Australians at War Film Archive

Pleasure.

Yeah, well, I was born in a place called Batavia, which is now Jakarta. My father was in the Colonial Service. After the war he got married in 1921. And he decided, like a lot of Dutch young enterprising fellows, to go to the Dutch East Indies to make his fortune. And so in ’22 I was born there

and stayed there until I was 5 years old. And then my Dad got another job and he became the general manager of a Dutch insurance company which meant he had to go to Sumatra and he went to Medan in northern Sumatra. And that’s where my sister was born. And we stayed there until ’28 and then he had an opportunity

to go to Holland, see all Dutch people they used to work for five years in the Dutch East Indies and then they got a year-long service leave with full pay back in Holland. So I went to Holland there to be admired by all relatives in Holland. And in ’29 we went back again. And then my Dad

had the misfortune to be retrenched in the days of the big Depression, ’33, and I have little recollection of it except I can remember how my mother used to cry all day because Dad didn’t have a job and no money was coming in. Anyway he then got another job and he became an accountant for a Dutch firm in

Indonesia which had tea, rubber, coffee, quinine plantations and that’s when he had to go back to Batavia. And he was, used to be one week at home and one week at a plantation. So we lived there and I did most of my primary school in Batavia and then high school and that was followed by teachers’ college. And then when the war broke out

I joined the Dutch Fleet Air Arm to become – well, I joined as a cadet pilot officer. We trained for 2 months, elementary training in Surabaya, then in March it looked as if Java was going to fall, the Japs [Japanese] had shot up the flying school and the whole flying school was then transferred to go

to Australia. And they wanted to put us on Catalinas and Dorniers to fly us to Australia but senior officers of the Dutch navy decided they wanted to use those planes so they commandeered the planes for themselves and their wives and children and they went to Broome, where they were shot up as you may

recall from history. Anyway, my chance to get to Australia was via a transport ship, the Tjisaroea, I’ve still got pictures of that. And we left the south coast of Java, two days from Fremantle our ship was taken by the Japanese and I went then to, they took the ship, they didn’t torpedo it fortunately so that’s why I’m here to tell the story.

And they took us to Macassar in Sulawesi where all the survivors of the Battle of the Java Sea from all the ships, the Dutch ships, and the [HMS] Exeter, the [USS] Houston, the [HMAS] Perth, the [HMAS] Yarra they were all there in that place. Then the Japanese decided they wanted navy personnel to build ships in Japan, so a thousand of us were put onto a Japanese transport ship, Azuma Maru,

that was early in the war. And in ten days’ time we were in Nagasaki. So we arrived in Nagasaki in October ’42 and I spent three years in Nagasaki working on the shipyard. After liberation and I survived the atom bomb there as you know, I was only six kilometres from the epicentre. They, after liberation they took us

to Okinawa on board an American aircraft carrier the Chenango and then from there they flew us by aircraft, available aircraft to Manila. All ex-POWs [Prisoners of War], that’s POWs who were liberated from different camps in Japan were all brought together in Manila and we were awaiting

repatriation. But there were a million and a half Americans who were also waiting for repatriation, so they won the war and they had preference so we were just biding our time. And then in December the navy asked for volunteers to go to Australia. The navy bought fifteen Dakotas to be used to bring the women and children out of the Japanese concentration camps,

who were all dying and very sick and horribly underfed and we had the job of flying them to Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. So that, I volunteered for that and I was picked. So 280 of us went to Australia in Dakotas. And we had a base at Rose Bay and at Mascot and our home was a big

mansion Arden brought at Point Piper. And after six months we had carried 50,000 women and children to Australia and it looked like our job was finished. Then the wharfies [wharf labourers] declared all the ships, Dutch ships black because they were sympathising with Sukarno who was an ex-communist, so all the ships were declared

black and the Dutch said, “Oh, no worry, we have 280 navy personnel, they can do that.” So we then became dockworkers, loading ships. We knew nothing about it but we used to be able to load the ships in about a third of the time it took the wharfies. We were very unpopular with them but it didn’t worry us so we loaded ships in Sydney, in Melbourne, in Adelaide and a lot in

Western Australia too, in Perth, Fremantle. So we flew from ship to ship and that last about till June ’48 and the ’47, ’47 and then we had the opportunity to get a discharge in Australia or a discharge in Holland. And that meant a free trip to Holland and I decided that was a good idea

to get a free trip, so went on board the Asturias, we had a free trip to Holland. Oh, the Asturias went as far as Southampton and that’s where we changed ships, on a Dutch ship and we went to Holland. I stayed there for about 12 months because I wanted to go home, I wanted to go back to Australia, I had already decided because when I was in Manila I heard that

both my parents had been killed by the Japanese, so I had, after six months staying in Australia I said, “This country will do me for a future and start a new life.” So I came back to Australia in ’49 after having lots of trouble with the Department of Immigration because I was born in the Dutch East Indies, they made out I was Indonesian and that’s a story on itself how I convinced them

that I was, had no coloured blood as they called it in those days, it was just the high time of the White Australia Policy. And so I came to Australia and looked for a job and there was no problem of getting a job there because the papers were full of vacancies. And so I started, because when I, in my immigration papers they didn’t accept my job as a teacher, they said,

“No, we don’t need teachers there we need technical people.” so I made out I was a ship’s carpenter, in prison camp I had picked up some of that. And that’s how I went to Australia, under that name, so I had to look at the wharves, the shipyards in Newcastle and they didn’t seem to be very keen on migrants there

and it was a closed shop anyway. And I noticed that the people there, you know what they call work, I was used to work for the Japanese which was slave labour with a stick behind you and so the loafing up there that put me off. So I then took my second interest that was photography, so I started then off as the bloke in charge of the

dark room of the Sydney photo works at the back of Broadway in Sydney. And I worked there for a few months. And then by chance I met the principal of Sans Souci Public School, and this gentleman who had, you know we were talking over a barbecue, over education he said, “How come you know so much about this?” And I said, “Well, I was actually trained as a teacher.” He said, “Well what are you doing working at a photo works, why don’t you

work as a teacher?” I said, “Oh, they told me they didn’t need them.” And he said, “Oh, what rubbish. Do you want to teach? I’ll get you a job.” And a week later I got a telegram start working at the Cowra Migrant Centre, so that’s where I worked, I started my teaching career, classes of 45 kids, none of them spoke a word of English, they all spoke Ukrainian and Polish and Yugoslav, but we had them

talking fluently in English in three months’ time. It was amazing; it was a very exciting time in my teaching career. Well, from there, at one stage in ’51 the Department [of Immigration] started another camp for migrants in Bathurst and they had Dutch people coming there. And so because I could speak Dutch they thought, they sent me up there. So I stayed there for about three, or six

months I think. And then it was back to Cowra again. And we, in Cowra that was in ’51, the end of ’51 and I got engaged to my wife and we married in ’51. And so I continued teaching at the migrant centre till ’55 and there again you know life was full of opportunities,

I was the sports master at the school, about 800 kids there, migrant kids. And we had an inspection from the Physical Education Department; they wanted to know how a migrant centre worked with sport. And the inspector said, you know I talked to him and he said, “You seem to know a lot about Phys Ed, how come you know so much about it?” And I said,

“Oh well, I was actually trained, I have a certificate, a diploma in Physical Education to teach.” I did that simultaneously when I was at the Teacher College. And he said “Gee, would you like to become a PE Teacher, there’s a vacancy at the high school here?” And I said, “Yes, all right.” So that’s how I started my physical education teacher career in ’55. And I did that at Cowra High

for ten years and got very involved in the town. I was founder member of Apex and the Aero Club and that was one of the highlights of my stay in Cowra, flying Tiger Moths and other aircraft and doing trips all over the place. And in ’65 I used to go to, they had annual conferences, I was a member of the

New South Wales the, it’s called the ASHPER, that’s the Association of Health, Physical Education and Recreation, the Australian, it’s a sort of union. And they, I was guest speaker there on a couple of occasions and then the lady in charge of

the Sydney Teachers’ College, the physical education course at Sydney University, she asked me to join the staff, so then I dropped out of the normal education and became a lecturer in Physical Education. I did that for two years and then I had to move because I was standing in for somebody who did his PhD [Doctor of Philosophy] in the United States and I was sent back. I had to move to either Armidale or

to Wagga to teach college as a lecturer. And I said, “Look I’ve just bought this home.” I bought it in ’66 and so I decided that I wanted to go back to high school, I saw them at the department, I said, “Look, I’ve done 17 years country service, how about giving me a good position in a high school?” and they said, “Where do you live?” And I said “Belrose.”

“Okay, we’ll get you a school close by.” And I got Balgowlah Boys’ High, which was only, in those days about a 10, 15-minute drive. Now it takes you half an hour with the traffic to get there. But so I stayed there for a while and we have, in those days we had a series of promotions and teachers were on lists, first, second, third and fourth list

and I was on the second list already and on the third list which was for masters, I was special master in Balgowlah Boys’ High. And down there I got my second list, which is the list, which all deputies were appointed. And each year you got a list from the department to pick schools where you wanted to go. And everything went by seniority

then, so if you’re number one of the list you could pick wherever you wanted to go. I was number 61 on the list and I got a list there and I picked the correspondence school and the correspondence school had a name of a place where old crack up teachers used to be appointed to and well I took it, as I said I was number 61 on the list and lo and behold I got a

phone call from the department, “Would you like to go up there?” So I did and I took that on and I thought, “I’ll do that for three years and then get a…” At the next move you see you get an appointment in the department but you had to stay for three years before you could apply for a move, and I thought I’d transfer to the Northern Beaches here or somewhere on the Peninsula but it was such a fascinating job and there was so much reorganisation

to be done, that I took that on and I spent the rest of my teaching career and I finished up there which was a tremendous set up. The correspondence school was the best in the world at that stage. And so that was my career as a teacher, in the meantime in ’73 I heard there was a vacancy on Warringah

Council and there was a by-election and a number of people around the place, I was already well known, I was here, I came here in ’66 and I became the President of the P & C [Parents and Citizens’ Association], I had four little sons going to school at the back of this place, here is a primary school. And I was President of the High School and I was President of the Youth Club and I was in Apex and Rotary, so

a lot of people knew me and said, “Why don’t you run for council, we’ll help you.” so I stood for council and I got elected. And I was re-elected seven times so I did seven terms on council. In ’79, the highlight of my career in local government was ’79 till ’83 when I was the Shire President of Warringah and there was a lot to do in Warringah and I think I made

a very big contribution to the Council because they didn’t even have, and that was indicative of all local government. Local government was run off crisis management, they roll from one crisis into another and there was no forward planning and I was the first one to introduce five, ten and twenty year plans for Warringah and I had a lot of opposition from the staff because that was something unheard of

you see. But I managed that and we started new budgeting system. And in those days local government was all about the three Rs: Rates, Roads and Rubbish. And the roads meant good roads, kerb and guttering, footpaths but people, they had very little in that. And actually when I joined

the council we had one bloke working in what he called the Social Welfare Co-ordinator, a former colonel of the army, Frank McCaskill, well known in the district and that was the only staff we had and I said, “Hey, wait a minute, local government is about people.” So I turned it around and now the department,

the Community Services is the biggest department in Warringah Council with, I think, something like 300 people working in that department with different subsections, so that was another big contribution I made to local government so it was a very satisfying time.

And I retired from teaching in ’82, I was then 60 years of age and I could retire,

much to my wife’s disgust because, you know, I was, well, a big-shot in departmental terms and she, “You’re retiring now, what a shame.” and I said, “Yeah, but there’s other things I want to do.” And I was at that stage also the Mayor of Warringah and I said, “I can now be full-time mayor.” I used to work 80 hours a week you see, 40 for the Department and another

40 for being the President of Warringah, because in those days mayors and presidents really had power. Now they’re just rubber-stamping what the staff tells them what to do. That’s completely changed. So I continued till ’95, before I retired. I reckoned by that time I said, “Look, if I do another term

I’ll be 78 by the time I retire, that’s, give somebody else a go.” and so I retired and from that. But I did not retire from the community. As soon as I got out of the council I started getting phone calls, “As you’re not on the council any more how about taking the, we’re looking for a new president or we’re looking for a secretary.” so

I was very careful not to fall into that trap but I’m still on a number of committees. Two committees on the council, the Peace Park Committee and the sister city with Chichibu, I’m the community representative, chairman of that committee and I’m still in Rotary

and I’m also the chairman of the Business Enterprise Centre in the Northern Beaches, which is an organization the government set up to support small business. So, and I’m tied up with the Liberal Party so I have still a fair bit of interests and when I retired from council I was

a patron of a large number of organizations, I thought, “That’s the end of it.” but no, they all kept asking me to be patron, so I’m patron of a golf club, patron of a football club, as a matter a fact three football clubs, three codes, very difficult, you must make sure when you’re at the Annual General Meeting you say the right things, don’t get the codes mixed up, so it’s Rugby Union, Rugby League and also

soccer and I’m patron on Bush Fire Brigade and so…

Well, it’s been interesting. And what also still takes a fair bit of time, about once a week I am a guest speaker somewhere. And the most common request is for my experiences at Nagasaki

as survivor of the atom bomb, people are fascinated by that story; well, it is a fascinating story of what actually happened. There is very few people still alive, I buried two of my fellow survivors last year so that is an interesting story and the other story is what it was like to be a POW of the Japanese.

Oh yes, yes naturally we were married for about 8 years actually before our first son was born, my wife had problems having babies. Our first thought of course that it was my fault because

having been exposed to radiation, we had tests done and I got in touch with the Atomic Commission in the United States, in Washington and they gave all sorts of information and blood counts and white cell counts and sperm tests and anyway they said, “No, it should be all right.” and then my wife she apparently had,

she had perienteritis before she got married and that often causes adhesions in the fallopian tubes and that’s why she couldn’t have any children, so she got an operation and although the doctor gave us very little chance because that was before they had microsurgery but he did the job properly and so

in the next six years we had four sons. And when my first son was born, a healthy baby completely normal, that was the happiest day of my life. Because you know especially when you’ve been married and you got married because you want children, at least we did and to see that finally

happening that was really tremendous, I was on cloud nine for the whole week.

Well, we are again extremely fortunate because they all live in Sydney. My eldest son, Paul, he lives in North Sydney, Waverton actually, no, I always get mixed Waverley and Waverton.

Waverton, that’s North Sydney, yeah, yeah, yeah, he lives very close to the station there, he lives in a nice flat, and he’s married and they have twin boys, twins a boy and a girl, a family already made and he started his career as a navy officer in the Fleet Air Arm so he was like his Dad. And

he became air engineer of 817 Squadron then in his next promotion he had to go to Canberra and he said, “No thank you, I didn’t join the navy to sit behind a desk.” And so he became a flying instructor, then he thought, “Well, you’re only a glorified bus driver.” and if you were, because he did a bit of charter flying too and then he said, “I will go

to university to run an airline.” But to do that you need a MBA [Master of Business Administration] so he did that in New South Wales, the University of New South Wales, got his MBA and became a consultant and he had a number of jobs, one of them was working for the new Strike Fighter, the F35,

which Australia’s a partner of and then he joined Raytheon, which is an American company looking into all sorts of aviation electronics and that’s where, what he’s doing at the moment. Son number two, Tom is a, he works in computers, have a software company, Coversoft, and

he lives in East Gordon with his wife and three sons and the eldest is four and they have 2 year old twins, so twins doesn’t run in my family but IVF [in vitro fertilisation] helps, and so out of my 10 grandchildren five of them are IVF. Mainly because my sons married fairly late and their wives

were already in their thirties and that’s when often falling pregnant the normal way is a bit harder. And then son number three is Michael, and Michael married a girl Caroline and they have my eldest grandson, Jake who is nine and Jasmine who is six, they’re the ones who often

come here, that’s why you see baby stuff here. And the youngest, and he lives in Cromer and the youngest lives in Erskine Park which is about an hour’s drive from here and they’ve got three children and he too works, Michael works in also a technical job, he

is working for a company in Hornsby and they make electronic switchboards whilst Chris works in the computer section, he is second in charge in the computer section in the Reserve Bank, so we’re very fortunate to have them all so close by.

Yeah, it’s quite remarkable. There is,

my family they have lived in Holland since 1681, they were French Huguenots [Protestants], you notice the name is French, they were French Huguenots and they fled to Holland, Rotterdam in 1681 and they established a dynasty, my father was one out of five brothers and two

daughters. So my grandfather had seven children and lo and behold they all married, but their sons married and all had daughters, one of them had a son, and the sons had all daughters except for one who, Eric who is now 55

and Eric had three daughters, so the male dynasty of the Couvrets in Holland has died out. And then the only, well I’ve started a new branch of the Couvrets.

Yeah, yeah. There’s still Couvrets, relatives of mine living in Paris and at Lyon.

Yeah.

Well, we, as you heard I went to school there and it was an absolute paradise for young kids to grow up,

apart from the fact that you had the threat of disease like dysentery, cholera because you didn’t have inoculations against that. So you never drank any unboiled water and you never ate any fresh lettuce or vegetables because they had been watered with contaminated water, but apart from that, and incidentally malaria was also

a major problem, of course, we always had, you were covered at night with long sleeved shirts and we used citronella oil which is still being used these days, very effective. And you slept in beds with gauze, mosquito gauze or you had in the bedroom you had a little bit of an enclosure with a framework

with mosquito wiring so that you, well you could sleep without having the claustrophobic idea of sleeping into a cocoon with a net around you. But apart from that, you know as far as playing was concerned we always amused ourselves with playing games. I was very keen

on flying kites and kite flying is a national sport in the Dutch East Indies or was, and now still is in Indonesia. They had the aerial combats where you try to cut the thread of your opponent by, they have a bit of glue and glass on the wire, on the string and

you fight that way. We used to go out riding our bikes, you could go anyway, it was completely safe everywhere. We used to play soccer mostly, soccer was the national sport of the Dutch and it was very popular with the Indonesians too of course. The only problem was you weren’t allowed to play in parks, but we often did of course, like

boys do. And as soon as you saw the cop arriving on his pushbike, then somebody grabbed the ball and disappeared so that, because they used to confiscate the soccer balls, they were worth a fortune in those days for us. So it was a very happy time. At school, we went to school six days a week, Saturday was also school but you only went to the middle of the day.

Seem schools in those days, you went to school from 9 till 1 and then from 2 till 4. From 1 to 2 was the free time. And that went from 5 days a week and on Saturday was only the morning session so we only had very little, and work also was Saturday, everybody worked as well and only Sunday was the free day.

So I had a very happy life there. My Mum and Dad, they were very devoted to their children and tried everything to give us as much as they could. Birthdays were our, the days when we got presents. Christmas was always a very happy occasion at home but it was mainly a

dinner and going to church and the presents were being given at St Nicholas’ Day, the Dutch have a system whereby on the 6th of December, Saint Nicholas is the patron saint of children, supposed to come out of Spain, you might have heard of that before. And that’s when you got your presents you see, so Christmas was more of less a day for

religious purposes. And the Dutch were in those days much more religious than they are now in from what I read in papers from Holland. That all made things a very pleasant upbringing.

Yes, that’s an interesting question, you see the Dutch people in Indonesia during, what often happened in the early 1900s, it was only the men that went over and then invariably they married an Indonesian women and then you got

the Eurasians and so there were two groups of people in the Dutch East Indies, the people who had mixed blood and they were either half-caste or quarter castes, or the ones who had no mixed blood and they were pure, although they were born in the Dutch East Indies they were

from Dutch parents only. And they, the people in Indonesia, there was a bit of a division between the full-blooded Dutch and the Eurasians, that had disappeared altogether now from what I can see from people that have come from there and which I’ve met with reunions,

the Dutch have become much more tolerant but I remember my mother was always very keen that the girlfriends I mixed with were not Eurasian girls, if it was a Eurasian girl she was nice to them but she wasn’t encouraging the friendship. And I was always very much encouraged to get purebred Dutch girlfriends.

Nevertheless, of course, as far I was concerned boys made no difference you see, so I played in football teams and I was also a pretty good swimmer and water polo player and I played with lots of Indonesians or Eurasians and Indonesian kids too. At the schools, both primary

and the high school and the teachers’ college the schools weren’t just purely for Dutch people. They were completely the Dutch curriculum because so many people in the Dutch East Indies who came from Holland, they regularly went back to Holland and if you had a family you wanted to bring your kids with you. And so the, even the school terms were the same

as they were in Holland. So the big holidays, the long holidays were in July-August because that’s in Holland and the same happened in the Dutch East Indies. And the Christmas holidays, it was only just a fortnight, a fortnight holiday and we worked in quartiles of course, we had the quarterly sessions. And

that made it very easy for people who transferred. Now the schools were opened to Indonesians and Chinese because, a lot of Chinese in Indonesia before the war. All the traders, both the retail and also the gross retail was very much in the hands of either Dutch or

the Chinese. And even little corner shops everywhere, they were often run by Chinese, and hard workers. And at school sport, it’s the same even here in Australia at the moment, sport is only secondary to them, high marks in study, that is the most important thing for Chinese students here. If you look at the,

we just had the leaving certificate again, or the HSC [Higher School Certificate] rather and Chinese featured very highly in that and the same happened in our school. I could never beat the Chinese in marks because they worked so hard and were so clever. I had some very good Chinese friends too, very considerate people. And

so we had, and the same applied to Indonesians who were well-to-do Indonesians, leaders in their own group and they were at school too and I made good friends with them. So that actually became important to me when I, later on here when I came to Australia and particularly when I got into a position of authority at the council because I,

because you deal with a lot of migrants and a lot of migrants feel that are not taken at full value because they’re a migrant and I never treated people that way and so that was a good training for me. I didn’t realise it at the time that that would be so helpful when I came to Australia later.

We, my mother was, well, very much Dutch, she actually came, she came from Amsterdam my mother and she was, before she married she was a nurse, she was actually a matron when she married. She was a matron of a hospital and then married my father. So she was always

obsessed with, almost obsessed with cleanliness and the fear of infection of tropical diseases. And she wouldn’t allow, like a lot of Dutch people, you always had servants, you see everybody had servants. They had good salaries and you could easily afford servants. So the average Dutch

family there had what they call the jonas, he was the sort of butler. He served the meals and looked after the silver and the crockery and then you had one or two babus, babus they call them and one looked after the beds and the linen and another one looked after all the washing and the ironing. And then you generally had a gardener, the kabon, who looked

after the garden. And they often lived on the premises, the standard homes were the main home for the family and then there was at the back of it, there were servant quarters and they loved it because you know they were proper homes instead of living in the bamboo and atap [matting made from coconut leaves] dwellings they lived, they had

these so it was very much sought after. They were very honest; you very seldom had things missing from your home. And so that made things very easy for the people. But my mother didn’t want a cook, most of the, or a lot of homes they had what they call the cocky and that was the cook.

