Australians at War Film Archive

Well I was born in Sydney but I came from farming people really, rural background and we kept up our contacts with the bush

throughout my life. And actually I had a very happy childhood and rather I suppose privileged in a way because we had a lot of activities. We weren’t wealthy but we were comfortable. And I was born in 1926 so there was that link between the Great War [World War I]. My uncles coming back from that terrible war

and other people as well that we knew. We had a great range of activities about aviators and that was the big thing of the day and linking through to the Great Depression. Must say that as a family we weren’t affected by the Depression but we did see it. The

evidence of it was quite horrible and my mother and my aunt who had come to Sydney to live - my parents married down here - were quite involved in helping people very respectfully during the Depression and occasionally I was taken on these expeditions and saw for myself. And I went to school

at St George Girls High School, which was a selective school where I did mainly language courses, science and language and became fairly proficient in German. Not quite so proficient in French and Latin but that did help me later on in what I eventually did. I became a teacher.

I went to Sydney Teachers College and the war was still on and we did have a lot of restrictions. Coupons you know, there were clothing shortages. Food coupons. All the transport stopped at 11-o’clock at night. There were blackouts and brownouts and so on. But still everyone was in the same boat.

It was a sad time in many ways because a lot of our relatives went into the services and it wasn’t very happy saying goodbye to them. But eventually the war ended and I went out teaching in the inner city and taught a cross-section of children. My parents

had decided that they would sell their home and in the meantime they were – well, it was really because of this: a friend of my father’s, or an acquaintance really, had a big block of flats in Darlinghurst that was the old Hampton Court Hotel and he offered a flat to us so that my parents

could sell. And I went and took possession of it for a while because there was a difficulty regarding tenancy in those days. And while I was there in that capacity for a few months, the landlord was very good. We had to wait until the incumbent resident went

elsewhere. And I was one day in the shop next door and they were foreign people, two brothers, and I was asked if I’d be interested in teaching four displaced young men English. Displaced persons were coming out here in droves. They’d

experienced the chaos of war and the post-war chaos as well and these young fellows had ranging from no English to very poor English and I said I was happy to do that. So I gave them lessons in just English that would get them by until they were able to enrol in say

Evening College, we used to call TAFE [Technical and Further Education (college)] then. And through them, I became very aware of the problems associated with the Russian occupation of certain countries in Europe. Three of them were Jewish lads and they all gave me to understand, except for the fact that they were Jewish, the Germans were better

occupiers than the Russian Army and so I became very aware of the frailties of Communism and other reasons to back that up as well. We managed to get by because of my German and faulty French so they were launched more or less. But before, just about the time my parents moved in,

I was also asked if I would teach a neighbour English, a Russian lady, and I said I’d be quite pleased to do that. She was wanting to polish up her English and I was told she was two floors below our flat. So

I contacted her and that’s how it all started really. I didn’t know anything much about them except the landlord was very suspicious of them because the husband was the TASS [news service of the Soviet Union] news agent and that was really a cover for the KGB [Russian Secret Service] as they were

called. And so I took it on, two lessons a week and found Mrs. Nosov, that’s the Russian agent’s wife, a very nice woman. She was a plain, strong, rather gracious lady but quite determined in

her way. She was practical, down to earth and she more or less told me how she wanted to be taught, which was fair enough. Her English was fairly good but she said that she wanted to be an interpreter when she went back to Russia. She wanted to be a good interpreter and would I extend her. And of course her written English was quite good but

it was very stilted and her spoken English needed a lot of help. And so we embarked on two lessons a week. I met Mr. Nosov, quite a gracious man. But he didn’t interfere in any way. The only time he socialised exactly was on our first lesson so to speak, at the end of which Mrs. Nosov

served tea from a samovar, a little samovar, and some biscuits and he joined us for that. But otherwise he didn’t join us really from then on. Although I had a bit of contact with him he kept to his office, which was just inside the front door, which incidentally had a window that opened onto the vestibule outside and I

noticed that it had a heavy mesh grille over it. But I just thought, “Well this is something that’s valuable to this lady.” Incidentally, they insisted on paying me, which I didn’t mind, and I was quite surprised at how highly they valued my service.

And next thing I knew the landlord who had been speaking about security and various other things that meant nothing to me asked me to go down to his flat and meet some important people, which I did and I was introduced to several men, three or four, and one was The

Colonel. The others, I don’t know what they were, very presentable men, well dressed, quite courteous, and they told me that they were interested in asking me to cooperate by giving them information if

I could about the Nosovs. And they explained the function of TASS in Australia all through the war. They also explained that I was the only person as far as they knew who was an ordinary Australian who had access to a Russian

home or an official Russian home. And the reason I later discovered was they were quite keen to know the likelihood of the Nosovs defecting. And I don’t know what they based that on. They must have had some reason for it. But I thought, “Well, the Nosovs

would be an asset to Australia.” She was an engineer in her own right. She was a bridge builder and she told me about the various bridges that she herself had designed and overseen the building of in Russia. And I knew that he was such a nice man too and I thought it’d be good if they defected. So I said, “Well, I’ll consider it.” But I was warned that

I was to tell nobody about the meeting and I certainly would be sworn to secrecy about the operation. I gave it a few minutes thought and I decided I’d do it. And I was given a false name. I was not to tell anyone about anything to do with

my, well, operation. And I had to be sworn, sign a document and I was told I’d be paid. And I said I wouldn’t want any money for it you know, this is for Australia. And apparently it was required that I be paid. And I think it was a bit less than 3 pounds a week,

which wasn’t too bad in those days. And I said, “Well, what’ll I put on my tax return?” And of course there was a sudden elevation of horror. “You don’t mention anything about it on your tax return!” So that was tax-free. But that’s just by the by. But that’s how it started.

Right, remember I was teaching, so there was all the stress and trials and tribulations of the classroom and

lesson preparation for that and then I was teaching them two days a week. I pretty soon stopped teaching the four lads because they got into an Evening College I think. And as the time wore on, I became quite fond of Mrs. Nosov. She was a delightful person

in a very strange way. I was interested in the way she spoke about herself in relating to her ambitions later on when they went back to Russia. And I found out that she had two children in Russia and hadn’t seen them since before the war.

When I reported, which I was required to do regularly to a handler - I had different handlers actually - they said that that was the usual thing for the Russians to do, to hold the children back in Russia because by that they had a hold on their agents and operatives elsewhere and so they had to

go back to Russia. The interesting thing to me, which I thought was quite hilarious at the time, I was never given anything in writing. I was told never to put anything down in writing. Arrangements were made for me to meet my handler each

time that I met someone, and the first one I had to walk down Ithaca Road at Elizabeth Bay and just keep on walking and a car would pull up beside me. The door would open and you’d just quietly get in. I said, “But how would I know it’s the right car?” It’ll be the right car and not to worry. And I did that and off I went

with this gentleman to a discreet place, which happened to be Lady Macquarie’s Chair or Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair down there, and I made my first report. And I was asked to describe the flat in detail, which I was able to do because our flat, my parents had moved in by then, was two floors above and it was identical. So

it was just a case of putting the little finishing touches, such as there was a koala on the mantelpiece over the fireplace, there were an ashtray here and a vase there and a few other things. It was sparsely furnished actually, rather austere. And I described all of that and how she was dressed.

Then the next meeting I had to meet someone in a little café in Phillip Street in town. There was not at no time was it repeated if you understand. We varied our locations and to my astonishment I was asked about the koala again.

It’s just a mystery to me to this day. But I was asked to describe the koala and the ashtray and the vase and the chairs and the tables and so on. And that happened quite frequently, that wretched koala. I was sorry I’d mentioned it, but it had some significance. But I must say that the information was all one way:

from me to them. I didn’t get information back with the exception of a few things when it was wise for them to offer a bit to, I suppose, jolly me along. But I mentioned that Mrs. Nosov bought a lovely gold watch and they were very interested in that because “Aha, that’s a convertible asset”

and she’d be able to get money for that if they defected. What other things has she been buying? Has she been saving money or you know? But I couldn’t pry. For one thing, I didn’t like to do it and the other thing was that it wouldn’t have got me anywhere anyway because they’re very cautious

people; they have to be. So I was able to give little bits of information like that, which made them very hopeful that the Nosovs would defect. Whether they did or not, I don’t know. Time wore on and one day they just went, and apparently

back to Russia because as that handler told me, they’d have to, to get their children. They wouldn’t be able to ever see their children again if they defected without somehow getting them out. And they must’ve had some plan if they did defect whereby she would use her interpreting skills as a means of going to perhaps a

higher appointment. I don’t know. That’s just speculation on my part. I was sorry to cut the bond because they were very, very nice people. There were occasionally visitors to the office. I wasn’t interested really in them. I didn’t see them actually. But you’d hear sometimes the phone and that sort of thing.

Then do you want me to go onto the next lot?

A summary, yes. Well, the next people who came were different. The landlord said, “The Pakhomovs have moved in. I don’t know if you’ll like

him. And they’ve asked to see you.” And so I went to see them and I was told that yes, he wanted his wife to be taught English and would I carry on as with the Nosovs, because I had been recommended. So

I was pleased about that and so was Security, they were very relieved. He was a different man entirely. He was the most arrogant person and my first encounter with him involved being seated down at the same table I used to teach Mrs. Nosov English at and he stood - I can see him yet standing outlined

at the door - giving this great speech about the marvels of the USSR, the wonders of the marbled Metro station in Moscow. How Australia was no good. “You only have to look around; Australian woman are all prostitutes.” And of course I didn’t

take too kindly to that and I think what he meant was such occupations were not allowed in Russia. I don’t know what he meant. But that was the tone of his speech and I later had other confrontations with him. I mean it was one-sided. It was all his

way, which made me quite dislike him. His wife on the other hand when he called her in, came in very excited, very girlish, quite dowdy; a nice little thing but young, much younger than he. And she didn’t have one word of English. She couldn’t even say yes or no.

She’d never heard any English whatsoever. And he said to me, “You teach.” And so I was set to work to a regime that was quite unworkable. It was obviously his idea. I was to read from an English translation of a Russian classic

and it wasn’t all that good a translation I’m sure. And she would follow it in a Russian version of the same classic. It was this thick. And of course I’m reading and she’s following it like this and of course as you know syntax varies between languages. I explained to him that it wouldn’t work, but that’s how it was to be and of

course the security people were so interested that I thought, “Oh well, I’ll do what they want” and that’s how we sort of bumbled on. It was an interesting experience to say the least, yes. So that was a summary. But poor Mrs. Pakhomov had a serious breakdown in the end and

I don’t blame her. I think I would’ve too.

Well I went. I hadn’t done my country service. I was kept in Sydney longer than most teachers were in those days. You had to do two years’ country service and

I said to the Inspector because of the strain of dealing with the Pakhomovs, “I really think it’s about time I did my country service.” And next thing I received a telegram to say I was going to Wagga Wagga in the Riverina. By this time, I had lost a bit of

weight because the strain of the Pakhomovs. It was a very involved relationship that I had with the Pakhomovs because of Mrs. Pakhomov’s little breakdowns. And she’d be taken off to some place in Canberra because no Australian hospital was good enough and she thought she had a heart condition, which she may or may not have had. But I felt

that she was extremely stressed and she’d be taken away by people that I did meet. Well, in a way I met them. And so actually I was quite pleased to escape from the situation. And the security people tried to convince

me that I shouldn’t go but they didn’t pressure me. Actually, I’m skipping quite a bit here. The Pakhomovs suddenly left and that’s really when I had the transfer to Wagga and Security to my surprise said, “It doesn’t matter, because

we have another role for you to play and instead of going to Wagga, we want you to go to Canberra.” And I said, “The Department has said I’m to go to Wagga next year.” And he said, “That’s all arranged. Don’t worry about that. You don’t have to even think about that. We’ve got it all arranged.” And I said, “Well, do I just turn up at

Canberra School?” They said, “Oh no, you’re going to the National Library at Canberra.” And I said, “Well, a library, I’m a teacher.” And they said, “Oh well, there’s a reason for it.” and they explained that they had very serious leaks that were of national security importance

and they wanted to be able to pinpoint those leaks. And they said that, “You having the trust and access to the home of Russian dignitaries more or less, you can manage somehow to avail yourself of the position there to find

out where the leaks are coming from.” And that to me was very spooky. I knew that it’d be dangerous. Actually, they said that there were certain dangers involved. They didn’t go into any detail but I thought it’s about time I told my

father and asked his advice. And my father was a very honourable man. He knew that when I told him that he couldn’t tell anyone and I said I was breaking my oath telling him but what would I do? And he said, “Go to Wagga. Give Canberra a miss and forget about it.” So I did that and it took quite a while to get it out of my

system. I actually met my husband in Wagga and we later got married of course, and he was a returned man with very long experience in the war from go to whoa. And while, even after I had children, Security still kept in touch with

me, various ones, which I quite liked, but I wasn’t interested in doing any more or less local work. I couldn’t come at that but there were a few funny little episodes that happened. One was that my husband later on mentioned

his later involvement in the paratroops. He transferred from the infantry after he was wounded, he was commissioned and transferred into the paratroops and jumped into Malaya behind the Japanese lines, and I knew that but I didn’t know the operational side of it and it turned out that

he was seconded to the BEF or the British Expeditionary Force and was attached to MI-5 [Military Intelligence 5, the British internal security service] and was sending back reports through his radio operator and he had an interpreter with him. He was actually with the Chinese guerrillas in Malaya in the jungle. And I had to laugh because

I thought, “Well, isn’t that a coincidence.” So I said, “Well look, the funny thing that you should mention MI-5 because I did very mild, ordinary thing with Security here.” And he thought it was very funny too. So here we were two spies married. And of course when various

three different security men called on us in Wagga, he quite understood. But actually ASIO [Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, then Australian internal intelligence service] as it became known tried to recruit my husband after the war because he had all this intelligence experience and had actually been involved in tracking down Japanese war criminals. But he decided he’d had enough of

that sort of thing and turned it down. But there you are, that’s how it came out. And it was only recently that my husband, who’s a very frail man and aged, let slip to our daughter that I had worked for ASIO after the war in the Cold War and of

course she was just thrilled to think she had two parents who were spooks, and she let the cat out of the bag. But otherwise there were only two people I ever told.

Well I was born at Haberfield, a suburb of Sydney, and my parents both came from farming rural people and they moved to Sydney. A lot of people did. There was a great shift from the bush to the city after the Great War. My father

had volunteered to go to the Great War but the war ended before he got away and, as his brothers said, “and a good thing too.” So they set up home together in the Illawarra and we had a comfortable home and lots of space and my parents being country people were very proficient at everything they did.

My mother was a clever woman, expert with the needle and quite an artist in her own right, and my father was very anxious to get ahead in the city, which he did. And we used to still keep contact with our country links and so I had a lot of experience in the country,

riding horses and yarding sheep and all that sort of thing. And we had a weekender. We weren’t wealthy but we were comfortable and a very happy family with the extended family of jolly people. And my mother’s cousins and brother, they were all into aviation, and so we used to tear out to

Mascot Aerodrome it was called then, it’s the Sydney Airport. And I used to be taken up in Tiger Moths, the bi-plane, and Gypsy Moths and did loop the loop and all sorts of things like that, which I wouldn’t do in a fit these days. I actually turned off it a bit when I was about 6 because I was out playing

in a paddock and I heard a bi-plane sputter. It was as if the - the pilots used to have to feather their engines and stop and then start and this didn’t start again, and I watched it and it spiralled down to earth very slowly, cause they were only light things, you know, paper over bits of wood and it nosed into a

marshy end of a paddock. And I raced down to it at full pelt with my eye on the pilot who was sort of leaning out over out of the cockpit and I’d almost got to him and his arm went like that and that must’ve been when he died. And so I stopped. People ran from nearby houses and I dawdled back

home and told my mother. It turned out it was someone my cousins knew. He was a doctor I think and I was rather saddened. I didn’t like loop the loops after that.

