Voices from the Air

by Tony Hill

  . . . the job’s been very strange and not too easy mainly because I was a stranger in a strange land but I think I’ve overcome that now. I find that if I am to stay here there’s a lot of hard work ahead getting known and gaining confidences. There’s a big mob of war correspondents in the place and they’re all at the same game.25

  It was constant work. ‘At the moment we are being called to conference at any hour of the day or night. This morning we were summoned two hours before the normal time. Last night I received a call at half-past nine and was working re-writing and recasting stories until nearly midnight. So was every other correspondent.’26

  Gordon Williams, the correspondent for the overseas shortwave service, was working with Lennard at GHQ in the latter part of the year and they were relieving each other whenever possible to share the workload. Lennard quipped to Frank Dixon that ‘Williams believes that his present job could not be carried on indefinitely under present conditions “unless by a circus elephant with insomnia”.’27 Lennard enjoyed being at the centre of official information at GHQ, but while the practice of tightly controlling information for release through GHQ rather than at field headquarters benefited the GHQ correspondents, they did not get the independent background and context that correspondents could get in the field.

  At various times in 1942, the ABC had correspondents stationed at GHQ, and in New Guinea, northern Queensland and the Northern Territory. At one point three field units were in operation at the same time but the longest, most sustained coverage by a field unit was in the far north around Darwin.

  The Top End

  Peter Hemery covered the Top End for eight months. He was in Darwin for many of the air raids that followed the first attacks in February. The newspaper correspondent Allan Dawes described Hemery as ‘the only man I’ve met who really went around looking for air raids, for example, before they were actually on – studying weather conditions, and the probable track and tactics of the bombers, so that he might secure a grandstand seat of sorts for a recording.’28

  Hemery covered the raids and crafted colourful on-thespot and soft propaganda stories that actively highlighted the daring and successes of Australian, American and Dutch East Indies fliers defending Darwin and operating against Japanese targets in Timor and elsewhere to the north. In July, he was staying with an American Kittyhawk fighter squadron – the 9th Squadron of the US 49th Pursuit Group.

  I woke with the first streak of dawn. For a minute, I couldn’t figure out what had happened. The world was just one earth shaking roar of sound. Then, I realised. I was living with a fighter squadron. The noise was the engines of better than twenty-five Kittyhawks warming up. A thick dust haze swirled among the scrub gum from the combined slip streams.29

  Many of the battles between Allied fighters and Japanese raiders took place out to sea and out of sight of Hemery and other watchers on land, but he interviewed pilots returning from these dogfights, and bomber crews returning from Allied raids. On 28 July he interviewed Kittyhawk pilots who had pursued a raiding force of 27 Japanese bombers and 20 Zero fighters. One of the pilots described to Hemery how he had been shot down.

  . . . my engine started getting rough, and oil sprayed all over the wind shield . . . fumes came up . . . I looked over my right shoulder, and saw two enemy fighters firing. I dove my plane down from a high altitude over the water, making preparations to bail out. I unfastened my safety belt and took all my gadgets off. The fumes were so strong I had to put my head out, and breathe out of the side of the cockpit. I glided and waited until I was over shore. I was 2000 feet by this time. All the time I was turning, looking behind me to see if any enemy fighter was possibly following me down. I don’t know what I would have done if he had. As I reached the shore, I stepped out on the left wing, and the plane threw me out the right side.30

  Such tales of the defence of Australia would have resonated strongly with the public, but censorship of the full impact of Japanese raids and the lack of a real land war to cover meant Hemery and other correspondents in Darwin were often scratching around for stories. Hemery’s interest ranged widely – from the building of military airfields to an interview with a fighter pilot who found a poisonous snake on the floor of his cockpit at 3000 feet over a remote area of the Northern Territory. The pilot had his trouser legs rolled up and couldn’t reach either his knife or his pistol before the snake bit him. He dropped the snake out of the cockpit and feeling lightheaded from the effects of the venom, landed his plane in a dried up swamp. Using a broken tree branch as crutch he made his way to a waterhole where he lay in the mud to help draw out the poison. The next day with a swollen and immobile leg he managed to take off and using his crutch to operate the left rudder pedal flew back to base.