And that was usually a woman who looked after the kitchen but my mother never wanted one of those because they reckon that was too dangerous for getting disease introduced. Their standards of hygiene weren’t good enough as far as she was concerned. So she always did cooking and we had Dutch cooking although the Dutch had

one particular dish they called the Rijstafel and that is Indonesian and that is rice is the main food but then there is about 20 different dishes to go with it: chicken, curried chicken, ordinary chicken, satay chicken and all sorts of vegetables and egg things and so there was about 20 dishes and she

got an Indonesian cook in to help that and that was on Sundays, that was the Rijstafel and that was what my, that was the only Indonesian food we actually had. And the other Indonesian stuff was the satay man; they used to have hawkers who used to walk up and down the street

the streets around the built up area selling satays and they’d have a little charcoal brazier and you called them in and they had in a glass case, they had skewers with beef, with pork, with chicken, with goat and with dog. And you asked them for that

and then he would do it in your garden while you were sitting on the front verandah and he would cook and you just went for 10, 20 depending on how hungry you were. And my mother allowed that all right because she reckoned that being braised over the fire killed all the germs you see. So that was the only other Indonesian food we had. Plus of course plenty of fruit,

there was an enormous choice of fruit, but always had to peel it. But Indonesia is a fabulous place for fruit, they’ve got all sorts of delicious sorts of fruit which you can buy here too now but at a great expense.

Yes my mother was

very ambitious, obviously she had become a matron already so that showed that she was very, well I think she probably got that as a, for the reason that she was capable, naturally you don’t get it without capability and she had a certain amount of authority.

She was bossy up to a point, she used to order people around but by the same token she was very popular with her colleagues and she was known to all my friends as Aunty,

her name was Anna Marie, her Christian name, but in, the Dutch usually, in the Dutch nursing they called a sister by her surname and her name was Bishop and so she became Aunty Bissy and everybody knew my mother as Aunty Bissy. And she played, she was always

encouraging me and I think she was, my father was a quiet achiever but he never threw his weight around and so I think that as far as my mother was concerned she played a major part in me being, becoming a bit of an organiser and doing things

because she was absolutely delighted but so was my father when I became the school captain for instance. And I used to organise trips away for the school. Excursion to an island in the bay of Batavia. I just hired a whole tugboat and about 60

students of the high school went on this tugboat on a trip there you see. And that was unheard of that a student would organise that sort of thing. Well, the teachers they really enjoyed that, the fact that they had somebody. I also started the school magazine, the school

didn’t have a magazine, so I started the school magazine. And that was in ’38, I’ve still got a copy of my first school magazine. And that school magazine kept going and they still produce that school magazine now and that’s the Old Boys, they took on the format of that magazine and it’s now the Old Boys magazine, which

comes out four times a year and goes around the world.

Oh, of coming events, things we were going to do. And we asked people to make contributions, write stories of whatever took their fancy about relationships of what they

wanted to do and yeah, trying to make it interesting for the students.

Yeah.

Well you see I was, I was only 11 years old then. And

I can remember that we couldn’t do this and we couldn’t do that. My mother couldn’t buy clothes for my sister was growing bigger and she used to cut up her own dresses, her old, well older dresses and cut them up and make new skirts or dresses for my daughter and she used to make,

well she was pretty good on the sewing machine, a Singer sewing machine. I remember, I was just a little boy, I was allowed to push, it had a little tread in the back and I was allowed to push this thing, that was a great. And then a sort of a bonus when you were allowed to do that while Mum was doing the sewing. But she made clothes. And the fact that we still had

enough to eat. I can’t remember being hungry. But my father used to send, he was usually out in the day looking for jobs or doing odd jobs and so. And so, and she was just, I never saw, my memory of her she was very sad in those days and you’d, kids do pick that up of course

when a parent is upset. But as I said my Dad got a job again and that was that. But that’s all I remember of that.

I think the fact that he was always praising what I was doing. He took great delight in, when we had visitors

he would show the visitors what I had been drawing or painting. See, I was pretty good; I got a diploma in art too. So I was pretty good, at an early age in drawing and so. And I was absolutely mad on flying and I used to make models. Now in those days you didn’t have all these beautiful

boxes of plastics where you can stick them together. You had to make everything hand made and all we had was Balsa wood in various thicknesses and I used to glue them together with wood glue and then you had to cover them with kite paper, Chinese kite paper and paint it. And that’s how I made models of aeroplanes and he used

take great pride in showing friends my collection of model aircraft. And the other thing he took pride in, I had a very big collection of coins. And I had a lot of coins of VOC [Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie], that’s, the VOC was the Dutch East Indies Company

coins then they had (UNCLEAR) in Batavia. And the way I got onto those was by in Old Batavia they, Old Batavia was built by the Dutch in the 1600s and they had all sorts of moats there and all the canals and moats they were full of

silt and the silt was collected by Indonesian scavengers to see what they could find in it you see. They looked for old metal actually and in amongst that they often had coins and I used to buy those coins from them for the size, if it was the size of a cent, I gave them a cent and it was to them it was just copper

and that way, I went home and cleaned them with chemicals and I got a beautiful collection of Dutch coins. And I had them all in trays in a special cupboard and my Dad used to show that off. So he was very proud of me and gave me lots of encouragement. And took us out to places

during the holidays. We’d hire canoes and go canoeing on a lake and so he did his best. He was aware of the fact that through his job he was away half the time, see he was, one week he was home, came home at night and the other week he was away for the whole week at some plantation where he inspected the books of that particular plantation. And I think he found that

he preferred to be home so that he could see us. He did talk to us a lot and he always, he told me a lot about his early days and his war days because he was involved in World War 11 up to a point. He was studying dentistry at the university and then during the war,

World War 1 the university had their own regiment and his regiment which was the cavalry, they were stationed on the German border and that’s where he spent most of the war, guarding the border and I don’t know whether the Germans decided it wasn’t worth conquering it because World War 11 of course they

conquered the Dutch territory but they didn’t at that particular time, whether that was because they were guarded or what I don’t know. But he told me about those, that time too and the time he was a young boy, they had stories, which fascinated me, how they had a cart which was drawn by goats and

the kids were sitting in that, in a cart, they did those sort of things when they were little in the, well, that was the early 1900s.

Oh my father was very much, very, very Dutch in his and so was my mother. The royal family was

very important to them. And most of the Dutch actually were very royalistic. Oh, almost as bad as the English. And, but we had the advantage that the Royal family didn’t have quite as many scandals as although the husband of Queen Wilhelmina used to play up too,

history has recorded. But then they got, I remember in, when Princess Juliana, see, she had only one daughter, Queen Wilhelmina, and it was Princess Juliana and Princess Juliana, when she became engaged the whole of the Dutch East Indies went berserk and we had huge big

festivals everywhere and their wedding, everywhere the big buildings had J B on it, Juliana, Bernhard, that was Prince Bernhard. Who is still alive incidentally? And Prince Bernhard is now 93 I think, or 94. Julianna’s still alive too but she is with the fairies now. She lost, she got Alzheimer’s and she’s

completely out of the picture. But the family was always very royalistic and even in the former Dutch East Indies we always had a public holiday at the Queen’s Birthday and at Princess Juliana’s Birthday. They were big festivals and they had all sorts of occasions, balls and

celebrations. So yeah, that was always very much, the Dutch as I said were very royalistic, everywhere you saw the Dutch Queen as a picture in public halls and so on. So…

Oh yes, I myself too, you know

it was instilled in me the Queen was very important and she represented all the good things in government. And that’s how they were picturing it. And the Dutch royal family actually had a lot more influence than other royal families in the Netherlands. So they

did play an important part.

Yeah I, I suppose the first time I saw an aeroplane actually was in I think it was in

’30 or was it ’28 [it was 1930] and you know Kingsford Smith flew from England to Australia and when he, he landed in Batavia on a, in a paddock there, and that was, my father took me up there to see this aeroplane landing, so I saw Kingsford Smith landing in

Batavia. And he was refuelled from 44-gallon drums; they had a whole string of drums there. And he flew in a Fokker that was then, and that was the first time I saw this amazing thing coming out of the air with a lot of noise and landing and then, oh it was a great show. And then they, in ’33

they had the London to Melbourne Robinson Chocolate Air Race and that’s where I saw an aircraft called the Uiver, that was Uiver is actually the Dutch word for Stork and I’ll never forget seeing that because I was there when it landed to refuel. And the amazing

thing we saw, when we saw this silvery looking aircraft going at tremendous speed because we were used to seeing Dutch aircraft later on, the Dutch started a regular airline once a week from Batavia to Holland and it took six days in those days, amazing isn’t it? And we saw this aircraft coming and we thought it was a tremendous speed, I’ll never forget how fast

it was going and it was a DC2 you know and I think that they probably cruise at about 200 but that was my impression of it. And I got very interested then and I got a book on how to fly, a bloke by the name of Zimmerman, I still remember the book. And he showed how the controls run so I was a bit

of a handyman and in the back of the garden I had a bit of a big box which was built like a cockpit, with a stick in the middle and using the rudders and then the Dutch Government was calling for young men to join the Volunteer Flying

Corps they called it. And that was for young people to learn to fly. VVC [Vrijwilliger Vlieger Corps] it was called and that started operating in 1940, June 1940 and they bought a number of Bucker Jungmann, that was a German version of the Tiger Moth. And they were giving flying lessons

and I joined that organization. That’s where I got my first flight and controlled an aircraft and oh, I thought it was absolutely fabulous. And so I got this great interest in flying and of course the war interfered and I didn’t learn to fly but one of the first things when I went

to Cowra was join the Aeroclub and in ’51 I got my wings. And of all things that I’ve done in my life, all sorts of recreational activities, nothing has given me more pleasure than flying aeroplanes and doing aerobatics, especially in a Tiger Moth.

Well the first time, yeah the first time I actually heard anything well about Australia, it was of course in school in geography, we learned about Australia and my father had some business connections with

Australia and I used to get the stamps because I was a stamp collector too. He was a stamp collector and he introduced me to stamp collecting. And I did like the idea of seeing those stamps about Australia, then in history we also learned about, one of the first memories I had

that a bloke called Blaxland and Wentworth and somebody else [Lawson] they crossed the Blue Mountains and they were the big explorers. And then I recall the papers showing one of the latest greatest achievements in the world, the building of the Sydney

Harbour Bridge which, and that was featured. And little did I know that when we learnt about Wentworth and MacArthur and the family they had there, the family feuds and the contribution by the Wentworth Family, little did I know that there was going to be a day, that I give a, host a testimonial

dinner to Bill Wentworth in Warringah when he retired from government, amazing. But yeah my family actually has had a connection with the early history of Australia too because you recall the mutiny of the Bounty and

two of my ancestors, uncles of my grandfathers or great-great-great-grandfathers, brothers of them were VOC Captains, Dutch East Indies Company. And when Captain Bligh he sailed back to Timor, he went from Timor to Batavia and then in Batavia the survivors of the trip in the rowing boat went back

to Southampton on board of Dutch ships. And Captain Bligh was on board a ship called the Vlydte and that was captained by Captain Peter Couvret, one of my ancestors, so it’s quite remarkable. And I got excerpts of the log book of

Captain Bligh where he describes the crew and the seamanship of Captain Couvret and he reckoned he wasn’t much of a sailor because if on such and such a day he had set that sail and steered another 5 degrees east, north east then he would have made another 5 miles that day. So it’s absolutely amazing, but he was a top sailor of course Captain Bligh.

Yeah, we had at school of course, my best friend with whom I sat in the same bench or the same table at both at high school and

at the teachers’ college was a bloke called Joop ’t Hart and he was a fellow, a very enterprising young man who had lost a leg, he had been like we all did, we used to have bikes and there were trams in Batavia. And he used to hang on to, we all did that, hang on with one hand,

steer with one hand and with the other hand you, he had a free ride you see, especially going uphill that was always very easy. And he fell over and lost his leg. So Joop only had one leg but he coped with it extremely well. And one of my ambitions, I was a very good swimmer and so was he, was beating him in the 50 or the 100 metre, or the 200 metre and I never managed to beat him because he was such a good swimmer.

But he was also an extremely good friend and oh, we had very long discussions and both he and I took great delight in annoying the girls, that was a sport of course, it’s still a sport amongst young boys at high school if they’re in co-ed [co-educational] schools to annoy the girls. We used to intercept the little notes they had, all that sort of stuff.

And Joop also, he was very interested in the occult and he was a member of the Rosicrucians and we talked about that at great length. And the power of positive thinking and I think that was very important in, when I look back at my life, the

idea of positive thinking. Because I always, I still often think in my mind that’s negative thinking and the power of positive thinking helps you tremendously in tricky and dangerous situation. Now that was one very good friend, the other very good friend, a second very good friend was Gerard Adams; he was another classmate of mine.

And both Gerard and I, I was the editor of the school paper and Gerard looked after the business part of it you see. He was a bit of a businessman. And he later on became an engineer, a top man in Phillips in Eindhoven in Holland after the war. But Gerard and I had great fun too. We used to,

both he and I had an army. And when I say an army, it sounds crazy but that was one of the things we enjoyed ourselves with. You were able to buy little moulds and you melted lead and poured that in the mould and then you got a little lead soldier, which you then painted up. And there were all sorts of

moulds and we used to put them on the ground somewhere in a battle situation and then I was behind this line and Gerard was behind the other line and then you pelted with marbles in turn you had a shot you see and whoever shot most of them the, he was the winner. And I had great battles with Gerard, we had all sorts

rule which we made up by ourselves. But that is one of the enjoyable memories of Gerard and I kept corresponding with him all his life. And actually last year he died and I was asked to put a eulogy about Gerard in the Dutch, the Old Boys magazine. And then I had another very good friend

and he used to stay with us regularly but it was mainly because of my parents were good friends with them you see. And he was mad keen on making kites and I remember him as the champion kite maker and staying at our place and we had lots of fun.

Oh always, always Dutch yeah. But of course we were bilingual then already even as children because you spoke Malay to, with the servants, the servants were all, they didn’t speak Dutch, they spoke Malay, which is

not Bahasa Indonesia which is a new language actually, it’s a refined type of Malay. And they, so we all were bilingual. And the, at school according to the Dutch system, you can only get the High School Certificate if you were proficient in three other languages.

So you had the Dutch, then you had a French, German and English you had to have. So by the time you finished high school you had four languages, your own language, French, German and English plus the fact that we lived there so we spoke Malay as well. So I can still speak a little bit of Malay and I can still speak German, French I can understand if they speak slowly and I can make myself understood.

You know if you get out of practice, I suppose if I did a crash course, I’d be back in six months, go up to Macquarie [University] where they do special classes and I’d have no trouble with it.

Yes, I thought it would be

helpful, well, in life I think the major spin off is the fact that you learn there is other people and you get a wider perspective of the world by knowing other languages and when we were at school we didn’t only learn the language, you also had to learn a bit about their history and their art and

communities of how they lived, so it broadens your horizon. But then all these languages, when I finished up in Japan it didn’t help because the Japanese only speak Japanese and nothing else. But I remember I was a volunteer at the Olympic Games and the Paralympics and one of the reasons that I was picked was because I spoke these languages

and I hardly ever needed it at all. The only time the language – I remember we had an African and nobody could understand him and then I spoke a bit of French with him and then we knew what he wanted. And another one was a South American, I think came from Argentina, had lost

his spikes and nobody could understand him and then I tried German on him and lo and behold he spoke German, because his ancestors or his parents were probably Nazis who escaped to South America. People are, it’s interesting, especially when you sit in the train or the tram and you hear people talking to one another and

you know what they’re saying and they’re saying all sorts of things and quite confidential and if they knew that you could hear what they said. So I take great delight in saying goodbye to them when I get up out of the train or something. Oh yeah.

Yeah.

I think like most teachers’ colleges they give you very little training on what it is like to be in front of a classroom.

And I think I still found that as in my teaching career, especially when you get into, well, when you had your colleagues who came straight, when you get a new appointment at a school here in Australia. When they come to school they haven’t got a clue on how to handle situations as they arise in the classroom. And especially when you become

a subject master you spend half your time on teaching newly appointed teachers on how to teach and how to control a class. Some people do it automatically because they’re born teachers but there are a number of people who can become good teachers if they are taught by somebody on the ground and some of them are a

bad loss and give education a bad name. But I find that at the teachers’ college too, you know you get your education in the subject of education and you learn all about Froebel and Montessori and other educators, French educators of, and the theories

they had on how to deal with children and so and it’s all theory but in practise I didn’t find that very much assistance. Something, which I found useful, which we had, I don’t know whether they do it here. As a matter of fact I don’t think they do it in teachers’ colleges here, how to use the blackboard, writing on

the blackboard and using colour and drawing on the blackboard and I found that very helpful. Maybe because I was artistic anyway. But I found especially in the migrant centre when I started teaching here in Australia that was extremely helpful to teach kids. But apart from that, well I suppose one thing we had too,

because it was, the teachers’ college I went to was a Christian, it was nondenominational but it was Christian. It’s a bit like they have here in Australia; I don’t know whether you’ve heard of them? The Christian Covenant schools, they don’t push one religion in particular but we had that, we extended our knowledge on different religions at that teachers’ college that was

interesting because you know the teachers we were aiming, at in the Dutch system at the schools there you had as I said before we had the Dutch people, we had Indonesian people, we had Chinese people, we had Arabs, there were a number of Arabian students too on the schools. Because the Arabs seemed to control a lot of moneylenders

and so on in the Dutch East Indies before the war. Looking back at it, it certainly was helpful but not to the extent that you really learn how to teach.

Well, as a matter of fact that’s an interesting question because

my parents always asked, “What do you want to do?” like all parents, no matter where you go in the world they always ask, “What are you going to do when you leave school, when you leave high school?” And I wanted to be a doctor, I was keen on being a doctor and so my

father and mother used to play bridge every Saturday for years with a group of other Dutch people. And they used to go on Saturday night, that was the bridge night. And then we had a babysitter if they went to the other house and if they came to our place well you know we were able to stay up a bit. But one of those partners was the deputy principal

of the teachers’ college and Jan Haan was his name and Mr Jan Haan he said that he talked my parents and he said, “That boy is top material to become a teacher.” you know how teachers, good teachers can pick often,

“That boy’s going places.” “That girl is going to go a long way and ideal for this.” and he reckoned that I would make a very good teacher. And he convinced my parents of that and then I made an agreement with my father and mother that I’d first finish teachers’ college and when I finished that if I still wanted to go to university to become a doctor I could do so.

And well the rest is history, because the war….as a matter of fact I never even finished my teachers’ college final exams. It was the third year of teachers’ college and the exams were in December and I escaped the exams and I often think just as well because I wouldn’t have passed, I was playing up too much you see. I was very interested in going out and sport and I

was captain of the football team and captain of the water polo team. And sport was my life but not study but they gave it to me after the war, they gave me my teacher’s degree, everyone in our class got their teacher’s certificate, as a sign of goodwill I suppose. Well, we had had the training

anyway. So that’s how I became a teacher and not anything else.

Well, that’s a,

I think I was very energetic, particularly energetic and not particularly interested in girls. In those days we weren’t very interested in girls and the way young people these days are obsessed with sex and

nudity, that never occurred to me. We were more interested in showing off by smoking and drinking beer, see Indonesia was a very hot and muggy climate, especially in Batavia, that’s why so many Dutch people lived in the mountains because that was much more bearable. And, well, I suppose

I was keen to show off, when I say off we weren’t particularly interested, we did show off at times. I had a girl that I was very keen on and I used to ride up and down the street past her place, no hands on the, you know, your bike, no hands, just ride the bike like and

with a cigarette just to show off. So, but generally speaking it was, we sought, by company you wanted male company, you didn’t want to be seen with women, we were keen on motorbikes, very keen on motorbikes, yeah, yeah. The first motorbike I rode was an Indian, that was a motorbike they had before the war, Indians, handlebars

about that far apart with the, the gear was on the side of the petrol tank and, yeah, we were very keen on those things and playing Tarzan. That was in the days when Johnny Weissmuller made the first Tarzan film and I had neighbours and they had some very beautiful big trees, very similar to camphor laurels and we

rigged up big ropes in the trees and we swung from one limb to the other and my poor sister who, we manhandled her into the tree and she was Jane, it was crazy, no, we had a lot of fun.

Well, I think the, generally speaking the Dutch population in the Dutch East Indies didn’t pay much attention to a threat from Japan mainly because, you know, the Japanese we saw in Indonesia before the war, and they had a lot of

Japanese people who started businesses. Number one, they had barbers, barber shops, Japanese barber shops, they had photographic shops where you put your print and develop films and it was all boxed cameras in those days, the 120 with eight exposures on a film, and then they also

had a number of shops like where they had cheap clothing and cheap toys, cheap bicycles and that sort of shops. And most of those people were very, they were small little Japanese with heavy glasses and they didn’t look like superheroes or supermen at all. They were little

in stature, very obliging and didn’t have a high profile at all, they just stayed in the background very much. So that was the only contact we had with Japanese people. The equipment they sold, the films, they did that all right, the barber they gave you a good haircut. The stuff you bought in the shops like the cotton

shirts and singlets and so on, they fell apart after a few washes. The bicycles were very inferior, I had a Japanese bike one day and it just broke in half, so it all had a very poor reputation. And so we didn’t think that the Japanese, we knew they had started a war in

China but it was a long way away. Later on we found that the Japanese people who ran those shops all came back to Indonesia in officer’s uniform, we had a bloke, a Suzuki, Mr Suzuki in a place called Sukabumi, where my parents lived when the war broke out and

he had a shop there and he was, he came back as an officer which my sister met later on, after the occupation of the Dutch East Indies by the Japanese. The government did realise there was things happening because the government started, for instance,

that Voluntary Air League and also all schoolboys who were eighteen years of age in 1941, those who were school age during the big holidays the June, July/August holidays, we all

were, had to go and report and they gave us a uniform and we went to a place called Ambarawa and we were given elementary military training there like marching and we had rifle practise and they were aware that

they needed to do something. The government then tried to build up the army, they bought aircraft, and the navy of course was not controlled by the Dutch East Indies Government, the navy came straight from Holland and was still the Dutch navy. But the army was a special army

trained by Dutch people but it was half of it, or maybe three quarters was Indonesian people who were interested in joining the army because it was a good life there. They had good clothes and good pay, much better than they could earn otherwise. So the, and they tried to build up but

it was too late. Because by the time that they started to deliver fighter aircraft for instance they had a good navy but the navy had good aircraft, they had something like 60, I think it was about 25, 30 Dorniers and 30 Catalinas, I’ve got the exact figures down, but they had a good

area of flying boats which used to reconnaissance the islands in cooperation with the navy so they had that covered. But the army didn’t have any air force, well, they did have an air force but they had Brewster Buffalo aeroplanes, which were hopelessly outdated

American aircraft and they had orders for new ones, Kittyhawks and so on. But they arrived too late for the emergency when it arose at the end of ’41.

