It is December 1995 and almost Christmas. I am now 76 years old and have lived a very long and eventful life. Here is my story.
I was born at Upper Lansdowne on the 9th April, 1919, to Fred Whatson and Millicent Lacy. My mother came from Newcastle, while dad lived here on the Manning. I believe dad got a job on the Perway at Newcastle and that’s how dad met mum.
The first I can remember is when I was about 4 year old. I was sitting on my grandfather’s knee and he had this long grey beard. I think the reason for the long beards, was because they used to shave with blade razors in those days and probably the old fellows couldn’t handle them. We lived in an old house on Ted Minett’s farm, it is still there today as a barn. When dad decided to go share-farming on Len Unger’s farm at Mt Coxcombe, he shifted us with a buggy and pair. I was still very young, only 4 years old and I don’t remember too much about it.
At this time there was only my sister Dorrie, who was 2 years older than myself, along with mum and dad. Dad had taken our gear and we’d walked. I remember walking up this steep lane hill, it must have been steep because I remember it well, I was buggered when I got to the top. Dad picked us up at the top of the hill with the buggy and pair. The next thing I can remember is coming to a creek and as the horses were trotting through the creek the water was splashing up all around.
I can recall a few instances that happened while we lived on this place at Mt Coxcomb.
One day mum was milking the cows by hand and I must have been running from one side of the bales to the other. The cows who were standing there had very long horns. This one cow hooked her horn in my braces and picked me up and threw me from one side of the bales to the other. I had blood running from my mouth and nose but I must have survived it.
I remember another time dad took me with him to get this cow with a calf. The cow was pretty temperamental and she charged me. I ran full pelt down the hill. The next thing I fell over and was rolling down the hill with the cow after me. The only other thing I can remember about that place was a girl who worked for us.
Her name was Ruby Tisdell. She took us down to the creek to swim sometimes, and she let me sit on her back while she was swimming. Many years later, this same girl was on a farm two doors away from us. She had married a man by the name of Alan Masters. They had three girls and two boys and one of the girls married Freddie Hardes, that was Shirley.
The next thing I recall was that dad bought this farm next door to where I was born. It had belonged to George Jobson and he had 3 girls and 2 boys. Linton and Allen were the 2 boys. (I met the girls and one of the boys again at the Centenary at Upper Lansdowne in 1995, 71 years later).
I didn’t know who they were but Stan McCaffrey who lived at Upper Lansdowne (now deceased), was related to them and called me over and asked me if I knew these people. I said I didn’t, but he told me that it was their father who had sold dad the farm.
The man that had this farm was a terrible swearer, he could go for ten minutes without drawing a breath. One of his best sayings was ‘Jesus bloody Christ’ so we named him Mr Jesus. His real name was Teddy Minett. I must have been only five years old then because I started school when I was five, and I remember starting school when we bought the farm.
The first day we were on the farm, the fellow who was selling the farm to us had this tomahawk. It was a beauty and I liked it instantly. I watched where he put it down and I sneaked up and got it. I went down the hill and hid it under a log. A couple of days later he came back looking for it. We searched everywhere for it and do you think we could find it?
It was still down under that log after he went, and now it was mine.
I remember another time, it was before we went on the farm, we must have been still up living in that old Minett House. Mum decided she was going to go down to see Aunty Flo. We had to walk down over this big log. Up the side of the log there were water rushes that had a long stem with a big brown brush on the end, like bull rushes.
On the way back I said to mum “l want one those long stemmed things mum.”
She said, “No way, you’re not getting it.” So I took off for home and when she got home there was no sign of me. Mum and dad searched for me, they called out and searched everywhere, but alas, not a sound. There was this old hen’s nest in a patch of bushes not far from the house and they came down there looking for me. I knew because I was standing up watching them search. Eventually they found me, and I can’t remember whether I got a hidin, but I’ll bet I copped it. They wouldn’t have let me go without a thrashing.
School Days
The first day at school, what a day it was, I’ll never forget it. You had to be very careful because they had these home-made billy carts and they’d run you down if you didn’t get out of the bloody way. It was a rough show.
Then on the way home from school, this bloke grabbed my hat and threw it into the Lantana. So the kids said, “get stuck into him.” I said, “If you get my hat out of the Lantana, I’ll give him a go.” They got my hat and I got into him. He went off howling. His name was Ray Schubert.
I remember another time I wanted to have my dinner with the big boys. This big fella said “no you don’t! You’re not coming with us.” So we got into it, and I wrestled with him and fought him and in the finish after that he said “Right oh, you can come.”
Mum was given this old pair of boots, the type that laced right up to your ankles, halfway up your leg. I hated them. Nobody ever wore them, nobody ever wore boots, in fact, they never wore anything on their feet in those days. Mum said I had to wear these boots to school.
As soon as I got away from the house I’d stop and take them off, plant them and continue on to school. On the way home, I’d stop and get back into them again and arrive home wearing my boots. This went on for ages, they never ever did wake up to what was happening.
By the time I was 10 years old my family had grown to 5 kids. There were 2 girls, Dorrie and Peg, and 3 boys, Myself, John and Elwyn. Elwyn died when he was 12 months old from gastroenteritis.
Later on, I was probably about ten years old and this big fat guy pushed me in the vines, so I got stuck into him. I was goin’ alright too. I knocked him down a couple of times but anyway he kept gettin up again. In the finish he landed one on my nose and of course it started bleeding like a stuck pig. So that was the end of that. I had to stay outside for the rest of the afternoon and keep washing my nose under the tank.