Yes.

She was a very interesting person. I think she’s one of the most intelligent women I’ve ever known but she didn’t have the opportunity to go to university because boys in those days got that opportunity and girls didn’t.

But I think she would’ve made a very, very clever student at tertiary level. But everything she did was very perfectly done. She was an exquisite needlewoman. She used to get a lot of prizes in the show. She was a good cook. She liked walking and

we’d go out fishing. We used to have a little weekender. We used to row up in a wooden rowing boat and she’d fish. She didn’t like swimming. She was a bit afraid of the water for a very good reason: there was a drowning in the family. And she was a good rider although she wasn’t a show rider, show quality equestrienne,

because she was too short. She was only barely 5 feet tall. And her father and uncle who were both judges said that she would never achieve much in the ring because her legs were too short. But she was a pretty woman and my father thought she was the most beautiful thing that every walked. But she wasn’t that pretty.

And they were…my father was a…he greatly admired my mother for her humour. She was very witty as much as anything and we had a very comfortable home. But there were certain restrictions. We weren’t allowed to run in the house or put our feet on the furniture but we could jump on the beds and there was no restriction in other ways. But

you know when I’d come home for lunch when I was in primary school, the little table would be set in the breakfast room with a starched cloth and serviettes and that sort of thing. And I don’t know too many little girls who had lunches like that in a school day. But that’s what my mother was like. Embroidered cloths and she even crocheted her bedspread, big double bedspread.

And industrious. She was politically very aware but we didn’t discuss politics and religion and that sort of thing because one didn’t in those days with other people. And we had a wide circle of friends. I met all sorts of people. Major Stoddart who came

third in the London to Melbourne air race. I have his autograph to this day. I thought I knew Smithy, that’s Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, but I didn’t really. But I saw him on a few occasions, saw his aeroplanes coming in and so on, and another aviator called [Charles] Ulm and

some air aces from the Great War who used to go barnstorming around the country. We knew a couple of them.

Yes we lived in the - it was a new area. The next street was Rockdale that way. And the next street that way was Brighton-Le-Sands. It was rather a nice area and it overlooked a very wide

expanse of vacant land where cows actually used to graze and then there were the mangroves and Cooks River and then beyond that there was a sandy beach of Brighton-Le-Sands. There weren’t any houses there then and we had a very big area of ground. My father made a wonderful rockery in the front

garden and flower beds and planted couch grass and made a very long driveway and put in a cement path right the way down and we all hoed in together, you know, we used to like that sort of thing, gardening. And we had lots of pencil pines and jacarandas. The first thing they did when they

built the house was to plant a lemon tree. But my father built a great big fernery and we had a billiard room, very large, and it had three glass doors and 13 windows, which I used to count. I don’t know why. I used to do things like that. So I can assure you there were 13 casement windows. And my father terraced the area and

in the bottom terrace we had an orchard with 32 fruit trees because I counted them. And we had a fowl yard and a pond for the ducks. And we had bantams and powder pigeons and chickens and an aviary full of birds and cats and dogs. And at the back of the orchard was a tennis court and at the back of that was a

paddock for Mr. Sorrel’s horse, it wasn’t ours.

Yes, you know, there were no stresses and strains because we had a lot of other interests and I think having two

very industrious and positive parents who got a lot of fun out of their own relatives as much as anything. The house was fairly near my father’s two sisters who came down from the country to Sydney. They lived fairly nearby within walking distance. And they had children and we were

all very close. So my mother also had family who came down, like her brother and sister who came down for a while and they were very jolly too, but they went back to the country.

He was a wonderful father. He was the most honest person

you could ever imagine. I never knew him to say anything bad about anybody and he was a man of his word. He was a person if you wanted to get out of sport or gym or something like that, you couldn’t ask Daddy to write a note if it weren’t genuine because he couldn’t do that. He never said ‘No’ to me

I don’t think or ‘Don’t’ in my life. But he was overindulgent because there was that break that he had, he was able to perhaps, able to later point out by allegory the pros and cons of something. He didn’t criticise but he made sure that he

got across an expectation of behaviour and attitude and outlook on life. He was a very, very good man and a cheerful man. People said that you could always tell when he was coming from a great distance because of the spring in his step. Yes.

Well he

started off - his father and back to time immemorial were dairy farmers and dairy cattle breeders. In fact, his grandfather I understand had a hand in developing the Illawarra Short Horn [cattle]. But then my grandfather moved the family up to the Dorrigo and

they had Jersey cattle up there because of the distance to market and so on, they went in for fat milk. And he came down and I suppose through influence obtained a position with the Camden Vale Milk Company. And I know that one of my uncles through the 7th Light

Horse was involved with the originators of that company. And my grandfather incidentally was one of the originators of the North Coast Dairy Cooperative. So there was that connection, and he was a clerk with the Camden Vale and then moved across to the Dairy Farmers Milk Company where he did his homework and everything and became an accountant. He also

was house accountant for Totalisators [racehorse betting system] because of a connection with the family that invented the Totalisator, so he used to go to the races. He wasn’t a betting man himself. He wasn’t a drinking man but he had a broad outlook on life and he was a very popular person and family oriented. Nice man.

Yes.

I have one brother. He’s much younger than I. My mother had a difficult time one way and another and so there are only the two of us, and he was a rather a reserved person and he went to Sydney Grammar School. He later went to Western Australia. He was

with a bank. He was a financial, an investment sort of consultant with the bank, an accountant and so on and he did very well. But he lives in Victoria. And we were great pals.

Yes, yes. I smothered him a bit you know. I used to take him round to well symphony concerts and things

like that. I don’t know how much he liked it but he came.

Yes. Now I don’t know how accurate I’ll be here because I heard about it when I was a child. And my great grandfather was drowned in a flood

fording a swollen river or creek. This is in the country getting horses across and he was swept away and drowned. And when he was buried, at his burial, the children were sent out; the boys were sent out for a walk under

the care of an older brother to get them out of the house I suppose, and they were walking around the paddocks and so on. And everything was, the water was still, the river was running a banker I’m afraid, and one of the children, one of the little boys slipped in and an older one jumped in to save him

and I think they were both drowned. I know that one was nearly drowned and was saved. But I think two of them were drowned. And that was on the day that their father was buried. So it became a darkness in their minds about water and then strangely enough my mother nearly drowned at Coogee Beach. It was

quiet, the beach to go to then. So shell covered that you had to wear surf shoes to walk along the beach or you’d cut your feet. But she nearly drowned there because a person that she was with who was married to a relative of my father’s panicked and grabbed hold of my mother and kept pushing her under. Not meaning to, but to save herself.

And my mother heard bells and so that was another experience. And then later on during the war, one of her cousins - they all seemed to join the air force you know - he was on final leave and a friend of his who was also in the air force had had an appendectomy, and they had a holiday cottage on the Nepean River, and

they were up there for a bit of recreation before going off to England and we don’t know what happened but the boat that they were in, that they’d been rowing in, had Bernie’s, that’s the friend’s, clothes neatly folded at one end but not…

No, I think it was, yeah. I just can’t remember if it was Billy my cousin or the other one was fully clothed. They were both drowned and they don’t know what happened. Whether or not Bernie went in for a swim and was overtaken by a cramp and Billy went in after him they don’t know. But there was

a bit of a mystery about it all and that was one more incident relating to drowning.

Yes. My mother was born with a caul on her head, which said that she would never drown. So there was this thing they had in the family so.

Oh well, I have to say we didn’t suffer at all during the Depression because my father was fully employed and we had an orchard full of fruit. My mother was a great preserver and a maker of jams. We had a fowl yard with WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s [chickens] running round and my mother would chop off a WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK ’s head and

I’d help her pluck it. And we had access to food. We had no real problems ourselves but evidence of the Depression was everywhere. There were children who never knew what it was like to have shoes on their feet, particularly boys,

and there were women who actually used to get around barefooted too. And they had no dental care. Bad teeth were quite common. Ragged clothes and I remember that my family still lived in the Illawarra at that stage; they later moved to Gordon. I

remember there were humpies built around the shores of Botany Bay and they were made out of scrap iron and bits of this and that that were scrounged around about and families lived in those humpies. And my mother and her sisters-in-law used to go in a car, like one or other of the cars. My mother didn’t drive but my aunts did and we’d go over there.

Actually, I didn’t accompany them very much. The first time I went, I think I was very young and I had an attack of the mumps and I couldn’t go to school and I had my face with a scarf tied around it, and I sat in the car while my mother and aunts distributed boxes of food they’d cooked. And they were very respectful to these people. And there was very little

government support. It was inadequate in those days. For example, having such close ties to the rural sector I was aware of the condition of men as they were tramping round the countryside looking for work. And they did in the city too. But it was noticeable there because they used to

go to a town and the police used to issue a ticket of some sort to get food, rations and they’d give them a blanket, a government blanket grey with a blue stripe. That’s how it was called a ‘Bluey’ [swag]. And then they’d have to move on to the next town next day to get their further ration. They couldn’t get two days of rations in the one town. They

had to keep moving, so they were really itinerant. And they’d work on a property just for their sort of tea and flour and a billy of boiling water and just camp rough under a tree. It was very hard. A very hard life and when you’d go through on a road you’d see men camping by the roadside.

And children had that urchin look about them very frequently. I was very well dressed. My mother was a genius at making everything just right and a lot of people dressed well. Not everyone was in that terrible situation. But I think it was 30%

of employable men were unemployed. The mines closed. The factories closed. To get a job was very difficult. And of course women once they were married didn’t work at all. Well outside the home where they slaved and conditions were harsh. I didn’t see that side of it until I became a teacher actually.

But…

Well, I just saw the externals of it. I’ll tell you what I did see. Occasionally when I’d go to the country, I used to go to a country school cause I was never allowed to miss a day of school, and there was one girl that I took - it sounds awful - I took pity on because if she

had a lunch, all she had was just a door stop of bread as we used to call it. Bread with fat in a bit of newspaper and she’d sit alone. She was very shabbily dressed and I remember distinctly going and deliberately sitting with her and someone said to me, “Don’t sit with her, she’s lousy.” And she

probably was. She probably did have lice but I didn’t get that close to her. I didn’t ever get lice. But it was a shock to me to see that little girl so poorly catered for. There were others who were just as poor but I related to her and

that’s because I had the, it was a juxtaposition of city and country. The poverty in Sydney was more confined to certain areas, the inner city; the outer outskirts of Sydney where we lived there was very little evidence of that. In the country,

however, it was there for all to see.

Well, you only had to go and the electric trains we always called trains then. The electric train from the city down the Illawarra line and go through Erskineville and

those parts that are very popular today, Marrickville and so on, and the housing was in terrible disrepair. And of course large swathes of Sydney - and I’m jumping a bit here because I’m going to when I was a tertiary student and became more familiar because I went into the inner-city then -

large areas of Sydney had overseas landlords and very little was done to remedy any deficiencies in the housing. And there were lots of houses that were demolished to make way for government housing. The Slum Clearance they called it. These days, of course, the inner-city area is so valuable

that it’s being regenerated by the desire of people who want to live there. But in those days it was a pretty depressing sight. Of course before the war, even Sydney was quite largely a horse and cart city. There were plenty of horses and drays and things on the road and

not as many cars.

Oh yes. I know all about the Domain [central Sydney park, known for soapbox speaking on Sundays]. See we used to go out all the time, the family. My father was a great one. Educational you know. And we’d go down to the Domain on the way to somewhere and that was full of people

who were listening for really a word of hope. There were spruikers [speakers with a message] on soapboxes everywhere and the largest of all was I think perhaps the Communist group. They had the largest audience. And the Labor Party had a group. But there were others too,

some of them very comical. But there were one or two groups of people who I think were called Australia First and they were far right. They came back, I think originally there was the New Guard. Australia First or the New Guard and I forget which came first. But after the Great War, several

returning men became extremely worried about the revolution in Russia and they formed a group themselves to more or less take over if a revolution started here, and it could’ve happened too, except that in our democratic way

we were able to get around it somehow. Because there were hunger marches. I knew all about that because I was allowed to read the paper too even though I was only young. And I used to hear discussion. There was a lot of sympathy for people who were in this awful situation and of course the country was landlocked by the squatters and there was all this sort of

talk. There was great animosity between the Red Raggers [communists] and the Union Jackers [conservatives] and that sort of well animosity really. The Domain then, as I understand it, but I don’t remember this myself because

I wasn’t taken to see this, became full of tents. The government set up tents for people who’d been evicted from their homes. I mean these people were homeless in a way that people aren’t homeless today. It was a different sort of homeless. They really were - they were thrown out onto the street, whole families. When I said about Botany Bay the humpies around there, those people had been evicted

from their homes and, you know, little babes in arms. Terrible. So they put up all these tents in the Domain to ameliorate the situation and I suppose it did a lot of good for those people but there were plenty of others who

were evicted elsewhere. The Domain had some very amusing people though. There was one man who used to…all he talked about was gallstones and my mother thought that was a bit crass but I liked it. I was attracted to anything that was rather off and I used to like to listen to him. And there was another dear old thing,

she was quite dotty and she used to have a Bible in one hand and an umbrella in the other and she had a shabby old black hat on, and she used to carry on about the word of God and she was quite horrendous really. And there was this person in the audience who went up to her and she also had an umbrella

and tackled this person about what she was saying and, I’ll tell you what, there were nearly wigs on the green that day [a serious fight - vigorous enough to make wigs fall off (Irish idiom)]. But there were these characters as well. But generally speaking there was a lot of anxiety.

It was.

Well it was like Hyde Park Corner in London. It was a safety valve in many ways. People could say what they like. There was always a police presence but that was to break up anything that might happen because I believe there were fisticuffs occasionally. I didn’t see that but I

know that on the way out my father, who always believed in you being occupied all the time, he’d say, “Now c’mon, keep your eyes on the ground. Look among the leaves as we’re walking along, you might find a fiver.” So I’d be there looking for a 5 pound note. Never found one.

Well

I went to the local school and they brought in mental testing [intelligence testing] it was called then and when I was in 5th Class I was chosen with another girl to go to an opportunity school they had just started. I think it had opened the year before and I was chosen to go.

So I went and of course my mother was very pleased about that because it showed that her, you know, child was pretty good. And from there, I went to a selective high school. I was supposed to go to a private school but my mother thought it was much better to go to, you know, I was in the A-stream of the selective high school. So I

was unfortunately always the youngest and I wouldn’t recommend to anyone to have their child the youngest in the class. In those days it was considered to be a feather in your cap if your child was the youngest in the class and you know. But it wasn’t a good thing socially because I was just that year behind in a lot of ways and I was a pretty naive sort of a child

anyway. And although I had friends in the senior years, when they was sitting round being languid on benches in the senior grounds, I was playing rounders with you know my little crowd or still wanting to play countries you know with a tennis ball. I

don’t know that they play countries anymore. I was always a bit behind socially.

Well you throw the ball over your head and you call out a country. I actually can’t remember how you play it. But you’d all have your own country and if the person called out ‘China’ and you were China, well you got

the ball and you threw it. It was just a very childish sort of a game. But that sort of thing instead of being more grown-up.