Oh yes,

we did have regular, very, see the main connection was by radio and that was published very regularly, we had the papers, we had full coverage, we knew what was happening in Europe. And it was absolute great dismay of course when in ’42 the,

No, not ’42, ’41 the war broke out in ’39 and in ’41 [actually 1940] the Germans invaded, overrun the Netherlands. So we suddenly lost the whole of the home country, although the government transferred to London and Queen Wilhelmina continued with her cabinet to run the overseas

possessions like the Dutch East Indies and the West Indies, she stayed in control with that. But so we knew all of that because most of the Dutch people were living in the Dutch East Indies had their relatives of course and their families were all living in the Netherlands. But the first part of the war after the terrible bombardment of Rotterdam by the German

Air Force, after that the Germans were more or less favourably disposed to the Dutch because they looked very much like Germans and they fitted in the Herrenvolk [Master Race] as they called it, the superior race of the Aryan Germans, and the Dutch fitted in nicely so they accepted them you see. Blonde and blue eyes

and tall and fair hair and that was all fitted in very well with the Germans. But then of course later on as the war got worse and worse and we still had the Underground, the people who was fighting the Nazis and things became much worse in Holland and by the end of the war the Netherlands were plundered

empty by the Germans. But we didn’t know anything about that. As a matter of fact from the time I became a prisoner of war that was the end of my contact with the rest of the world. Right from March ’42 onward we knew very little of what happened. The first time that we had an indication that something had happened in Europe was when we were in Japan on the

fifth of June, 1944 wasn’t it? The invasions, yeah because we saw Japanese newspapers and we saw, we didn’t get any newspapers but we found newspapers in the toilets, the Japs were very short of toilet paper too. And often the workmen, when they went to the toilet took newspapers with them to use as

toilet paper and when they were finished they threw the paper away. And they people who were, who picked up the paper, you found maps in there and we couldn’t read Japanese, but the maps, we knew our geography and we could see the map of Europe and all the arrows so we knew they had invaded and then so we followed the

proceedings or the progress of the war that way, the same as we followed the progress of the war in the Pacific. The Japanese always had great, on the wharf they had great celebrations of another victory and the first victories they had were in the Coral Sea and then it came into the Bismarck Sea and then they had big victories in Truk and then

another in Midway and then another big one at Saipan and we knew from our history, from our geography where these places were and we could see that the victories were coming closer and closer to Japan. And the greatest excitement was, was in, I think, the end of ’43 when we suddenly saw 6 American B29s high in the

sky flying over the, over the shipyard, with the ack-ack [anti-aircraft fire] going like mad and couldn’t reach them because they flew at 30,000, and the Japanese Ack-ack could only get up to 25,000. And that was tremendous for our morale and we knew that we were, well they were getting closer to our liberation as we hoped.

Yeah

Yeah

None of us, this was the declaration of war in Europe?

Oh, in ’39, well,

my parents always thought that they would eventually go back to the Netherlands but they stayed in the Dutch East Indies till we finished our schooling. Like many parents do, you know they wait till their kids have finished school and then they go back to wherever they came from. In a country town or something similar and we

had the same, my parents probably, I never discussed that issue to them but I would say that was the reason, see, my sister was two years younger than me and she, whilst I finished she was still at school and so when the war broke out in Europe, that put the spanner in the works. Actually my parents were due to go back to Holland

in ’39 for a year’s leave. And my Dad then said, “Oh, I don’t trust this Hitler, he could well start a war there.” And sure enough in October [actually September] ’39 the war broke out in Europe. And he said, “See, I did the right thing.” But he jumped from the frying pan into the fire because when the Japanese conquered

Indonesia he was taken prisoner because he was in a sort of Underground movement, which the Dutch had organised in case of Allied landings they wanted to protect the women and children against attacks by people who, Indonesians or whoever wanted to have a go at them.

And they wanted to protect them in case of the Allied landings when they were going to liberate the Dutch East Indies again. They, the Dutch always thought that the occupation of the Japanese was only temporary, they were going to, the Americans would come back and liberate them again. Of course the Americans never did that, they went to the Philippine Islands because that’s where MacArthur thought

he should get even with the Japanese. So that answers your questions? Yep.

Oh, I didn’t know anything about it, you see I saw my father for the last time. They lived, when the war broke out they were living in Sukabumi, which is a town in the mountains south of Batavia

And when I went to war the whole school, our whole class, all the men in the class, because it was general mobilisation of all the able-bodied Dutch people, and we were given an opportunity to go home and say goodbye to our parents so I went to Sukabumi and spent the

day with my parents. My mother was crying all the time and she wouldn’t come to the station to wave me goodbye. So she gave me a little New Testament and in it, in the front page she had written he that, in Dutch of course, “He that has a heart for God

in light days, will find the light of God in his heart in dark days.” And I thought, “That was very nice.” And I never realised how the truth of that, till a few months later when I was a POW. Anyway, my father went, he took me to the railway station and the last thing he said, “I hope you’ll

never do anything I’ll be ashamed of.” So yeah, that was a bit emotional. Yeah, well I don’t think I’ve ever disappointed him. So that was the last time I saw my parents and when I was taken prisoner…

Yeah.

Well, out, when the war broke out actually it started off we

were all put on a train and we went to a place called Bantun where we were put into barracks to be trained as soldiers. And we were in a large barracks and we were given a bag and we had to fill up our own bag with straw and that was for our sleeping. We had

marching and drill with wooden rifles, that’s how well prepared they were. And I said, “Oh, this is not for me.” So I volunteered, I made enquires and they said, “Yes, the navy was looking for volunteers. And with the fact that I could prove that I was a member of

the Voluntary Flying Corps, they said, “Okay, you can apply for the Fleet Air Arm.” which I did. And so on New Year’s Eve I went to Surabaya and the Dutch Navy had the rule that anyone who was going to be in the navy had to have two months of elementary training in navy procedures, rowing,

sewing, washing all these things which a normal boy wouldn’t know anything about. And we were sent to Surabaya and I did this 2 months training which stood me in very good stead later on in prisoner camp, because especially the sewing skills because we had to repair our own clothes all the time. And

as soon as that was finished, then of course we were going to start our flying training in the Flying School at Surabaya, but the whole flying school was unexpectedly shot up by Japanese Zeros who must have had a field day, all these unarmed aeroplanes flying around there. So that’s when they decided to send us to Australia to continue our

training.

No, none of, well when we were mobilised in Bantun for the first few weeks I think it started on the 15th, so we were only there for about 2 weeks. And there were some, oh, Joop ’t Hart

my best mate with one leg, of course he wasn’t involved they wouldn’t take him but Gerard was there and I can’t think of the others, whether they were there or not but I remember Gerard was there too. But then of course when I joined the navy I was on my own there and I made new friends with the team of 20 people because in the

navy you are divided in groups of twenty. And those twenty blokes who were all going to be or hoped to become cadet pilot officers or pilot officers. They finished up, some of them finished up with me in the same prison camp and

I still correspond with one of them, or two of them, one lives in Brisbane and the other one lives in Holland. I still correspond with them, amazing.

Yeah. Well, the training consisted out of a bit of marching, we learnt to do rowing, that’s a part of the training there, it a bit like rowing a surfboat, they were big boats and

they had to, I remember a hell of a job it was every now and again they give the orders, “Oars up.” and then you had to put the oars right up above you in a vertical position and they were big oars and pretty hard work. And blisters on your hands too because of the rowing in was fairly, you know we weren’t used to that sort of exercise. We

had shooting practice too, we learnt to handle rifles, we learnt about the procedures in the navy and we had medical teaching too, we were shown all the horrors of venereal diseases which in those

days they had no, very little medicine for you know if you had, if you copped VD [Venereal Disease] then the chances were that you were going to be a physical wreck for the rest of your life, especially syphilis, they had nothing for it in those days. So we were warned against that very severely and they showed us chemical warfare,

mustard gas was the thing and it was still a possibility an attack on ships by mustard gas so we learned to recognise that. And as a matter of fact when I saw the victims of the atom bomb in Nagasaki some of the burns looked very much like mustard gas burns and I thought originally that they had used mustard gas there in Nagasaki.

Because of what I saw there and these coloured pictures they showed us. And there was a lot of fitness training, gymnastics, gymnastics for half an hour, we had to stretch twice a day because not all boys were as fit as I was. And I had great trouble handling that. We had climbing, climbing way up

in the top of masts and so, which, well, I had no fear of heights but it was a big problem for some of the boys and there was no safety harnesses, if you fell off you were gone. So, well, all those things, especially the climbing was again very helpful when we started building ships in Japan when we had to climb on all the scaffolding on the side of the ship.

It was good that I had all that training of how to climb up boards and ladders and all that sort of stuff. So I thought it was a very thorough training. We had a skipper, what you call a drill sergeant, a skipper and he was an excellent bloke who really felt for his crew and that was

like a father to some of the blokes because most of them were 18-year-old boys and in those days an 18 year old was nowhere near as mature as an 18 year old that you find these days. So I found that very helpful.

I was 19. 19 and my birthday

was the 5th of June and I was a prisoner of war, well when I joined I was 19 and I was still 19 when I became a prisoner of war in March ’42.

That was in Surabaya.

Well Surabaya, I

have a photo I think of the Goebeng, what they call barracks. And they were stone masonry buildings with tiled roofs, we were sleeping in bunks, double bunks and they had a big mess room

where we were fed very well, it was excellent food, that was one of the envies of all military forces, the navy used to get better food than the army, by a long way. And that was one of the attractions of joining the navy, you got fed a lot better. And well there was a parade ground of course where we did our

marching and a sort of a gym where they had all the ropes for climbing, big solid ropes and yeah, I remember because of my gymnastic prowess I used to be able to get between two ropes and go up hand over hand and pull myself up to the ceiling. And then you learned also how to climb if you couldn’t pull yourself up,

using your feet as well. It was all good training and I don’t think we had any, yeah we had a little bit of combat training too, that’s right in hand to hand combat we had that too on mats and so. Yep. And …

Oh, excellent.

And yeah, the, you know we did as we were told. And the skipper he used to be very colourful in his criticism and if he started swearing at you, it was a delight to hear it, he never repeated himself. I often think Dutch sergeant

majors and drill sergeants are much colourful than Australians because if Australians do that, every fourth word is an F word, but the Dutch don’t do that, they don’t repeat themselves and they’ve got very colourful language, especially in the navy. Yes it’s funny to think of that but it was, but the discipline was good and

I can’t recall anyone even getting into serious trouble. I think the worst thing you could do is not reporting into base before, if you were late for reporting, if you had leave, shore leave as they call it till 8 o’clock and you arrived at five past eight you were in trouble and you were put on report and you were on home duty for a week,

that was about all but no (UNCLEAR).

Yeah, I didn’t have any problem with being told what to do, I could see it was a team effort and

I was always impressed with team effort and well I could accept it, I used to be, well I captained soccer teams, water polo teams, handball teams and I knew if people did as you asked that was always for the better of the team so no, I had no great difficulty.

The difficulty taking orders came when the Japs started to order me around, yeah.

Yeah.

Well the, it’s still, it’s the same here in Australia as a matter of fact the navy has their own air training and although I don’t know whether the elementary training is for the navy here now. But we had, they were totally autonomous

they had nothing to do with the air force at all and they were trained as, you walked around in a sailor’s uniform and the only way you could tell that you were in the Fleet Air Arm because you had a half wing or a full wing on your uniform. And that was indicating where you were serving, like

that was on the chest, on the arm you also had, you could see the same as they have most navies, you can see whether a bloke is in the engine room or he’s working on torpedoes or whether he is working on the guns, you can tell by the emblem on the shoulder. So there was no connection between, except that

we all flew aeroplanes. And the aeroplanes which the navy were concentrating were mainly flying boats of course, the only time you used a land base aircraft was when you were in the Elementary Training and they used Orions for that, which was then an advanced aeroplane but the navy they started with Orions

on the land and then you got Orions with floats under it. And an Orion with wheels is a hard aeroplane to handle; with floats it becomes almost impossible. But that’s what the navy did.

No, no, we didn’t, well you know we were based there on the land and

I was going from there straight onto the flying but we didn’t have an aircraft carrier at that stage, the Dutch Navy didn’t have them, that was actually one of the big outcomes of World War 11, the big development of carriers, the Japanese knew about it and the Americans had a few aircraft carriers and they became

the major, the major air, as far as navy was concerned, the major weapon aircraft carriers with plenty of support from other surface aircraft, surface ships but in those days they didn’t have any aircraft carriers and so we were looking for flying boats.

Well, it was tropics, so it was white. And white trousers, and they were ordinary trousers; nice fitting trousers with a jacket and then you had a big V open shape and they had a little, sort of a little

small apron which fitted underneath it with the blue and white lines. And you had a cap on your, naturally your head and a nice looking cap and which we always tried to give a little bit of a tilt to turn on the girls and which the, when you left the base the

bloke at the guardhouse would always say, “Get back and get your hat properly.” and you had to put it on with very little tilt, you were allowed a little bit of tilt but not too much. Yeah, it’s funny days. I’ve still got photos of; I’ve got plenty of photos of myself in navy uniform, both in, that was in the tropics of course. But when I came to Australia later, in the winter it all turned to

navy blue. And it was a very smart uniform actually, it looked pretty good, very, a bit similar to the Americans except they wear the silly looking hats, the caps there, but which are very popular with the girls again but I thought our caps looked much nicer.

Yes, they had, and long white socks and white shoes, yeah, yeah, yeah that’s right. And you had to wipe those shoes all the time, what a cow of a job. Because you know the white they had in those days wasn’t as good as the whites you buy now. I still use whites for my golf shoes now. Yeah, but for going out

you often had the long pants. Here in Australia for instance, our navy summer uniform was long pants, yeah.

Gerrit Bakker, I don’t know where Gerrit Bakker came from actually. I met him in Surabaya and he was, I think he was a fitter and turner, I don’t know whether he was a fitter and turner then, certainly in prisoner camp he landed the job of

fitter and turner which was a fabulous job because you were working indoors all the time you see. And he was very good at it and a lot of the Japanese used to give him the difficult jobs to do. So that was Gerrit and the same with Paul van Apenhauser, we called, it was a very long name,

the Dutch are very great in giving people nicknames so we called him Apey, Apenhauser sort of became Apey and I don’t know where Apey actually came from. I know he finished up in finance here in Australia but I don’t know where they actually came from but, you know, you didn’t ask people

when you were in, joined the army, “What’s your background?” You accepted people on face value and if they were good company you teamed up with them and you went on shore leave together.

No, they were all Dutch, we didn’t have, no we didn’t have any other. I think the navy was very, although they had, no they had quite a number of Eurasians and I think they, I’m pretty sure they had Indonesian people there as well. But,

Well, I didn’t mix very much with them. I can’t recall any out of my navy days of any Eurasian people I associated with at that stage. I remember them from high school and teachers’ college but no, none in the navy.

I didn’t do any because as I said, we were due to start in the 1st of March because the training was finished in Surabaya and the Flying School was shot up at the end of February, so there was no aeroplanes left and so

they, we didn’t even had briefings or anything. And I went straight to Tjilatjap, that was the harbour in the southern part of Java after we finished our training actually to go and board a ship to go to Australia.

The Morokrembangan Flying School, well I was in the Goebeng Barracks. The Goebeng Barracks were in a separate part of the, in Surabaya, it was separate from the

Flying Base. It was actually the marines’ barracks. And marines are the ones that train raw recruits, that still happens everywhere I think and it still happens in Holland now. The marines are the ones who train raw recruits but I think their training would probably take more than two months. But it was an emergency so they had to do everything in double time.

Oh yeah, we knew of course because you know we met after, when you had shore leave you mixed in the hotels and bars where you went, or the restaurants where you went for a meal and so we heard

all about the actual drama they had down there. And we ourselves we had, I remember one occasion when we were all going on a shooting practice and all of our elementary school, they all went to the shooting range

outside and whilst we were there, there was an air raid by Zeros and bombers who bombed Surabaya. And some of the Zeros came over and were strafing and oh, it was general panic there. And that’s the first time I actually heard the aerial combat and was the tat,

tat, tat, tat, as a matter of fact, the shots then had a much longer interval than what they have now. They couldn’t shoot at the rate of a thousand bullets a second, they can do now. But, and we had a number of air raids since. And whenever there was an air raid we had to go into the air raid shelters in

the Goebeng Barracks, they had trenches and we all had to go in the trench with our helmet And I remember the major worry was no bombs coming down but the shrapnel from the anti-aircraft which explodes and that comes down of course. And I nearly got

hit by one of those, it came just past me, it zoomed past me and buried in the ground, a bit, shard of metal. And some of the boys, one of the boys got hit and it made a hole in his helmet but it saved his life anyway. So that was one of the major worries but we didn’t have any actual air attacks on our barracks so we were lucky in that respect.

But we knew things were serious and of course we knew from the papers too that you know we heard about the fall of Singapore and we knew that they were coming down and then they had landed in Sumatra and then they came and they had occupied parts of Sulawesi and then of course they had the landing ships which landed in

Java. And that’s when the navy decided it’s time to evacuate personnel if we could to continue the fight from Australia.

Yes, we were allowed to write

and I used to get letters from my parents, they knew I was in Surabaya and I had an uncle, one of my Dad’s brothers was an engineer and he was in charge of the dry-dock in Surabaya so I visited him sometimes. And he was one of the people who got away actually from Surabaya. And he then became,

he worked on the dry-dock in Durban in South Africa during the war. But no, we had mail which it came, it travelled fairly slowly because it had to go through the navy censorship too, because we weren’t allowed to write anything about your, what it was like there, so you could just tell them about you felt

okay and all that sort of stuff. But I did get some letters. But then after that, I didn’t even have a chance to, well, maybe if I did write and mailed it somewhere; my parents never knew what happened to me. They heard there was a

report over the radio with a list of names of people who had landed in San Francisco on a transport ship and my name was on that but how that happened I don’t know because I never went to San Francisco. So that was a mistake, but as far as my father and mother, they knew what happened to me. And my mother

often, from what I heard from my sister was often talking about, “I wonder what happened to Paul?” And she never knew that I was still alive. And she had actually given up by the time she died, she, no. My sister said that she thought that she had, that I’d probably died somewhere during the war.

For my parents? Yes, oh yes, yeah, yeah. And, well she finally gave up actually in; she was deteriorating because of the malnutrition for such a long time, had she known that the war was going to finish in

a fortnight’s time, she died on the 29th of July, ’45. Had she known the war was going to finish a fortnight later she probably would have pulled through. But I saw that right throughout my time in prison camp, as soon as a bloke gave up the spirit and the will to live he was gone. It was just a matter of mind

over matter and if you were convinced that you were going to make it you were. But if you gave up then that was the end of your survival.

Well that was in Surabaya and the first things I did, I knew my uncle lived there and so I went to see him and his wife who was most appreciative that I was coming down but then I you know I also of,

from my other mates who went to pubs and restaurants of the fun they had down there, telling jokes and drinking beer, so I then went and joined them. I made, I’d rather go and join them than see my uncle and his aunt, as nice as

they were to me. And there was a lot of rivalry actually between the navy and the army and the air force personnel and it became so bad that some of the pubs were declared off limits for the navy because they had had too many fights.

And we were involved in several, well, I took part in some of the brawls they had between the army and the navy. And we used to be issued you with gas masks you see. We were not allowed to go ashore, out of the base without your gas mask, everybody carried a gas mask. They came in big tin or aluminium tins

about that round and they had a big strap on them and they were big weapons, you could wheel those and land that on somebody’s head, you’d knock them out. They were a favourite weapon and when you came back to the base, they inspected them to see whether there was any dints in it. And then you had to explain how the dint got in there, oh. But, so there was plenty of fight in them, but

this has happened, that doesn’t happen only in Australia, apparently what I hear the same thing happened with Australian ex-servicemen in places where they were in operations, that they were fighting, air force was fighting the army and that sort of thing happened, quite remarkable you know.

Oh, usually fighting about somebody

insulting someone, you know, having something to say about their uniform or women, they were fighting about the same women they wanted or somebody insulted somebody’s girlfriend and he’d take offence and knock the other bloke, and as soon as a navy bloke knocked, had a fight with an army bloke all the other navy and all the other army blokes joined in and on was

the fight there with tables and chairs being smashed up, oh it was crazy, absolute crazy but that’s what happened yeah, sometimes.

Oh usually it didn’t last very long because the MPs would come, the Military Police, they were patrolling these places and they had hotlines with the

MPs or they were on the premises behind the bars and they’d just suddenly appear and that was the end of it so it never amounted to people getting seriously hurt, not as far as I know, but yeah. And then of course we had, I suppose it was the fight that was which was in them and they were being trained

to fight and when the enemy turned up there was very little fighting because they, as far as the navy was concerned, well we had a terrible fight as far as the surface ships was concerned because the Battle of the Java Sea was absolute disaster for the Dutch navy. They lost three cruisers and I think six destroyers and it was a

massacre of the Dutch navy. And the Exeter went, the Houston went, the Perth went, the Yarra, it was a big victory for the Japanese.

Yeah.