Mates came and went but Con Hogan and I were very good mates when we were at school. When he wasn’t at my place I was at his, we practically lived together. We used to try and get on the same side to play football because we were about the only two that would pass the ball. I’d pass it to him, and he’d pass it back to me. In the finish they wouldn’t let us play on the same side because we always won. Con seemed to be about the only one the ‘ol fella liked, because he was the only one he’d let come down to our place. He even used to call dad “Fred” and everything, everybody else had to call him Mr Whatson. Con was allowed to talk to him and do anything.
There was a lot of small things happened at school that are stored in my memory. The teacher had been a sleeper cutter in his day before he got the job as a teacher. I remember this day he had it in for me. He had some work on the blackboard and asked me to explain it to the class.
He didn’t give me a chance to tell him that I wasn’t at school the day before and that I didn’t know anything about it. So I was standing there trying to think what I would say and he said “Come out here” He took me out. “Hold out your hand” He gave me two cuts and it was then that I decided that I wouldn’t speak. So he brought me out and gave me two more, sent me back and roared “Now will you speak.” I never spoke. He took me out again. The third time he made sure of it, he stood up on his toes and brought the cane down right up my arm, up to my elbow.
When I went home there was just one blister on both arms from the palm of my hand right to the elbow. Mum and dad were very annoyed about it but they did nothing. Nothing was ever done in those days, the teacher could do just as they liked. Well that was the end of Jumbo Fennings for me, I never liked him anymore after that.
Another day he was out in the playground where there was this big old box. It must have come with books or something in it and it was about 4 feet by 4 feet. Anyway, he grabbed hold of me and shoved me under the box. Although he was only sort of playing with me when he shoved me under, he sat on the box and my toes were still out. His sixteen stone wasn’t helping one bloody bit and he nearly chopped my toes off. They were bruised and sore for a week or more.
When I was about 11, Russell Phillips from up on Fern Hill next door, and I found these old sulky wheels, it still had the axles and everything, and we tied a board on the bottom with a piece of wire and we used to sit on the board and steer with our hands. We’d fly along and have great fun with that.
As kids we all used to go across the paddock to school as it was a short cut. There was the Minett kids, the Atkins and us. The Atkins kids had orange trees. They used to take oranges to school but on the way, they would plant some of them in the rushes to eat on the way home. My brothers and I would come along after them and pinch them. We used to go a different way home to them so we could watch them trying to find their oranges and laugh our heads off because we knew they weren’t going to find them.
There was this young fellow by the name of Jim Saville who had only been left school for a short while. Jim worked for the fellow who owned the place where the short cut was. Jim had to come over to our back fence to get the cows and he’d put me up behind him on the horse. Away he’d go, flat as a tack with me bouncing up and down on the horse behind him. I don’t know how I didn’t fall off that horse, but I hung on for grim death. He went flat strap right to my place where he’d stop and let me off.
I only wagged school once and it was with this mate Russell Phillips and his big brother.
We decided to go up in the bush about a mile and a half to two mile up this mountain they called “The Haystack”. We only just made it back in time to get home at the right time. I was lucky, although, they never found out that I had wagged school at all, not to this day.
The paddock where we used to cross to go home from school was full of snakes. One day I killed this green snake and hung it up over the rails of the fence. The next morning I came back to have a look at it, and here’s two more green snakes curled up around it. I didn’t mind killing one snake, but I wasn’t about to have a go at two more. So I said “bye, bye. I’m on my way.”
Another time I killed this black snake that had swallowed a green snake. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The green snake inside the black one was about six inches longer than the black one. I don’t know how he got inside of it but sure enough, it was in there. I’ve never heard of this before or since, but it surely happened. How I was never bitten by snakes I’ll never know because I never ever wore boots and I’d be walking about at night barefooted.
I remember when I finished sixth class at school, the teacher wrote a letter to dad and asked him if I could continue school. He replied with a trip to town where he bought me a pair of work boots and a brush hook and said, “Now go up the mountain and clear the bracken fern.”
Sometimes dad would take me fishing after perch in the creek. He’d go up to this bit of a hole in the creek and dabble the bait on the top of the water. I’d hear Plop, Plop, and it wouldn’t be long before you’d hear splash and out would come a two-pound perch. He would nearly always get half a dozen of a night when we went. There were a lot of perch in the creek those days.
Other times we’d go out shooting possums in the night. We never had torches in those days but what we used to do was line the moon up with the possum and you could see the rifle sights and shoot. We used to get quite a few of them.
Dad used to sell the hides in those days. You couldn’t do that these days because they are protected now, and the environmentalists would have your hide for it.
Growing Up at Home
My younger brother John was the laziest thing on two legs. Every time Dad went away, Mum and I, and I think Dorrie and Peg used to have to do the milking. Although, we only had about three bales and in those days there were no machines, it was all done by hand.
I guess I was about 5 or 6 when I started to milk because I remember getting down under the cows and trying to keep up with dad. John’s job was to walk out and bring another cow in each time you milked one. He wouldn’t even do that he would just play about. So I got sick of it, and one day I took my belt off and I gave him the biggest flogging that any six year old ever had, especially from a ten year old brother. I’m sure he’s never forgotten it, he’s never liked me since.
I remember there used to be three bullock teams at Upper Lansdowne, Tom McLaughlin, George Keitling and old man Carmody had one. These were used for dragging logs into the mill that Tom McLaughlin had. The mill was situated just down over the bridge from Upper Lansdowne on the way to Comboyne. Old Uncle Harry Whatson worked for Tom Mclaughlin at the mill. He walked at least 2 miles and he had to start work at 7 o’clock and then had to walk the return trip in the evening. He did this for many years until the mill got burnt down and they never rebuilt it.