  Hemery conducted the scripted interview in the jocular boys-own style of much of the lighter radio stories from the front. He had a somewhat cynical view of some of his fellow correspondents and a talent for caustic observation, but a sure touch in telling the stories of the troops. In Melbourne, Hemery had created an ABC Diggers’ Session for the thousands of men in the military camps in Victoria, broadcasting messages for the men, camp news, a Diggers’ musical talent quest and music requests. In the camps around Darwin where they scripted and made recordings of military life Hemery and Ed Jinks became popular figures, playing music and other recordings to the troops. Hemery also wrote regularly for the ABC Weekly magazine and in one article he described the ‘Mobile Talkie Units’ showing films in the camps – screen slung between the trees and the projection van at the other end of the clearing. The soldiers walked or came by anything that moved – ‘You’ll see bicycles, gun-carriers, staff cars, huge three-ton trucks, utilities, lumbering reclamation vans, even road graders and tractors . . . I’ve even seen a horse (a rarity for this area), tethered waiting for its owner, who had improvised a saddle from pieces of old blanket.’31

  Hemery was bright, ambitious and often dissatisfied with the ABC but he was just one of several ABC correspondents who fought the ABC bureaucracy over pay and conditions. In making his case to the ABC he explained the difference between his role as an observer and that of a news correspondent.

  A Journalist covering a story will be called upon to interview personnel, obtain his story, and write it in two or three hundred words of telegraphese, which will be edited into its final form in his office. To cover the same story, I have first to interview the personnel involved, and obtain the story. Then a complete, factual, colourful script of anything up to 2000 words, accurately timed, and written in natural-sounding dialogue, must be prepared and submitted for censorship. Next the feature has to be produced, usually involving coaching of those participating, the writer has to make the commentary, and often look after the recording as well. Then discs have to be edited, a fair copy of the script made and the discs despatched.32

  By July, when Hemery’s ABC News colleague Bill Marien arrived from GHQ, there had been nineteen raids on Darwin. ‘We are billeted at the deserted Parap Hotel’ explained Marien in a letter to the ABC. ‘The biggest bomb crater in Darwin is fifty yards down the street and from my window I can see four lesser craters. Only 500 lb. stuff. Fortunately the pub is not damaged but it is certainly not healthy.’33

  Bill Marien was sent up to Darwin to provide news coverage while Peter Hemery continued to make field recordings. The son of the respected journalist and editor of the tabloid Smith’s Weekly, the late Frank Marien, Bill was a solid man, 5 feet 10 inches (178 cm) tall and almost 16 stones (100 kilos), with a round, bespectacled face and a determined mind. The war artist, WE Pidgeon (WEP) who was friendly with Marien in Sydney and later in New Guinea, described him with a cartoonist’s eye for simplicity as a ‘big, dark, fattish chap’.34 Like his father, Bill was a Joey’s boy, which in Sydney marked him as a graduate of St Joseph’s Catholic College at Hunters Hill, where he also followed his father in playing rugby and winning the rowing eights.

  Marien was Sydney publicity manager for the theatrical agency J
C Williamson’s, a reporter for the Daily Telegraph and later press relations officer with the Department of the Army before joining the ABC news staff at the beginning of 1942. Bill was married to Moira MacNamee, known as Peg, and she appears in numerous references in his war diaries from the frontlines. His family name was an anglicised version of the Italian ‘Mariani’: ‘Let ’em call me an Italian bastard if they care’, Bill’s father Frank Marien once declared. ‘The laugh will be on them, because I’m half Irish on my mother’s side.’35 Bill was a similar strong character with a stubborn streak that owed more than a little to his Italian-Irish heritage.