I think very much similar. They began to realise that Java was going to fall and a lot of, especially navy

personnel, you know they had ships and motor torpedo boats and aeroplanes and they decided that they’d try and get out before, they couldn’t do anything any more there. There was no opportunity, the ships, a lot of ships were sunk and they tried to get away. And I think the Dutch Navy

the senior officers there played a very questionable role there because instead of getting the fighting personnel to Australia so they could continue to fight against the Japanese, they chose to take their wives and children and a lot of the

Dorniers and Catalinas and Lockheed Lodestars were used to cart personnel to Darwin and Broome. Well, first Darwin and after Darwin became a target for the Japanese because the Japanese didn’t want that to happen then they went to Broome. And that’s why I didn’t get on one of those because

I had to go to Tjilatjap and board a fifteen thousand tonner, the Tjisaroea and where they put 400 navy personnel on board and wished us luck. And there were a number of ships and they went in three directions, some went to, went straight

for South Africa, others went for Ceylon and others went for Australia. And our captain decided to go for Fremantle and we survived two nights there. We fully, well, we had been told there was a good chance that you’d get torpedoed but, “If you want to come with us, go.” So we walked and slept

with safety vests all the time because we were expected to be torpedoed but after two days at about 11 o’clock we were called on the foredeck and there was a speech from the bridge, it said, “Men, if we make this day unhindered, we’ll be in Fremantle in two days.” And about 2 o’clock on the horizon appeared a Japanese float

plane, which kept a safe distance, circled around us and then disappeared again. And two hours later we saw some white spots on the horizon and we thought, “Hey, these are probably Indonesian praus [boats], say fisherman.” And as we were appearing and waiting we suddenly saw that that white had a centre in it and it happen to be the bow

waves of cruisers and destroyers which were coming towards us at full speed. Well they surrounded us and with all the guns trained on our ship and the captain decided not to give battle. We had one three inch gun on the aft deck, but fortunately he didn’t open fire, otherwise we would have been drilled into

smithereens. And so they sent a, they stopped the ship and they sent a prize crew on board. The first thing they did was haul back the Dutch flag, hoisted the Japanese Rising Sun flag and they put a crew on board. And then life just continued as we were whilst the ship set course to Strait

Lombok and we went through Strait Lombok, which is between Bali and Lombok. And that’s where some people, I nearly jumped ship then because we had a number of people who decided that they’d jump overboard and swim to Bali or Lombok, to the nearest shore. But what I didn’t know then, that,

there is a very strong current going through there. And they had it all organised, they had theories, with their vest and they had the gas masks sealed off and they knew I was a good swimmer so they wanted me to come with them and that was in the evening, they were going to swim across. Well I didn’t

make it, I didn’t join their, and just as well because those, the three blokes who jumped were never heard from them again. So we were then landed a day later at Macassar.

Oh, the Battle of the Java Sea? Oh yes we knew we had lost a lot of ships there, yes. The news spread, you know the Kortenaer, the Van Ghent, the De Ruyter, all those ships, we knew because they had informed the wives of some of the blokes who were

lost on those ships, were there. And so that was, it wasn’t official, there was no great announcement made but you know the part of it was of course unofficial and nothing worse than the rumours which fly around when you get a lot of servicemen together.

What they call the news by the wind, they called it.

No I don’t think there was any real panic, it was more everyone for himself. There was very little general direction although they told us, our whole group, our Flying School, we all went

on the train to Tjilatjap but even, and we only travelled during the night because in the daytime we were too much exposed to attack from aircraft. And then in the harbour itself there were a number of ships and some of the ships made it, some of them of course didn’t and were subsequently

either torpedoed or with great loss of life or were taken prisoner. I think there was only two ships actually they took, there was our ship and another ship called Duymaer van Twist and those two ships were taken to Macassar.

Yeah, well I think we, it was the more adventurous, we were given a choice

you see, go on board this ship or join officer so and so who is going into the mountains to continue to fight against the Japanese in guerrilla warfare. And, well, as far as I was concerned, that going to fight in the jungle that didn’t attract me very much. And I thought I’ll take a chance

and this seems to be the better alternative. And that’s what most of us thought, be, we were all fully prepared to save our lives, that’s why we took up position, we weren’t going in the ship we were on the back of the ship on, near the lifeboats and that’s where we decided, there were floats too, they had floats on board and we

were going to hang onto a float in case the ship was going to be torpedoed. That’s what we did then.

No.

Oh well, we, I don’t think I felt any particular

fear of it. We were very optimistic, we were young people and you had not much fear. I don’t think there was any, I never felt frightened of that opportunity and I knew I was a good swimmer so I thought I’d survive that and we’d be picked up afterwards. We never heard, we didn’t know at that stage that the Japanese never, they did

actually pick up some survivors but we never knew anything about all the atrocities of machine gunning survivors in the water and all that sort of stuff.

Yeah

well as I said the, at about 1 o’clock we saw this Japanese float plane flying, he had spotted us and he was flying around. We had two 20-millimetre machine guns on the bridge and they were manned and were going to shoot it down which would have been useless anyway because he had probably already radioed to the mother ships

where he was. And he circled around a few times and then disappeared. I don’t know whether he signalled to the radio operator on board the ship, but he disappeared over the horizon and then, two hours later we were approached by these ships and

Oh, about 2 hours.

Yeah, I think it was about 4 or half past 4, so they couldn’t have been very far away at that stage.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, well we thought,

“Gee, that floatplane, you know, it must be from another ship.” and we thought, “Maybe we can outrun the warships because it’s a long way away from it and we can get to Australia before we are intercepted.” Which was, of course, you know the speed of that ship was about 10

knots and the Japanese destroyers were probably doing 30 knots so that was very naïve thinking that that was possible. Well forever hopeful yeah.

Well, when we saw these ships coming by and then particularly when one big cruiser was lying alongside,

it was only a few hundred metres away and we saw these Japanese on this big cruiser with the Japanese lining the railing all looking at our ship. And you know that was a pretty, we said, “God, this is the end of our fighting; we are prisoners of war now.” And it was a very low

time in my life to become suddenly to, and especially of Japanese, they were an unknown quantity, they didn’t know how they were treating us and we found out the next few days on the trip to Macassar we had these Japanese sailors on board and they were pretty pleasant blokes, nice blokes, they didn’t speak a word of English but they wanted to

pay us in yens for watches and gold rings and they were very pleasant. Sailors against sailors are always much more friendly than soldiers from different nations when they meet one another, that’s something universal too apparently. And we thought, “Oh well it’s not quite that bad.” But boy, when we reached the shore

in Macassar and we met our first Japanese soldiers, that was a different story. We woke up very quickly what we were dealing with.

Oh it was absolute, we were absolutely downhearted, yes,

we thought we were going to make it and being able to continue fighting and be in a free country and suddenly to become prisoner is a pretty horrible realisation. And that was everyone felt absolutely downhearted, yeah.

Well, the CO [Commanding Officer] got onto the radio and he told us what was going to happen. That we, they were going to take us somewhere. See, our immediate reaction

when we were taken prisoner, we didn’t know what the Japanese were going to do. We didn’t know whether they were going to, we knew they weren’t going to sink the ship, they were going to take it because otherwise they would have sunk it before. But what were they going to do with us, were they going to make us jump overboard and then machine gun us or were we allowed to stay there. So we were very relieved when we

got the crew going, well, it was the same crew of course but the prize crew were supervising, made sure that they kept the right course. And we were relieved to that extent that we were still, we didn’t have to jump the ship and jump in the sea.

At the ship, taking the, of taking over with the prize crew? No, we were being escorted by a destroyer too. So there was no, yeah that was discussed. We’d knock off the prize crew but they were armed and they had the destroyer there with them

so it was useless to do that. So we survived so far, so we weren’t going to jeopardise our survival after that. And our next thought was, “Okay, they’re taking us to Macassar, we’ll be in there for a few months and then the Americans will retake the former Dutch East Indies because it has rubber and

oil reserves which the Americans need too.” Because that’s what the Japanese wanted of course.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh I had a couple of times contact with them. They came to us as a little group and I

wanted to, one of them handed out a cigarette to one of my mates, Jan ve Baan was his name and so we started talking and then he wanted to trade watch, he wanted to pay yens and we thought, “Yens, that’s no good to us.” If he had had guilders he might have been

able to sell it but no, we didn’t want any of that. And so I don’t think anybody had a chance to, and as a matter of fact one, I had contact with one Jap and you know we had a pieces of paper and a pencil and he wanted to know what I was you see

and so I drew an aeroplane and he said, “Oh yeah, good, good, good.” And then I drew a picture of him and a woman and children asking him whether he had kids and oh yes, he had two kids and he was married and so it was all very friendly and you know very entertaining and but so boy did we get a

change of scenery when we went to Macassar.

Well we were put ashore on the quay and the whole of the harbour, all the warehouses were destroyed because the Dutch believed in, they had learned from the Germans, the scorched earth policy, so they’d blown up all the warehouses and set them alight. And

we arrived there and we had to disembark and line up and we were handed over by the navy to the army and they were Japanese soldiers in their uniform with their putties and little caps and all with rifles and sticks and it was all “Kura, kura, kura, buggaro [bakayaro?].” and the swearing they

had and everything had to be done on the double and if you weren’t running fast enough they put the butt of a rifle in your ribs. And then we had to march from there to the jail, to the Macassar, there used to be a jail there. And they had cells, big communal cells of for twenty people with it was just a big cell

with a big window on top there. And a bunk about that, well it was just one continual bunk about that high off the ground. And it was only enough for twenty people. They put sixty of us in one of those and as a toilet they had a big barrel and that was the toilet. And they put us in that and for food we got

one day, once a day we got a ships biscuit, a real hard ship, that’s the emergency ration which they had pulled out of lifeboats. And they put us in there for the next three weeks and that was more or less solitary, well not solitary, it was 60 people in one of those

and you can imagine, you know, there was no room for 60 men to sleep so we had a roster of eight hours on the bed, you could lie down for eight hours and then you had to stand up the rest of the time, or sit on the edge, or sit on the floor. But of course the big barrels for the toilet, that was totally

inadequate and they began to overflow so we were just in the whole floor was running over with urine and muck and that took nearly a week before we finally could convince the Japs that those big barrels had to be emptied at least three times a day. So that’s what they

did then and it made it a bit better. And then they also allowed us later on for a wash and that was a fire hose, there was no showers, well there were not enough showers there so they just put us in the shower recess and put the fire hose on us to well give you a bit of a wash and there was no towels,

nothing, but you dried yourself and put your clothes back on and that’s how we spent the first three weeks there and we thought, “Oh gee.” we felt weak with hunger, you know we were used to normal proper meals and to suddenly be reduced to one big biscuit. It’s like a cracker; you know the big Arnott’s crackers they used to have on the market but much, a bit thicker and much harder.

And so we got dizzy with the hunger, if you suddenly don’t eat. And then toward the end of three weeks I think they started to bring in some rice. And it was burned rice from the docks and the Japs said, “Well, you burned it, so it’s your fault, but you can have

this.” So we ate some of that and then they decided that there was a better place to put us in because they realised it was hopelessly overcrowded. And incidentally the population outside, the Indonesian population in Macassar were mainly Buginese and Buginese didn’t like the Dutch at all

because the Buginese are the, they were actually amongst the best seafarers in Indonesia but they were also the people who were doing all the, they were the what do you call the people who rob ships?

Pardon.

Pirates, yeah that’s right. The Buginese and they’re still pirating at the moment. If you’re

in Australia and you want to go through the Straits of Celebes you’re warned against doing that because the pirates are still there. And the Buginese had been chased and punished by the Dutch on a number of occasions so here was their opportunity to get even. And they were outside the jail and having demonstrations and they wanted, they were yelling in unison, “Cut their heads off, cut their heads off

Poton combala, Poton combala.” they were yelling and we could hear that. But to the credit of the Japanese, they dispersed them, they just fired a few shots over them and said, “Get going.” and so that protected us from having our heads cut off by the Indonesians. Anyway, after a few weeks they finally decided to transport us to another camp and that used to be a camp which

was, that was the training school for Indonesian future crew for the Dutch KPM [Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij] ships, that was the Royal Packet Company, that was Dutch company which had 200 ships which were small and larger freighter which traded all around

the islands in the former Dutch East Indies. And they were crewed by mainly Indonesian crews and they had that training in that particular camp. And that was taken over by the Japanese and they put about 3,000 POWs in there.

Yeah

Well, the Japanese were telling everybody. Well, inside the room the senior officer was, he took command and

so it worked automatically there was never any argument on who was in charge and it was always the officer of the highest rank. And if it was two officers of the same rank the one who was senior, who had the, there was never any of the ratings who decided who was going to be the boss. So that

worked out, there was no problem with the discipline.

We did have some Dutch people who had a sprinkling or could speak proper Japanese. And we had one bloke,

I don’t know how he learned Japanese, Budding was his name and he spoke reasonably good Japanese and he became the interpreter so and there were some Japanese officers, who had a sprinkling of Japanese as well,

of English so but generally speaking it was always a major problem when a Japanese soldier or guard said something to you, you didn’t understand you know. We learned certain commands like kiotsuke, that means stand at attention and that was one thing, as soon as they did that we learned that. And one of the hardest things for the Europeans was to

get, if you saw a Japanese you had to salute, well that was all, we could do that, well, if you didn’t have a hat then you had to bow at them you see. And we did not realise that as far as in Japan everybody bows to one another and even if you meet your good, your best friend, when you see him you don’t say, “Hello Bill.” you bow to him you see and the more

you respect him the deeper you bow. And to a European to bow to somebody, that’s a sign of submissiveness and you only bow to God, you don’t bow to another person like a lowly Japanese but we soon learned that it’s easier or much less painful to bow to

the Japanese rather than get a punch in the face.

Well, whenever everybody played up or didn’t do as they were told they worked on them, they kicked them, they punched them and they used the, frequently the butt of their rifle because their arms were never far away. And that was the best part for them

because you don’t hurt your hand and they used that. But we quickly learned that when a Jap punched you it was better to just fall over and roll on the ground because then you only had one punch you see. He wouldn’t continue, he’d say, “Well, I knocked him down.” If you stood up to it,

well then he would keep punching and you might lose teeth or get injured worst so it was better to roll with the punches as they say.

Oh that was a big improvement because we had much more room. The Japanese were at that stage wondering what they were going to do with us I think. And we had barracks, they had large barracks, they had dwellings for the higher ranked people and

they were tiled floors. We had regular meals, breakfast, lunch and tea and that was, whilst it was mostly burned rice, there was plenty of it and we supplemented our food by trading with the Indonesians over the

fence. So you had a piece of paper and, or you talked to somebody you say “Are you there, are you there, what’s your name.” “Oh, my name is.” say, “Bill. And what’s your name?” “Oh, my name is Soho.” “Oh good. Soho, could you buy something for me?” “Well, throw over the fence your order and your money

and I’ll deliver it when it’s dark tonight.” And that’s how it worked. So it went entirely on goodwill, you threw, you put a piece of paper with a banknote over the fence with the name on it and it went up there and then the following evening you’d go up there and you’d call and, “Yes, yes in there.” and then over it came

and you have done some extra food like sugar or cigarettes or, chocolate became very scarce but was mainly cigarettes and sugar and tea and coffee we were very keen on. So you supplemented your food with that and a lot of the boys had a fair bit of money with them. The Japanese of course were

patrolling that but it was a very large compound and they didn’t have too much of a chance to patrol it all the time and there were always gaps in there. So that’s how you supplemented your food. Plus the fact that after a while, after the first few weeks they started to call for volunteers to go on working bees

and they used to bring trucks into the camp and then a team of POWs, say 10 or 20 in a truck with a Japanese, a couple of Japanese guards, soldiers and they took us to the wharfs, all the destroyed wharfs. And we had to shovel all the debris into the trucks which was then dumped somewhere

into the sea to make an artificial reef or extra land and clean up the dockyards. Now what we found is that underneath the collapsed buildings, half burned, they had lots of piles of tinned fruit, tinned meat and tinned meat and vegetables and all sorts of food. And whilst they had been burned

and you could see the tin had been exposed to great heat because it was all bulging when you put your pick through it and tasted it, it still tasted perfectly. So we, it became very popular to go up there and we used to fill our canteens with extra food, so if you wanted a good feed you went to one of these trips. And it was strictly illegal by the Japanese but they couldn’t be everywhere so

that’s how we supplemented a lot of our food.

Yeah, they were very downhearted, they, but our

belief was that it would be only temporary, nobody thought that it would be a very long period because we thought that the Americans would come and reconquer, reoccupy the former Dutch East Indies. And they thought that was only a matter of months so it was only a temporary arrangement and but we had to make the best of it until then.

And we kept our, we tried to keep our mind off it by singing sessions, we had singing sessions and playing cards, there’s always somebody had a pack of cards or they played bridge and the Japs didn’t stop us from singing there in that jail because Japanese like singing actually. It was only in

Japan that we weren’t allowed to sing any more because the war was a serious business and they didn’t want to hear us enjoy ourselves while we were singing.

Oh all sorts of dirty navy songs and every military has dirty ditties and we had them too. And also a lot of Dutch patriotic

things, you know ‘I love Holland’ and ‘Tulips’ and ‘Amsterdam’ and all that sort of stuff. There’s a lot of songs, see, the Dutch at schools, at primary school they start singing a whole series of songs which every Dutchman when you get them together even now, if you go to a Dutch club, they’ll break out in song every now and again and everybody knows the words because,

so we had plenty of singing and Dutch are pretty keen on singing, yeah.

Yeah.

I had a fountain pen and a

silver pencil pen, you had these rotating ones you used to buy in those days, that was two things I had and that was about the and my mouth organ I took that with me too.

And I had very, I had a bit of money but it was only

a few dollars you know, I went in there as a sailor and they weren’t loaded with money, so I didn’t have very much money with me but, so, and that ran out fairly quickly but that was about as far as I remember the only personal effects I had, yeah.

Well we were wearing our, the navy

clothes we were taken prisoner in but of course after working on the shipyards there, not the shipyard, the quays loading rubbish and shovelling debris all day, they wore out fairly quickly. And when the Japanese had the big muster when they picked out a thousand navy personnel to go to Japan

in October they issued us all with a new set of clothing and that was the Indonesian sailor’s uniforms, all cotton, and very light cotton too, it was all for tropical stuff. And that’s all they gave us to go to Japan and in Japan of course we faced the winter.

So we had, but clothing in Macassar wasn’t a major problem really because you know it was a very tropical climate there and it wasn’t cold so it didn’t worry us, but in Japan of course clothing became a major issue. How to keep warm in winter.

Yes, we had different jobs there. The favoured one was, I always tried to get into the working bees at the quays in the former harbour because, as I said before, we had

an opportunity to get extra, scrounge extra food. But another thing they used us for, sometimes we were in small groups, were set to do gardening in the Japanese, in the homes the Japanese had set up as brothels and they had usually Eurasian women in there, who spoke Dutch of course. And

it was forbidden to talk to them but every now and again we had an opportunity to speak to them and ask them news, “What’s the news? Where are the Americans? How long do you think it will be before we get liberated?” And we tried to, every now and again they threw us some cigarettes and so because they knew cigarettes were extremely short amongst the POWs. So that was

another job we did. That was mainly the jobs, well, I was involved in. I don’t there were very…yeah well there was another working bee, the Japanese camp commander, he decided that he wanted to pick coconut trees at the entrance of the camp.

So he decided they had to dig two big holes and then they had to dig out two coconut trees, full grown coconut trees and transplant them in the holes at the entrance of the camp, crazy idea you know but I heard later on that

in Fukuoka, in Kyushu that is a national sport to plant big poles, they are planted in a hole and straightened up and then somebody’s got to climb to the top. There’s two teams and whoever does that, gets to the top of one of them first is the winner. And that’s apparently a sport and I think that’s where that originated from, this bloke done that before so he thought you can do that with coconut trees.

So you can imagine what a job that was for the POWs who were involved in that job of trying to transplant a coconut tree. But they carried the whole coconut tree with the bottom part was of course was where the roots all are, that was the heaviest part but they managed. And then they planted the trees and with ropes they hoisted them up and patted it down and both trees of course died

after it but that’s another story. They had to water them and all but they didn’t do it but that was one of the crazy ideas the Jap guards got up with in Macassar. So the yeah that was about all the working bees. I told you about the food but we found all sorts of things. At one stage we came across a lot of eggs and the eggs were still

good and we all, we used to try and smuggle cans of food and anything edible into the camp. Then every now and again the Japs would search us you see and one day they searched us and we were loaded with eggs, we had eggs in our pockets, eggs in our caps and so they thought, “We’ll punish these blokes.” So the team of 20 of that

particular truck which had the eggs, in full view of all the other POWs, they had to stand in two lines of 10 facing one another, about 10 metres away and they had to pelt the eggs and one another and they smashed them up that way. And that wasn’t, well it was pretty messy naturally but that was their way of punishing us. And, well, the boys, of course, they didn’t want to be hit in

the eye but we had to aim at the heads naturally because they were quite sadistic, they wanted to have a maximum of physical discomfort as a result of it but anyway, after that we all walked into the showers and had a good wash and that was the end of that. But the funniest part was when in one of the sheds, they struck a keg

of red wine and oh, we thought that was great, so everybody filled up their canteens, the water bottles with red wine. And we all tasted it. And I gave, the Jap guard was with us too and he liked it too and he got us drunk as a skunk and when we all came back the, every guard had to report

to the CO there, the Japanese CO and he could see this bloke could hardly stand up you see and so he searched and he found most of the boys were smelling of drink and so they all, he thought he’d sober them up and all those blokes had to just run behind him on his bike and go on the double running around the camp and the Jap

guard, he couldn’t even run, he was so drunk he fell over, I don’t know what they did with him but, well, I’m sure that he got the better of the Japanese discipline because they were just as tough on their own people as they were on us. So he would have had a terrible belting. So they were some of the experiences we had there with working on the working bees.

Over there, no I don’t think so, no. I think if I remember at working bees we weren’t allowed to sing or whistle. Because I think the Japs thought

that could cover up other intentions we had and no we weren’t and on that particular part there was a lot of laughter and fun. We killed ourselves laughing when the Jap guard, we even carried his rifle for him because he was so drunk, yeah. But this is what often happens in, what I find when I get together with other POWs

you know you remember all the very funny episodes and don’t dwell too much on the tough times, when you were being belted up, or suffered, or tortured in one way or another. Yeah.

Yeah.