Oh yes, before I even started school I was sent to Miss Fortescue because I had a bit of a lisp. But I don’t think my mother realised that nearly all children lisp

pre school. So I went to Miss Fortescue’s and she was a very fine lady - beautiful home with everything polished, prisms, that sort of thing - and I learned to say, “Round the rugged rocks the ragged rascal ran” and, “Sister Suzy…” you know, all that sort of thing. And I ended up having two ways of

speaking, one a posh way and one my own way, and it was a bit confusing at times. But I used to have to recite and I used to learn singing because my mother thought I had a voice. So I used to have to sing occasionally and I sang at the opening of the Rockdale Town Hall and that

sort of thing. It was good experience in a lot of ways but my mother was not stage-struck, don’t think of that for one moment. It was all for altruistic reasons. I had a relative whose mother was rather stage-struck. And I was dressed more like Princess Elizabeth and my second cousin’s child

was dressed like Shirley Temple. My mother thought that was common. No, there were strict boundaries.

Some funny things of course, you know how men are when they come back from the war if you ask them about the war. “Tell me about the war, Uncle.” “Oh, there was this donkey, etc.” And I had

two uncles on Gallipoli and an uncle and they were in the 7th Light Horse and after coming off Gallipoli they patrolled in the Western Desert and did charges with bayonets and things and they had very definite ideas about people and so on. They

actually thought ‘Johnny Turk’ [the Turkish soldier] was an admirable character because they fought well. They’d have, I heard about a truce being called so that they could bury the dead. They had a very poor view of the way Arabs treated animals. Very, very worried. My people are animal lovers and

one of my uncles actually took his own horse overseas. But he wouldn’t sell it or leave it there when he came back, he shot it himself rather than leave it because he was afraid of how it’d be treated. I heard all that sort of thing but nothing too gruesome. I had another uncle who served

right from 1914 right through to 1919 when he was demobilised and he was at the Somme and Pozieres in Belgium and the retreat and all dreadful, dreadful things and he was in the trench warfare. He was gassed actually and then went back into action.

But he didn’t dwell on it. But if you asked them, they’d tell you something honestly but without dramatising it and no tears or anything like that. They’d just say it was awful. For example, my uncle who was…

Right.

Yes, he had a terribly gruelling time of course right through the war in the trenches and I’d say to him, “Tell me about the war, Uncle?” And he’d tell you something about

the Mademoiselle from Armentières [popular World War I marching song] and all that sort of thing. And then one day he said, “Oh, it was dreadful, it was so muddy you’d be waist deep in mud. And I remember one day when a shell came over and landed right in the trench and exploded.” and he sort of went off into a bit of a reminiscent phase. And he said, “Yes

you know, there were a lot of dead bodies in the trench. It was quite dreadful and the smell was terrible. Rats.” He said it was a terrible thing. You could only get around on duckboards [boards laid in tents, trenches, dugouts, etc]. It was the only time he mentioned that but it was quite graphic the way he… But I’ve got part of his diary. I’m not sure they were allowed to keep a diary but he did.

But it was very technical. All these about being on picket duty and so on and so forth. Right from 1914 he kept this. Unfortunately three volumes are missing. But I remember at one stage, he was at the front. He’d been moved back for they rotate them of

course, give them a bit of rest, and he’d moved back to the front and the only thing he had in that entry was, “21 today.” which I thought spoke volumes. You know, they were only kids. So sad. But he was gassed and recuperated at Salisbury Plain in England and then sent back into the fray.

Very, oh yes. We always attended, well in those days it was a pretty big affair. In the country, there’d always be... Every town had a memorial but I don’t ever remember one in my mother’s hometown but there certainly was in Dorrigo. And when my

uncle returned from the Great War, he was given a great reception in Dorrigo. This was my father’s eldest brother, because he went back there and he had written letters to his parents throughout the war and they used to be published in the Dorrigo Gazette, which I’ve never seen. But he was given this reception by the townspeople, which was rather

good. And he was a fine style of man in every respect. And amongst the crowd that welcomed them back was a German that I forget his name, Mr.…I forget his name, I did know it and my people kept in touch with him for many years. In fact, I have a photo of him camping in the paddock. He

used to go fishing on my grandparents’ property. But everyone shunned him right throughout the war and called him “German Charlie.” this sort of thing, and my uncle went straight across to him and shook his hand and my father said he was very proud of his brother doing that. Because I mean they were people like we were

and it was a bit like things that happened during the Second World War. People do become very emotional and lack understanding and can be rather cruel without even realising that they are.

Oh, definitely it changes people.

I don’t think Australia was ever the same again after the Great War because things changed rapidly. There was a boom period for a while from the 1914 Depression when they had no money. They could suddenly find what was it, something like 3 million pounds a week for the war or 8 million pounds a week, and then people began to wake up. There was a boom period.

People drifted to the city. Labour-saving devices came in changed the domestic situation. Transport. Everything started to change with the end of the Great War and of course it changed for the worse in 1929.

Definitely,

because well of course Australia had that remarkable advantage in that women had the vote here right from I think it was a year after Federation [1901; universal franchise adopted by 1903]. Correct me if I’m wrong but I think that’s right, whereas in England they still didn’t have it and I think they got it about 1923. In fact, France only got it in 1945, votes for women. So we were streets ahead and in other

respects too. Child welfare that was part of round about the time of Federation we had a child welfare act, whereas it was years later that it was introduced in England and before that you could employ any child down the mines and you know in the woollen mills and all the rest of it and they had no protection.

Oh well, I went to school my secondary schooling was at St George Girls High School, which was very good. We were conscientious, it was a very strict school you know, hats and gloves and black

stockings and all that sort of thing. It was an academic school. I was in the academic stream so we had sport and compulsory gym and I did English plus three languages: Latin, French and German. I suppose I was best at Latin and German. I used to get good marks in French. But French is very idiomatic

when you get out into the world and it’s a bit, you’ve got to really have an ear for it. And I did chemistry and physics and mathematics one and two, we used to call it then. Now it’s different levels. We had choir and music and that sort of thing as a side issue. But it was a very well rounded education as far as secondary schools were concerned in those days,

particularly for girls. Mostly girls went to a domestic science school or an intermediate high school. I was supposed to go to a private school but my parents were so buoyed by me going to this special opportunity school for two years that they decided to stick with it and carry through that way. It wasn’t a bad decision.

They didn’t. They wanted me to be a doctor. And you understand that preference was always given to the male of the species and for the reason that women got married and education was wasted on a girl. It was very frequently stated. And of course that happened regarding

going to university. Boys were given priority. I did apply for medicine but didn’t get in the first round, the second round and I was told that you wouldn’t get in because you were a girl.

Because a woman got married and had children and she was a

homemaker as its called today - a domestic in those days - and it would be wasted. And not much was expected of a girl except to be very good and compliant, whereas I wasn’t brought up like that. I was just brought up as if I were a human being and that was it. I mean not many girls can say Don Bradman patted them on the head but I can. And you know

I was taken to meet people and taste various aspects of life.

Oh yes. My father actually played a little bit of cricket and I think Bill O’Reilly bowled him out for a duck and I thought that was dreadful I said, “Oh Daddy” cause I was there watching.

My father wasn’t a cricketer but he was into sports. He was a good runner in his day. He was the North Coast Champion for his age at one stage. Oh no, it was all go, I’ll tell you.

I quite liked the idea. Actually I got a Commonwealth Scholarship for Physics and

I went to look into that, was shown over by a charming person who talked to me about radio physics I’d be attached to. And I’d never heard of radio physics and I didn’t like that idea so I threw that aside.

Yes. They were pretty rare in those days I believe but I didn’t know about that.

I don’t know. It was in the physics faculty but it didn’t appeal to me because I was sick of physics at school and. I wanted to work with people. My mother had been a nurse and I said, “Well, I’d like to be a nurse.” and she said, “Over my dead body.” so I knew I wasn’t going to be a nurse. She said, “You could become a doctor.” So I thought, “That’d be alright, I’ll be doing good for

the world.” And then I became quite imbued with the idea of saving the world through education and the children will be liberated through education, the world would be a better place, and I was quite missionary-oriented that way and so I accepted the teaching

scholarship. And my sponsor was a great friend of my fathers who was a judge at the time in the Equity Court and also one of the Camden Vale people and of course got in no trouble at all, and they sort of pinned me down to doing an extra course

and it dealt mainly with, it’d be like what they call ‘Head Start’ in America. It was a new idea of fitting children into being prepared for a positive role in education. And William

McKell [Sir William McKell, later Labour Premier of New South Wales, then Governor-General of Australia (1947-52), first Australian so appointed] whom my father also knew, he and the judge and my father had the same birthdays. They used to go to have lunch every birthday. But anyway I went to school, went to teach, it was my first teaching school at Botany and Minnie McKell that William McKell’s, Sir William McKell’s wife, was very interested

in Botany School because they lived at Redfern. He was the member there and he became premier and then Governor-General. And at that school I thought, “This is where I have to be. Its just right for me” because there were children there who lived in very bad circumstances but they came to school by and large very clean and well looked after. Their parents loved them

and yet they came from terrible circumstances. There was one street in Waterloo - I said Botany but it’s Botany Road, Waterloo, the school - and one street there called Wattle Street and every house in that street was condemned as unfit for human habitation but it was teeming with children and families.

And there was one family I know that the father told me that those marks on the child’s leg that was from rats biting him at night. And other times they’d have to have umbrellas held over their heads if it rained because the water just poured through. They called it absentee landlords: a lot of these owners lived in

England, you know, it’s back to colonial days and nothing was done about these hovels, a lot of them. And you’d think that their ambition was to get out. But there was one lady I knew and she had children in the school and she got the opportunity to move to Watson’s Bay. She and her husband and her family moved out there. They were thrilled. They had this house

out there and no time at all, about six months or eight months later, they were back again. She said she couldn’t stand the loneliness of it because there was a community feeling in Waterloo and she was right. There was a community. There were women able to talk to each other over the fence and children played in the street and that’s how the inner city was. If I’d been

in dire circumstances, I would much rather have lived in the inner city than on the outskirts of Sydney. There was a feeling of belonging. I later went to Balmain and there was the same territory feeling there. I had done a practicum at Glebe. There was that same Glebe feeling

there and you could work on that.

Well, you could just, you only had to mention the local football team and immediately all the eyes would be on you because and also there was a history with all of these places and if you…well, say, at Waterloo opposite was STC Cables, we used to get this soot coming over. I used to have to wash my

hair every day and all the desks had to be wiped down every day. I’m blaming STC Cables but it might’ve been something else, awful smell of tanneries see - you don’t get that now. Going to Mascot used to be quite an experience you know, like this. It was a very grimy area.

Sydney Teachers College, the university, and I also was an undergraduate at Sydney University after that.

Yes, well yes definitely. Professor Anderson was the big name. He was controversial actually at Sydney University. But at Sydney Teachers College

we had some quite interesting lecturers there. There was Dr Curry and he was a historian. He was an expert on China. He was fluent in Chinese and Ancient Chinese manuscripts and all of that. He did certain work during the war. We had also a lecturer Hyacinth

Simmons. ‘Keeping up Appearances’ no? And she was a fluent Japanese speaker and I understand that those two used to go every evening over to the Arts Faculty and translate Japanese ciphers and things like that into English. Right from the time the Japanese

came into the war and that was on top of their lecturing duties.

I suppose so yes. He was quite - he was an odd character. He was completely bald, a very tall man and we used to have assemblies in those days. And he’d usually bring in some sort of very funny Chinese joke. The trouble is he’d tell you

in Chinese and of course all the wretched students would roar with laughter and of course it’d please Dr Curry no end, but of course we couldn’t understand a word. No, he was a very nice man. We had others that…No, Dr Cole I’m sorry, I’m getting mixed up. Dr Curry was the historian; Dr Cole was the Chinese, the sinologist. Oh dear. Look, I was born in 1926

I’m allowed to have a bad memory.

Yeah. Percy Cole, yes: wonderful, wonderful scholar. Very highly regarded internationally. Oh yes, we had some fine brains there.

Yes. Yes.

No, no. All I know was that my psychology lecturer said it doesn’t matter about the size of

a person’s head in relation to intelligence: you only have to look at Professor Anderson, he has a small head and he’s very intelligent. And so there were little things about Professor Anderson that attracted attention and comment, yeah.

Oh yes. No, I didn’t do philosophy.

Well I think from my family. They were quite imbued with the idea of education. There were particularly, I mean we had a few shining lights particularly in my mothers family.

There were quite a few there. Dr George Osborn, he was actually on my father’s side, he was a geologist. He was head of geology at Sydney University. But my mother had quite a few that were very successful in the academic world.

Well I had an uncle, my mother’s brother, who was an acolyte of Jack Lang [Labour politician: Premier of NSW twice 1920s 1932, when dismissed]. He just adored Jack Lang. He had this very great feeling for social justice and a lot of people did. And actually my father’s grandfather I

understand was a founding member of the South Coast branch of the Labor Party right back you know the 19th Century. And so there was this great feeling for the rights of man and improving the lot of people. And a lot

of children didn’t get any education at all. There were itinerant teachers. My parents were lucky. They were able to go to school. On my mother’s side, people went to university and boarding school and so on. My mother didn’t but she stayed on at school until she was nearly 18. And it was obvious

if you looked around in the country district, the people who had a good living, a good lifestyle, prospects, also had education. The others had to really battle to live. Life was pretty hard you know. I mean Dad and Dave [characters on small starveling farm, from the stories of Steele Rudd (Arthur Hoey Davis), notably On Our Selection (1889)] they were real characters.

Oh very, very much so.

Men had to work gruesomely hard and so did the women. No labour-saving devices and for very little money. A lot of people could be land rich but money poor. A lot of people were land poor and money poor too. So it was only through education that they

could get ahead.

Yes, it was sort of a balance between the two. I did get offered a place in medicine but I gave it away. By then I’d started at Sydney Teachers College you see and I was interested in it and I went on.

I came out of college in 1945 that was the year the war ended. I remember it very well. School closed and everyone was going mad in the streets. I actually walked through Martin Place and it was a sight to see. Quite frightening in

fact, there were so many people you know jumping around and very happy. I remember when the bomb was dropped: that was before the actual end of the war. It wasn’t proclaimed until a few days later. I remember seeing in Railway Square, what do they call the banners that newspapers put out, something about

‘ATOMIC BOMB’ or ‘THE BOMB’ or something like that. Huge letters like this taking up the whole of the placard and I was with my father and he said that might mean the end of all wars, please God. Yes, well he wasn’t right. But we thought he would be right at that stage and we thought perhaps you know, dreadful as it was, it might have a good outcome. Yeah.

Oh, the whole lot, yes, because we read all the newspapers, except Truth. We weren’t allowed to have that in the house. That was a bit risqué.

It had things about divorce in them and my parents didn’t go along with that. Not those days. Square.

But I remember all the actions that my husband was in were quite vivid to me because we had a big map and we followed everything.

Oh yes, I was at Grandma’s place and that was in the Oberon district and of course she didn’t have a wireless set. But a

neighbour did and he rode over and told us that a war had broken out and war was declared and I was there sitting there by the fireplace with my grandmother.

I thought. “A war.” I immediately thought of my uncles in the Great War and I thought, “Oh gosh, that’s pretty bad.” But look I was only

12 I think. You don’t really know what war is. Actually I still don’t, because its only people like my husband who really knows, or people like those displaced persons that I taught a bit of English to. They’re the ones who know what war is.

This sounds awful but people used to say, “Well, that’s brought the Americans in.”

It was essential

that they came in because otherwise, well Australia would be Japanese, England would be German and America, well who knows, it would’ve been all by itself I suppose. Oh no, it would’ve been a terrible thing had America not been brought into the war. There was a great conflict in America. I was aware of all this

even though I was only a child. I used to listen to Hitler’s broadcasts on short wave static.

Oh no. Well.