There was this tennis court next door to where I lived. Down the road towards where the Drury’s lived, in the paddock we called Fern Hill. A lot of the people around used to go there of a Sunday to play. When they weren’t there a mate, Russell Phillips and I would go and have a game without a net. I made these bats out of beech and we used them to play with. Sometimes if there weren’t many there, they would let us have a game with them and they would offer us their racquets to play with, but we’d turn down their offer and use our old bats that we were used to playing with because we’d make a better game of it.
At this time I had 2 more brothers, Harry and Athol. Mum and Dad were still practising at this stage because there was Jim, Ron, Marge, Win and Val still to come to complete the Whatson family.
When I was around the ripe old age of 12 this tin kettling was coming. In the old days when someone got married, the community always gave the bride and groom a “Tin Kettling.” They used to get a kerosene tin and belt on it until they let us in, that’s how it got its name.
There was always a 5 gallon keg of beer and probably a few bottles of wine as well.
There was one on this night but dad said “You’re not to go to that Tin Kettling.” I told him “No” that I wouldn’t go to it. As luck happened the night it was on, Dad was away. I thought “here’s my chance, I’ll sneak out and he’ll never find out about it.”
Away I went. Some of the boys pumped a bit of wine into me. Of course I got a bit toey. I sneaked home some time through the night and got into bed. The next morning I got up and I was as thirsty as could be. So I went straight to the tank and got stuck into the water.
I was worse than ever, I was staggering all over the place. Mum got up and saw me and boy was she shocked. She told dad when he came home and thought I was in for it. Nothing was said for about a week and I thought “I’ve got him beat, he must have forgotten about it by now.” That was a big mistake because a day or two later he had the shits bad. Something must have stirred him up and he said “I thought I told you not to go to that Tin Kettling” and the next thing I knew, “BANG” across my face with his open hand. I closed my fist and was about to swing one onto him and something told me I had too much respect to hit my father.
Another time, it was a rainy day and dad had gone to sleep on the bed. A couple of mates and I found these ball bearings that I thought would be great for ammo for the catapults to shoot at birds and anything else we could find. I went in to ask Dad if I could have them, to which he grunted. That was good enough for me, I said “we’ll get stuck into them.” I smashed them up. When I had them all smashed up, he came out.
He went out to the quince tree, they were terrible those Quince Waddy’s, they’d cut you to pieces. He broke off a branch and got stuck into me. Well he flogged and flogged me. With these two other fella’s there, there was no way he was going to make me howl, trouble was, he had it in his head that he was going to make me. He finished up white in the face and buggered. He couldn’t go on any more, so he gave it away in the finish.
I remember one day I was walking along the road and this hare stood up in front of me about 25 yards away. So I took careful aim, and down he came. I got the shock of my life, I nearly shit.
There used to be two big fig trees over in the cow yard where the flying foxes used to come in the night time. We used to break up old pieces of steel out of the old stoves for the catapults and use that to shoot at them. It was pretty solid and if it hit them in the head or broke their wings, they’d come down, but otherwise they’d give a bloody squawk and away they’d go. The fig trees and flying foxes were the cause of many tales, but I’ll come back to that later in the story.
Working Days
It wasn’t long after I got the flogging that dad found me a job with Mckearnan McLaughlin who had a bread business down at Croki, I was all of 13. They had this farm out at Krambach and they wanted someone out there to do a bit of work.
I got sick of it in the finish after about six months, I came home for a couple of weeks and helped the ‘ol fella do a bit of scrub chopping up the back and then I decided to go back out again and I got a job with another bloke, George Stevens. He was a good bloke, but by gees you had to work. I worked for him for about 4 or 5 months I suppose, and there was a big drought on.
My next job was with old Bob Betts who was getting timber up in Connelly’s Creek for the Mount George Timber Mill. There were 32 creeks we had to cross to get to where he was working. The first day I went up, he’s got this old Fiat car and there was about 8 or 10 of us. We used to get in this bloody old thing and away we’d go, tearing along up over these bloody creeks.
I then worked for the “Hawkins Brother’s” mill. I did that for about six months and I was still only about 15.
I worked here for about 6 months, the mill kept breaking down. You would work a week or two and then it would break down and you’d be off for a couple of days, then back to work again. This went on for a good while and you weren’t getting enough money to pay for your tucker. When I left there I owed about a 10 pound tucker bill. The boss at the mill said “we are going to break for a fortnight to fix the mill up properly.” So I came home.
I got a job milking at Upper Lansdowne for Des Payne about three or four months, and then came a drought so I had to give it up then because he couldn’t afford to pay me. While I was still working there, this Bill Hawkins that had the mill came out and tried to get me to go back out there again. But I said “No bloody way, I’ve had a gutful of that!” He said, “Oh it’s better this time, it will be alright now we’ve got the mill all fixed up.” But I never went back.
While I worked on the farm I got about 30 bob a week and we all got on real well. Vic Hall and Dorie my sister were married, and they used to help Ossie Hall, Vic’s brother, work the farm and then after a time they got Vic Carle’s share farm at Bulga. They went working on the farm at Bulga and I got a job working on the farm with Ossie.
Vic Hall had this heifer up on his place that used to charge him all the time and he couldn’t get it into the yard to milk it, so he got me to come up with him one weekend to help. It charged at me and as it did, I stepped to one side and I grabbed it by the horns and threw it. So he got a rope on it and handled it alright then, but he couldn’t handle it at all on his own. I was a bit of an idiot in those days I’d have a go at anything. Heifers that were reared on a cow were nearly always wild like that, they would charge at you. It didn’t pay to take a heifer off a cow and try to milk it, you might as well sell the bloody thing.