No, not particularly except, well yeah there was a boy next to me, that’s right who slept next to me on the floor, Baas Becking was his name. He was the son

of a bloke, his father actually was at that stage the curator of the Botanical Gardens at a place called Bogor which is south of Jakarta and that’s still a very famous Botanical Gardens. And he, after the war he came to Sydney and became the Dean of Biology in

Sydney University. But his son was lying next to me and a very immature little boy, he was only 18 and all he wanted to do was draw warships all the time. And he drew all sorts of warships and the best thing you could do for him is get another clean piece of paper from somewhere and some pencils for which he could draw.

And he cottoned on to me because I was, he had no friends and he was very sympathetic and a very appreciative of somebody who took notice of him. So that was one boy and another fellow was a bloke who was a medium, he was a Eurasian bloke and he was a medium in séances,

See, we tried to get information in all sort of ways. And one of the reasons was trying to have a séance, spiritual séance and he had this board, with the, we went in fours with a cross with a nail on it and you all held the cross and it moved around over the letters of the alphabet and then spelt out something you see. And

I went to several séances with him, I, he was a fairly mature bloke already, he was already well in his thirties and ex-boxer he was too. And he, I struck up a friendship with him because he often wanted me because he reckoned he got, I could be a medium myself and I was a strong helper in his séances.

And I’ll never forget that we asked, you know I asked about my future and the future I had it said that in a few months you will go for a long sea trip, I’ll never forget that, a long trip on the sea and that was it,

that was the message I got you see. And I, we all laughed at that, a sea trip where? A sea trip where? Back to Holland? No, no chance. And low and behold about three months later I went on a long sea trip and that was to Nagasaki from Macassar. So I often wonder whether that was just coincidence or whether it was really something, yeah, yeah.

Oh, he made it himself. See in the camp there we had access to paper and pencils and he made it up out of cardboard. You know, it’s easy to draw a few lines, ABCD and so and just a few sticks nailed together or glued together or tied together, whatever it was

just sticks about that long and we sat around a table and then just waited and then when you felt that, a power which moved the pen and the dropped. And it really, well to what extent it was all manufactured by the so call medium, I still am in doubt about that. I don’t know whether you’ve gone to one of these

séances, it’s an interesting experience, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, that was his opinion; he said he could feel the current and so. Well, I do believe you know everybody, you have vibes and I’m convinced that people have vibes and most relationships

between people depend on vibes and some people are more, you react better to certain vibes from certain people then you do from others. And so I’m convinced there is such a thing, a power and I’ve notice you touch people who are obviously tremendous personalties and you touch them

and you can feel the current come up through your arm and I’m receptive to that and it helps and when you get negative vibes, well you try and fight it. Because it’s not a good way of communicating.

Yeah, yeah. Oh,

I think, I’ve heard of it before, that people were trying to do that you know. Anyway to get news and we had, we had there what they call the kabar angin, which means the wind newspaper, rumours

that float around through the wind. They were always hoping for the immediate or imminent release in Macassar by the Americans and as it happened it never came. The atom bomb stopped the war for them. And we thought it was absolutely a disaster when they picked

the thousand POWs to go to Nagasaki because Nagasaki was Japan, probably would be the last place to be liberated. As it turned out, because we went early in the war it was the safest way to go across the Pacific because the Japanese were still the masters of the Pacific although there were American submarines operating. And so we made it fairly quickly and we escaped the Burma railway

or the Pekanbaru Railway. That was the equivalent of the Burma railway, which they built in Sumatra.

Yeah, that was an interesting episode was, we had a

general appeal, everybody on general parade, everybody had to stand on parade in one long line in front of the place where he slept, there were no shes [women] of course because all men there. And we had to undress completely, stand naked and along came a team of

Japanese doctors, I presume they were doctors, they dressed in long white coats and they looked you over, what I remember well of that episode, that they were very keen on feeling your testicles, I think that was because they were all, had homosexual tendencies, I don’t know what. Or whether our tools were bigger than they were used to, I don’t know.

But I remember that part, we were very insulted but nevertheless and as they walked past and looked you over they every now and again said, “One step forward.” and you had to step forward and by the time they had a thousand of them the rest could go back. Now I was one of the blokes that had to step forward because, well I in pretty good nick [condition], from before the war

I was pretty athletic and very good in sport in gymnastics and swimming. So I apparently impressed the Japanese doctor with my physique at that time and so that’s how I finished up getting that extra issue of clothing and finished up on board of the Azuma Maru, a Japanese transport

ship. I’ve got photos of that ship here at home here. And so in ten days we got to Nagasaki.

Yeah, yeah.

No, no,

nobody knew and when we were transported, I don’t know whether we walked to, I don’t think so, we must have gone by trucks because it’s a fair way to the harbour. And when we arrived at the harbour we saw this big Japanese troopship and we knew we were going somewhere on board that ship, but where we were going we had no clue. And even right throughout the trip,

whenever we were aired, we were allowed to, because we were all put in holds in the down in the bottom of the ship. And in the holds you know the air became pretty stale naturally with so many people in there. And every now and again we were allowed for 10 minutes fresh air on the deck and once a day we had fresh air. And

the, well the people, the navigators around us said, they said, “Well we’re still going north.” And we worked out by the speed of the ship where we would be and then you know they worked out we were north of Borneo, and then we were, we must be somewhere near the Philippine Islands and we were still going north and then one early morning we saw all this grey drabby looking city

and we sailed in the Nagasaki harbour, he said, “All right, anchor” and we were put ashore there and then were taken by ferries to the shipyards, the Kama Minami Shipyard of which I’ve also got photos if you’re interested. And that’s how we went there. And of course we always thought you know

that in Macassar you had a better chance of getting the, well get released or liberated but in Japan you had very little. Plus the fact that we thought there was always a chance of escaping, escaping and then with friendly population get away and actually that did happen once, three

enterprising Dutch people they did escape, it was easy to escape from the camp there, you just went over the fence at night and, but then you had to make your way to the east coast of Sulawesi and then get a boat and sail to Australia. And that was the plan.

They had made a deal with some Buginese and that’s what they did, they did get to the beach and then when they got to the beach, instead of a boat, Japanese soldiers arrived to arrest them because they’d been dobbed in by other Buginese. And these three blokes were beheaded and as a matter of fact when they escaped it was I think they escaped on

Monday or something and it was reported every day, we had a count of the prisoners and they were missing so the Japanese said, “Right, where are they?” We said, “Well, we don’t know, they must have escaped.” And the Japanese said, “Right, we’ll take 30 hostages.” and they came to my barracks and started counting 1,2,3,4,5,6, I was number 31, but they took 30, 30 of the boys and they all went

to a separate barracks near the guardhouse and they were told they were going to be beheaded if those POWs weren’t going to be caught within the next week. And, well, we didn’t quite believe that but when they were set to work to dig their own graves prior to being beheaded we believe they were really, they weren’t kidding.

And fortunately for them the day before they were going to be executed these three bedraggled POWs returned and they were beheaded by the Japanese. For which the camp commander, the Japanese camp commander was executed after the war, in the war crimes.

In

Macassar.

Near the camp, near the camp, yeah. Fortunately we didn’t have to watch it, which they did in other occasions I believe in other places. That, of course, discouraged escape. Anyone who was thinking of escaping before that dropped that idea. But the Japanese were always absolutely terrified that we would escape. They did the same in Japan. And in Japan we were counted at least 10 times a day, it was absolutely crazy the way they were always

very worried that we would escape. What chance have you got to escape in Japan, a European stands out like a torch in the Japanese community. And it’s a long swim from there to the mainland so there was no escaping tendency between us in Japan.

Yeah, yeah off, we didn’t have the guards patrolling inside the camp very much; occasionally a drunken soldier would come around and the words sprayed around, “There’s a drunken Jap around.” because they pick on you for any reason to give you a belting. And so

we had very little problems with that and not many people were caught with trading over the wall and very few Indonesians were picked up by the Japanese because they wanted to be with them you see at that stage.

Oh well we were all in the same boat you know and we’re nearly all navy personnel because Macassar, they brought all the survivors of the Battle of the Java Sea had been brought in there. And so we were all pretty loyal to, well

to the cause, the cause was of course trying to survive the war and make the best of these temporary circumstances. We never thought that it would take that long because we saw the Japanese equipment and we didn’t think that was anywhere near as good as the American equipment but no we also, one of the big

surprises we had in Macassar was to see the Japanese Army people, when we went on doing cleaning up and gardening we saw a lot of the Japanese more senior people and they weren’t just the little Japanese we were used to, they were six foot tall and we saw them all

strutting around in the bathhouse with a magnificent physique, you know real strong samurai looking blokes, so we said, “Gee whiz.” they were a far cry from what we had in our minds as the Japanese, they were a very fit and physically superior group of people than what we were used to.

Yeah.

Oh, there’d be a guard looking after us, yes. But he couldn’t be on all four sides of the house at the same time, you see, so you made sure that he couldn’t see you. But then you were also, if you did anything wrong you were also exposed to the danger of

one of the customers dobbing you in. One of the Japanese officers who was down there as a client that, he would dob you in for doing the wrong thing. Which actually happened to me once, because I picked up a bit of rubber from a tyre, and he saw me doing that and I needed that for, put on the sole of my shoe, because the soles

were completely worn and I wanted to tie that up. We used to wire bits of rubber underneath your worn out boots so that you didn’t walk on your bare feet and he caught me there and then decided to give me a belting with a baseball bat. And the standard way of punishment in the Japanese Army for all their own soldier, they stand you up, legs about that

far apart, arms up in the top and they stand behind you and go whack across your buttocks. And five is about the minimum, they give you five belts like that and it’s excruciating pain. And of course your, well your bottom becomes all bruised, badly bruised and battered and goes red, blue and green like any bruise and that was the standard of element, I got that,

that was my first belting I got from a Jap at, that was in Macassar when I was caught doing that.

Yeah, oh yeah at the brothel, yeah, obviously he felt very proud of himself, you know I look back at, now if the bloke is still alive and if he remembers that he dealt out that beating to a defenceless POW

will he feel proud of himself. It remains to be seen.

Oh absolutely, you know many POWs have had that, of the Japanese have had that experience. You know it’s a

feeling of desperation and the pain as I said is terrible and well all I could think, “Say, please God please help me to get through this.” and make sure I don’t faint. Because if you fainted halfway through it then the next hit would hit you on the spine or rupture your kidney

because you were on the way down as you collapsed. So it was pretty risky. So the idea was actually, and that happened on another occasion when I got a belting like that, after three I just fell on the ground, you see, and then they threw buckets of water over you to try and revive you, make you stand up again. But I just fainted; I

feigned that I fainted so I got out of any more of that. Yeah.

That was in Nagasaki, yeah. In the shipyard.

Oh, I had to go back to work after that. But the guard

didn’t let me do too much more work and I was allowed to do some weeding on my knees so that I didn’t have to stand any more. And I think, well, the guard we had was a soldier who maybe felt that I’d had enough or something, I don’t know.

Oh the girls in the brothel of course, the,

and the one Jap and maybe some Indonesians outside I don’t know, you didn’t pay attention who was looking at you.

Yeah, that was one way they punished you. Yeah.

No, we didn’t know anything. And we knew, well, as I said earlier we knew how we were going to go to Japan, after 10 days they worked out at the speed the

ship was going it should be almost near Japan, so we realised it was going to be that we were going to go to Japan.

No when they gave us all these clothes they said, “Oh, you’re going somewhere.” but they didn’t even tell us that we went on a ship. The first time we knew it was when we arrived on the quay in the harbour

and went on the ship.

No, we were very disappointed that we were going to Japan because the fact we were going away.

Yeah, because things in the camp were bearable, you know you didn’t have to go to working bees at that stage, it was

still, at that stage it was still voluntary, they only needed so many people per day to go working. And so if you didn’t want to go to work, we had books there and which were smuggled in, we played cards, we played chess and all that sort of thing so we even played volleyball. And there was plenty of

place to keep yourself clean so things weren’t that bad at that particular stage. But…

How it was going to develop, yeah.

No, we said, “Oh, that’s what it is, we’re going by ship somewhere, it must be a long way away, it must be to another island.”

that’s what we thought, they were going to take us back to Java or some other place, we had no idea. And the officers asked the Japanese and they wouldn’t tell them where we were going to go. So it was all a big surprise when we arrived there. And the trip itself was no joke because we were in the hold, it was stifling hot in the,

it was badly ventilated, we only were aired once a day, maybe twice a day, once in the morning, once in the afternoon, I can’t remember but we had, the ship was, it used to be a luxury liner which ran between Japan and South America but it had been converted into a troopship. And our deck where we were, we shared that, we had a big

toilet block and bathrooms and of all things in that bathroom they had a komodo dragon [very large lizard]. You know what a komodo dragon is? They had pinched that from the zoo somewhere and they were going to take that to Japan. And that bloody thing was in our showers and the

shower recesses they had flooded that by about 6 inches so that the thing had water to make it habitable for this animal. So when you went to the toilet you had to look where the komodo was and wait till he was away from there before you went to the toilet. Especially when the sea was running and the ship was

swaying a bit they, the water went this way and the water that way. And this bloody komodo, it frightened everybody, but fortunately he never took to any of the POWs so they fed him with meat I think they had somewhere. But he was a meat eater and komodos have been known to attack people so that was one of the special

tricks we had there for the trip. And the other thing was we had a couple of air raid, not air raid, alarms on the ship and then everybody became frantic, the Japanese running around and the times that we were on the deck, when some group was on the deck when the alarm went, we were all rushed back down into the hold and then a Jap with a machine gun took position

at the top of the stairs and it was quite clear that if the ship was going to be torpedoed we were going to go down with it because they had the machine gun there on top to stop us from getting out. So we had a couple of alarms, obviously for American submarines or maybe false alarms, but it wasn’t a very pleasant feeling to be there. We had no air attack from American planes but

as I said two of those raids, so we were relieved when we arrived and threw out anchor so we said, “Well, we’ve made that trip, now what’s going to happen?”

Oh, very little, very little, it was a Japanese troopship and I think they had them in, well, they weren’t bunks actually, they were canvas stretchers,

four above one another, so it was quite a climb to get in there if you were on the top one but well at least you could lie down. But people got seasick, that wasn’t very nice if they were seasick at the top there, oh, it was a filthy spot there. And the food wasn’t much either really.

Shed, yeah. Oh, they were proper urinals and toilets, I think they had even, yeah they had proper toilet seats which was in for Japanese, see it was a luxury cruise ship for the Japanese so that’s why they had the western toilets there. Because usually the toilets are these,

just a hole in the ground with two pads you sit on, or you squat on, that’s the Japanese general toilets much to the disgust of women tourists when they go to Japan. They always found that very difficult to get used to.

Yeah.

I didn’t know it was Japan actually, we thought it might be

Borneo, then we thought it might be the Philippine Islands but then finally when that didn’t happen, yeah, we made out it was Japan.

Yeah, what are they going to do with us? They obviously, they’d given us clothes and we thought it would be somewhere in the tropics because we had all the tropical clothes you see. But then as we

got further and further north it got colder and colder, especially when you got on deck, you go, “Gees, it’s cold here.” Because October, it’s getting pretty late in the year and things get a bit chilly there.

Yeah, the arrival was actually a pleasant surprise because we were taken by ferryboats to a brand new

camp, army barracks, well they weren’t army, it was a camp especially built for, I don’t know whether it was POWs or Japanese workers but it was a compound, a square compound and they had barracks, I’ve got a picture of it here that I can show you what it looked like. And they had these long barracks with rooms, each room had forty people in it. And

we were first brought to a large hall where they put us in and we got a very nice meal, nice rice and a piece of fish and nice condiment made out of seaweed, chopped out seaweed, it tasted very nicely. And we were welcomed by the management

of the Kama Minami Shipyard and they welcomed us as workers for the shipyard and by the time, they’d look after us and by the time Japan had won the war we could all go back to our loved ones in our home country. And we said, “Gee whiz, this sounds all right yeah.” “And you’re going to work here or you may work at the shipyard.” So the following day

they asked for volunteers to go and a lot of us said, “Working on a shipyard, that’s war industry for Japan and we don’t have to work in there because the Geneva Convention says you can’t do that. You can’t ask POWs to work in a war industry.” So the Japanese welcomed these blokes

on the shipyard and they worked there all day, come the end of the day, we’re all sitting down for dinner expecting a meal but those who hadn’t come to work, all the ones who went to work were put in special barracks and they were fed and the rest of us didn’t get anything, they said, “Look, we don’t have to work there, the Geneva Convention says that.” And their attitude, they said,

“Geneva Convention, never heard of it.” And so the following day we decided then that half the people would go to work and when they come back they give half the food to the others who hadn’t worked. Well, that didn’t work because when the blokes came back from work they were so hungry, that very few of them felt like sharing a meal with the others, so

by the end of the week, there were that many hungry people there, that they all decided to go working, so they solved that problem very quickly. And everyone who worked got fed and so that’s how they started our career in working in Japan. And we worked with Japanese civilians. The shipyard was controlled by or supervised by

the navy, the Kaiguns they called them and, but the shipyard itself was actually a civilian shipyard and it had Japanese building ships and they brought in these thousand POWs and we were put into groups, some were riveters, some were drillers, some were platers, some were carpenters, oxyacetylene cutters, a bit of welding.

Ships in those days were still riveted together you see, three rows of rivets kept all the plates together. So we would work with, half was Japanese, the boss was Japanese and the other half of that team were POWs. We didn’t understand a word of Japanese but we quickly learned because if you didn’t understand them you got belted. That’s a very quick way of learning, when you get belted when you don’t

do as your being told even if it’s in another language. So in a very quick time we had the POWs all working, and of course we tried to work as slow as possible but if you’re working too slow you were reported to the guards and they belted you up. So same with the riveters, if a rivet is not riveted properly then it leaks, but after the POWs

had done a row of rivets you had to sign for that with a piece of chalk, that is so and so, you all had your own name in Japanese and you wrote that down that you did. And then the inspectors come along with their little hammers and tap all the rivets and if a rivet is not properly riveted, it makes a different, so they picked it up. And if you had too many of them they’d call the riveting team and they all got belted up. So sabotage was very difficult.

Well, you see we had the forty people per room and the rooms were, there was an open space in the middle where they had a table with benches you could sit on and on either

side they had the bunks, just wooden boards at one was that level and the other one was about that high off the ground so you had 10 people there, 10 people there and on both sides, so you had 40 people in your room. And we weren’t all, the people in the one room weren’t all working in the same place, it just depended where you had, where you stood at the fall in at the shipyard, where you had been standing

and when they asked for volunteers for a particular job. Some people thought, “Well, I’ll volunteer for that.” and that’s how the people in each room worked probably in 10 different locations on the shipyard in 10 different jobs.

Oh yes, yeah, yeah, certainly you had your own bunk and with your own blanket,

everybody had one grey blanket and we didn’t have pillows, we had Japanese pillows which were little bits of squares about that wide, that long, that wide and you put your head on that and it’s apparently very healthy according to Japanese but for us it was most uncomfortable so you got whatever rags you had and what you had in extra clothing, you made

a ball of that and put that under your head. And that’s how we slept and then of course in winter you had the difficulty of trying to survive in the cold weather, no mattress and so we, everybody in winter had a sleepy, that was the bloke you slept with together and your mutual heat, body heat kept you

warm so if you slept back to back that kept your kidneys warm and you can cover up the front of your body by curling up and put your arms over your body and that keeps you warm and you had the advantage of having two blankets because you are, the two of you are together. So that’s, plus all the other things, we tried to keep warm by wrapping newspapers around you, especially when you were outside, working outside,

newspapers are tremendous insulation and we used to wrap that around you as a corset and that kept the wind out.

I’ve got a photo of it and then I’ve got an illustration of it drawn by one of the POWs. They were wood, all timber, concrete floor,

the table in, there were two long tables because they were separated in the middle by a hole in the floor, which was the heating place. See, the old traditional Japanese heating was a hole in the floor in the living room and they put hot coals in there and everybody sat around that. Now we had those too, but they were never used. We never had any heating except once when the Red Cross came,

International Red Cross came to inspect the camp and every room was sent to the cookhouse and we had to get a shovel of coals to put in that hole to make it look as if it had been used. So when the Red Cross came the following day they saw all these fireplaces used and, but we never got any heat from them. But what happened, of course, in the winter you get 40 men in a confined space,

that warms it up and of course there’s no wind. The roofs were pretty good, they had shingle roofs and that kept the rain out so it was fairly dry but the major problem, not at first when we came there, it was clean, but we never had soap, we didn’t see any soap for three years and so and we had no fresh water to wash clothes with,

so we were pretty dirty, we only had a bath every three weeks. So we all got full of lice and the bed bugs moved in too. And the bed bugs, they kept you awake at night and the vermin, we had fleas of course, the only thing that we didn’t have was the pubic lice and hair lice because every

POW had to shave his hair off and we thought that was very degrading that you had to have a bald head but that was the Japanese, all military people in Japan had bald heads and that was for purely hygienic reasons to avoid just that very thing. And the Japanese were always very keen on body, keeping their body clean, so they didn’t have that problem with

lice and the workers, the Japanese workers on the shipyard, they had an opportunity to have a hot bath every night, even though it was salt water, but you know that kept all the grime off and they kept clean. But they used to always walk around and the first thing they do when they come near a POW, they’d put a face mask on because we smelled and, well we weren’t noticing that we were smelling because

we were used to it you see and but we stank naturally because of the filthy, the only time we didn’t stink was after we’d been in the big communal bathtub.

No every three weeks.

Well, the procedure was every, there were 26 rooms in our camp, we had 1300 people

at the top of the intake. And the, it rotated, room one was the first time, room two, room one was the one bath time, the following time, room one became room 26 so it rotated. And the bath was real hot salt water with steam pipes from the kitchen, so that was beautiful in

winter because you were, you know you’d be cold all day and you’d get in that hot bath, beautiful. But, and we didn’t, we had no towels so you couldn’t dry yourself but you dried very quickly anyway because your bodies were hot after you came out of that. But the remarkable thing was that after a group of 40 men had been in that bathtub which was about the size of this lounge

room then all the muck floated to the surface and after the blokes walked out, there was a couple of blokes with long rakes with a flat board and they had to rake all the scum off the surface of the water into the gutter and then the next team would come in.

Oh yeah, oh it was delightful, yes, yes. And on our spare, we had one free day every three weeks too. And when that came along you had an opportunity to wash your clothes in salt water but again you know it doesn’t get much cleaner but the lice didn’t like the salt water either so you had for

the first couple of days after that you didn’t have too much trouble with the lice. That’s the little white lice which live inside your clothes and they hide in the seams of the clothes.