A lot of ranting and raving. I wouldn’t understand it all of course but it certainly picked my German up. But yes, I was very well aware of all of those. I was aware of Tobruk and Benghazi and

El Alamein, Dieppe and Norway, Narvik Fjord, all of those, it’s very vivid; we took a great interest in the war. My cousin Dorothy’s fiancé was killed in the Battle of Britain. He was in the RAF [Royal Air Force] and you know they were terrible times but.

Oh, the papers and it was all censored, and the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation], overseas service of the BBC: that was regarded as factual and true. But of course we…well, it was pretty right you know, they weren’t…it wasn’t just propaganda. And of course some of it came through in the moving pictures too,

because that was one of the few things that were left in the way of entertainment. Travel was very restricted. You had to have a reason for going further than I think 30 miles or something. You couldn’t just get in a country train and go off up to Oberon or Dorrigo, that sort of thing. You had to have permission to do that.

Who knows? I don’t know. I was still a child but I used to go. And of course there was no petrol and cars used to get around with great big balloons on top of them, you know, with gas balloons and they used to call them charcoal burners. There was no fuel for heating.

We were all in the same boat so it was alright. But my mother was a very clever needlewoman and she could turn anything into something rather stylish. So when I turned up at Sydney Teachers College to be oriented and inducted, I had quite a nice outfit on, but there were some there that still had their

school uniforms on because they had nothing else. We had 56 coupons a year. I mean out of that 56 cards, you’d have to say eight for a pair of shoes, four for a pair of stockings. I don’t know how much for a dress, 28 or something, and your bed linen came

out of that clothing issue too. It was later increased. There was a special issue given to school leavers, an extra 56, so they got over it that way.

Yes, an extra 56 coupons.

Well, clothing, only clothing. You couldn’t, they weren’t interchangeable with other items. Or bed linen: sheets and pillow slips

and that sort of thing.

Oh very.

Well we had connections with Singapore before the war, a cousin. He was in the RAF and he

was stationed up there and we also had connections with Papua New Guinea and we watched in horror. We had relatives who were captured by the Japanese. We watched in horror the march down with the Japanese on bicycles just going through like a gully raker, right through, you know. And

they meant business and of course at Milne Bay they were held back but, and Kokoda Track or Trail as its called now.

Oh, very. Very, very. Oh, yes.

That they’d come, because by this time the Rape of Nanking [China, 1937] was very well

known, what they had done in Malaya, Singapore as part of the Federated Malaya States then, and what they were doing I think it was in Rabaul. We knew for a fact from coastwatchers that they actually cut the hamstrings of native people so they couldn’t run away. They couldn’t walk far and that sort of thing. They were very tough people

and we knew that there’d be no mercy shown. And yet strangely when people we knew, both men and women that we knew imprisoned up north returned, they said it depended on the commandant of the camp as to how they were treated, sort of badly or really horrifically. Badly because

there wasn’t food or they had to work and this sort of thing right through to slavery. But you know, Japanese people are the same as we are in that there’s a variety of attitudes and a variety of personalities. But mostly they were very bushido [warrior-like] and yes. Oh no, we were very afraid. And of course we used to hear

gunfire off the coast quite clearly and Sydney was let off very lightly of course. We had Japanese submarines in the harbour and I remember that.

I remember my brother being absolutely frightened because we had to, the air raid siren went off of course and we had to go into our air raid shelter. But then we used to have air raid drills. We used to have to,

there was a signal given at school and we had to just drop everything and walk. We weren’t allowed to run. We had to walk to a new sewer that was being put through. It’d never been put into operation, thank heaven, and that was our air raid shelter, which was very huge, very large and it took some getting into. But we had gas masks and every girl’s

bloomers had to have a pocket and you had things in there that were essential. We had an identity disk which we wore round our neck by the way, and we all had identity cards. I’ve still got mine. And the Manpower [compulsory war work] was in operation. Any woman who had

a child under 16 was exempt but once that youngest child was called 16, they were called up and had to go to work in a factory or, well, some gainful work. We were all mobilised in other words. So it was you know, it was a team effort. But a lot of people made money out of the war. There was black market. No black

market in our family, no. We went without. Men lost their lives bringing supplies by ship you know to Australia.

Well, it goes right back to the beginning when they first came out. My father’s people came out from Ireland and they became successful farmers and

the children went to the school, with difficulty, riding or in rainy weather they had to walk, but my father’s mother’s people were in better circumstances and they had a governess or a tutor for the children, large family. They had a

dairy stud, a Jersey stud and so on, and it was similar a generation later on my mother’s side, they had a tutor for their children and this is you know out on the land, cattle because there were no schools or some people had itinerant teachers come but they lived too far out.

There were subsidised schools. In fact at one of the properties that belonged to my aunt and uncle not, you know, indirectly related to us, there was a subsidised school there and if seven children could be of school age in the district and the parents perhaps

donated pound for pound, I’m not sure about that, subsidised by the government to erect a little school there. But my parents both were able to go to a proper school so it goes right back to then. I think people have always wanted their children, by and large, to do better than they did, to have

a broader opportunity and just through education.

Yes and they were literate people, which is also rather interesting too. In fact, letters, my maternal grandfather used to

write items for The Bulletin and the Sydney Mail and they subscribed to everything you could think of. They were voracious readers and of course the daily press. Used to have to, had the Western Mail sent to them by post and similarly on my father’s side so it was a certain

mindset. My mother and father were well suited in that respect.

Yes, everyone had to have an air raid shelter in their back yard

and of course my father, being a very good innovator, dug the biggest and best air raid shelter you’ve ever seen. It was all lined, had shelves in it and we put tinned food in and water and anything else you needed, bedding and that sort of thing. Well, we only really used it properly twice I think, three

times, because really Sydney didn’t suffer, not like Darwin or Townsville or Broome. We got off very lightly here. We had a plane come over one night, an observation plane, the submarines, which you know, and the shelling of Rose Bay and other places scored a few shots.

Not much was released regarding information about damage to Australia. We had very strict censorship laws, a little bit like the recent Afghan or the Iraqi set-up. Australia didn’t release much information. It was all very skewed to American involvement or British involvement. Australia’s always been a bit like that I

think, just don’t talk about it.

Well, when the plane went overhead, which did no damage whatsoever, but it was an observation plane; and the miniature submarines; and when Rose Bay was shelled, didn’t affect us but the

siren went off anyway. Otherwise it was just practice, that’s all.

Well of course, the siren would go off and you’d immediately, without question and without

any speaking, proceed to a prearranged assembly point and under supervision. This is school children would proceed to the nearest air raid shelter, but of course you had to always wear your identity disk and other items that you had to have, a pocket with a handkerchief and your bloomers,

and various things, a gas mask. And also preceding that, we did a first aid course every year and that, you had to carry a first aid kit and I don’t know, we didn’t have tin helmets or anything like that, but just walking quickly

and we knew exactly which entrance we had to go, climb down a ladder and of course we had to leave in an orderly fashion too. It was a bit of a bore but a break from school.

Yes, yes and I s’pose it was put into operation very shortly after I think.

With paling, yes he, otherwise well he was thinking about collapse and that sort of thing. It was reinforced in other words and there were four by twos [4 inch by 2 inch planks] and bits of other things to make sure it didn’t collapse. He even put a floor in it and we were all quite cosy

and we had a lamp, was a safety lamp, sort of a hurricane type of lamp, lanterns and a roof of galvanised iron with turf on the top.

About as big as a small bedroom there, about 10 feet by

10 by six or something like that. Bit smaller than a bedroom but we could easily fit into it comfortably.

Yes, there was ventilation too. I think there was a bit of agricultural pipe or something that spun around. I wasn’t into that.

All looked after.

Yes, that was rather unfortunate because nearly all of our fruit and vegetable shops were owned or run by Italian people and they were very cheerful and obliging and then Mussolini [Benito Mussolini, Fascist leader of Italy, 1930s-1943] went into the war on the side of the Axis and straight away the Ities [Italians] were

persona non grata and I remember one shop had a brick thrown through the plate glass window and another one, there were two, was an Australian fruiterer and an Italian fruiterer a little bit further along and the Australian had “Australian late AIF [Australian Imperial Forces], shop here before the day goes.”

D A Y then G O E S [i.e., ‘dagos’, pejorative slang for southern Europeans, particularly Italians (from Diego: James in Spanish)] and people thought that was funny but I felt sad about that because they were very nice people in the other shop and that, I think business was pretty bad after that. But there were Italian prisoners of war here. I used to see them out in the country on properties working on properties and they used to wear a type of a maroon colour if I remember rightly,

a reddish-coloured uniform. Quite ghastly actually, you could see them a mile off, and they’d do labouring work on the farms, yeah, and course you used to see Japanese prisoners of war but they used to be, I only ever saw them in double-decker buses. They weren’t let loose on farms but they were kept more in camp I think.

Round the city. Perhaps in transit,

I presume so because there was a big camp at Cowra. I used to go out to Cowra a bit because my mother had a cousin who was a solicitor there and also we had relations on the land there and yes they were encamped at Cowra. There was a bit of an incident there, nasty one actually, yeah.

Well of course.

Well, that there was a breakout

and some lives were lost. Not much actually, just what the local people knew, cause that filtered through because of our grapevine really. Not much was released officially I don’t think at the time.

That there was an outbreak and

that Cowra was threatened, which I believe it was. I think they thought they could take over and then get away, you see, that there had been some deaths. I don’t know that I heard much more than that. That was enough to scare anyone because the Japanese were very much feared and

not trusted then.

Yes, nice people and well apparently they were communists and a lot of people were because they were idealists. My people regarded

them as Bolshies [Bolsheviks: Russian communist; loosely used for any revolutionary] and were not communists although they had great sympathy to social democracy and all the rest of it, but one day Mrs. Tennant was seen selling sheepskins for Russia at the Sydney Town Hall. There used to be a stand of people there. That was to raise funds for the Russian war effort and they had a mighty war effort

too I might add and I suppose those funds were sent overseas or the sheepskins were for warmth in their clothing, I’m not sure about that, but my mother was in the city and saw Mrs. Tennant and when she came back she said, “You keep away from that Tennant girl.” and I did too but she was a nice girl.

No, I didn’t know them at all except that they were Bolshies.

Well, Jean was her name and she was a nice girl.

Her mother.

Yes, yes, yes.

Yes, yes, yeah.

There were plenty like that. At Sydney Teachers College there were others you know who had that idealistic attitude towards the Russian revolution and I know that the Dean of Canterbury in England of course published a little book. I forget what it was called, but it was a very persuasive book. He was committed to the Utopia that he was shown when he went to

Russia, but I knew that that was exaggerated because of, I knew people who’d been there too and it was, you know, the wool wouldn’t be pulled over my eyes, no, but I can understand people being persuaded because it’s a perfect system. The only trouble is, it doesn’t work,

people being what they are, yes. I had a cousin who was high up, very high-placed officer in the Royal Air Force, and he came out directly after the war after glorious service and he had been on several missions to Russia in a helpful fashion but he told me what he

he saw there and how coldly he was treated. They didn’t regard the allies as friends and that was one example. The other example was the four lads I taught a bit of English to, and although they were Jewish or well three of them were, they said that the German occupation was far preferable to the Russian occupation.

That of course didn’t relate to communism but it related to an attitude.

Hungarian.

Yes, even though one of them had his family were in hiding in cellars and that sort of thing and he was in a labour camp and they were all, you know, displaced persons camp and were sent to other

countries and they took quite a while to get out here.

Well, one of them said that they were efficient and smart and fair,

well, I suppose comparatively they were fair, whereas the Russians, they were robbing people in the street and shooting people in the street. One fellow said he saw one Russian soldier with his arm full of watches that he’d taken off people, all sorts of nasty things they did to the population. Now we know from documentaries, particularly

released ones recently, that the Germans were, could be very hard. We know that, but at least it was purposeful. It was under a discipline, their own sort of law, but it was different and one of them was Polish, that’s right, and he was very bitter.

Definitely. You can’t blame people for; it gave them hope. Its like England went through it generations before with the Chartists and the Tolpuddle martyrs and so on, but somehow it had got bogged down and but here was another opportunity to

take a step up. Churchill said something about democracy being an imperfect system but its the best so far, you know, its the best you can get, even though its very flawed but there are checks and balances, you know, we don’t let each other get away with things whereas, if you’ve got

a totalitarian regime, they can get away with anything.

Very concerned. People were, actually that’s one of the things that turned people very much against radical unionism I think. It laid the

seeds of cynicism amongst a lot of people because they were so determined in their use of the unions to their own ends. There was a lot that needed to be done. I’m a member of the Teachers’ Federation to this day. I will be till I die. I joined when I became a first year student

and I believe in unionism passionately, but I don’t believe in people gaining control of unions and using that control for a political end that had really nothing to do with our form of democracy. That’s where they fell down. We had strike after strike after strike.

Bunnerong,

the powerhouse at Bunnerong [demolished 1987]. There was no electricity, no gas, and the war was over and yet here we were with candles and kerosene was rationed out, people trying to get warm with a little kerosene heater and building was disrupted. The wharves were always

on strike so supply was disrupted. My husband can tell you. They couldn’t even get food and clothing too, at Papua New Guinea when he was there because there was a strike and here were soldiers, you know, laying down their lives - but it wasn’t the average unionist. It was that they were forced by

the people that control them, I believe. There was room for improvement in working conditions particularly for women. I was lucky I was a teacher. We got equal pay in the 60s. It was very easy to say Joe and Molly were doing the same work

side by side rooms, same curriculum, there’s no argument. We got equal pay but nobody else did. I think doctors had equal pay and solicitors but they didn’t have equal work, but other people… You see, until after the war, a married woman couldn’t be in the public service, couldn’t be a teacher.

They had married women teaching during the war because of the atrocious teacher shortage but I was teaching with people who believed that they were going to be sacked as soon as ever the war was over, women teachers.

Yes.

N, I wasn’t married, I was still single you see, I was only a just start.

Married women, yes. You weren’t, there was no such thing and that’s one of the reasons why there were so many spinsters in the teaching service too because Depression, jobs hard to get, you got married you were out on your ear.

Yes well I’m no expert

on it but I know from my own knowledge talking amongst family, the great Wall Street crash is regarded as the beginning of it. It rippled down to us; I think the worst of it started to bite in say 1930. I mean into the 30s it got worse and worse as this mine closed and that factory closed and so there was a filtering

down effect and then it accelerated and it went on like that really right through the war until after the war. During the war, people were mobilised as I mentioned before. There was a Manpower office and everyone had to report to the Manpower office. Men who didn’t go into the services could be called up to serve

in the CCC - I think it was called the Civil Construction Corps - and they were sent off anywhere to do jobs of national importance like making a road. I think to Central Australia some of them went making a road to Darwin, that sort of thing, to allow the passage of military vehicles. Others were given other sorts of

jobs. I know that I had a relative, I have a lot of spinsters amongst my relatives, and she was called up and she was put to work in the munitions factory at, I think it was St Mary’s, and she came down from Oberon and worked there through the war.

Yeah, yeah. Teaching was a protected occupation so I wasn’t called. I had to report to the Manpower office but you weren’t called up. There were other protected industries too. In fact, they couldn’t even join up. For example, a policeman, any police who were returned soldiers I think must have

joined up before they joined the police, because police were a protected occupation, had to have police. What would have happened? And then again, there were others who got out of it all, the black marketeers and all sorts of interesting people, colourful characters.

Well, I truly believe that we were at a crossroads. It was a case of conflict in the offing. I’m not saying that there would have been an outbreak of armed hostilities,

I’m not saying that, but it was a very real crisis because so great was the feeling. The Communist Party had a big membership. It fell away dramatically later on, but the time that there were so many troubles and a lot of them, the coalmines were on constant strike - that was another

area - and there are historical reasons for all of this but people were fearful of falling under the heel of a non-Australian type of government and life. There was a quiet tension. There were anti-communist groups. I was influenced by people who belonged to them.

