, Eileen
Featherstone-Haugh, Richard
Fisher, Cynthia
Fisher, Vera
Fletcher, Alan
Ford, Mary
Galwey, Alan
Gammidge, Colin
Geoghlin, Bill
Goldrick, Robert
Goldsmith, Horace
Goodhew, Ron
Gratte, Stan