I had one at home later on when I bought the farm, it was the same. I bought these two heifers off Alf Minett, next door, and one was as wild as buggery. When she calved I was after her and she charged at me this day, and I had this pole in my hand and I went to put it down across her head, and I slipped and went down and she went over top of me. I eventually got her milking alright, and she wasn’t a bad milker but as touchy as all hell. If you moved when you were milking her she’d nearly kick your head off.
Vic was on the share farm at Bulga for about 12 months. There was nothing in it so he chucked it in and came back to live down on the farm with Ossie, so he and I went off contracting together for jobs. He was a great worker, he would work from daylight till dark and never think of stopping, a terrific worker.
The first job we did together was to split 100 posts for Roddy McDonald. He took the Contract too cheap and we had to work like buggery right up till dark. We did get a bit out of it and when we had finished that, he wanted us to put this fence up right along Roddy’s flat. He took this one too cheap as well and we had to work like bloody hell on that too. I suppose we made enough to keep living on, but after that we went to a place that Lance Tyrie was on up at Central Lansdowne. A fellow by the name of Mick Mooney owned the place and he wanted us to burn off this big paddock for him, so we took that on.
There was quite a lot of big old dead trees on it and rather than chop them down we dragged a heap of old logs up around them and stuck a fire to them. But there was one old one there, we had a hell of a job getting it burnt down, so Vic and I were working around where it was, all of a sudden Vic said to me “Look out!” and he ran for his life and I followed him. He went about 50 or 60 yards and he held his hand over his head. When trees were burning you couldn’t hear them falling until they hit the ground. Well this one came down about 10 feet away from us, limbs flew all round, but as luck happened, nothing hit us. It could have been the end of us, because we were working under it and if he hadn’t seen it we were both gonners.
We finished that job and got a job brushing a big paddock for Kenny McLaughlin. All lantana and bushes and everything. It was a terrible job, Vic had no idea what it was like to brush lantana, I did because I’d done it at home. We didn’t make anything out of that job because it was so hard. But we stuck at it and stuck at it and worked from daylight to dark on it, and while we were there we had this hell of a big hail storm, huge big hailstones as I remember and a lot of rain in it too. We used to get the water out of the creek to boil the billy. When the rain came down it muddied all the water up so we scooped up a heap of hail stones and boiled them up for water. That was the only way we were going to get clean water. The next morning there was still hail about 4 to 5 inches deep where it was blocked up against a log or sheltered or anything like that.
I left Os Hall’s and went to work at Comboyne for Howard Pheiffer and after that Les Pheiffer wanted me on his place, so I went up there to work for a while. I forget how long it was that I worked there, but I was there until I joined the army.
The War Years
When I was on Comboyne, once the Japs came in, I decided it was time for me to go to the war. I joined up and went down to Sydney. I tried to get into the Air Force but they told me I was anaemic, of course I wasn’t at all. I arrived back home in Taree and here’s Snow Gleeson, my mate, down there joining up to go in the Army. So I said “Ok, I’ll go in too.” I joined up the same day.
I was in the reinforcements for the 17th Battalion. I went out to Dubbo and they gave us these new boots to put on, and we had to march about 4 mile out to where the Dubbo Zoo is now. By the time we got out there a lot of the men’s feet were all blistered. Mine were alright, but a lot of them were in a hell of a mess. As soon as we got out there they put us on parade and this bloody old Sergeant Major started shouting and bellowing at us, and telling us that we had to be out by 6 o’clock the next morning and have our beds made, and breakfast time was 7 o’clock.
After we had been there for about a week, they decided that they would take us out on these 20 mile route marches. There were 4 of us who only did 1 of these marches. After the first time we took a pack of cards, and after about 1 mile or so we’d break off into the bush and play cards until they came back. The silly part about it was that they always came back the same way, or nearly always. If they didn’t we had someone primed up to answer our names at roll call, which was straight back to the parade ground after the march.
We then went to Canberra to guard the aerodrome.
We spent about 6 weeks out there just guarding the aerodrome.
They took us from there to Bathurst, and by hell that’s the coldest place I was ever in.
Next they took us back to Dubbo where they used to give us riffle drill and all that.
After we’d been there for some time they thought we’d been there long enough, so they shifted us out to Greta Camp, just out of Newcastle. There was this great big steep hill there and they trained us up and down it. After we’d been there a few weeks they decided it was time to move on, so they took us to Ingleburn and onto this boat called “The Swartenhondt”.
Into the Action
We landed at Port Moresby and they put us to work unloading boats, a lot of the cargo was food, a bit of grog, but mostly food.
I disembarked the Swartenhondt? in Port Moresby on the 7th June 1942.
We were only there about a month and they decided that they were going to take us up behind the Jap lines and cut their retreat off. We had to go up through this rough place and they had a radio they carried with them, and they were supposed to be able to keep contact with them back at Port Moresby. Wouldn’t you know it, the batteries went dead and they couldn’t get any word to us nor we to them. No one knew where we were or anything.
For about 4 days there all we had to eat was green paw paws and bananas. We used to roast those bananas on a fire and they tasted a bit like a potato when they were green, and the paw paws we cooked as well. After about 4 days we got sick of it and we went up to the officers and said if you don’t get us something to eat we’re gonna walk outta here, were not stopping.
So they decided they couldn’t go on any further and they pulled us back, and on the way back we met a Yankee mob that were coming up to take over from us. But they weren’t walking, they were coming up in trucks. They were dozing a track up. Anyway, when we got back to where they were camping and they gave us cigarettes and coffee and anything they had to eat.
They were great like that.
We never made it back to Port Moresby that time, they took us straight up to Kokoda. When we got up there we expected to get in and have a bit of a lash at the fighting but by the time we got there they had retreated. So after that they decided to take us over the mountain to Buna. We walked from Buna a couple of miles up to this place they called Soputa and we were there for a week or two, and then they decided to take us round where the action was.