There was Catholic Action, which was another story entirely. People like that recognised the threat. Some of it of course was based on atheism versus Christianity, that sort of thing. My worry about it was more political because I believe in democracy and I believe

in social justice. I believe in freedom, other freedoms too. It was a real threat in people’s minds, there’s no doubt about it, but sanity prevailed. Robert Menzies was the Prime Minister. He brought in

a referendum question requiring the outlawing of the Communist Party and the people voted ‘No’, even though most people weren’t Communists, and it was a sensible thing because it just withered away after that and I think a lot of the attraction with some people, especially radical

student groups, was the fact that they were on the outer. People are like that, yes.

Well, they would have gone underground, that’s a fact. There was a lot of, as I’ve found out, a lot of

work being done accumulating information in case that happened.

I suppose in membership and who was what and who was doing.

Yes, I didn’t know anything about that then but

I learnt about that later.

That’s right. Well, I’ve seen lots and lots of photos. I’ve seen photos of people climbing over back fences into covert meetings, didn’t know any of them, but they were shown, “Do you know any of these?” “No” and they covered everything.

When I was with the security. I can’t think of in relation to what. I have no memory of a lot of things. As I said before, the information is one way and I’d just be questioned along a certain line or

shown things along a certain subject and it meant nothing because it wasn’t in context as far as I was concerned. I really don’t know.

I think you’re right. Well actually my part

which was, although it was important from Security’s point of view, it was only a tiny, tiny little facet of the intelligence world. My importance, if you could call it that, was that I had this access to a KGB officer’s home and I was welcome there and not only that

I was treated not as so much as a friend, not a close friend. I don’t think they had any closeness to anybody outside their own people, but as close as they could be. Very nice people, the Nosovs.

Well I was teaching at

Birchgrove, the Balmain district there, and I would have been about 20 I suppose. I’m sorry I’m vague about the years and so on but it was just that late ‘40s era I’m talking about and

I was teaching flat out actually, because it was a visiting school, students used to come, and it was still the Balts [Baltic people] were coming. They were immigrants from overseas. That was a great innovation for Australia but these displaced persons really preceded them.

Now what was the question again?

Yes I was about 20 I suppose, yes, 21.

It was the original Hampton Court Hotel but it was demolished, like so many things in my life,

it was demolished to make a roadway and it was an interesting place. It was an ‘oldie-worldie’ type of place [old-fashioned]. The new Hampton Court was complementary to it but big flats, high ceilings, you know, good dimensions. It had been quite a

place in its day. The owner was a man who’d been displaced by the Japanese in Papua New Guinea. He was a miner up there and I suppose wealthy in his own right. He wasn’t a close friend but he knew people that we knew and so on. Clem’s uncle was there, Administrator of Papua New Guinea,

and so he was able to, it was a seven-storey building, eight-storey if you count the lift top, and the TASS agent or the KGB man was on the third floor and we were on the fifth, so

it was just a case of running down the stairs or getting a lift down to him and their place was exactly like ours.

Because my parents decided to sell their home and because they, this is such a convoluted story. I have an uncle who had a lovely home in Annandale. He had a little

old lady tenant in it, Lyndon Hall it was. I can show you a photo of it. It’s a beautiful old mansion but he was living elsewhere in a more modern place. My mother was actually married from that home and he was afraid of communist squatters. They were squatting everywhere, taking over people’s houses and living in it. Well, a lot of people didn’t

have anywhere to live. They were living with Mum and Dad or you know under, in garrets and that sort of thing.

Yes, it was very real, terrible actually, and so my great uncle asked us to move there and my parents thought, “This is an opportunity to sell our house and we can stay there.”

Yes, it was old. It was the original Hampton Court and it was residential, very spacious flats. They weren’t called apartments in those days. It had a lift, the cage sort that you see in French films. I got stuck in it once

and had to be lifted out through the top, which was rather an interesting experience, and there were a lot of quite stylish people still living there and they resented very much the landlord who had been a gold miner in a big way in Papua New Guinea, changing the name when he bought it, to Kaindi. His gold mines were on Mount Kaindi in Papua New

Guinea and the established residents still had their mail sent to Hampton Court but it didn’t worry us. But it was an area of Sydney we had nothing to do with ever before that, but it was interesting. People lived there who

were just like anybody else but there was a smattering of artists and colourful characters and all sorts of people. I didn’t have anything to do with the local area really. I was too busy for one thing and it was different. It changed when the R and R [Rest and Recreation] started up with the Vietnam War I think it was, Kings Cross changed very much

suddenly then for the worse, I think, but it had a style about it I must admit and it was very convenient. You could just hop in a tram and be in town in no time at all and I used to hop in a tram and go right down to Erskine Street Wharf and get the ferry over to Balmain and another tram, go on some sort of a cable up the hill

from Darling Street Wharf to school. Yes a very interesting little interlude in our lives but my parents didn’t want to stay there forever.

Yes, they moved into the flat as soon as they could. I went there first just to hold the fort until the lady occupier had to go elsewhere

and then they moved in and stayed until they acquired their house at Gordon on the upper north shore.

No, I went to Wagga.

Yes, now I went to school, to Wagga and then I married from Gordon actually.

Well I don’t really know what was behind it. It’s all a mystery to me. Looking back in large of what evolved, I really should have been more curious but I just took it at face value. I was in the shop next door, which was run by two foreign gentlemen. They were brothers,

nice little short Scotsmen and very shy and obsequious almost, and one day one of them asked me if I’d mind teaching English, because they knew I was a teacher, to four DPs [Displaced Persons], young men who had been able to get out of a camp in France actually and I said I would be

only too happy, you know, to get them on their feet so they could have enough English to get by and I did that without any question, but very shortly after I was then asked if I would teach English to a neighbour. This person had found out from them that I taught English to these other people and she was a Russian woman

and in the meantime the landlord had been, he’d acquainted me with the fact that the Nosovs were living two floors down from us and that was the TASS agency, TASS being the news agency like Reuters today and he didn’t trust them at all because they were Ruskies [Russians] and

TASS, “You know what that means.” No, I didn’t know what that meant but that’s alright, but I thought about teaching this woman Russian, English I should say, didn’t have a word of Russian and I thought, “Well, I’ll give her a few lessons to see if she’s up to extension or whatever.”

In the meantime, before I’d really made up my mind, I was asked by the landlord who had often talked about security in the few weeks ahead of that, to come and meet some interesting people in his flat. So I went down and met these four men, one of whom was the Colonel and he only ever was introduced as the Colonel and the other three weren’t

given any names at all, or other two perhaps, three I think, and they told me that they knew that I’d been asked to teach Mrs. Nosov English and would I cooperate with them because they needed my help, more or less, not in those terms but they led up to that very nicely. I think I

told you that at the beginning.

None. They were very professional people. They approached it in a way, they treated me as a free agent, as a person that they seemed to know something about and I assumed it was through the landlord knowing my parents, and he didn’t know them

all that well, I might add. I took everything at face value. They did explain that the meeting had to be kept secret if they were to progress any further and they explained that if I would help them that I’d have to swear an oath of secrecy,

and one thing and another it was explained that my access to Mr. and Mrs. Nosov was very important to them. Eventually, I learnt that they were quite sure that it was possible that they were intending to defect and I don’t know why they thought that or if it was just they were hoping that it would happen,

but they had spent the war, I believe, there and going back to post-war Russia wouldn’t have been very good.

Well I really believed

that they were interested in the intelligence side of it. Of course if I saw anything that was suspicious, heard anything, was told anything that was detrimental to Australian security, they’d have expected me to report on that, but I really do believe that their main object in the short term was to ascertain the likelihood

of the Nosovs defecting, yes, I think they were hopeful of it and as I said before, they would have made good citizens, I think, different but good because they were I think straight down the line type of people and they were doing what we had people doing in other countries, so in that way I had nothing against them personally,

but I certainly had learnt different things later on, which rather worried me.

Not well but then again I wasn’t really spying

on them. I must admit I had to report about the koala, that sort of thing. I just wondered if that were teaching me how to be observant and very accurate in my reporting. My association with them related to ascertaining whether they’d defect and I was quite happy about that.

I thought it’d be a jolly good thing if they did but I knew that they’d have to go back to Russia first because of their children. Security told me that and I later learnt, not from Security, not this actual point, I later learnt

from something that happened later on, after I was married actually, that information was going back to Russia, to Moscow, because I believed that TASS was a news agency. I didn’t realise that the landlord was right, they were up to no good and then that was being relayed to Japan and

that put a different complexion on things but that wasn’t the Nosovs’ fault.

No, no, never. I sort of casually brushed against people but they were related to the office and or they didn’t come into the sitting

room where I was giving the lessons and they were just a very, very quiet low key thing. It wasn’t until the Pakhomovs came that things changed and that was quite awful.

Well, they weren’t instructions so much. You mean relating to what I was to do with the Nosovs?

No, they weren’t instructions. It was just that it could be a help to them

to notice any change in the Nosovs’ behaviour or acquisitions or activities, if they told me anything, that might relate to them defecting. That seemed to be the key to their interest at that stage so I thought. I can’t say any more than

that really. I was given very clear instructions about nothing written down and the meetings. I think I’ve explained that. They were very carefully well-staged you could say.

I was to tell nobody and I wasn’t to discuss it with the landlord or my parents or anything like that, that there were certain dangers involved in a way. I don’t

mean to say that somebody would do anything terrible to me but there were dangerous side issues, everyone knew about them. I think mainly they were information gathering from me with a long-range plan in mind,

because they expected, this is only supposition, they expected the Nosovs to defect eventually and then they had another plan for me later on, but I didn’t know any of that. I wasn’t spying on the Nosovs as people and, you know, dobbing on them [informing on them]. It wasn’t like that and I don’t think that the security men expected that.

They were interested in very specific things and then of course the Pakhomovs came and that was a different story altogether. I’d have dobbed them into anybody. Not Mrs. Pakhomov, I felt terribly sorry for her, but he was quite outlandish and a bully,

not a nice man at all, and she was, you could see her falling away in front of your eyes, and by the time she left she had no English at all and I thought, “Gosh, so much for that.” I felt very sorry for her. She was a funny little thing. This is getting away from the Nosovs of course.

Yes, yes I was.

I was told by Security and this did surprise me because I had never felt fear or any sort of threat in my whole life because I had a very

easy life in many ways, but I said it was funny how I was asked to teach English to Mrs. Nosov when they’re so careful about associating with people and my handler said, “You were followed, you were followed for three weeks.” and I said, “How do you know that?” and they said, “Because we were following

the followers.” and I thought this is a bit off but

No, oh no. I was quite surprised, bit shocked, but I had nothing to hide, you know, I was just going to school and tearing around eating Chinese meals with my parents and I used to go out with a

fellow who’d come, he was ex air force fellow, and take my brother to symphony concerts and you know there was no, I had no political activities. There was nothing to worry about and I don’t know how deeply the followers went into my background but apparently they thought I was pretty bland beige and it was alright.

Well I was accepted into the portals wasn’t I? Yes, can’t understand it.

Well it was yeah.

Well it was unsettling. It was all by default. It was one accident after another. I mean my parents wanted to move, you know, the people in the shop next door, it was all sort of like dominos and

it was unsettling to know that I was going into a different milieu. I’m not saying that ever my life was in danger. I don’t think it was, but later on it could have been. How can I put it? The

thought that I was being followed, that gave me a feeling that I was being watched and that didn’t leave me for several years, that I was being watched.

I think it’s a nasty feeling

that you’re looking around to see if there’s a peep hole or whatever or if you’re being followed. I wasn’t frightened but it’s not a pleasant feeling, knowing that I had been followed and I had no idea of it, and

was passed as being suitable to let in to teach a Russian official’s wife. I think she took an active part actually because she was a very well educated person. I mean, she was an engineer who built bridges and I think she could have built them on her own; she was so strong and forthright, so it was a different,

I came from such an open background but this was, I think the thing that bothered me most was that I didn’t tell my parents and I didn’t tell anybody until towards the end when I felt I had to, yeah.

Yes.

Well, I know exactly what it would have been like as far as, because you know it was identical to our own flat, but I only peeped. It was very much a working office and I think there were,

there could have been a radio that sort of thing. I didn’t go into it ever. The only room I went into was through the hall into the sitting room, no other room, so I can’t tell you anything about the office but there was very little space for him and say Mrs. Nosov and or other people

to squeeze in. They’d have been very close together because there was so much stuff around. There were filing cabinets and I would suggest radio, perhaps even a transmitter. I don’t know what was in there but it was very much a working office.

Well there was

the mesh grille across the window that led in, overlooked the vestibule outside near the lift, and that was forced open at one stage and I can’t really remember, it was forced open twice. It was all reinforced the second time. I can’t really remember if that was towards the end of the Nosovs’

time or if it both happened in the Pakhomovs’ but I think it was both, but no other people in the whole building ever were broken into to my knowledge in the time that we were there, so I don’t know who broke in but I don’t think they got very far. But I know that the Pakhomovs didn’t want the police called or anything like that, oh no, no, no, no,

they didn’t want anyone looking into it.

Yes, well I can’t always be sure but they only went into the office. I didn’t really see them. I did brush shoulders with a couple that were

polite you know. They were Russian and they’d look at me and someone would say, well, they knew I was a teacher, yes, but no hobnobbing, nothing like that. Just Mrs. Nosov and I used to have tea and bought biscuits.

Well, it must have been about a year. She was very good, heavily accented and I tried to improve her diction, her accent. She was anxious to speak southern Standard English, not American,

she was most adamant about that, so I’d say, “You know, perhaps an American might say…” “No, no” she wouldn’t have it. She spoke in a stilted way but she gradually…she was a good student. She really tried. I think she practiced. She did her homework very well. It was all diligently handed back to me and in translation and there again I was able to help.

You know how you see Chinese directions on electronic stuff today? And they used the wrong word, well, she would do that and I would guide her in that respect and she wasn’t very strong on idioms and that is a necessity when you’re translating from one language to another. You must

understand what is meant because sometimes it can be misleading so, and she’d collect all that and she’d learn it off. She was a very conscientious woman, yes.

I have no idea but I tell you what, she would not have been idle and I think she would have taken an active part along with her husband, but she wouldn’t have been a shopper

or a bridge player or anything frivolous like that. No, she’d have gone out and built bridges if she could but she didn’t socialise, not at all.

Yes, yes. Well, I know they went back to Russia because I was told, “The Nosovs have gone and they’ve gone back to Russia” and

she was saying…..

Well I of course hoped that they went back to Russia, gathered their children to their bosom, and were sent somewhere else from which they could defect if they wanted to, but of course

who knows? We never found out or I never found out but that’s what I’d hoped.

I was just told, yes.

Just across the table if we were in a café I was just told. It was always a very quiet café, out of the way café, usually rather dark.

Just long enough to have

a cup of tea and a sandwich and perhaps another cup of tea, not long. Very professional but not rushed. That wouldn’t have looked right anyway and it was all very well done.

I have no idea,

no idea at all, just a nice man and a professional style of man. They were all well dressed. They were all ex-army officers or ex-police special branch or something like that. I’d say hand picked. As I said, they tried to recruit my husband. I didn’t know that of course, didn’t know him then.

Often yes, not necessarily the same one.

Yes, yes, as I remember it, it was Sally Field and that turned out later on to be an actress’ name and then later on it was changed to Betty Jones or something.

I think that’s right. It might have been Betty Field and Sally Jones, maybe, yeah.