Well, there wasn’t much of an opportunity for enjoyment because we

worked 11 hours, by the time we left the camp to go, see, the camp was 20 minutes walk to the shipyard. And by the time you’d got, from the time you left the camp and came back it was about 11 hours so in the evening after the evening meal, in quotation marks because it wasn’t much of a meal, a mixture of rice and Kaffir corn.

And then you had, 10 o’clock was lights out, half past nine we all had to stand up and undress the top of our body and rub ourselves. That was a standard procedure in the winter months because you see a lot of people were getting colds and coughs and pneumonia and the Japanese

doctors decided that because we hadn’t built up enough resistance against the cold, we kept saying, “It’s because you don’t feed us enough and we don’t get any fat and we have insufficient clothes.” But he said, “No, we’ve got to toughen you up.” So we had to undress and then stand there in the room along the tables and rub ourselves vigorously with that little towel and that would warm your body and warm yourself

and you build up resistance against the cold. Well, that was compulsory and they used to patrol up and down the corridors making sure, so we had blokes standing out there watching and as soon as the Jap came then everyone started rubbing ourselves vigorously and then as soon as the Jap was gone we went back to taking our shirts which we had taken off and go looking for

the lice and kill as many lice as you could in your clothes, you see. And that was the delousing session for most of us, but for the Japanese it was the way of getting us to build up resistance against the cold. Yeah, as I said the, we tried

to get rid of the bed bugs in all sorts of ways and one of the more ingenious blokes on the camp decided that if you had a long steam hose and you run hot steam through all the cracks of each board in each bunk, that would kill most of the bed bugs, which indeed it did. So every now and again we

had these blokes coming around and they deloused or debugged the room. But of course, you know, they lay millions of eggs. Once you get bedbugs in a barracks you can never get rid of them. And so we usually had relief of them for a few weeks until it got bad, back to the bad situation we had before.

Well the, well Christmas of course as far as we were concerned, that was a big occasion but we, the Japanese never gave us Christmas, a holiday for Christmas, it was just another working day.

But most of us, see the, when you talk about big events, what we did have from time to time, the big event was an issue of Red Cross Food parcels. Now we got Red Cross parcels regularly in the camp. But we saw very little of it, the Japanese guards ate them because the stuff in the food

parcels was excellent food and the Japs knew that and they loved it and ate it and we’d come back from a miserable cold winters day with sleet and we’d been working and we were absolutely half frozen and you’d come home and there’s the Japs in the guardhouse and we were coming by, laughing and shaking holding up cans of Spam or some over

food which we’d dearly love. And they said, “Djoto, djoto.” means it’s very good, very good and then we’d walk in and go for our diet of rice and Kaffir corn. Kaffir corn was a cereal, which the Japanese imported from South Africa and it was used as cattle feed for the dairies and it tasted bloody

awful, it looked awful and it was red, grey and green stuff and later on we heard that actually that rice and Kaffir corn was very beneficial because it had more traditional value than the ordinary rice, that probably helped us to survive. But that was a great event when we got a Red Cross parcel and they used

to give it, divide it between four people. And so some people, they ate their share in the one day. People like myself, we rationed ourselves, me and my sleepy, we ate half a tin or we split a tin between us once a week so that it lasted a long time. So that was a big event. And then every now and

Again, believe it or not, the Japanese issued us with cookies, sweet cookies and everyone got about 4 little cakes and that happened sometimes and that was an absolutely amazing thing that we got that. They also issued us as a very special occasion a couple of times we got loquats, that’s fruit, Japanese fruit,

nothing to rave about but anyway it was fruit and it represented vitamins and we were terribly short of vitamins, vitamin B and vitamin C, C1 was the worst one because the lack of that gave you scurvy and all your gums began to bleed and your teeth wobbling in your mouth and we had, that was because of lack of Vitamin C but the Japanese themselves

suffered of that too, they had that. And they used to have a little bottles of dried chilli pepper, cut up, you can buy them in a supermarket now, these little bottles of cut up dried chilli pepper. Well you know chilli peppers, it burns your mouth, in healthy mouths any time but half a teaspoon of that in your mouth after you bad attack of scurvy, well you can imagine the agony that is on a raw

bleeding mouth. Within days your mouth was recovered, it was tremendous stuff; it was a very rich source of vitamins. And the other big event was the weekly, fortnightly or three weekly issue of a packet of cigarettes per man. And cigarettes actually was the currency in the camp. Everything

had value and the value was calculated in cigarettes. So just after an issue and it had a widely fluctuating rate. The rate, after an issue of cigarettes you needed 6 cigarettes to get a bowl of rice, some people would forfeit, they’d have a meal somewhere on the shipyard or scrounge something there so they could do without a bowl of rice,

and then you paid 6 cigarettes for that. If it was the day before a long period without cigarettes then 1 cigarette became a bowl of rice you see. So it was a widely fluctuating thing.

Yeah the, well we had trade amongst our own people but a lot of the

trade went with the Japanese workers on the shipyard and the civilian shipyard workers they were always out, especially in the beginning of it of leather belts, see because a lot of us had leather belts and leather was very valuable to the Japanese. Jewellery if you had any jewellery, a bracelet or a ring, a gold ring or watches they were

very much in demand. But if you did a deal with the Japanese, you know that was all strictly illegal, they weren’t allowed to deal with it. But if he didn’t honour the deal you had no comeback. You could complain to the Japanese guard and you knew he could belt it up but you were belted up yourself too because you were dealing with them. So you had

no comeback, it was purely by trust and so there were a lot of people who were duped that way. But you could also earn it by doing certain things for Japanese. Like some of the Japanese workers, they weren’t very keen on the war industry, either they were drafted in there and they’d

say, “Look, if you stand guard for me I’m going to sleep in the double bottom of the ship for an hour and you’ll be guard for me and if there is a Kaigun come you just knock on the ship, till I answer and then I’ll come out.” So that he couldn’t be caught sleeping there you see. So they’d pay you for a rice bowl or a

couple of cigarettes. One way I earned extra rice and cigarettes was by drawing, they, see everybody had chalk in his pocket because whenever you had done something on the shipyard, you work you had to sign for that in chalk and so I signed it with my name in Japanese and so

on an off day when there was nothing doing I’d draw a picture on the steel. They’d say, “Oh, you can draw, oh good, and draw me something else.” And invariably it became, they wanted naked women of course and that attracted them very much. And one day a Japanese came with a piece of paper and pencil and said, “Come with

me and draw me a picture of a naked woman.” and he was standing guard and I was drawing a voluptuous blonde with big tits and all the details, no clothes on and oh that was, that went around very quickly so I had a steady stream of customers and they always paid me for it and

the more pornographic I made the picture, the more they liked it. And I didn’t mind corrupting the Japanese morals at all. So that’s how I made a bit of extra money. And I also did that on a couple of occasions, Japanese guards they’d come into the room and said, “Can anybody draw?” with the interpreter and,

“I want somebody to draw me.” and they’d take you up to the guardhouse and they’d sit there looking very fierce you see, and then you made a portrait of them and that took several hours and whilst you were drawing that they’d give the scraps of their meal, so that was very nice and I quickly learned that what they really want you to do is make sure that they look very ferocious and give them a European nose.

They were very, the Japanese were very sensitive about the flat noses and if you gave them a European nose that made them look much better and so I got a few free feeds out of that, till the CO decided that was too much fraternising and he stopped that sort of practise and I couldn’t do it any more. So that was another way I earned

extra money, or extra money in extra cigarettes and food. It was food, food, we experimented with all sorts of, we even experimented with the weeds growing on the roadside, try and cook them and see whether you can eat them and didn’t get the trots afterwards.

No, well yes, apart from food,

mental stimulation. See, it was extremely boring to do something which you don’t want to like working there, we didn’t like that work at all and to have to do something which is boring work to begin with and to have to do that, that is very boring but we were mentally starved of

any stimulation and you see we didn’t have, we had very little to read but lo and behold the Japanese, what they call them? Salvation Army, the Salvation Army they had an agreement with the prisoners of war or the, via the Red Cross that once a month they could bring in a box of

religious books, books which had a religious overtone or something to do with religion. And some of the boys weren’t interested in that, they’d rather play cards and a lot of blokes played cards or chess at night before they went to bed for mental stimulation or telling jokes. And I and

other people were reading these books and that was fabulous to have that opportunity to read a book, it was marvellous because you can think about it all day.

Yes, yes, we actually have a very healthy camp, when I say healthy camp there were up to 1300 people in the camp at the, it was the thousand of us, we stayed there for a long time up to about April, those thousand, but as I mentioned earlier, I should have

checked that but it was late in ’44, 300 new POWs arrived and they were Australians. They were Australians who had been working on the Burma Railway. When the Burma Railway finished they sent them back to Changi and then from Changi they were transported to Japan. They were lucky that they weren’t torpedoed and they came in

our camp, they were put to work there on the shipyard. Those 300, they thought conditions there were much better than what they were used to in, on the Burma Railway. And of course they didn’t have the tropical diseases and what’s more the, in Nagasaki we were regularly inoculated against typhus,

cholera and dysentery. We used to get every six months; we used to get the injections. Now that wasn’t because the Japanese were so worried about our welfare but they were afraid that if we contracted those diseases we would infect the Japanese workers we were working with. Anyway, these 300 Australians they were set to work down there and as I said they thought the conditions there were better than

they, what they had been used to. But that was the total of our workforce and it was a mixture of Dutch, American, Australian and we had some Malaysian people as well, so it was a mixture of four different nationalities. And as far as the treatment by the Japanese was concerned, the Americans were the worst

treated, then came the English and they didn’t punish the, or didn’t take it out on the Dutch as much as they did the others because you know we were the poor people or the miserable people in their eyes who had surrendered and the Japanese people I worked with you know they often said, “Oh, you were only, you surrendered,

you should have died for your Queen instead of surrendering.” Well, I had no surrender I never put my hands up but it was just circumstances which landed me as a POW.

Not very much, because the Australians all had separate barracks, the Americans had separate barracks,

the, I’m not sure whether the English were mixed up, I think they were mixed up with the Dutch because there weren’t that many of them you see, they were people from the Exeter. The Americans in the camp, some were of the Houston but they also had emptied a jail from Wake Island and sent those up to

Nagasaki and they were working in Nagasaki and they were pretty desperate Americans, I can assure you, because if you finished up in an American jail you become a desperado. And that was a bit of a, well it was a big problem actually because the Japanese believed in collective punishment. If somebody had done something wrong it wasn’t, if they couldn’t find the person who did it the whole room got, or the whole camp

got punished. And that was pretty grim. I remember one particular episode, outside of every room was great big sand tub and the sand was to be used in case of fire and you had to use that sand to put out the fire. And somebody during the middle of the night from one of the rooms,

it wasn’t our room, well we don’t think it was one of our rooms, and people often had diarrhoea and he hadn’t made it and he used the sand in the sand drum in front of our room. And so the Japs found, the Jap guards found that, “Who did it?” And none of us did it. “Okay, fall out” and the whole lot of us had to stand out in the cold for

as long as it took till somebody would own up. And we stood there all day and then finally one of our boys said, “Look, fellows, I’ll take the blame.” He hadn’t done it but he owned up to the Japanese, “I did it.” and so he was going to take the punishment and we could all go back in and we hadn’t had any food or anything.

And as it turned out I believe the Japanese Bokoko, he was the bloke in charge of the camp, he wasn’t the camp commander but he was the offsider of the CO and he used to run around the camp making life hard for us. He believed that this bloke owned up for the others and he let

him off. Which was absolutely amazing, the only bit of fair play I can remember of the Japanese in the prison camp. But that was, they’re one of the things. Smoking inside the rooms was not allowed and when they came in and smelled smoke the whole room was, all the cigarettes were confiscated and they couldn’t smoke for a whole week.

All, the whole camp was stopped from smoking so they had the usual thing of not having the, if they couldn’t get the individual trespasser, the one who did the wrong thing, then it was the whole group. So we watched our own people too, not doing the wrong thing because otherwise we’d know we’d all get punished

by the collective punishment.

In their own rooms, yeah, yeah.

Oh, easy, because my team I was in, I was the one, we

worked, there was seven or eight in our team and I was the best Japanese speaker because I could speak several other languages and so I learned, well I didn’t learn very good Japanese but I learned enough, more Japanese than my fellow POWs. So they were sent somewhere else and I got three Japanese to show them, three

Australians to show them how to do the job of plating. So, and I spoke fluent English so I explained to them what was expected and there was Tom Hallahan, George Dickson and Ron Moore, Don Moore, the three of them. Tom Hallahan was a player for Carlton and a first grader for Carlton, playing Australian Football, and a very tough

bloke. And George Dickson was a grader driver in Victoria and as a matter a fact, you know I told you that program of Tales from a Suitcase and I mentioned these three people I was in the prison camp with and the daughter of George Dickson heard about that, she didn’t see the program, she rang, she got my phone number and rang me up and I

knew more about her father, because she was born just after the war and knew very little of him because he died very soon, he only got to 40, 50 years, the prison camp killed him in the long run, he died shortly. And I knew more about her father than she did as a little girl, and it was amazing, I had a long, about three quarters of an hour till she broke down in tears and that was the end of the

discussion. It was remarkable that I met these Australians there then and that’s another reason why I finished up in Australia because we talked about Australia a lot and I actually with the help of Don Moore and particularly George Dickson, I planned a whole trip to Australia for my

parents, a trip from Melbourne and Sydney and because, you know, during the time in prison you have a lot of time to think about things and I, then I often thought back about my home and my younger years and I began to realise the big sacrifices my father and mother had made for bringing up myself and my sister and I thought I’d pay them back after the war.

And so we planned a whole itinerary, it was just talking you know, where they were going to stay and they knew all about Albury and places like that, and Gundagai and George Dickson told me all these things and so did Tom because they knew the country pretty well, naturally being Australians. Then of course, well after the war I found that was all for nothing

and I had no opportunity to show my appreciation to my parents which has been a big disappointment in my life but you’ve got to take the good with the bad.

Well yes, they told us how tough it was there but they didn’t talk a great deal about it really

they said that it was much better here and they hated the Japs of course but they did the work because they reckoned it was better to do this type of work and we were always looking for ways to sabotage but sabotage was very difficult on the shipyard. But I did a bit of

sabotage here and there by the time a ship was, had been launched from the shipyard. We build them on blocks you see, in big docks and when the docks was flooded and the ship pulled out and then it was finished on the quay and they put the engine room in it. And in the main bearings they have great big oil bars and I used to throw a handful of

steel shavings in the oil bars hoping that that would do some damage later on. And another favourite trick of mine was get a pocket full of cement, dry cement, undo a steam pipe in the engine room, fill it up with all that dry cement and then connect the pipe again and hoping that once they started running, that that pipe would, the cement would set and blow the pipe

Another favourite way of mine was the fact that we had so many bed bugs we thought we should share them with the Japanese crew. So every now and again we had to work and clean up the cabins, which were the crew

cabins on the ship, that when the ship was nearly finished. And you know the ordinary match box, a match box will hold about 200 well fed bed bugs, all you know swollen up with blood and it holds about 200 of them. And I had great delight in smuggling that into, put it in my pocket and take it to the shipyard and then when I was in the bunks of the, where the crew was going to work,

I’d sprinkle a few bed bugs out of the box in each bunk. And one you get bed bugs in a bunk you can’t get rid of it, so I thought as we had have all these bed bugs in our time it was only fair to share it with the Japanese. Quite disgusting really when you look back at it but that was another way of sabotaging and it made you feel reasonably good about it.

Another, which I didn’t do but other people who worked in the building alongside the dock up in the upper floors, they’d open a window and with a piece of wire, a piece of fencing wire about that long, hooked the ends and then they’d drop it out of the window and it would come down and hook onto the electric wires which were running like both sides of the dock

to feed the power for the cranes, the electric cranes which ran on rails there and then if it hooked on there it caused a short circuit and it blew, flames flying everywhere and all the power went off and then it would take about 10, 15 minutes before the Japs found the trouble and restored power. And well it was probably a fairly useless way of sabotage but at least it made

you feel better that you were doing something to fight the Japanese war Industry.

Yeah that’s right, 75 people, about 75 people died in our camp and about 25 of them were suicides. They just couldn’t stand it any more and they either electrocuted themselves or they jumped off the top building into the dock and that was about a 50-metre drop so if you dropped onto the concrete floor you were killed. And that was a number of people died that way. The other 50 of them,

they mostly died of accidents they had, there were a few serious accidents but most of them were pneumonia. Pneumonia was the big killer in our camp because you know we had, we didn’t have a thread of woollen clothes and we had a fatless diet, we never got any fat in our meal. That’s not quite right, we did find some fat at one stage and, but you had no resistance

against the cold. And to try and keep warm was the major issue in the winter, that’s why you had sleepys but you tried to keep out of the cold weather but some of the bosses insisted on you working out in the blizzard and the snow. Except that some, we did get some issue of fat; about half way through the war the Japanese were very short

of lubricants for their machinery in the fitter and turners shop. And one day we saw it arriving there and that was peanut oil came and minja katjang. Minja katjang, that’s peanut oil. And so that was used for lubricating the machinery and well we know what peanut oil,

that’s good fat so we pinched a bit of that and put it in our canteen and took it home. And just a teaspoon full of peanut oil which you just put over your meal, the following day you could feel that, that little bit of fat made a hell of a difference in fighting the cold. And so that peanut oil disappeared

at a much greater rate than it was being used, so the Japanese became suspicious and found out that the Japs themselves had found out you could use it, so they decided to stop that. And so they mixed it with a bit of kerosene, which gave it a terrible taste you see. But POWs are very resourceful people, so we rigged up a four-gallon square kerosene tin,

filled it with charcoal and poured the oil, the contaminated oil through there and that took most of the kerosene taste out of it so you could still use it then. But it only lasted a few months and then that source of fat dried up. They probably couldn’t get it or the ships were torpedoed or what happened but we didn’t get any more peanut oil to the

shipyard.

Yeah, we had, in the morning if you were feeling sick you had to go to the morning appeal and the doctor would take your temperature and or ask what’s wrong with you and the,

if he then decided that your temperature was too high he would write a chit for you and then you’d go to, you were allowed to go back to bed and you had to put a little chit, one of these illustrations showed that, would you get that drawing there? You can see a POW and it had ‘Yasumi’, that means rest, with your number

on it and if you went to the toilet you had to walk through the camp with that toilet, if a guard hailed you up and said, “Why aren’t you working?” you showed him that ticket and then it was okay. But there was always a big argument between the doctor, our doctors and the Japanese doctor; they reckoned we were rubbing the thermometer to get the temperature up and anyone with a temperature the doctors usually

say if you were over 37 you didn’t have to go to work but as far as the Japanese were concerned, if you were under 39 you still had to go to work. So with a temperature of 38.9 Celsius you still had to go to work. And well that was very difficult when you had a bad fever and you still had to go to work. The other major

complaint was people with diarrhoea of course and, well, it’s very hard for the doctor, and then you had to go with a tin and show him your watery stool and then he said “Okay. You have a day’s rest” and they’d come and check and so it was always supervised by the Japanese doctor as well. The Red Cross sent plenty of medicine but

it was never used. It never, or very little of it was issued so bandages and so, we, the doctors used the same bandages. As a scalpel the doctor had the blade off a pair of scissors where the end of it had been put into a hot coal fire and flattened out and that was the scalpel, which he used to sharpen.

The main disinfectant was permanganate, that purple permanganate. And if you had a boil then they opened it up and then put this gauze with permanganate in it to stop it from closing up and get the pus to spread around your body. And that went on for a few days but you still had to go to work

with boils, that didn’t stop you from working. And the other way you could get rest, if you had a broken arm or appendicitis. Appendicitis, if people had appendicitis they were taken to the Japanese hospital on the shipyard. They were operated on there under an anaesthetic and then the, as soon as they were ready, they could go back to the

camp hospital for recuperation. But I had pneumonia and I nearly died. The only medicine they had was Dazinan that was a yellow powder and a Dutch navy officer had a trade going with a Japanese

English-speaking interpreter and he traded watches and gold rings in exchange for this powder and he saved the lives of possibly up to 200 POWs by trading that. If they’d been caught, either of them, they would have been beheaded so I was very fortunate they had that medicine, our doctors had that medicine to cure you.

But before the war if you had pneumonia you usually went for two months or three months into a sanatorium to get over it. It was three weeks after I had pneumonia I was back on the shipyard in the soup and muck and that gave me a scar on my lungs, which actually interrupted my proceedings to get back to the country because any migrant who wanted to come to Australia after the war

had to have an x-ray and it had to be clear. And I had a spot on my lung and it was the scar, which I picked up from there which delayed my return to Australia in ’49 for another three months.

Yeah, the time in, well the end of course came on the, well the 6th and the 9th of August of course, the end of the war virtually. And the 9th of August was when the second atom bomb was detonated and that

day was a nice sunny day and it was about 11 o’clock about, five-eighth cloud, when a single B29 dropped the atomic bomb over Nagasaki. Nagasaki wasn’t the target actually, the major target was Kokura. Kokura was a city about 100 kilometres, maybe 200 kilometres northeast

of Hiroshima. And in Kokura they used to make these hot air balloons which the Japanese used, they had these hot air balloons and the basket was full of explosives and when the weather conditions were correct they launched them in Japan and they floated across the Pacific and landed in Canada and the United States and they were hoping to

create a lot of damage in America. Only, I believe only seven people got killed, they managed to float 310 of them across the Pacific which landed in Canada and the United States but mostly in paddocks and forests and were harmless and didn’t do any damage. But apparently it created quite a concern in America so they decided to

flatten that factory once and for all. Well, when they came over Kokura it was completely clouded in so Nagasaki was the secondary target. And they flew over Nagasaki and dropped the second atomic bomb. Now I was working in the bottom of a large dock where they built four 50,000 tonners at the same

time and we had just finished the bottom of the ship and they were built on wooden blocks about that high off the ground. And the first indication we had that there was something unusual happening was we saw this bright flash as if somebody just took a picture of you with a camera. Every camera has now got a built in flash. And it was just as bright and it lit up everything and

we looked around, “Where in the hell did that light come from?” And we looked up because the cranes which run across the dock we often saw had, as I told you before they had these short circuits on the bare wires which fed the power takeoff for the cranes. But the cranes were still going so we said, “No, that’s funny, what the heck is that?” See, it took 12 seconds before

the blast of the bomb when it detonated, which caused the light and light travels instantly, reached the camp, the blast travelled at the speed of 500 metres per second, so it was six kilometres away from us and it took about twelve seconds before the blast hit the buildings on the shipyard. And most of the buildings there consisted out of very solid

big concrete pillars with concrete floors and then in between the pillars they had built walls to make offices and storage places and all those walls, because of the blast, were blown out of the building and they came thundering down into the docks. So when we looked up we saw this avalanche of debris. You see there was five storeys of buildings alongside us. And we saw this avalanche come thundering down in the dock and we just had

enough time because we were ten metres below the ground level to dive underneath the blocks, in between the blocks underneath the steel bottom of the ship. And all this debris thundered down at a tremendous rate and after about 30 seconds, it had all stopped falling. And our immediate reaction was we thought that the buildings along had been hit by a row of bombs and that had blown the building apart.