When we got there you would hear a sniper fire or a machine gun go rat-a-tat. We went round through the trees trying to find a sniper so we could knock him out of a tree. We thought we could see one up in the top of this great big high tree, so the boys said “Go on, you have a shot at him, you’re the best shot.” I got down and took aim and it was only the dead leaves that I knocked out of the tree.
The next morning they decided to send us in. They had three machine guns trained on us when we went in and the bullets from the machine guns started off and they were sort of chipping the dirt up around us. The next thing they lifted their fire and the bark was flying off the trees around us. One chap alongside of me got hit in the foot. He started to jump around and say “Oh my foot, oh my foot.” Then one got me in the back from a sniper bullet from behind us where we were attacking. It hit me so hard it knocked me straight to the ground and I fell on my face, when I came round a bit I said “This is no place for you Ken, get out if you can.”
What I did was stagger to a tree and hang on till I saw another one close. I did that until I got to a thick clump of bushes. I couldn’t go any further so I laid down there. I must have been moving in the bush because they opened fire on me with a machine gun. The leaves were falling in my face from the bullets, and the stretcher bearers hadn’t been able to reach me until then.
When they arrived they picked me up and headed for this boggy gully about 30 feet wide. We got about in the middle of it and a machine gun opened up on me again. They had to drop me because it was too hot in the middle, too much with bullets firing and flying everywhere. I could see water splashing up all around me from the bullets. Then when the magazine finished and he paused to reload, they rushed back and grabbed me again.
After about two days I had swelled up from the blood in my lungs and I could hardly breathe. This queeny looking doctor came along and asked me how I was, to which I replied “I feel as though my lungs are about to burst.” He said “Hang on a bit and I’ll be back.” He brought a syringe and a bottle about the size of a pickle bottle. He had needles for the syringe from about 1 to 4 inches in length which he put into my back where the bullet went in. He drew the first lot of rotten, stinken blood out. Then he changed his needle to a longer one. It was so long I could feel it pierce the wall of my lung. He carried out the same procedure with that needle and then some, and when he finished the bottle was full. I would say that was what saved my life.
They sent me home on a hospital ship called the “Mununda” to a hospital in the Brisbane area.
It was a real “battleship” because it had been bombed previously and the engines were out of line and made the whole ship quiver. You could imagine how I was and what I had to put up with.
They sent me to a hospital in Redbank in Queensland, just out of Brisbane. I was only there a couple of days and they decided to put me on a train and send me to Baulkham Hills to another hospital. On the way down, it was an awful trip because I had dysentery bad, and I had to make it to the toilet.
When I got to the Sydney hospital I met a nursing sister. Sister Gregory, and she was the loveliest girl in the world. Only for her, I think I would have died. I was so weak and sick that I couldn’t eat, and I had dysentery and hookworm which they treated and killed.
When I first came into the hospital, this sister and a Dr Hedberg, who had a German sounding name, got to work and drew a diagram how they would treat my wound. The sister said, “l don’t know how your lung has survived because they haven’t even stitched up the wound. They usually put air into the lung to collapse it and here you’ve been breathing through this gaping hole, it’s a wonder your lung hasn’t collapsed.” I had been breathing through the hole in my lung since I’d been shot.
The diagram lead to a plan for recovery. They got a big jar like a gallon wine jar and placed a plastic tube in it which led to a pump on the floor, and another tube came from the wound in my back into the bottle. Each day they pumped it up 3 or 4 times by foot to withdraw the rotten muck out into the bottle. After about a Week they decided to empty the rotten pussy blood out of the bottle. When they took the lid off the pungent smell that wreaked from the jar was incredible. You couldn’t stand the smell, it was just like the smell that comes from a dead body. This went on for about 3 months. One day there was a big panic on, the tube had ceased to run. They raced me into the X-ray theatre and that night the sister came to me and said “I’m not supposed to tell you this, but, you are alright.”
So they took the tube out of me and allowed me to get out of bed. They said, “we will wheel you outside into the sunshine.” I said, “Don’t worry about a wheelchair, I’ll walk out.” They said “Ok.” I started off down the hallway and got halfway up the ward with them standing watching me. Suddenly everything went black and I hung on to the foot of a bed. They said “Would you like a wheelchair?”
It was marvellous how quick I regained my strength being out in the sun. Then one day the sister came along and said to me “You have beat the hoodoo, the last three blokes that were in that bed all died.”
Dad came down from Taree to see me a couple of times while I was in there, and also the girl of Hall who I had been engaged to before, who was now working in Sydney.
Then it came time for me to leave and the doctor signed me out A1. I was to leave the next day, but I got an attack of Malaria that night. I went and saw Sister Gregory and she took my temperature and she said “You report to the RAP and you’ll be back in here.” I said, “I don’t want to sister.” She said “That is an order, I’m ordering you to go to the RAP.” I didn’t go because I knew by the time she got to work I’d be gone.
After I returned to my unit near Townsville, we were up there doing drills, sloping arms, route marches and all that shit, when we decided that we had had enough of that so three of us decided that we would clear out. So we jumped a train back to Brisbane. You had to change trains there at Roma Street Station onto a wider gauge to go into N.S.W. There were all these troops going on leave so we got in with them.
I stayed a couple of weeks at home and I didn’t bother to tell them that I was AWL, but after that I decided I had better go back. When I got back to the station to catch the train back to my unit, there were all these troops going north, so it suited me right to the ground. Two of my mates out of the same section happened to be on the train so I went back with them. They were being drafted back to the unit after being wounded.