  To gather his stories from the bases around Darwin, Marien was travelling up to 400 kilometres a day. It was already into the dry season and when a vehicle passed in the other direction the dust often made it impossible to see beyond the end of the radiator. Accidents, collisions and roll-overs were common. ‘I am rapidly becoming used to typing stories with my machine on my knees, every tap of the keys sending up a little spurt of dust.’

  His first days were constant work:

  Monday, raid alert, 12 noon to 5 pm finding out just what happened. Tuesday. Raid on Kendari. Left pub at 8 am. Investigated other stories. Waited for bombers to land at their base. Then write story, have it censored, and take it to Telegraph station Adelaide River. Back home 9 am next morning, Wednesday. No sleep either. Left Wednesday afternoon for another story. Censored right out. Got material on another Dili raid. Back home 11 pm. Thursday. 6 am to 5 pm. Another Dili raid, conference GOC Friday. Left 2 pm after morning conference. Galkin DFC, Koepang raid, watched bombers return. Story written. Home 3 am.36

  Bill kept small pocket diaries of his work as a war correspondent. His jottings show that the air raids had become almost commonplace: ‘Up at 4 am. Dull raid. Post Office again. Near oil tanks. Back to bed.’37 The long work days alternated with days with little to do – ‘Bugger all. Swam’.38 – ‘Early morning walk to Fanny Bay with Allan. Found horse, rode him home.’39

  He occasionally went fishing and shooting geese or buffalo – but the inactivity chafed. ‘Things at the moment in Darwin are far from exciting and unfortunately Mr Togo, as well as our own people, seem to have relaxed. It may be that it is the quiet before the storm – in one way I hope so.’40

  In September 1942, with the slower pace of stories in Darwin, Peter Hemery returned to Melbourne for a break from the field and the ABC pulled the field unit out of the Northern Territory. Hemery lived on reserves of nervous energy and by September 1942 the constant work had taken its toll and he was mentally exhausted when he arrived home to spend time with his wife, Norma.

  Northwest of Darwin, on the island of Timor, a different kind of war was being waged – a guerrilla war by Australian and Dutch fighters. Bill Marien was already reporting the raids by Darwin-based bombers against the Japanese on Timor, but there was now a chance to report from the island itself and to lift the veil from a little-known story of courage and endurance.

  Chapter 7

  BACK FROM THE UNKNOWN – TIMOR

  The rain was pouring down and the group of men stumbled on tiredly through the dark night in the forests and foothills of Timor. Bill Marien and his companions had walked for seven hours with just one rest stop, heading for a way station at Alas, one of the hideouts for the Australian guerrillas fighting the Japanese on the island. With no end in sight, they were eventually forced to turn around and retrace their steps to the nearest campsite, where they settled for the night. They were still two days away from the mountain headquarters of the guerillas but they were already far from the daily routines and relative comforts of Darwin, and in a world of guerrilla warfare that had been little reported.

  In the mountain wilderness of Portugese Timor, less than 450 miles from Australia’s northwest coastline, an AIF commando force which for 59 days was written off as lost, together with Dutch guerrilla forces, is today pinning down a big Japanese force . . . They are ambushing the enemy in the mountains, raiding them in their camps, and have even carried the fight right down the main street of Japanese-held Dili.1

  Following the Japanese invasion of Timor in February 1942, members of the Australian 2/40th Battalion of Sparrow Force escaped and joined up with commandos of the 2/2nd Independent Company in the eastern end of the island. With the help of local Timorese, the combined group began a guerrilla campaign against the Japanese.

  In the months since, there had been some thin press reports of the Australian and Dutch guerrillas fighting in Timor but no war correspondent had been able to get there. Bill Marien was covering a largely second-hand war in Darwin, writing reports of raids and actions happening somewhere over the horizon, and he pushed strongly for the chance to cover the Timor story first hand.