And our thought was that the aircraft probably fly around and do a circuit and drop another row of bombs and if they hit the door at the end we would have a 10 metre high wave flooding the dock and we would all drown. So our immediate reaction was we must get out of this dock as quick as possible. Because it had happened once before that the door had flooded and twenty Japanese got drowned.

And we, so we climbed up these 10 metre high ladders and started running towards the shipyard air raid shelters, which were tunnels in the rock face surrounding the camp on the one side. And, well, it was a 500-metre run and naturally we couldn’t run too well. I’m 75 kilos now

and I was only 44 kilos then so you run out of puff fairly quickly and so as we slowed down and we looked over our shoulders still because we were afraid that we might be strafed because that had happened before. An American aircraft had strafed the camp and then we had to seek shelters underneath steel plates and behind steel pillars to stop being shot at by your own people. But there were no aircraft and then as we looked around

we looked in the direction of Nagasaki and we saw this huge column of fire and smoke with the mushroom at top, climbing in the sky at a tremendous rate, there was all this fire inside and it was absolutely amazing and we’d never seen anything like it. Well, I’d seen something like it in volcanic eruptions of the Merapi, it’s a big volcano in Java and it…

But we knew that Nagasaki wasn’t built on a volcano so we couldn’t understand what it actually was. But we looked at it in amazement and everybody stopped running and the Japanese were looking too. And then the Kaiguns came out, the Japanese guards came out, “Kura kura buggaro.” and we had to back, that’s Japanese swearing and we had to get

back to work as soon as possible. And the order came out, no POWs were allowed to work out in the open, so we all had to work inside and inside buildings or below ground in the docks. But of course they couldn’t stop us going to the toilets. So we went to the toilets which are in different places around the camp in threes, two cockatoos [look-outs] on the end of the toilet and then one by one we went in and stood on the seat and you peered through

the ventilators in the direction of Nagasaki and the whole city had caught alight, everything was on fire and that big column in the centre had disappeared but the mushroom was still towering over the top of it all. So we could see there was a terrible fire had erupted in Nagasaki. And, well, that evening we marched back to the camp and we talked amongst one

another, “Where were you?” “Did you see anything?” and the boys that had been working out in the open actually had seen the bomb come down, because it dropped on three parachutes you see. The aircraft had to have time to be far enough away when the bomb was detonated, so that it wouldn’t be torn apart. Cheshire, who was on board of that ship, the famous British pilot

he described that, when I read his book and he said, “There was tremendous turbulence when they saw the big flash and the turbulence hit the aircraft but it didn’t tear it apart and it landed safely at in Tinian.” the island in the Pacific. But the

they saw this come down and it had just disappeared behind the top of the hill because there’s a hill between the shipyard and Nagasaki city, when it detonated. So they didn’t see the thing explode. And, but we had like a theory for that, the three parachutes and the theory we had, that the American had probably done the same over all the cities in Japan

and dropped capsules containing negotiators to talk about surrender or ceasing hostilities or something like that in Japan and that’s what had come down on parachutes, we didn’t believe a bomb would come down on parachutes. But then we had to have an explanation for this tremendous explosion. Now, Nagasaki happened to be the second largest

ammunition dump for the Japanese navy, Sasebo was number one and Nagasaki was number two. And the whole Indonesian Nagasaki which itself had a big ammunition industry, Indonesian Nagasaki were many deep underground ammunition dumps and our theory was that that a single B29 had dropped a rain of incendiary bombs

and one of the incendiary bombs had gone through a badly constructed ventilator and found its way into an ammunition dump and had blown that up and that set up a chain reaction and blew all the underground ammunition dumps sky high and that was our theory. And we didn’t know that it was a bomb and we didn’t hear about that actually, it wasn’t confirmed that it was a bomb till the 28th of August

when we were visited by American aircraft, they were Mitchell Bombers, three American bombers and we quickly rolled up blankets and made letters out of it on the parade ground, N-E-W-S. with a question mark and they read that and one peeled off and circled around a few times and then he made a low run over the parade ground and dropped a

packet of Chesterfields [cigarettes], and in the cellophane was a piece of paper out of his diary, “War is over after Yanks dropped atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Godspeed home.” and that was the message and that’s when we heard that it was actually and it confirmed that it was a bomb. Because the news that it was a bomb was kept away from the Japanese population too. And it’s only later that we realised that, that moment

we saw that flash, at that very moment 74,000 Japanese men, women, children, babies, thousands of animals died instantly. And another 19,000 died a horrible death of radiation sickness in the next three months. Now after the 9th, the following day, we still had to go to work because we were still POWs and there’s normal routine,

we went to work again and but all the work on the shipyard had stopped, and all the workers, the Japanese workers were put into rescue teams and they were going into Nagasaki and to see what they could do. The fire burned all night and the following day, it was a very big fire and we saw these blokes coming back at about 5 o’clock, bedraggled and

full of ash and silt and they were really downhearted and they had seen a lot of horror there and you see could see that something terrible had happened in Nagasaki. That went on for the next three days and then suddenly on the fifteenth we didn’t have to go to work. And we’d only had a day off about ten days before so we said, “Hey, that’s funny, we don’t have to go to work” and the following day again no work

and there were no more air raids, but there was just a single, practically all the time, a single B29 which kept flying over Nagasaki taking photos, and reconnaissance and testing I suppose. And then on the 17th the, we suddenly all got our Red Cross parcels, which were stored there, and they were handing them out and we said, “Hey, hey, hey, there’s something happening here.” And then

finally you know we heard that the war was over and oh, I’ve never seen so many men cry when they heard, “We made it.” Yeah.

The ninth, you say?

Well, during the day, as I said, there was a huge fire which we saw all the, you know, the clouds of fire and smoke and sparks flying

everywhere. What we saw at night, it was summer, and the order came all the windows had to be covered with blankets, so the Japanese didn’t want us to see what was happening there, but again they couldn’t stop us going to the toilet. See every, you never could sleep for longer than three hours and then you had to get up. We had a saltless diet, and if you have a saltless diet you can’t hold your water, plus the fact that

half of us had diarrhoea anyway or some sort of diarrhoea so you had to go to the toilets regularly. And the toilet block was about 20 metres from the barracks, so you had to walk through the open ground and they had guards there, and they made us run there, so we had a minimum of time to see what was happening in the direction of Nagasaki. But you’ve probably seen bushfires of a night, and you see the glow about that high, but the glow there was right over the top of us all and

it was so bright and it was the biggest fire I’d ever seen. And as I said the following day when we saw these people coming back, we knew that it had been a tremendous fire and we later on heard that a lot of the, see around Nagasaki were a lot of pine forests, those pine forests were instantly dehydrated by the heat of

the bomb and exploded because the fluid in the stems became superheated steam and they just exploded and caught fire, everything caught fire in Nagasaki because of the tremendous heat. As I said at the following few days when we were on the shipyard working and

we, our job was cleaning and painting and repairing things, sweeping, to keep us busy but whenever there was an air raid we had to go into the shelters and we stood shoulder to shoulder with some of the victims they brought from Nagasaki into the dockyard because they had a little hospital there with about 50 beds. And so whenever there was an air raid everybody

raced into the air raid shelter and they stood shoulder to shoulder with some of these Japanese civilians, there were no army people, just civilians who had been burned. And anyone, you could see their bare skin was all badly burned. A bloke had say his arms and his face was burned and his body was not because his shirt but wherever he had, he had a big

hole in his shirt, that’s where there was a big burn. And so we thought these people had been caught in the fire itself but later on of course we found it was the heat, that tremendous radiation heat from the bomb. We could feel that six kilometres away when the hot blast came and hit the buildings, we could feel this hot air rushing past us. And that was six

kilometres away, so you can imagine how hot it was near the epicentre of the bomb. One particular occasion, of a victim is a picture I’ll never forget, I’ll have to take with me for the rest of my life. Was a woman, a Japanese women, oh a little, you know she was only about 5 foot 4 or something and obviously she had been leaning forward

tending her garden and women in those days, say in Japan, always carried their babies in a shawl on their back. And she had been carrying this little baby on her back but as she was bent forward, the baby was facing the direction of the bomb and the heat had burned off all her hair, her eyes were blind, her ears were burned off, her nose and lips were burned but the poor thing was still alive.

And we felt so desperately sorry for this poor woman who was trying to shoosh her little baby and comfort the thing. All we were hoping is that the baby would soon die so that she would get out of her suffering. But they were pretty horrible pictures and we thought the baby had fallen in the fire, we didn’t realise till later what actually caused all those terrible

burns. There was little sign of radiation sickness, which causes, well, if you got so many roentgens which is the amount of radioactivity you absorb, over a certain level you start to get diarrhoea, your mind goes out, you start bleeding from the mouth and oh it’s a pretty horrible way of dying from radiation.

And that’s what happened to 19,000 Japanese afterwards. So it was a pretty grim picture. And after the war was finished, when after we were free men again, the guards, the Japanese commander asked us, “Do you want us to keep guarding your camp against the local people?” And we said, “No, you can get the hell out of here. We’ll take the rifles and we’ll

guard ourselves.” And where is Bokoko and where is Watanabe, they were people who had made life very difficult for us and they of course had shot through already. They were caught later on and tried by the war tribunal, War Crimes Tribunal and they got varying sentences from twenty years to less, Bokoko got twelve years. Anyway, that’s

another story. Then our POWs in the camp decided to go searching for food, and so they went, around Nagasaki are little farms, so they walked through Nagasaki to the farms and the farmers were terrified, they thought they’d come to kill them, rape their women and kill the children and that’s what the

farmers thought because the propaganda had told them that was going to happen. But of course all they wanted was a good feed so they were very relieved when the POWs went back after having a good feed. But these POWs came back with the stories of what they saw in Nagasaki. And the whole place was absolutely erased; everything was grey with a terrible stench hanging over it and that stench

was still there on the 12th of October when I went through Nagasaki itself on our liberation. And the, they could see there had been tremendous heat. There is little beaches around the bay of Nagasaki and little sandy beaches like we have around Sydney Harbour and the sand had fused into glass, sand is the raw material for glass and

they brought back pieces, they’d broken off pieces of that big of sand which had fused into glass and they could sell it for 200 dollars on Okinawa to souvenir hunters of the Americans. And anyway, they could see that there had been a tremendous heat, tiles normally are very brittle and the

tiles on all the debris there were as hard as steel because they’d been superheated and super cooked by the heat of the bomb. Wherever there had been heaps of bottles, stacked neatly, it was all melted into one big gooey mess of green glass, because of that heat of the bomb. So they came back with those stories. I didn’t do that, I didn’t walk

around there because at that stage I had developed an abscess in my leg, I had beriberi, which means your leg just swelled up that thick, and I had an abscess on one leg and I couldn’t walk any more. So I was cursing the fact that I couldn’t go searching for food and going to the hills to get some

extra food, but it turned out it probably saved my life because several of the boys who went, walked through Nagasaki in search of food they died twenty years later of leukaemia and bone cancer. It was an epidemic among survivors both in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, twenty years later of people who died of leukaemia. And when that was finished they survived for

a lot longer, but the incidence of cancer amongst survivors of the atom bomb, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is three times as high as it is for the average population in Japan as a result of the radiation they experience then.

Well, I was nursing this very bad abscess and it was being treated by the doctor all the time. It was an open, a big open cut and trying to get rid of the pus but it wouldn’t heal up very well. The only medicine was permanganate

and keep it open so that the muck could ooze out of it and I was hobbling around on a crutch in the camp. And then from the 29th of August things started to improve considerably because we then suddenly got the

first aerial supplies from the Americans who dropped food and clothing and medicine by parachute over the camp and on the island near the camp because, well, there was an enormous amount of food they dropped there and oh, that was, it almost killed some people who, you know all this beautiful food

and our stomachs couldn’t handle that at all. And some people really almost killed themselves by eating, overeating. There was one case of two blokes I well remember they amongst the big pallet, the came down in whole pallets with a parachute on top and they had a tin of

dried, dehydrated rice with meat and it tasted so nice they ate it, they couldn’t be bothered to cook it first and they ate it and got a terrible thirst of course, and they ate a fair bit of it, a terrible thirst, then they started to drink and then of course it began to swell up and I can’t forget these blokes lying in the sickbay and they were looking like

nine month pregnant women and the sickbay attendant who had tried to push down on it and they were screaming in the pain but they actually finally finished up forcing it through their system and they survived after a great deal of discomfort. But that was an

occasion. We also found that fat food, if you took more than a teaspoon, a smooth teaspoon of butter it went straight through you like a laxative, our systems couldn’t use any fat at all. And we had to very gradually work ourselves into normal eating and the doctors were warning us all the time about

taking it very easy on the food, which we tried to do of course but you know when you’re very hungry you want to gorge yourself on all that good food. But the aerial supplies were absolutely, every three days we started to get it and we got a warehouse full of it soon. And it did a lot of damage because not always did the parachutes open

and sometimes whole drums, they did everything in a big way, Americans do things in big ways. Cocoa powder came in 44 gallon drums. And I’ll never forget there was one drum of cocoa powder landed on one of the Japanese barracks, three storey barracks, it went through the roof, first floor, second, floor and embedded itself in the concrete floor in the bottom, exploded and when you looked

into that room everything was a beautiful even brown as if somebody had painted the whole place and it was all this cocoa powder, it was an amazing sight. But it was that bad that whenever it was an air, they dropped the air food we went into air-raid shelters to make sure we wouldn’t get killed by a pallet of food. But the Japanese were very

very happy with the parachutes because they, we didn’t mind where the parachutes went and they collected them and within a few days you saw kids and women walking in purple, blue, yellow, green, blue dresses you see which were made out of silk and very good Japanese, very good American silk and they made dresses out

of it, well, good luck to them.

Oh, tremendous relief that we had made it, you see. It was a fight of survival all the time and the realisation that you had made it and you were going to get home, back

to well we thought life would return to the way we left it which was of course, for in may case, complete for all the Dutch who came out of the Dutch East Indies that was changed completely and it never returned to anything like it. But the fact that we made it and we’d be able to see our parents and sister and relatives and old friends and that was a

tremendous feeling and we were absolutely delighted that we made it. But we had earlier, early in September we had, I think it was on the 10th of September we were looking out for the Americans, we were amazed; the war finished on the 15th and it went on and on and on

and nothing happened and then we saw the American aerial drops and we said, “Ah, at last they knew we’re here.” Well, we had been, had that reconnaissance of those Mitchell bombers that had dropped that message on the parade ground but it was the only contact we had had with the outside world. And we even had people who climbed up on the hill, looking out over the ocean to see whether the American

ships would come into the harbour. And when they finally arrived, the Yanks sent a motor torpedo boat, no, it was a landing craft to the camp and I’ll never forget that because you know the camp was on the seaside and they drove up with this and they landed, down came the front and out came these

Americans sailors with a few petty officers, there were about 20 of them, all in beautiful spotless white outfits. You see we had never see any white clothes with all the grime and much. And they came into the camp and they walked there with spring in their steps and we then began to realise that, you know we had

changed into, we couldn’t walk with spring in your step any more, we just shuffled along looking down, because you never looked up because then you might catch the eye of a Japanese and you’d attract attention so we used to walk with head bent and shuffle along and suddenly we saw all these Americans with spring in their step and that’s when we realised how far we had as, human

beings we had actually sunk although they hadn’t killed our spirits. And then the order came in, all POWs had to go back into their rooms because the Americans wanted to see what conditions we lived under. And so we were in the room and I’ll never forget an American petty officer stuck his, opened the door, stuck his head into the door and he said, “Goddamn you guys

stink.” that was what he said. You see the air just wafted and it hit him in the nose and, well, as I said we were used to the smell and oh that was quite amazing when he said that. But then they said, “Look, get ready fellows, you can leave everything here or you can take your personal belongings with you and then we’ll pick you up in landing craft

and take you to the wharf.” which they did two days later. And we went to the quay in Nagasaki itself and that was a sensation by itself because as soon as we arrived there, all our personal belongings, that was, I saved a book and I saved, I had my mouth organ, the Japanese actually confiscated all that when we went in

to the camp and we got it back after the war finished, much to our surprise. So all those things you had to put in a special bag and that was being fumigated. All the clothes that we were wearing were, went straight into an incinerator and our, naked we went into, it was a long 20 showers, fresh water, hot fresh water, well what a sensation that was.

We hadn’t had fresh water or a hot shower for all that time so that was a tremendous sensation. So you had to soap yourselves in and have a shower, soap yourselves in again and by the time you came to the end they gave you a towel and you had to dry yourself properly. And these beautiful white towels, it went straight into another incinerator and we thought, “Oh, what a shame.” you know and

then we walked into the next team, still no clothes, all naked and there was a whole team of blokes standing there with shavers and they shaved, anybody who had a beard was shaved off, all the pubic hair was shaved off and underarm hair and if they had hairy chests, it was all shaved off and then the next team there were blokes with puffers

and it was DDT [Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane], DDT powder and we came out all white looking like ghosts and then we got into a dressing room and you got white, beautiful white underpants, a singlet, blue jeans, shoes with white socks and oh, what a sensation. And then when we came out there was a girl, a Red Cross girl waiting with an ice cream

and we hadn’t had an ice cream for all that time either and I’ll never forget that ice cream and it was absolutely marvellous and I’ve never enjoyed an ice cream that much in my life. Yes, and then, and all this walking, I actually didn’t walk, I hobbled around on the crutch because my leg was still very gammy and I couldn’t put that shoe on either so I carried that in a bag with me in the other arm

in the other hand, and then they were going to take us on board, off the aircraft carrier and, well, the boys were just jumping in that boat and I couldn’t do that so they manhandled me in there and when we came to the aircraft carrier, the only way to board that was with scrambling nets, you know what a scrambling net it? They used them in school as climbing nets,

twenty years ago here or forty years ago. Anyway we had these scrambling nets and you had to get up on deck and I had no chance of getting up there so and a six foot four big Negro, built like a bear he said, “Come on buddy, on my back.” he says and I hang on like a little monkey and climbed up the, he just climbed up and it didn’t bother him at all

that there was somebody hanging onto his back, so he took me on board of the deck. And that’s where the sickbay attendants were waiting and they carted me straight into the sickbay and pumped the penicillin into me and a week later I could walk normally again. So it was absolutely marvellous the way they looked after me up there. And the food on the American

aircraft carrier, that was absolutely unbelievable. You know we, that was the first time we got in touch with the navy, “Gee.” we said, “this is a luxury navy.” Even our own tucker we had before the war in the navy which we thought was pretty good, but the food there was absolutely unbelievable and Americans were then and still are big eaters, and oh it was fabulous.

So we went that night they picked up people, POWs from several camps and we all went on the Chenango up to Okinawa. And that night they put on big concert, jazz concert for the POWs, and Benny Goodman and all that beautiful music, yeah they were very happy days because

we knew we had made it you see. And the reception we had from the Americans was tremendous and of course officers there wanted to, they went around asking because they knew we had survived an atom bomb and that’s why I started telling them of what I experienced there and they were fascinated because they didn’t know anything about it, they didn’t even know about radiation, neither did we for that matter. Nobody knew about the radiation and the after effects of

that, that only came in later, much later.

Well, when I came back, you see the quays were right in the middle of Nagasaki and there was nothing left, you could see here and there in the distance a concrete building, the concrete buildings had been badly damaged but they were still standing but

every other building had been erased completely. There were a few buildings behind the hills, because that gave certain protection against the force of the blast and some parts of Nagasaki which were in valleys behind hills didn’t suffer much at all except that, of course, they got the radiation. But

I can still remember even then, that was the 12th of September the terrible smell hanging over the place and there was very little activity there because well all the Japanese had disappeared from there and they weren’t starting to come back yet. They lived away from the town and they were evacuated and so only later that they started to come back to

Nagasaki itself.

No, no, well we heard that it had been a tremendous bomb but what we didn’t realise that actually that saved our lives because if there had been allied landings on Japan, they had all the plans ready

and if that had happened, all the 47,000 POWs in Japan proper were to be killed at the first sign of Allied landings. They had, for each camp they had different rules, in the mines they were going to send them down into a shaft and then pour oil over the top of them and then set them alight. In our camp there were four machine gun emplacements

on the four corners of the camp, we helped to build them actually, and I remember the boys who were on the working bee which built those pillars, those machine gun emplacements they said, “They can’t, the bloody Japs can’t read the plans, they can only shoot inwards.” we thought they’d made a mistake and that they had built those to

protect us from attack from outside but no, they were damn serious because the plans they had for us was to give the people in the camp, who had remained in the camp, had to be given injections, a benzine injection and they realised that by the time the first half of us were dying of, in agony because of the benzine injection

then the doctors had to withdraw, set the camp alight and machine gun any POWs trying to get out and that was the way they were going to handle it.

We went, from Okinawa I flew to

Manila, they didn’t want to keep us there they wanted to, all the POWs were taken to Manila where they thought it was a better place to put us in large camps and they had a special, a very large camp for pre, former Dutch, or Dutch military people who were former

POWs from Japan and they were all put in a big camp in Manila. It was a tent camp and that’s where we were sent and we were formed there, we had to wait for repatriation. And the trip from Okinawa to Manila was something unique too, because I went in a Liberator, a four engine Liberator and

the captain of that was an American naturally and he was only 19 years of age and he flew a four engine Liberator and he came down to us, we were sitting in the bomb bay and he came down and talked to us and he asked me, “What were you in the navy? And I said, “I was a cadet pilot officer but I never learned to fly.” And he said, “Oh well, if you’re a cadet pilot oh you had better come up in

to the cockpit.” So I come up in the flight deck and he took me up there and sat me in the second dicky seat and said, “Now you fly the plane.” And he said, “Just keep the horizon there and that’s the course we fly.” So for the next half hour I’m flying over the Pacific, piloting a four-engine plane with about 30 people on board. It was unbelievable the things which happened during the war you know.