When we got to Cairns we found out our battalion had gone back to New Guinea and active duty. So they took our names down and put them on the nominal roll and sent us back to a staging camp not far out of Charters Towers. I can’t remember the name of the place (Probably Sellheim Army Camp).
We stayed there about 6 weeks and had a great time.
On 27 August 1943 I boarded SS Katoomba for New Guinea. We landed in Port Moresby and then they flew me back over the ranges to my unit where we had seen action before.
All they were doing when we got back there was training with live ammunition and that went on for weeks. Everything was timed because if you weren’t at a certain place at a certain time you would get blown away. They also had these tracer bullets on fixed lines. They were like a red glow and you could see them so you knew not to walk in there. One day they took us out on a bivouac for 5 days.
After I was back with the camp for 5 or 6 weeks, I got Malaria and I had to go over to the RAP to see the doctor. This was when they caught up with my AWL, even though I’d been at roll call for all of this time. The old Sergeant Major said to me “What are you doing here? We have a warrant out for your arrest, we’ve had it out ever since you left.” He asked me how I got back here and I told him. He said “It’s not possible.” So I said “Well I’m here.”
He told me I would have to go before the Colonel and they sent two blokes over with fixed bayonets and I had to march between the two of them over to him, it was really a laugh. I don’t know if they thought I was going to run away or what. Anyway the officer in charge of our unit was a new bloke that hadn’t been with us before and he was a bit of a bush lawyer, so he came over to defend me. He did a pretty good job too. The first thing the Colonel asked me was why I had done it. I thought pretty quick and replied “I had no leave when I came out of hospital so I decided I would just take it.”
So he was very sympathetic with me. I knew that my papers wouldn’t have gone to New Guinea to say that I had really had leave. He thought for a while and said “I’m very sorry to have to do this but the two boys who went with you were fined 5 pound and 28 days detention so I’ll have to do the same for you.”
They sent me to hospital with Malaria the same day and I was there for a couple of weeks and then they sent me to this convalescent camp. I was there for another 6 weeks and I had the time of my life there. You did just what you liked, I don’t think there was even a roll call.
In the finish they sent for me because they were going on a boat around to the other side of the island to a place called Cape Hoskins.
We landed at Lae on the way and we patrolled in there for a couple of days, then they put us on the boat and we landed at our destiny, Cape Hoskins. From there we patrolled up the coast a few miles. On one patrol we struck this Jap Patrol and we seemed to be going to stop there for a day or two because we had to dig these slit trenches. The river was on one side of us and the sea the other and we could only go backwards. After we had dug the trenches they put a Sentry out on duty and all of a sudden there was rifle fire. We knew then that the Japs were coming so we flew into the slit trenches.
They had some of the New Guinea natives that they called the New Guinea Rifle Company and they attached them to our unit. As we were crossing this creek one day with the Japs on the other side, these fellows were in the lead and were going great guns until one of their men got hit. Well they came through us like a team of bullocks. We weren’t sure who was who, whether it was them or the Japs because they had some too, who were called Kimbies. We were too scared to know what to do but luckily they ended up ours.
We did most of our fighting at Cape Hoskins and there was a volcano that used to smoke all the time. Nothing ever blew out of it, but it was about three miles from where we were camped.
While at Cape Hoskins we had to do patrols up and down the coastline for 4 or 5 miles and every so often there would be a clump of bushes there full of Corella parrots. As soon as you got near them they would squark and kick up a hell of a row. They did the same for the Japs so we knew when they were getting within cooee of us as well.
When we had to leave there they decided that we had to walk across the island over to Rabaul, and we were the last company to cross. You could imagine how bad it was, as the weather was never fine, always raining. It was so muddy and slippery on the track and we had to travel in a line one behind the other across to Rabaul. After about two days we were filthy dirty, mud everywhere, you could hardly recognise us. On the third day it was so bad that this one poor boy, he was only a short chap, got bogged down in the quagmire and couldn’t pull his feet out. They had to get someone else to pull him out.
We finally reached the beach and everybody was caked in mud and we raced towards the water and rolled into the sea and washed ourselves. “We all thought it was the greatest wash we ever had in our life.” After we’d had a good swim and cleaned up a bit they took us round to this place where they had all the tents up ready for us. We got unloaded and fixed ourselves up and it was quite a good place really. There was an underground river that came out near the camp there, and we used to go and swim in it. It was so cold that you couldn’t stay in for very long. That was really peculiar because New Guinea was such a hot place, but the river was so cold that you couldn’t stop in for more than a few minutes.
After we got settled in, they issued us with about half a dozen bottles of beer each that we hadn’t received beforehand. Of course everybody got drunk again and that only led to trouble. There were these two soldiers who were on guard duty together prior to our new camp at Rabaul. Something scared them and one bloke wheeled around and pulled the trigger and shot the other one, luckily it was only through the shoulder. He was able to recover and then came back and re-joined the unit.
We made this our home for a couple of weeks and then the decision was made to take us back to Port Moresby. We had to go in these open barges and it was so hot and steamy that you almost felt ill. The only thing that kept us going and got us there without too much drama was a school of porpoises. There was anything up to half a dozen just swimming along ahead of the barge all the time. They kept us entertained and it was great to see them frolicking around and so close to us.
I used to cut hair and while I was in New Guinea, they used to give myself and another bloke one day a week off to cut the soldiers hair. When we got back to Brisbane they still wanted us to cut their hair.
Back Home Again
I came home and it was terrible for a while. You just couldn’t talk to people because you didn’t have a lot in common with them, and it was hard to make conversation with them if you didn’t know what they were interested in. We had this money from the Army in the form of Gratuity Pay, which they’d kept back out of your pay so you would have some money when you came out of the army. I think it was about 100 pound or something like that.