To sign for the payment that I received. I didn’t really relish being paid. I felt

that if it were important for security reasons or whatever, that I should be able to be like anyone else doing a job for their country, that it didn’t really need to be paid but as I said, that was insisted on. I had to be and in a way it locks you in, see.

Cash.

Yes, in an envelope, all very nice.

At the meeting, oh yes.

Sort of.

It became very sly. I always carried a handbag

of course and it’d just be slipped in. I can show you a hat I bought with one payment. Actually, it cost more than the payment. It cost four pounds 15 [shillings] at Farmer’s Model Millinery shop. Farmer’s has gone too. They seem to knock down everything, don’t they? But yes, it wasn’t, I suppose you’d think of Casablanca [city of intrigue in Morocco, connotations of the film Casablanca starring Humphrey Bogart] and it wasn’t like that. It was very Australian

but with a difference. Yes, it became more threatening with the Pakhomovs.

Well, I’d been up the country

riding horses and things on a bit of a holiday to take a break and they accepted that, and when I came back the landlord said, “The Nosovs have gone, they’ve gone back to Russia.” and so I didn’t even say goodbye to them, but I’d been away for a fortnight or perhaps

two and a half weeks or something, so I didn’t have a chance to do that. I mean, for all I know, they might have flitted off to Stockholm [Sweden] or somewhere. No, they’d have gone to Russia and the new people were coming in. They hadn’t taken up residence at that particular time and when they did, he told me

that, “You wouldn’t, they’re not like the Nosovs, you won’t…” something like “You won’t like him much.” and he was right. But I can’t quite remember how I was summoned to the Pakhomovs to continue English lessons and I think it was through the landlord. I think he said, “Pakhomov wants to see you.” and I went up

and I was shown in straightaway and that’s when he gave his diatribe about how terrible Australia was and capitalism - and he was only just off the plane mind you - and what dreadful people we are and how Australian women are all prostitutes, which made me raise my eyebrows a bit.

I said,

“Do you think so?” or something like that, but no, I was just sort of playing it cool to see, well to see what he had to say and after a while going on and on about how wonderful the USSR [Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – the former Soviet Union] was under [Josef] Stalin [Russian dictator] and all the rest of it and he was really table thumping.

He called in his wife and in she came. She was little more than a girl and very, very dowdily dressed and her hair was, it’d been, looked as though it had Brilliantine [cheap hair oil] in it or something like that, oily, and she was excited and childlike in a way, very

very unsophisticated, but she had no English whatsoever, not even yes or no. He hadn’t even taken that trouble on the plane coming out to say, “Da is yes.” and she knew nothing and that’s where it started with these two silly books, one in English.

With the Pakhomovs? Well, once again, they were interested in any acquisitions they might have but it was obvious from Pakhomov’s attitude that there’d be no defection for him and there was a problem there right from the beginning. He was a bad choice on the part of the Russian government I would think,

because he was blustering and quite insulting in many ways. He did nothing objectionable to me. It was just his verbiage was so distasteful. I did become apprehensive actually but it was more the effect it had on her, the indirect

effect on me that I found very unsettling.

He was the TASS agent. In other words, he was the KGB and he was more in keeping with what you imagine to be the KGB officer yes.

Well, he was a big man and I suppose he’d have been in his 60s or closer to 70, I don’t know. Actually, gold was discovered

in Papua New Guinea in 1926, the year I was born, and he had a few interests up there. I understood he had about 300 Papua New Guineans, Papuans in his line, “in his line of boys” [as porters, workers] he described it. He was a tough man. There was nothing he couldn’t do.

He fixed the boilers; he fixed everything. No sending out for tradesmen, he could do it and he jolly well could. He even used to fix the lift, so was a very self-contained man. He was an Australian. He came from the Cowra district but looking back I just had the feeling

that he might have, snooped is perhaps the wrong word, but there was just something. He was very interested in certain people in the building and he kept a close eye on them and of course TASS was number one on his list. I’m not saying anything untoward. He was an honest man and when he dressed up and went

out you know to the Tattersall’s Club, he was dressed up like a millionaire, which he probably was, and he was a generous man in many respects. He had a family. He was separated from his wife. She went back to Papua. I knew his children but he was

very friendly with the Leahys [well-known pioneering brothers of the Papua New Guinea highlands]. They were pioneer explorers up in that area and I met one or two of them but I, we weren’t close at all so I can’t really say much more than that, except that he was very anti-communist and had those Ruskies under his eye.

I think he might have been integral as you put it. I think, looking back, he possibly could have engineered the whole thing because here was TASS, here was a

young, well was little more than a girl, come into the flat, knew the parents, more or less the background. He was in touch with the authorities over TASS. I don’t know and I will never know. Who knows? But I think

he might have engineered the whole thing through the people next door.

My parents didn’t pry. We talked a lot but it wouldn’t have entered their heads.

Alright, I was teaching English to these people, that’s alright. It wouldn’t have, they wouldn’t have thought of it and I just kept quiet. Hard to imagine isn’t it, yeah?

It was an impossible way really because as you can appreciate, reading the translation of a Russian classic in English would be quite

different from reading it in Russian. The meanings would get across but in syntax they’d be quite different and so here was I reading word by word to her and she’s following word by word in Russian, which of course had no connection in many cases, and she would actually, I would stop at the full stop and she’d be sort of

three-quarters of the way through the sentence and wondering why. I couldn’t get across to her that this was a silly way to learn and I was attempting to even use things around the room to get her to pronounce better. I did, you know, I’d had some success with her of course because I persisted in speaking to her apart from

this silly method that he had dictated. I feel sure he had said that because there were restrictions on what they allowed to read and see and associate with, and I think it was another means of control and they were used to that but the interesting part about her was that she was

excited and she was looking at me and all the rest of it, and in the second lesson he said to me, “Your watch.” - wasn’t like this one - “My wife wants a watch exactly like that.” and he said, “Where did you get it?” and I said, “Well it was a gift from my parents.” and he said, “They’ll tell you where

to get it, she wants one.” like that and next thing she had a watch just like that and he said, “My wife wants hair just like you, same colour, wave.” I said, “I’m sorry?” he said, “Your hairdresser, where?” and I said, “No, I don’t go to a hairdresser.” I said,

“Her hair couldn’t be made like mine, hers is different.” and I said, “I’m fair and she’s dark.” She had a sort of a warm brown tone of hair, oily, and but anyway he persisted in this. “She must have hair just like you.” and I felt like saying, “Well, a good wash with a decent shampoo would improve things.” but

of course I didn’t, I wasn’t game and well I wouldn’t, and then about dresses and things like, well, I had a 21st birthday string of cultured pearls and she wanted that and she wanted dresses just like mine and funnily enough she managed to get a few that looked a bit like

mine, but she wanted to dress just like I was and he seemed to approve. I thought that was queer but anyway didn’t matter.

I didn’t like that. I thought, “Why try to make yourself into somebody else?” and she still couldn’t tell me these things. She had to do it through her husband but

there was one interesting episode, it was one of the, towards the end actually, he wanted to impress on me how wonderful life was with Russian customs and so on and the table, this is the teaching table, was set with a big plate of buttered bread, you know, rolls cut and thick, thick butter

and dishes of caviar, Russian caviar, and a bottle of liquid and little glasses and he said, “I teach you, show you good Russian life. You eat the good Russian caviar, true Russian caviar, and you eat it with the thick

butter and the bread.” and he said, “This is real caviar.” and “Australians know nothing about caviar. They wouldn’t know caviar from the eyes of a frog.” and there were some lemon slices and he poured out this clear liquid that looked like water to me into the little glass and he said, “Vodka, Russian vodka.”

I said, “Well look I don’t drink.” and he said, “Well, you drink this.” and he said “Now you eat the...” oh no that’s right, “You drink the vodka then you eat the caviar on the buttered bread, you drink the vodka and you suck the lemon.” Anyway I took a little sip. “That’s not right, you do it like this!” and he just threw

it down his gullet and went through the motions. I said, “I couldn’t do that.” He said, “You will do that, you must, it’s not polite, the Russian for hospitality.” so I thought, “I want to get out of here.” cause I imagined myself being plied with Russian vodka, which to me looked and tasted like methylated spirits and so

I did it and quaffed this vodka and sucked the lemon and then I was allowed to leave and I staggered out to the lift and got up to the fifth floor and staggered. Well, I mean, I’m exaggerating perhaps but luckily my parents were out so they didn’t notice anything.

There, oh yes, but I didn’t like it. I thought this is the beginning of the end.

However, his wife then started to complain of palpitations.

Yes, she was saying that, by this time she could speak a little bit and she said, “My heart!” and she was sort of, you know, very

limp and looking terrible and he said, “My wife has heart trouble.” and I thought, this is very sudden. I had previously noticed people that I understood to be, I think their name was Litvinov [phonetic], but I might be a bit wrong there, and they were sort of marching into the place and looking in at me and

they were different from the Nosovs completely and Mrs. Pakhomov said that she had to go to hospital. I previously had said to Mr. Pakhomov, “She needs to see a doctor. If you want a doctor, I can give you the name of a very good one.” and he said, “No, no Australian doctor, no, she’ll go to Canberra where she’ll be treated properly.

Australian doctors would be no good.” So I presume she was taken up there to see one that attended to the [Soviet] Embassy up there. Anyway, she went away to Canberra and when she came back, which was, I don’t know how much later that was, they got in touch with me and I went down to see her

to resume the lessons but she was very nervy and that was repeated a few times. She’d go away to this hospital so-called in Canberra. It could have been the Community Hospital in Canberra, I don’t know, but I don’t think so, and she’d be away for, started off a fortnight and eventually it was

six weeks, that sort of thing and each time she’d come back looking worse and worse, until finally I think she thought she was dying. He told me it was not her heart; it was the dreadful life in Australia under capitalism. The last time I saw Mrs. Pakhomov haunted me. I was coming through the front entrance into the vestibule. Coming out of the lift

was Mrs. Pakhomov with two very burly Russian women on either side of her and behind her were the people I think were called Litvinov, Mr. and Mrs. Litvinov or Lifinov, not sure, and they were sort of supporting her on the way out and she saw me and I said, “Hello, Mrs. Pakhomov.” and she immediately almost

screamed, “Teacher, she my teacher, teacher, English, teacher!” and she made to come over to me and they just grabbed her back, and Mr. and Mrs. Litvinov acknowledged me but the other two just pushed her straight out through the front into a waiting car and I felt very unnerved by that. I thought, “What is happening to that poor little

woman?” The next thing they were gone.

I think she was scared stiff of the officials. I think she came into a situation that she knew nothing about. She had a bully of a husband and here she was surrounded by these bullies and she was

so isolated. What she really wanted to do was to have nice things and a bit of a social life and she was denied it. To me, she seemed to be a village girl and she was cut off and she was just wilting and she was a very sad sight and I was concerned about her. I’ve

often thought about her, poor little thing.

It did, it did really.

Well, towards the end, I found that I was losing my appetite and I started to lose weight but not seriously

I suppose, well serious enough if you… I just wasn’t myself.

No, no, well in a way but it wasn’t heard of in those days. I just lost, it was loss of appetite and

I wasn’t sleeping all that well and I felt I was being watched. I was a bit afraid of Mr. Pakhomov, not that he ever did anything threatening to me. I sort of fretted for Mrs. Pakhomov and I didn’t like the little bit of contact, very tiny bit of contact I had with the other

Russians, and I thought, “This is time I need to lean on somebody.” so I told my father and then I told him that I had sworn an oath and I said, “Do you think I should tell you something.” and he said, “Yes.”

As a matter of fact

I was at home and I just told him, that’s all, very quickly and I knew he would never breathe a word to anybody because I asked him not to and his words were, “Well, I’m glad you told me but whatever you do, don’t say a word to your mother.” which I didn’t. There were more

reasons than one there but I had received this transfer then to, I sort of engineered it myself, to Wagga and Security went into a little bit of a flap over that and wanted me to go to Canberra and I said,

“Well, I’ve been transferred to Wagga, take up the position next year.” and they said, “Don’t worry about that, that’ll all be taken care of.” I said, “Well, what would the [Education] Department say?” and, “Don’t worry, its all taken care of.” and that’s when they said that I wouldn’t be going to the school at Canberra, I’d be going to the National

Library and of course I was stunned. I said, “But I’m not a librarian, I’m a teacher.” and that’s when I found out that the National Library is a repository of government archives and that there had been a leak, this is one of the few things that I was told, was a serious leak from

the archives in the National Library and they wanted to find out who was responsible, find out more about it to pin somebody down and I didn’t like that idea at all. They were very serious leaks.

I later learnt that

intelligence was being sent to Moscow and then relayed from Moscow to Japan. Now my husband was behind the Japanese lines at the time and here were these people sending it to Moscow and that information was being sent to Japan. I’m not saying it had anything to do with my husband

but it was potentially very serious for us, our security, yeah. I often wondered why that happened. I think, actually, Clem said that Russia was very anxious to get Japan into an alliance with them relating to the eastern

part of Asia there, so there was more to it than met the eye. It was all above my head. I can’t say any more about that.

They were interested in his attitude. They were also interested in her illness and also interested in her wanting to buy all these things and her actually getting them. I think he bought them. I don’t think she went shopping

so there was plenty of money, but the Nosovs didn’t display any money but the Pakhomovs could, which was interesting. I don’t know what interpretation you’d put on that. It might mean that the Pakhomovs were really salting it away. That could be right. They might have had access to records of where they were putting it, I don’t know. I wasn’t told but money was

no object to the Pakhomovs, which is interesting.

I think he was such a domineering man. He’d have,

well, I can’t say, I can’t blacken his name completely, but I thought, you never know where it would lead and I can’t say he was anything but proper but I thought there was an edge to him that I didn’t trust, yeah.

I think you do yes, and I have no reason so say that other than it was just a warning feeling, you know, that women get.

Intuition, yes.

Back out.

That’s right, that’s right, that’s right. Well I was told by somebody, one of them that “Watch your step.” yeah. No she was always there and when she was away in hospital, I didn’t go, so there was nothing improper.

Well, I didn’t tell him much about it at all, just that I had been reporting to Security and he didn’t ask me. I felt guilty about breaking my oath,

yes, I didn’t like doing that but I just felt I had to because I was feeling a bit fraught and I’m very glad I did.

Mm and off I tootled to Wagga Wagga.

Cause I was working. I was working very hard at school too remember, yes, so it wasn’t always easy.

Well yes, we used to go out.

Well, he was courting me but I wasn’t courting him, but he was a very, very nice man. I’ve got a photo of him outside Hampton Court Hotel. Yes he was a, he’d done two tours of duty on Lancasters in England and he was a nervy case, he couldn’t eat. He wasn’t a broken man but a lot of very tense men came back from the war.

A very nice person.

Yes and others too. Just not, he was my favourite but yes there were others that I’d go out with. Things were different then; wasn’t much to go out to. There’s Princes and Romano’s [upmarket Sydney restaurants/nightclubs of the day]. They were rather glamorous. You’d get dressed up, you know. You wouldn’t just go there in T-shirts and jeans, not that sort of thing.

It was all terribly proper and very nice.

Something glamorous of course, yes.

I had a few. Well, one was a black tulle [fine silk net – after Tulle in France], tulle? Tulle sounds a bit tizzy but it wasn’t, over like an

undergarment and it had hand done, rather tastefully done, rosettes here and here, that sort of thing with nice sleeves, and that was rather glamorous, and of course my 21st birthday pearls and another one, cause the new look came in. Do you know about the new look?

What heaven. The French of course, after years of privation and their textile industry ruined, decided they’d put the textile industry back on its feet and they got all these wonderful designers, Pierre Balmain and people like that, to coordinate a complete new look and they designed these gorgeous gowns.