  On the evening of Thursday 5 November, Marien, the war cinematographer Damien Parer, and the British war correspondent Dickson Brown, boarded the Australian Navy corvette HMAS Castlemaine alongside a broken jetty at Darwin. The vessel slid out that night past Bathurst Island on the starboard side, heading for Timor. Marien would be writing for all Australian radio and newspaper outlets, Parer would provide stills and film, and Dickson Brown would write stories for the overseas press. The voyage at night was quiet and Marien’s diary records ‘gossamer necklace of fireflies . . . phosphorous dancing in the bow-wash’. The second day out on the open sea they saw Hudson bombers overhead three times before Timor came into sight in the afternoon.

  They landed that night at Betano where they were met by some of the Australians and then set out walking in the darkness with a pack train, with Marien noting, ‘Donkey train in dark, white arse donkey to see and steer by’.2 The next night was the seven-hour walk in the drenching rain after which the group awoke the following morning to find that they were in a coconut plantation, lush with paw-paw, bananas and tobacco plants. They pushed on and eventually reached the first hideout at Alas. In all it took around three days of hard trekking in rain and energy-sapping heat along river beds and forest trails to reach the main guerrilla force base 4000 feet up in the mountains. The Australian soldiers had been in the steep, heavily forested mountains of East Timor for nine months by the time Marien, Parer and Dickson Brown arrived at the camp.

  All the troops are bearded, some of them with patriarchal growths; others cursing their stubble because, a week or two ago, they had to shave off their main beard to get rid of the lice. Some wear tin hats, some slouch hats, others wear handkerchiefs, Dutch caps, straw native’s hats. There are no sleeves to their shirts; their shorts are torn and patched with native cloth.3

  In his first diary entry at the guerrilla hideout, Marien noted the camaraderie between the officers and men: ‘Stress fact No whinging, wonderful morale.’4 Following their escape from the Japanese, the Australians had survived with the support of local Timorese and their tiny Timor ponies, which were used to carry supplies through the steep mountains. Parer filmed the guerrillas on patrol with the Timorese, though some of the scenes of fighting had to be staged for the camera.

  Marien awoke one morning with a tropical ulcer and a poisoned leg so instead of going out on patrol he spent much of his time in camp talking to the men of Sparrow Force and beginning to write his stories. He wrote the account of the fighting at Koepang against the invading Japanese and of the Australians’ isolation in the mountains in the first months.

  Without radio communications with Australia they had no idea how the war was going. They heard persistent rumours, all Japanese inspired, that Australia had fallen to the hordes of Nippon. They had no means to check on the rumours. They felt themselves out on a limb. What was their course when their ammunition ran out? On one thing they were definite. No surrender!5

  It wasn’t until two months after the Japanese seized the island that the Australian survivors fashioned a rudimentary radio which enabled them to receive information and orders from Australia. Marien’s story of the first radio contact with the outside world described the scene:

  In the thin air of a
Timor mountain hideout, four bearded, haggard Australians were working by the smoking, stinking light of a pig-fat flare. Three of them watched anxiously as the fourth thumbed a Morse key attached to a crazy, home-made radio contraption which they had named ‘Winnie the War Winner’. It was the night of April 19: Weak batteries sent the dots and dashes of the Morse dimly across the Arafura Sea to the Northern Territory of Australia. And there, fortunate quirk of circumstances, a wireless telegraph operator was idly twiddling with his set. Suddenly he heard the strange call sign; a piteously weak urgent priority call sign. Thus a force of gallant Australians, many of them officially reported missing, came back from the unknown.6

  Marien kept his notes for his stories in an unused part of his diary. One story fleshed out from these notes told how the Japanese tried to force the Australians to surrender. Ironically, it proved a godsend for the guerrillas, who were desperately short of paper.

  Vital reconnaissance information was forwarded to headquarters scribbled in tiny letters on cigarette paper. Bamboo bark and the broad leaf of the banana tree were most popular substitutes. The shortage remained until the beginning of March when the thwarted Jap would-be conquerors, with a fine disregard for the intricacies of English idiom, flooded the island with quaintly worded surrender notes. These notes were usually written in foolscap in an unpractised hand and had obviously been stencilled. There was writing on one side of the paper only and the Australians seized on this unexpected windfall.7