I’d hardly had time to breathe and dad was asking me what I was going to do. He said, “You have a few quid, why don’t you buy a boat and go prawning.” Tom Lattimore, a fellow I knew down at Manning Point, had this boat for sale. I forget how much it cost, but then I had to buy a prawn net and ropes and corks and everything, and we had to pay a bloke to hang the net as well.
Of course nothing suited the old man better than to come and help me, to start me off in it.
I got married just after that to Mavis Sowter. Her father was on a farm down on Oxley Island. So I got a job building a house for Wal Smart down on Pampoolah with a man by the name of Ken Parmenter. He told us what to do and we did it. He had some weird ideas but we finished up getting the house built for him. He couldn’t help us because he had a terrible bad heart but he could give us the details of what to do.
After that we came to Central Lansdowne and we rented a two room house just across the road from where Clarry Drury had a farm.
While I was away at the war, Vic Hall, my brother-in-law got a job with Hater, building the hospital and he learnt a fair bit about carpentering. So, he wanted me to go carpentering with him and the first job we got was building a house down at Lansdowne for a lady called Mrs Bidner.
Then Ken Ruprecht from Cundletown wanted us to build a house for him, which we took on and got built in only about 2 months, because Vic was still a good worker, working from daylight til dark, no matter what it was he was doing, and got the job done fairly quickly.
The next job we got was building a dairy and bales for Tom Lorry on Oxley Island. It had to be all built out of concrete and we had to make the moulds right up to the top of the walls.
After we finished that job, we seemed to get a bit of a crew together. There was Lance Tyrie, old Dick Henry and Percy Hall, Vic’s uncle. Lance and I went onto another job and Percy and Vic were still working down at Lorry’s doing their house up and painting it.
After that we had to do a job down there for Frank Evans. We had to pull his whole house down, but we had to pull one part down at a time and renovate it while he lived in the remainder. He would move around as we built each part so we really built it up around him. It was quite difficult really, but it had a lot of new timber in it and we made a good job of it.
Poor old Vic, he’d have a go at anything. I remember Ben Miller who had a house half way up the Comboyne cutting wanted a house pulled down and shifted down to Wingham where he wanted it rebuilt. He got someone else to pull it down which left us not knowing how it was originally, and how it had to be put back together again. It was a terrible job and we had to end up putting more on to it, but we eventually got it done.
One disaster after another
I had all the bad luck in the world when I took the farm over. Firstly, there was a big drought and I lost 7 cows the first year. The next year they all got brucellosis and started to abort. A sum total of 23 out of 28 lost their calves, and they won’t milk after they lose their calves. I just had to hang onto them and get out of them what I could because I couldn’t afford to buy any more. A lot of them wouldn’t go back into calf and I had to sell them, and with that money I bought a few more and built up a herd that way.
I had to grow early tomatoes and peas to supplement our income and just really keep us going. Of a weekend Ray Pankhurst and I used to work through the mountain picking these ferns to get some money, 3 pound per thousand I think was the money we got for them, and then we had to take them over to Wauchope after packing them and tying them in a knot, cutting the ends off which took nearly all night, and then sell them over there. So that was another day it took to do that. I also grew a patch of tomatoes every year and often I’d have to stay up to 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning wiping, sorting, grading and packing tomatoes, and then take them to sell the next day.
I still wasn’t making enough money and by this time I had 7 mouths to feed. We’d had 2 more kids, Cynthia Rose born 22nd September 1951, and Nerida Anne born 19th May 1955, so I asked dad to rent the farm to me and he did. Things did get better and I managed to buy a set of milking machines. However, it still wasn’t enough to keep going because by this time we’d had the last of the 6 kids, which included Narelle Irene born 21st January 1961. 2 Boys and 4 girls and they are a fine family, all of them.
In the 60’s I got this job down at Langley Vale in a sawmill working for Campbell and Jones. We were a pretty happy lot on the farm despite the hard times and apart from having no money it was a good life, hard work, but we didn’t mind that.
We had some good friends while we were living at Upper Lansdowne on the farm struggling along, and on cracker nights 4 or 5 families would get together and have it at one of the farms. There were the Carles, Roy and Gloria and the Atkins’s, Les and Hazel, the Minetts, Alf and Evey and all the kids.
We got as much fun out of the bonfire or cracker nights as the kids. We’d have a big bonfire that took us a couple of weeks to build, half a dozen bottles of beer and then a cup of tea afterwards. A lovely night, where everyone would bring along some cooking. It was more of a feast than a cup of tea that we’d have.
When we put on a dance at Upper Lansdowne I think the women would try and outdo each other with the cooking. The most beautiful slices, biscuits and cakes you have witnessed and plenty of it. You’d have half a dozen bottles of beer and maybe a bottle of wine that you would shout your mates with and then of course they’d shout back, and sure as eggs before the night was over there’d be a fight. We’d all ring round them and away they’d go for a while and next thing it would be all over and they’d be good friends again.
I had a bit of fun one night with Roy Carle. Tom Fahey and I got this long seat, it stretched right across the road, so we took it out of the hall and put it across the road. Roy wanted to go home but we sat on the seat and wouldn’t let him go home. We sat there and wouldn’t get up, and luckily he didn’t decide to fight us but he whined and carried on about it for a long time.
It was on one of these nights that my brother-in-law, Jack Sowter, who was down on a place about 4 miles away, decided to come up to the dance at Upper Lansdowne and bring their kids. After the dance was over they came around to our place to have a cuppa and when we got round there, their eldest girl was missing. They had told her to go to the car and they had about 4 or 5 kids so they hadn’t missed her. When they got round to our place they found her missing because she’d gone back in the hall instead of going to the car. We ended up having to go back to the hall to find her and she was waiting outside the hall for us.