But that’s the only time I ever flew a four engine aircraft.

Yeah, yeah.

It was yeah, it was a fabulous time except for the fact that you know when I arrived in Manila I went, one of the first things I did was I went to the Red Cross

missing persons you see and I wanted to see whether they could find where my father and mother and my sister were you see. And I gave them the address, the last known address and to the credit of the Red Cross Missing Person’s Bureau, they got my sister’s address who was,

she was liberated too, she was in a Japanese concentration camp in central Java with my mother together and she, they found her, Red Cross, then gave her my address and I got a letter from Nell, a seventeen page letter where she gave the whole history of what happened to my father and

what happened to my mother and so I then heard that they had both perished during the war. My father died as a result of beatings he received in a Japanese prison, he got gangrene in his leg and that killed him. And my mother, as I said, died of starvation, a fortnight before the end of the war. Well, that really

shattered me, that was the biggest blow I ever got in my life to hear that I suddenly had no father and mother any more. And the tragic circumstances under which they had died. There was only Nell and myself left then. But so I was waiting there for repatriation together with all the other Dutch people and as I said before there

were a million and a half Americans who had just won the war in the Pacific so were also brought back to the Philippines island and they had preference but whilst I was there I was, again often spoke to officers’ messes who the words sprayed around that I could tell them about what Nagasaki was like

and they were very interested in that, so I had all sorts of crazy experiences in the Philippine Islands, when I went to Leyte for instance and I was going to speak at the officers’ mess at night but to amuse myself during the day, they had motor torpedo boats there and the Yanks who were also waiting at the base, waiting to see what was going to happen. They used to go water-skiing

after, behind a motor torpedo boat but they didn’t have water-skis, they used a table, they had these army tables which had two legs which flapped up, you put those legs tight, you put the table upside down, hang onto the legs with the rope in front, tied to the table and you went at breakneck speed around Leyte Bay behind a motor torpedo boat, absolutely crazy. And then you made sure that you didn’t fall off

because there were sharks in the water and that’s how we amused ourselves and the Americans over there at the, in Leyte.

Well, I was still in the navy of course, I was still navy personnel and what was I going to do?

Was I going to go back to continue my training, go back in the navy and finish as a pilot officer or what? And then as I was waiting in Manila the Dutch navy bought those fifteen Dakotas and they bought those to use to bring the women and children out of the Japanese prison

camps to Australia. And they wanted volunteers to go and man the base, set up a base in Sydney. And I volunteered and they wanted to, they could only get people who spoke English fluently and I well remember the officer who had to do the selection, I had to go to him and my English was twice as good as his,

but I made a point not to let him feel it. So I was selected to go to Australia, so that’s why I, that’s how I finished in Australia on board of a Dakota, with still the American markers on it and we landed on Christmas Eve in Melbourne.

Yeah.

To the release itself, you know

it was the tremendous personal satisfaction that it was a victory for your will power to survive and the Japanese were all out to either kill you physically or mentally and they hadn’t succeeded in either of it. And that was a feeling of satisfaction, but also the

tremendous joy that life was going back to what you were used to before the war, and we thought it would all go back to something similar. Not realising that my life would change completely after the war. And the joy of being free and free to go anywhere and eat to your heart’s delight

after the war again, after we got over our initial malnutrition problems, that was a tremendous advantage, and the fact that you could have a shower and use soap and wear clean clothes all the time and have a dry warm bed to sleep on, comfortable. Although as far as beds is concerned I couldn’t sleep in a

soft bed at first as a matter of fact. There was, I think, for about the first month, I used to sleep on the ground on a mattress because or on the carpet, I wasn’t used to all that softness and I couldn’t sleep on it and I had to have a harder surface underneath me.

What the shock that I survived it?

Oh yeah, no I never had a feeling that it shocked me, it was just immense relief and joy of being a free man again, not somebody telling, with a stick behind you telling you what to do. And not being

punished for everything and having the opportunity to enjoy good things in life. One of the first things I did when I came to Manila was go to a Manila Symphony Orchestra concert in the concert hall in Manila, that was absolutely fabulous and of course, the Americans had their

recreation teams, I heard Bing Crosby and Gracie Fields and Bob Hope, I saw them all in Manila and the islands, that was great to see these people. And the new songs we heard and the song which appealed more to us than anything else was Bing Crosby, ‘Don’t Fence Me In’, that really spoke to us because you know

we all had that terrible experience of being fenced in for so long and that appealed to us, yeah. And the joy of, well at seeing women again, we hadn’t seen, well we’d seen women, Japanese women on the shipyard, they were working there too, but they were all horribly dressed and none of them looked very nice at all. And

when we came to Manila there, you know there was numerous bars everywhere and there was great enjoyment for Americans and that was the time when they started the Boogie Woogie and boy, could the American Negro dance, it was absolutely fabulous, they were unbelievably good and it was a joy to see them dance. But all those dance halls

they had, you could dance with girls there, they had a system, they called them taxi girls and as you went in you bought five or ten taxi tickets and when the music started you went to one of the girls and gave them a ticket and you could dance with her you see. And the first thing they said “Filipino custom, no touch.” And then you danced with them, some distance away but it was good

fun and you know to get back to some form of normal life, although the life in Manila was not a normal life, you know, with one and a half million military people, the city had been bombed and was flattened. The normal Filipinos were trying to take up the threads of civilian life from before the war and it was a very artificial life. So you can imagine

the big shock, that was when you are talking a shock, the only big shock I had I suppose was when we arrived in Melbourne. See we had been, all the time since the war broke out we had been in the Dutch Navy and then into the Japanese prison camps then we had Manila which was all

still male dominated, the only time you saw women was when you danced with them in a bar. And, but we hadn’t seen any normal life as we remembered it before the war. When we arrived in Melbourne on Christmas Eve we were in open trucks, we were carted from Lavington to Queen’s Mansion which is at St Kilda, there was a home which the Dutch navy

had hired to put the Dutch personnel in and they took us to Melbourne first because we had to be processed and so on that trip back there we saw sights, well, it was just ordinary Australian life, you know, a park, you see a woman with a pram and two little children. We had forgotten

completely what it looked like, it was such a shock there to see things we had forgotten that they existed, like ordinary family life, shop windows with beautiful stuff in it, people standing on the footpaths laughing and laughing and talking to one another and nobody in a hurry and all the Christmas decorations outside

Spencer Street, we went through, past Spencer Street Station in Melbourne and there were just thousands of people streaming out of Spencer Street Station and there was a Salvation Army band in front playing Christmas songs, Christmas carols and that was for us a tremendous shock actually to suddenly come back into normal life which we hadn’t, we had been away from that for six years

and to suddenly realise that that still existed and as you can see it was a shock to me because I still get emotional when I think about it.

Well in,

see after we were processed there, well we spent a week in Queen’s Mansion and that was just like a bit of paradise. Queens Mansion is just the other side of St Kilda Road which comes out at Port Phillip Bay and you could walk across the street onto the beach and

go for a swim or you could go, on the other side of St Kilda was a place called the St Kilda Ice Rink so you went swimming in the day or you hired a little sailing boat and you could go sailing at Port Phillip Bay and at night we went skating on the ice rink, now all these fabulous, that entertainment that was absolutely magnificent. Or

you could go into the city with the tram, the tram used to run there then and you went by tram into the city and you went to the movies and you got yourself a milkshake and the milkshakes were, oh they were really milkshake with lots of cream. And every milkshake bar, they used to have blokes who were real artists, they had the thing and they poured it, I don’t know whether you’ve seen that before,

but that’s what they did before, during the war, or just after the war. Sorry, and they poured it from a distance and never spilt a drop and you had your beautiful milkshake. So during the day we were as I said being processed by the navy, issued with Dutch Navy clothing because when we came we still had all American clothing but we got our navy uniforms

and then they loaded us back into a plane and we landed at Mascot and that’s where we went to Point Piper in a big three storey building which was taken over by the navy and that’s where we spent the next 18 months. And at Point Piper too, you know, Dutch people were very

popular. Well when you said, “How did you get over this all?” I remember the first day when I was at, in Melbourne I was just walking, I was standing there somewhere and somebody pulled up in a car and said, “Hello sailor what are you doing for Christmas dinner would you…?” Or it was Boxing Day; they said, “would you like to come

over to our place? My son is a soldier and he is in New Guinea but we would like to have a military person to share our Christmas dinner with.” So they invited me, and Val Quigley was his name and he lived somewhere and picked me up by car and then brought me back by car and I had a beautiful Christmas dinner so it was very easy to fall in love with Australia

and get over the shock of getting back to normal life.

Oh I don’t think it took me very long to get over the feeling that I was no longer a prisoner, that happened already in Japan,

that I felt free, although I felt confined because well I couldn’t walk for a start but I started to feel like a free man in Manila already, we could go wherever we wanted and I used to do a lot of sketching and as a matter a fact I was picked up by American officers, they saw me sitting on the road sketching and they asked me

and said, “Oh gee, you’re an artist.” I said, “Oh well, I was trained as an art teacher.” And they said, “Oh gee, we need you, could you come to the Roosevelt Club?” So the next thing I find I’m running art classes for GIs [Government Issue, slang for American soldiers] in the Roosevelt Club in Manila and that was very interesting too because, you know, and a lot of people came in and some of them were real artists and were much better than I could draw or paint

and, but that was an interesting sideline and so I never had much time to think, except when I got the bad letter from my sister and I said that really knocked me about for a few days. But my mates I was with, you know they helped me through that and it was mateship, which helped you through

right throughout the prison camp actually it was your mates, if you felt down they’d talk to you and you’d talk to one another and cheered one another up and make sure that you get through it. Plus I haven’t mentioned but religion really played a big part because you know, as I said what my mother said and I really found that when the days were very

dark in the Jap prison camp every night I used to have a prayer and said, “Look, I don’t know what tomorrow will bring but will you please help me to get through it? And will you protect me?” and it was always a great relief to know that you could turn

and you felt also that the Lord was near you and I had some, you know most people in their lives have at one stage or more a mystic experience and the most mystic experience I ever had was in Nagasaki and that was

Christmas in ’44, it was a bloody awful day, it was freezing cold and we, as POWs we always saved some of our Red Cross parcels to eat at Christmas but we had no spare day, the camp commander went to the Japanese camp commander, and that’s our senior officer,

and asked, “Can we, it’s Christmas, it’s a big day for Europeans will you allow us to sing?.” and we weren’t allowed to sing in the camp because you know it was, war was a terrible thing and so we weren’t allowed to sing and anyone caught singing or humming was belted up. So when after several approaches the camp commander said, “Yes,

okay, I’ll let you sing but you’ll have to go outside on the parade ground.” And he said, he thought by himself, “They’re not that foolish that they’d go out in the freezing cold.” But there’s a blizzard blowing and sleet and so the word spread around and it was 8 o’clock and we were allowed out and much to the disgust of the Japanese guards who had to go out of the nice warm guardhouse,

around the fire, they had to go out with overcoats and they went, they had to go with us to guard us because they thought somebody might run away and we all, practically everybody in the camp and at that stage there was only 500 people left in the camp, not because the others had died but they’d been transferred to work in a mine and the 500 of us, most of us, that’s probably about 400 or 450

and we stood there and together in the horrible weather, we stood like penguins, you know how penguins all stand together for mutual warmth and then we started singing Christmas songs, Christmas carols and we had some English Christmas carols and some

American and then we all finished up with ‘Silent Night’. And the atmosphere there was absolutely electric and I really felt that the Lord was with us and just stood there amongst us. And the funny thing about it the Japanese felt that too and the Japanese, who

were swearing and that at us, because they all got still, and they just stood there in silence listening to us and they could feel there was something happening there and I have never felt the presence of the Lord like that again. And it was absolutely unbelievable and we all felt that and we were greatly uplifted when we went back to sleep.

No it’s all right.

Yes, so we all went back to, and had a good nights sleep or a good night’s sleep, three hours’ sleep and then up to, and back again. Yeah, so they often say there’s no heathens

in the trenches but I can assure you there’s no heathens in the prison camps either. Everyone seems to get some belief somehow, somewhere because you knew that was the only thing you could fall back on. Your mates, but when the chips are down you’re all on your own but then you need some way to bolster you up and I found that tremendously helpful.

Yes.

Yeah, that question is often asked when I address people and at first of course I hated the Japanese because of what they’d done to me and what they had done to my parents. But

when I settled here I started meeting Japanese every now and again. My kids for instance, Tom had a little friend Yugi Yakuda and he had a mother, his father was working for Mitsubishi and they went to school here, he was a classmate and the little kid was very friendly and very friendly people and when they heard

that Tom’s father had been a POW they fell over apologising and being so sorry about it all that I had all these bad experiences. I knew that the Japanese themselves in Japan during the war had been treated just as badly as they treated us. It was unbelievable, the cruelty of Japanese soldiers to their own people. To give you an example,

one day when we were marching back to the camp, the road was blocked by a truck and the Japanese stopped the whole, our few hundred POWs, and there was an old Japanese woman on the side of the road, grey haired old little lady with a basket and it had tomatoes in it and she saw our hungry eyes looking at those tomatoes so out of

the goodness of her heart she took one, gave it to a POW who shared it, and there was 4 big bites and it was gone. But one of the guards saw it so he came up swearing and he didn’t attack us but he attacked the poor old woman, knocked her down with his rifle butt, kicked her, and then all the tomatoes spilled on the ground and he trampled them all into pulp. And you know

we said to ourselves, “That’s the way they treat their own, rotten animals.” And I saw that on another occasion a Japanese woman in a beautiful kimono, she dropped a tissue on the ground and a guard saw that, he grabbed her and dragged her face and the kimono through the mud and that’s the way they treated their own people, it’s absolutely unbelievable. Anyway how did I get over it as you asked? So

gradually I met more and more Japanese and when I went into local government, there was a lot of Japanese businesses had started in Warringah, Fujitsu is one of them, the Nakamura mob they have established a big factory here and I had to do a lot to do with them and they all were most apologetic about what happened in the past. And I then, in ’93, so I began

to realise then actually that the Japanese were just as much victims of the Japanese imperialists, the army, navy, and air force who had foisted that on the Japanese people. And then in ’93 I was asked to go to the world conference of Mayors for Peace. The Japanese every four years have a big conference in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, every four years and they invite mayors from all over the world

to come to these cities, everything paid, you’ve got to pay your own passage but while you’re there you are the guest of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and they had five hundred mayors from 70 countries and I was one of them and they had heard from your CV [curriculum vitae], which you’ve got to send prior, that I’d been a POW and even while I was still in Australia they rang me up already from Mainichi Shimbun from Tokyo

rang up, “How come you were here in ’42 till ’45, what were you doing here?” And I said, “I was a horyo.” “Oh, horyo.” That means POW you see. And he said, “Oh, oh I’m very sorry.” And anyway when I was there I was given five minutes to give an address and the message was two ways, one of them was if there’s ever a nuclear war it’s the end of civilisation as we know it and the second

one that I paid tribute to the 250 thousand Japanese men, women and children who, mostly civilians, who died as a result of the atomic bombs. And I called them the martyrs of the twentieth century because their horrible deaths have saved the world from a nuclear war, we’ve had several wars, Vietnam War, Korean War, Gulf War but they never used nuclear weapons and that’s because of what people saw, what happened

there. Now the Japanese had never thought of it that way and overnight I became a media star, so much so a friend of mine who works in Foreign Affairs heard later that they got a message from the Embassy in Tokyo, “Who is this Paul Couvret? He’s getting more publicity than when Bob Hawke visited us here last year.” So that was very interesting. But why I’m mentioning this,

I had a fabulous experience there and while I was in Nagasaki the reporters brought to me a woman, a Japanese woman and this woman said, “You know I was in that shipyard when you were there as a POW.” You see all fourteen-year-old boys and girls were taken out of school and had to work. We as POWs felt sorry for these poor

kids because they belted them up with baseball bats the same way, if they weren’t working hard enough. And this girl had been working there and she said, “Ever since I was there I have been feeling so guilty about what my people did to your people, the way you were treated, the cruelty, the rags you walked around in and I felt so sorry for you and I never had a chance to apologise, but today is the day.”

And then she stood in front of me and she bowed deeply and the only English word she knows, “Sorry, sorry, sorry.” and she bowed three times and said that. Now that really brought home to me, an apology that way is much better than an apology from a politician that means nothing. And then she walked away and she said, “Could you wait a moment?” I said, “Oh dear.” I said to myself, Japanese are very big in giving presents

and I didn’t have anything on me to give her you see but no, she did come back with a present, she come back with a little plate, two peaches, two pieces of apple, two cherries, everything all the fruit they had, two of each and she said, “You know, when I went to work every morning my mother used to give me more than I could eat.” like most mothers do, no matter where they come from, they give their children more to eat when they go to school.

And they always bring something home and her mother did the same and she said, “And I so much, I knew how hungry you people were and I so much wanted to give it but I never dared.” because if they had been found to do so they would have been belted up mercilessly by the guards so she never had a chance and she said, “But today my chance has come to share this so let’s eat this together.” Well so here we stood and I didn’t know this woman from a bar of soap but I put

my arms around her and we both stood there crying and I think any hatred, residue of hatred in my heart against the Japanese just melted. Yes, so that was a very emotional time, that time in Japan. But I think that’s when I got over, that was when the last hatred in my mind disappeared

from there. And then to top it all off my son introduces me to his girlfriend, a Japanese and it was his new girlfriend. And this was a Japanese doctor, well, she’s not Japanese, she’s lived here since she was six years old, went to school here, went to high school, went through Sydney University

and then became a psychiatrist, a fully licensed or accredited psychiatrist and he married her and they had twins and that was for me a test too of course, you know do you really don’t hate the Japanese any more. And I realised you know if I said, “Look, I really don’t want to know you if you marry her.” then I would have lost my son and nobody wants to lose

their son. And she’s been a wonderful daughter-in-law, can’t do enough for you so yeah.

I thought, I look back at this as something was you know I believe on a golden thread which runs through your life and I’m not a pretty religious man, I don’t go to church, if I got to a church once a month I’m doing well. I believe there’s a golden thread which runs through your life and the good Lord is holding the thread in one hand and it’s your choice to

hold that golden thread. And I do believe that my time in prison camp was just a part of growing up and a huge learning experience. I got a very big insight in people and you can’t judge people by what they look like. You learn to appreciate what they do and what they think.

I’ve got a tremendous appreciation of the good things in life and when I say the good things in life, is enough food, friendship, clean clothes and a nice home and a dry bed. The simple things, which we all take for granted

are most valuable and I have also learned what hunger is, for three years we went hungry every night and we always dreamed, we were dreaming of food. In prison camps nobody was talking about sex, we were impotent anyway, but we were always dreaming and talking about and exchanging recipes about

nice dishes and so. And at night you were always dribbling, at night your pillow was wet because you’d been dribbling because you had been dreaming about food, to make glorious food, ice cream and all sorts of lovely things, chocolate cake and that was things, so you got a tremendous, and you appreciated the horror and the deadening feeling two thirds of the world lives under because they are

going to bed hungry every night and I have had a tremendous appreciation for that and I’ll never throw away any food. I can’t stand people throwing away food because you get that appreciation of eating food which was thrown away from the Japanese kitchens. We used to crawl up behind the wall getting the crusts out of the big copper vats they used to cook

the rice in, we’d pinch that and try to beat the dogs getting there, get it and take it with you and chew it up, and it was still food you see. So if you’ve been through all that, that I think has all been a tremendous learning experiences and I felt that I come out much more better equipped to cope with pressure and adversity

deal with people who are anti which came, when I say anti you know especially when you are a shire president you meet lots of anti people, irate rate payers we had, we had the IPs [Important Persons] and the VIPs [Very Important Persons] and the VIR, the Very Irate Ratepayers. So but you learn to deal with them and that was part of my training I received in

the prison camp.

Yeah.

Yeah,

that we must learn to live with one another in peace. We, there is plenty of conflicting interests, but we must learn to solve our conflicts and problems by negotiation, by understanding, by compromise and that’s the only way

we can survive as a planet and I could also add that there is no room for hatred, you can’t talk about these things when you hate people. Hatred destroys the person who’s doing the hating, it doesn’t affect the person who is being hated and you destroy yourself from inside out, it’s very negative thinking.

And if you can live without hatred in your heart and can solve problems by negotiation, by talking it out then there is hope that we’ll have another millennium for planet Earth.

Well, you pick up something along the line; I’m eighty-one now.

No, well I, you know I could talk another day about some of the many experiences we had and how we coped with adversity and the funny things we experienced.

But I think you can overdo it and I think this is a pretty good record of what happened to me and it’s interesting to compare it with other people who went through the same provocations and experiences.

Yeah.

Yeah, well the, the problems, I’ve checked that naturally and especially when before we got married I had very long, well I was very, if and whether I should marry at all because having been

in a radiated area and there was talk about second, or the children of victims being subnormal and having all sorts of problems, so I went for all sorts of tests and the with doctors and they reckon that it would probably be okay so what happened was

that I finished up getting the okay. And then my sons were all born healthy boys so. But the major diseases which survivors picked up were the number one is bowel cancer, that’s a cancer of the colon, and cataracts through apparently

the radiation of the light, they reckon that was very serious, and skin cancers and leukaemia, yeah. I’ve had the beginnings of bowel cancer and I regularly have colonoscopies to make sure it doesn’t develop. And I have had both my eyes done and every six months I visit

the skin specialist to burn off skin cancers which I frequently get, I’ve got one on my head here now, I’ve got another one on my shoulder at the moment and one on my back which he did on Thursday actually. No, on Wednesday, on Wednesday he froze that off and I’ve got to come back for this one, if it doesn’t clear up he’ll burn it off so, and that happens every six months

and if you add up all that I’ve probably spent thousands of dollars on skin cancers. I’ve had a number of basic cell carcinomas cut out of me, so I’ve got scars everywhere over my chest and my back but so that’s a result, well it could be the sunshine in Australia, which caused that.

It was a pleasure talking to you.