All lots of material of course, French material, and everything to go with it and of course I was right into that and I had one, a very nice, well pink, but not real pink, a sort of a subdued pink with a scattered floral design on it, in a new look. I really fancied myself in that.

The Juliet cap?

Really?

Yeah.

We didn’t get married till early 1953 actually.

We waited a while.

Well of course, it was the very middle of the road outfit that I had. That was nylon actually and that was the new thing. It was embroidered Swiss nylon and the Juliet cap, every

one of those little petals was hand sewn on and, yeah, it was rather nice with, cause I had sleeves. In the Catholic Church I don’t think you’d have been married without sleeves in those days but, so I had the sleeves and contemporary you think, right?

Most of them were satin.

Thank you. We had a lovely wedding.

Well in the evening,

I mean I was talking then about afternoon tea, a tea dance, you’d have a street gown on but they were rather glamorous gowns when you were going to a place like that. At night, you wore full evening dress and it was really quite something. I mean some men would be in white tie, you know tails, but mostly it was dinner suit and I frequently went there

with a cousin of my mother’s who was this high-ranking air force chap. He eventually came back to Australia. He left the air force and became manager of Bristol Aircraft Company actually. He used to take me there a lot because he was on his own and when he’d be in Sydney he’d want a hostess and I filled the bill,

and because I made, you know, see I used to dress up. He liked that and or he’d like to lunch at Romano’s. Well, I only could do that in school holidays but that was rather good too but I liked Prince’s more so, which was like what you see on the old Hollywood movies. You know, the little tables with nice padded seats around and

a very nice orchestra. No jitterbugging, nothing like that, very nice. I had my 21st birthday at a place called The Ambassador and that was not as upmarket as Prince’s but it was quite nice and they had paintings on the wall and it was quite nice, but Prince’s was the tops and I think Romano’s next.

It was in Martin Place, now wait a minute let me think. King Street, you went downstairs. Romano’s was in I suppose Castlereagh Street near Martin Place. I think Prince’s

was in Martin Place.

I remember when nylons first came, that was

definitely well after the war, when nylons became available. See clothes rationing was lifted straightaway. I think clothes rationing was lifted before the end of the war. I’m not sure about that, can’t be sure. Petrol rationing went on for years but things were still hard to get but there was no restriction.

You could just go into a shop like Farmers or David Jones and if something didn’t quite fit what you wanted, perhaps size or you wanted a different colour, they’d whip up another one for you, just like that. Two or three days, you’d go in and it’d be ready because they had huge dressmaking area. Farmers were particularly

good that way. Relatives of ours had a shop called McCathie’s - was really ‘McCattie’ but everyone called it McCathie’s - just near Farmers, which is now Grace Brothers [department store - now Myer] you know, that big shop there, and they used to do things like that too but they were a bit down market. I preferred you know Farmers quality and

stockings were a real problem before nylons became, you know, we used to have fully fashioned with a seam up the back and you had to have the seam just right. If you had crooked seams that was not a good look but before that, had to wear lisle [fine thread, originally from Lisle, now Lille, in France] stockings which are a, I suppose they’re a type of cotton or

rayon and they were awful, but silk is what we used to wear but they were almost impossible to get.

Yes, I used to wear a suspender belt, just a little belt around here with the suspenders dangling down. I think everyone, and women used to keep their

money in the top of their stocking.

I loved her. She was a New Zealander and she was an aviatrix, and we used to use words like that then, and I used to collect all these photos of Jean Batten. I had a scrapbook on

her and there was the Mollisons [British aviation family] and various other people, was just an interest in these magnificent men in their flying machines and women.

I think it was because she was a New Zealander and we regarded New Zealand as a seventh state you know and she used to be here quite a lot and

I don’t say I actually met her but I was there when she landed.

Oh yes.

Yeah, she had flair yes, she was lovely and I saw Amelia Earhart [American aviatrix]. She died of course mysteriously, but Jean Batten was

my pinup girl.

I suppose it’s like space travel today. It was new and I knew so many who were involved with it. It was accessible and having the opportunity to go up in those

early aeroplanes, later on I have flown in Catalinas with, what’s his name? A famous…

Yes he was, made a name for himself in the war too. Dear oh dear, can’t remember. It’ll come.

Yes, yes.

Well, mainly my mother’s cousins. One in particular was Ernest Whiteley and he was a mathematician really. He had a degree in mathematics and he joined the air force and got the gold Sword of Honour in Melbourne at Point Cook [the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) Academy] and then

was transferred to the RAF where he went from strength to strength and I suppose, being a mathematician and heavily grounded in science too, he was pretty valuable. He served on Malta during the terrible bombing there but that was because he did the naughty thing and went on a bombing raid after his sister’s fiancé

was killed in the Battle of Britain and he was sent over there as a squadron leader too, for a little rest.

Well, he shouldn’t have been airborne because he was, the work he was doing was too valuable apparently, but it didn’t stop him from rising up from them but he worked on radar, navigational radar.

No, no,

no, before. He was given orders; he was grounded in other words, because he was assigned to research and testing and all that relating to navigation and leading up to radar. I met Dr Ted Bowen who worked with him on radar and it was very important in the defence

of Britain really.

Yes.

Yes, yes, yes. He got the DFC [Distinguished Flying Cross] and bar, those two, and he got the OBE [Order of the British Empire]. He was quite renowned.

Yes, yes, clever fellow.

Well, he later left the air force and was general manager of Bristol Aircraft Company, then he got sick of having his own jet and whizzing around the world, because he married and he became the general manager of the ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation] as a matter of fact in Victoria but later died. He used to come out here quite a lot because he was involved also with the

nuclear program that Britain had, you know Maralinga, Woomera, that sort of thing.

I have no idea.

Particularly relating to navigation I understand, yes, and he used to come out here and take me to Prince’s and Romano’s. No, he was a great fellow, yeah.

Well I don’t know anything about it except it was definitely related to navigation, aeronautical navigation, and apparently he contributed quite positively to the development of that in aircraft and

possibly later to rockets and things like that, but he did die of cancer, as a lot of people who used to go watching bombs go off, developed that sort of complaint.

I think so yes, cause I had another cousin who was in the occupation forces in Japan where the Hiroshima bomb went off. They were camped there actually

and he got radiation sickness and peculiar sort of radiation cancer of the lungs so I think there must be a connection there.

Yes.

Occupation forces, yes, he was younger. He’s younger than I was.

Yes, yes, Jack who was a very clever fellow. He was an engineer and he also had his own plane and he had a farm.

He used to commute to Bankstown from the farm and he had his own engineering, precision engineering workshops in Wentworth Avenue, and did that every day and of course he rushed to join up and he said he wanted to be a pilot and they said, “No, you’re too old to be a pilot.” and I don’t know how old he was but he wasn’t very old and said you know at a certain age your eyesight isn’t

quite right for landing, all this sort of thing and he said, “Well, I have my pilot’s license and I’ve held it for so often, I have my own plane.” and he just bullied his way in but he spent the war in Canada lecturing, instructing better, under the Empire Air Training Scheme. In fact

he always had to come top of the class in everything, he was that sort of person, and I understand he broke his hand a week before his final exam over there and he still came top of the class in his final exam and was kept there as an instructor, that sort of, and then Billy, a lovely young feller, he was also in the air force and he’s the one who drowned in the Nepean River on final leave

so, but the other two came back yeah.

Well, I was teacher in charge of a very small school and I was sent down to the Gurwood Street Demonstration School. I was attached to that, but then I married Clem.

He lived next door.

A bit spooky isn’t it? Yes it was actually. I heard him before I ever saw him. He shared the accommodation next door with a nice fellow who later became his best man and it was Anzac Day. I heard this frightful racket and they were practicing marching. They used to

act the goat a lot. Ken was ex RAN [Royal Australian Navy] and of course Clem was ex AIF etcetera and Clem had this great voice. They were marching up and down practicing and acting the goat with a dog. I thought, “I don’t think much of them.” and then one day Clem came into the kitchen

at, I flatted with two other teachers, and he came in for a cup of tea and stood beside the refrigerator and I thought, “He looks nice.” and I suppose he thought I looked nice too because he remembered what I wore that day, many years later, and I remember he was in an open-necked shirt and looked pretty good and things went on from there and we’ve been

married for 51 years.

Nearly two years, well no, no, a year and a half I think, not too sure about that, because I was in Wagga for six months before I moved into this flat

with these two other teachers yeah.

It was lovely yeah. My parents lived at Gordon and of course we had country relatives and so we decided that we’d get married at St Canice’s, which was at Roslyn Gardens [Road, Elizabeth Bay] and that’d be central to everybody and the people from the Illawarra the rest, goodness knows where,

and the reception was at Kinneil Officers Club and I think we had the last reception that was held there. Gorgeous, lovely old mansion, different from Lyndon Hall but I think perhaps a bit older than Lyndon Hall and then we had our reception there and they demolished it,

knocked this beautiful place down and for a while anyway, it was a car park. Dear, we were lemony about that, such a pity yeah. Bit like knocking down Elizabeth Bay House.

Well at the reception yes that’s right, just the big

room, which would have been the ballroom originally I should imagine.

Yes, I was in charge of a pre-school there, which was, it was a very strange set-up. It had been started by forward

thinking people, largely medical people, doctors’ wives and so on who were keen to have their children made ready for school and to have an educational base, and I had received extra training in my training based on Rachel and Margaret McMillan in London who I think initiated this type of education

where children were given skills and also living skills such as washing their hands and cleaning their teeth, that sort of thing, basic, and looked after medically in London, and it became the nursery school movement over there or the kindergarten movement, and here it developed along similar lines but it was cut off very short. I think there were only about

five of these schools but this one in Wagga was privately run by these people, committee, under another organisation’s auspices, and the Department of Education found that there was some irregularity according to some Department of Education rules and standards, and there was a

terrible problem arose. The local member, I won’t mention his name, promised these people at election time that he’d see to it that the Department of Education staffed the school and of course he shouldn’t have said that. I believe he was admonished for it in a quiet sort of way and here was a Department

required to send someone there and of course who was wanting country service but me and apparently I fitted you know the picture and they sent me down, and I had all these long instructions about being firm, guiding it into the right channels and not offending anybody,

and I found the people down there just wonderful. They were very supportive and it was a very nice little school, and then I got married and lived happily ever after.

I had one assistant, yes.

Only 25. It was a very select little place. It was nice.

Four to five.

Then later on when after I had my children the Department was desperate for teachers - you have no idea, the baby boom did awful things to schools - and they asked me to go back, the Director asked me. I said, “Well, I’ve got a little boy who’s not of school age yet.” and he said, “I’ll take him as a supernumerary.”

which I did and my little girl had started school, so I went back and taught in another small school, a similar, they were sister schools, you see, falling under the same banner.

Yes, very good people to work with. They’d have done anything for their children and anything for me really. They were very cooperative.

Yes, well there was one chap I hadn’t had anything to do with and he rang up and said could he call and I said “Yes.” and Clem was on his way home from some business arrangement and this fellow arrived and

I wondered what he wanted me to do and he said that he actually wanted to meet me. He said, “I’ve heard about you.” and I said, “What, heard about me?” and he said, “Yes, you’re quite well known and quite, you know, you were unique in having access to a Russian agent’s house.” and I said, “I gathered that.” He said,

“They even knew about you in America.” and he said that one fellow said, “How’s that blonde in the Commiess?” I don’t know what he said, something like that, “How’s the blonde, you’ve still got the blonde working for you in the Russian set-up?” and I thought, “Oh heavens!” I thought, “Surely he’s exaggerating.” but apparently it was a bit of a joke among,

which is fair enough.

Well, just only in Australia did they have an agent so to speak with access to the Russians as I did and nowhere else apparently.

Well, that’s what I was led to believe. I’d believe them, wouldn’t you?

Yes I don’t know, as I said before, information was mainly just one-way.

He said, “Do you mind if we keep in touch?” and I said, “No not at all.” and another gentleman called. I knew him. He was also interested in the local scene.

I didn’t want to have any part of that.

He put out tentacles yes. I wouldn’t. There was a reason for it and I said, “Look its over as far as I’m concerned.” He’s the only one whose name, real name, I ever found out but don’t ask me it because I won’t say it.

I was teaching, well, actually at that time I was only going to go back teaching, but I hadn’t gone back, but I was very busy with the little young children, I was doing charity work with retarded children as a matter of fact for a very short time and I was too involved. It was just too much and

its quite a draining business and it would have involved people, it would have involved me getting involved with certain organisations and councillors. I couldn’t, I wasn’t up to it so it was over.

Of course and another thing, its one thing to be doing it against foreign agents. Its quite a different thing to be doing it in your own community and it just wasn’t something I fancied, but this same fellow, the first fellow who came over, we used to go down to Mossy Point for holidays and a lot of Canberra people go there

and one day I was walking with my children, holding their hand, and my daughter was about four and my little boy was about two, and walking across the lagoon and who should I come face to face with but this chap. “Oh!” he said, “So we meet again.” and we’re laughing about couldn’t have a more secure place for a meeting and he was chatting on. He was quite vociferous really, it was interesting and I was enjoying it, so I felt

my daughter sort of jumping up and down beside me and finally we looked down and she’s only drowning, she’d stepped into a hole in the sand at the bottom of the lagoon and she was jumping for air, not for joy. She didn’t nearly drown but you know these things can happen and I was holding her hand.

Hideous yes, so he picked her up and he had his own children with him, yeah.

Well I didn’t know what they meant and I, you know, I just left it open to them

but when it came to the crunch, the situation had changed and it wasn’t something I felt up to or fancied.

Yes, that was a bit of a laugh, yeah, cause well Clem, I mean he would, if you asked him something

he’d tell you. I knew about the Middle East and Tobruk and El Alamein, all that sort of stuff, Syria, Papua New Guinea gradually unfolded. He wasn’t a person to talk about the war but he didn’t hide it either. He’s very jumpy but about him jumping into Malaya behind the lines, I just assumed he was giving feedback to

the Australian military intelligence and he said, “I was seconded to the BEF.” which is the British Expeditionary Force and through that actually a lot of what happened to him wasn’t recorded in Australian military records and he jumped in, full kit and everything, actually landed in a tree in the jungle and

the Japanese were there and he had to release himself suddenly and drop to the ground and hurt his back, that’s how he stayed for the rest of the war, with a sore back, but he joined the guerrillas and I said, “Well, so you’d radio back to Australia what you found?” “Oh no.” he said, “I was with MI-5.” and I thought how funny. I said, “Well, come

to think of it, we have a bit more in common that I thought.” and I just mentioned to him that I had done some work for ASIO. He thought it was a huge joke but he didn’t say anything to anybody, so my father and Clem were the only ones I ever said it to, but of course Clem’s much older now and he’s frail and he let it slip one day to our son and daughter, and of course our daughter was just cock-a-hoop. She thought it was

the greatest story since the Red Sea parted and course it was everywhere then and she got it all wrong. She thinks that the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] came out here to meet me. That’s not true; it was just somebody had come out and mentioned it in passing about the blonde in the Russian nest.

I tried to keep her quiet about it. I said, “Look, it’s not really for broadcasting.” and I said, “I don’t think you should talk about it.” “Oh, I think its wonderful.” she’d say, but she only told a select few yeah. She thought it was a joke.

Yes I had sworn and

that’s why I did feel quite guilty about telling my father. I didn’t tell him what I did but I told him that I had sworn that I wouldn’t talk about it. That’s why my father didn’t ask me anything about it. My father was a very highly principled man, more highly principled than I was at the time, but I wanted to know what he thought I should do. I told him nothing about what I did.