We had lots of fun times and then there were some not so fun times on the farm. After we left the house next to Clarry Drury, before we moved onto our farm, we went and rented a place next door to the school residence. It belonged to Claude Cicolini.
I remember when we were on the farm, of a weekend there would be about a dozen or so young fellows around playing cricket with Denis and Ian. They loved their cricket and they would put up some stumps on this old bit of a cricket pitch and have their game. There would be Ross Potts, Tim McCaffrey, who was a great friend of the boys, David Atkins and a few others and they would have the time of their lives. The boys would play all day and sometimes all weekend bowling and batting. When they got older, they were both good cricketers and they both played cricket in the local competition around Taree. Denis had more opportunities than Ian because he stayed around the area while Ian went away working into the police force. Denis has played on for years and still has a game and does a lot of umpiring at Laurieton where he lives.
When I had to work at Langley Vale and in Taree at the saw mill, the girls used to have to take the milk out to the road for collection. I would put the cans onto the trailer and either Cynthia or Nerida would drive the tractor out to the road. They got to be pretty good drivers and used to drive all over the place.
Another time when I was growing tomatoes, Les Atkins decided he wanted to grow some with me. The place where I grew them was very steep and you had to plough down the hill and come back empty. I had it all ploughed and he brought over his discs to chop it all up afterwards. He was going to be smart and go across the side of the hill but he found out it wouldn’t work, it would just slide down the hill, so he had to end up doing it the same as me.
I had a piece that was all covered in fern, about 20 acres, bulldozed to grow the peas and tomatoes and I’d plant peas and rye and clover at the same time. By the time the peas were finished the rye would be just about ready to feed to the cows. The peas would pay for the seed of the rye and clover and super and stuff. I did that for years.
Keith Potts who was my neighbour at the time used to do a fair bit of sleeper cutting and he asked me if I would like to cut some sleepers out. I had a good bit of timber there that was suitable and it was coming on Christmas time. It was hot as bloody hell and we found a few trees and with a squaring axe I found at home, started to get this timber. Pottsy used to get the billets out with the chain saw and I was to square them up. To start off I was pretty slow, but towards the finish I got pretty good and could get a fair few done in a day. I guess we got about 100 or so and then we had to get Alf Minett to come up and snig them down because my tractor wouldn’t get up the hill, it was too steep. He came and pulled them out for us and we made a few dollars out of that.
When I was younger, dad and I used to be brushing up the back paddock in the lantana, and you had to get in underneath it to cut it. Dad always said “If ever you see a carpet snake don’t kill it because they do a lot of good, they kill a lot of the vermin”. This day he was brushing away and all of a sudden a carpet snake shot his head out about a foot at him. He didn’t heed his words, he just picked up the brush hook and chopped it’s head off.
I finished up buying the farm from dad for 3 thousand pound and I had to sell the quota from the place to buy it. After that I had to rear calves and sell them. I would buy these calves and put them on the cows for about a month and then I’d sell them and get another lot. I went alright at that I guess but I still had to work at the Sawmill to make ends meet.
I used to do a lot of work for Alf because he had a lot of implements that saved time and we worked together. He would come down and dig the postholes and bore the posts for me saving me a lot of time on a new fence. Of course I had to do a lot more work for him to square up but it was a good help. He was a pretty good neighbour, Alf, and although he was pretty tight he would never do you for anything. One time we decided to make a garden on my side of the fence-line and we got to work and put a heap of watermelons and a few different things in. When the watermelons were ripe he pulled some up and had to halve them up exactly. If there were 5 he would cut 1 in half, if there was only 1 ready you had to have half each. He was keen that way.
A bloke from Sydney came up and bought the Upper Lansdowne shop and at the time we were feeding the cows with hammer milled corn. There was some substance that you could add to it to make it better and another product called “calfpab” that would help stop scours in young calves. It was pretty good stuff too and this fellow who bought the shop wanted me to go round the farmers with him and try and sell this product to them. This day I went round with him and introduced him to them and he wouldn’t say a word, he left it up to me to tell them all about it, how good it was and what it did. We had a big day and there were quite a few of them decided that they would try it. The big boss from Sydney came up and wanted me to take on a job selling this stuff, but I wouldn’t take it on.
Up along the top of the hill towards the bush, I decided to clear along the top of the ridge about a chain and a half wide was all there was before it dropped off the side. Ian wanted to grow some pumpkin and squash early. We put them in and they did ready well and he did alright out of them. He sold a lot around the place and down at Lansdowne and made good money out of them. After he went into the police force I decided to put it in with potatoes, and every few days after they got up there would be holes dug around them and the potatoes would be going. I thought the only thing I could see that it was, was turkeys.
I went up there one evening late just before dark with a rifle and here were two turkeys into them. I shot one of them and the other one ran down the end, and I thought he’s gone but he decided to come back and see what had happened to his mate, so I got him too. I never had any more trouble with them after that. I wasn’t going to get a potato off them if I hadn’t got the turkeys when I did.
I worked down at the mill at Langley Vale for a number of years until it closed down and they built another one in Taree, Campbell and Jones they called it. Campbell was the son-in-law of Jones. When Campbell and Jones decided to build the mill in Taree I had to give the farm away, it just wouldn’t work. They still have a timber business there, but they don’t work the mill.
Then I travelled in to Taree 5 days a week, Monday to Friday for about twelve months when Mavis’s mother died. Her father, George Sowter lived in Edinburgh Drive at Taree Estate and he wanted us to go in and live there with him. So I sold the farm for $22,000 and we lived with him for about 6 months.