They didn’t give a timeframe. I just assumed it was forever. I just assumed that.

Because my daughter let slip and Clem’s story was coming out

and somebody said, “Well that sounds an interesting story, particularly you know a woman, Cold War.” and she thought it was a good idea. Actually she said, when she rang up somebody and said, “Mum’s the one you should be interviewing.” I said, “Don’t be ridiculous.” I said, “I did nothing really.”

In fact I sort of, I felt guilty about not going to Canberra, that’s what I felt guilty about. I felt I’d let the side down but I couldn’t have done it.

No, no, I’ve been too involved with education. It’s been my life

and my family, other interests, but mainly my association with schools and teacher education and demonstration schools and lecturing a bit, that sort of thing.

Yes, yes.

Yes, I was at home for six years,

yeah, or nearly.

Yes, because I was told that 30 year limit was well and truly over and somebody even told me later, after checking, that General Peter Cosgrove [Chief of the Defence Force, 2002-05] said, “It’s alright to tell it.” and I thought if Peter Cosgrove says that,

it’s alright with me too.

Yes, I think he’s great yeah.

Really?

I thought it was so insignificant compared to what people did during the war. I met people, when I was evacuated, see my little school was flooded,

and so it was closed down and I was evacuated to Uranquinty, which was a Royal Australian Air Force base, and there these old, not old, they were young men pilots and so on from the war and there was one whose face I’ll never forget. He’d been terribly burnt, you know.

They used to get badly burnt if they were, the planes blew up, and he had really no face. I don’t know what he did there but he was a lonely person and his face was completely featureless. I suppose that great surgeon who was a New Zealander who

specialised in reconstructing burn victims in the war, who incidentally Clem was lucky enough, when he was blown up at Tobruk, he had a gunshot wound in the face and he was over there instructing other doctors and he did him, which was very lucky, otherwise he’d have been spoilt. But men like that, you know, giving their all and I’ve met

survivors of the prison camps including women, nurses who were prisoners and civilian internees, connections of ours, what they went through. What I did was minor compared with that, but I’ve realised there was potentially great importance. There’s a point I want to make regarding the Pakhomovs and how this

Canberra business came so suddenly. I wasn’t needed any more and the reason was, as I later found out by seeing a documentary on the ABC, the flat below us was occupied by a new tenant. I don’t know how it was arranged but I have my suspicions, directly above the Petrovs who followed the Pakhomovs

and what they did was through the…

Yes, it was a woman with a, I think a Polish name was the tenant underneath us. Well, we’d gone well and truly. My parents were in Gordon

by then, but then directly over the Petrovs who followed the Pakhomovs. Now, I didn’t know the Petrovs. I think I did see them once but that’s all and, with the landlord’s connivance I’m sure, they put a spy camera, perhaps I don’t know through the chandeliers, directly into the flat.

They couldn’t do that before because the previous tenants, well, they weren’t suitable apparently. That rather threw me when I saw this documentary on the ABC about this because I wouldn’t have guessed that at all, but I didn’t know this lady really and it was part, so they didn’t need me anymore, see, and

of course the Petrovs did defect. I don’t think they would have liked the Pakhomovs to defect.

It was enormous and of course I didn’t lose interest in it and all the time, from the time I went to Wagga, here were the Petrovs, front page

news. Well when they, when their crisis happened and I was almost paralysed with tension over it because I thought, “Gosh, this could have happened with the Nosovs.” It was a very stressful situation. I don’t know the inner workings of it except for the peepholes but they probably

had children in Russia too.

Exactly yes.

Always, yes, I’ve often thought about it,

particularly about Mrs. Pakhomov. I did worry about her and I worried about Mrs. Petrov and I didn’t really know her. I didn’t worry about him but, and I did wonder about the Nosovs, what happened, but I’ve thought about it, not very

often but every now and again, I’d think about it and sort of worry at it like a dog with a bone.

I did when I was, before I went to Wagga. It wasn’t easy. Knowing I had been followed and suspecting that I was being watched and after I saw that

with the peephole, I wondered how many people were being watched but I don’t think we were because of the nature of the people above us.

Yes, yes, yes, because I mean even popular novels and

picture shows, pictures and movies, John LeCarre books [spy fiction writer], that sort of thing, of course are far different from what I experienced, but it still brings it home to you and you have an appreciation for what the real people, not me, but the real people out there go through. It’s a very specialised and dangerous occupation and a very valuable one.

Yes, yes, I was interested and when the Berlin Wall came down, no-one was happier than I, but I thought that Gorbachov would be able to wave a magic wand and

create a miracle of some sort but it wasn’t to be. I think evolution is a very slow way of developing things. Revolution is a short cut but it doesn’t work and I’m very sorry that the Russian people have been reduced in status and their economy is shot and a whole lot of other things that

they valued so highly, including their wonderful ballets and their education system and so on, have all been affected so terribly badly and there are other western degenerate things that have taken over, at least the West gets the blame, but then again, you only had to read [Alexander] Solzhenitsyn [Russian dissident author, particularly exposing the Soviet regime, notably The Gulag Archipelago] to think, “Well, thank heaven its over.”

Yes I came down to Sydney. We moved to Sydney,

to here actually, and I taught in the classroom for a while and then took up my List One, as they call it, as a promotion position and from there I just rapidly went from one thing to another but I was mainly involved with teacher education in the demonstration school area. They’ve done away with demonstration schools now

but they were very valuable in their time. I know as a student I liked to go to see a demonstration of a particular type of lesson. Chosen staff we had extra staff, we also had extra pay and I had the privilege of working as an infants’ mistress and a deputy principal with,

they were world-beaters these teachers. Now I can think of some of them that you couldn’t possibly find better teachers anywhere. Trish Keen and Margaret Bennett, they were magical teachers and we dealt with colleges of advanced education. Students used to come in, in droves and the Sydney University. I was at Lindfield Demonstration School. We had

the Balmain Teachers College as it was called there, it’s called something different now and even at Birchgrove we had the old Balmain Teachers’ College used to visit Birchgrove School, which was called a visiting school, and so I’ve sort of been dealing with that. Even Wagga was the Gurwood Street Demonstration School and I was annexed to that and I used to have visitors come to me there, so I was involved with that side of things for a very long

time and had, I think I was honoured in a way in dealing with a lot of these dedicated teachers and executive people over the years. The last demonstration school I was at was Haberfield Demonstration School where I was born and then the demonstration schools were done away with, mainly because they were considered to be elitist,

I think. That was the push behind it, which I think was a shame. I think that was a federation push. I’m a federationist but I think they were misguided there.

Teachers’ Federation, yes. I might be wrong. It might have just been a monetary thing but I don’t think so; and from there I went as a first class principal to

Narrabri Public School which is a big, it was the biggest school in that region in the northwest and I loved that. It wasn’t a demonstration staff but they were very good teachers by and large and they were conscientious. There were about six hundred and something children,

mixed from every corner of the compass. They used to come in on buses. I think there were about 14 buses used to descend on the school - that’s why it was so big and we had a small aboriginal population. It went to about 5.8 percent, varied, 6 [per cent]. Some used to come in from Lightning Ridge and so on, and then disappear again.

A very interesting cross-section, mainly people who were on the land, some who were trouble-makers, some who were the finest people you’d ever meet, but even the trouble-makers were interesting because they were, oh no, bushies, very nice yes. I set up a special unit there called an OF unit, which was for

moderately retarded children. We already had an OA, which was for mildly, and they were taught by very conscientious and dedicated teachers. I had two wonderful deputies and nothing they couldn’t do so it was different, but they rebuilt

the school. It was in a very bad state of repair when I went there and, of course, I didn’t stop whinging about that and eventually I tripped over and really hurt myself and had this awful fall, knocked unconscious and a few broken things here and there, and my deputy who had a wonderful turn of phrase, I’ve still kept the letter, wrote this scathing letter to the Department saying about how

the state of repair of the school had been the subject of many letters and to think that the principal had to go so far as to have to fall over to, you know, make the point that it needed repairing. Anyway, they redid it and I was invited back to the opening of the new extensions and the refurbishments. It’s a lovely school.

They were in other schools.

They were grown up by then. Yes, my daughter actually was a solicitor with the Aboriginal Legal Service when I went to Narrabri and she used to go up there and up to Moree on cases and

fight the good cause and all the rest of it, and we used to meet and I met some of her clients and some of whom became quite notorious, but that’s her story, and then she went to the High Court as an Associate and then after two years there, she went straight to the bar and lost contact with the ALS [Aboriginal Legal Service]. But I had a good

feeling about Narrabri and we made some life-long friends there, townspeople, excellent.

Yes.

Well, its such a, it’s the most complex occupation you can think of because, look, a dentist can have a recalcitrant child in the chair and either Mum has to take him home or he gives him

a jab with a needle and quietens him down or puts a gag on him, but when you’ve got 35, 40, in my case I had 52 children in my class up here at St Ives, you’ve got to tailor your syllabus as opposed to the curriculum to suit groups of children. Its stages not ages and you have to

keep them occupied, keep them busy and inspire them, and you don’t have to raise your voice to do that but you use tricks and, you know, children are pretty good. They want to please you mostly. There are some that you could strangle but you can get around them too, so a teacher who is willing to give a little to cater for children’s needs is

conscientious in lesson preparation, very important, and is sincere because children can see through, you know an upstart, they really can, and to have a bit of fun and challenge them a bit. That’s the way to go. And let them participate and let the teachers participate, you know, authority. It’s a bit like Russia. You can’t keep

the people down all the time. Same in schools, they have to participate in the development of curriculum, syllabus, routine, discipline, all that sort of thing. Cross-fertilisation, cooperation, democracy: not perfect but it’s the best we have.

Well, I’m talking about one right through to tertiary really, but I didn’t teach in secondary. I didn’t like secondary teaching. No, I liked primary. I was in primary.

Infants and primary, and I also did a bit of lecturing of teacher trainees,

which I found quite good and it had a lot to do with students in CAEs [Colleges of Advanced Education] and a little bit at Sydney University but only a little bit, and they seemed to value what I did. I served on committees in the Department, a lot of committees, and that had its value too because it had a ripple effect. It trickled down and

cooperated with the development of reading, language, maths even and even in a practical sense in teaching aids, that sort of thing, so I was very, very busy, very involved and I think, I don’t know, I think I was effective in some regards.

Well, I’ll tell you, I was a teacher first and I was a spook second. I didn’t value the, I mean I was, in fact I felt that my tension regarding the Pakhomovs

and the thought of going to Canberra, that sort of thing was impinging on my teaching so, no, but teaching came first. Well my family came first but.

They’re very interesting children yeah.

Well they were very good children and happy and

I think secure. My daughter went to the local convent school at Corpus Christi and then went to Loreto Normanhurst and our son went to Corpus Christi and also to the public school and then to Riverview [St Ignatius College]. And she was very talented artistically. I think she takes after her father

and my mother in that respect and she wanted to become something in fine arts and she enrolled in Fine Arts, Sydney [University], but she was disappointed because she had a romantic view of fine arts and she found it was just rehashing stuff she already knew. She got a place in the State in the School Certificate and the Leaving Certificate or Higher School Certificate

in art and that was her passion, that and music and things like that. So then she decided that she’d switch courses and do sociology, so she was doing that at [University of] New South Wales and was doing sociology of law and ‘bingo’, the light went on and she found her niche in

the educational world and she wanted to become a lawyer. I thought, “Gosh, I’m glad she’s made up her mind.” so she did her BA [Bachelor of Arts] and then did graduate law at New South Wales where she met her future husband who was also a barrister and it went from there. But our son, although he was a clever boy, was interested right from the earliest age

in things that moved and worked, and he was obviously of engineering quality and he was right. He wanted to do that sort of thing and he did mechanical engineering then went touring the Americas, mainly South America, where he had some interesting and rather hair-raising

experiences at the time of the Falklands War and in the States [United States of America] he met his future wife through mutual friends, old school friends of his, and she made him aware of industrial design and that’s what he wanted to do. ‘Bingo’, the light went on and he came back

here and they went all over Australia where there were industrial design courses and he settled on the UTS [University of Technology, Sydney] where he got the gold medal yes, University Medal not the gold medal. Gosh, I’m thinking of Dawn Fraser now who used to be a pupil at Birchgrove Public School and she was a naughty girl and naughty but nice. Yes, he got the gold, the

University Medal at UTS and then he went on to do other courses and he’s a head designer and an engineer really and he’s also got a qualification in mechanical engineering and a production manager. He travels round the world a bit instructing and doing things, tearing his hair out about it, but you know everyone has their

own, for everyone there’s a field of genius for them. You’ve got to find the right thing and it’s through education and having parents who think, “Oh well, he’ll find his place eventually.” You’ve got to be patient and be prepared to wait for them to find their direction, because not everyone at school chooses the right thing to do.

Not immediately.

But he married

his American lovely, lovely wife and they had two excellent sons. They’re just top notches, yes.

Well, he really wanted to do law when he came out of the army and he could have done it through CRTS [Commonwealth Rehabilitation and Training Scheme] but his nerves didn’t allow him to settle.

He was very tense. In fact, I thought we’d all be killed in a car accident any old day. He was very jumpy, you know, a light in the distance would appear and he’d nearly jump through the roof. He wasn’t fit after his harrowing years to do that, so he got a job in

a Unilever company [large multi-national supply/services company] and it was Lipton Tea really, which is owned by Unilever, and in tea and he was doing country service down in Wagga, so coincidence again, and he was actually their sales representative going round to various towns getting experience that way, then he came down to Sydney

into the office and he was actually in number one Macquarie Street, you know, the big Unilever building there, which they knocked down, and we had some good times there watching fireworks, vantage spot, but that’s what he did. He was, he did before the war as a, when he left school he was doing accountancy.

Or Betty Field?

Yeah I think it was Sally Field.

Don’t confuse me further.

Nobody else knew it. I think it was to protect the person. There was nothing about my real identify in that, I mean they knew it but…

Yes.

I think so; I have a horrible feeling.

Nobody, I mean I kept forgetting what my name was. Nobody called me that. I used to have to sign something and one day I forgot and they said, “Put down Betty Jones” or something like that. It wasn’t as intense as you might think, in that it sort of petered out,

particularly when Mrs. Pakhomov was absent quite a bit.

Really?

I can’t really think of anything offhand except that young people today can’t imagine what it was like back then and I think it is valuable for them to get a peep into the past because things are moving so quickly now

that Australia’s history is being gobbled up. Our activities are being gobbled up. We seem to be so influenced by television, which is largely foreign, overseas. Even the press is becoming more and more compressed, fewer owners and

so on, and eventually young people might lose truths and I think in that way what you’re doing is extremely valuable, not necessarily what I’ve done, but so that young people do know that Australia did have a history and that there were women here who were quite able. For example,

getting back to education, in America they discovered Doctor Montessori in the last few years. Well, I was in a kindergarten with a Montessori cupboard. I did part of my special training with, under a woman who worked with, and this is Miss Simpson who worked with two teachers

that were sent in 1919 or something like that. I’ve got a roneo copy of their whole report to England to be trained by Doctor Montessori. New South Wales Education Department kindergartens are based on Montessori and they’re not as colourful and extended

as the new Montessori ideas are concerned. Montessori was a psychiatrist but she pioneered learning through experience, trial and error, and stages not ages really, which I don’t know that she said that, but young people today don’t know that our whole kindergarten system

in the public schools and also the systemic schools is based on Montessori. They think its come from America. Admittedly the nursery school idea came from London with the Rachel and Margaret McMillan influence because of the slum crisis situation there following the industrial revolution but its, I

think, valuable for young people to know that we’ve had a lot of inventions and participation in world events that are sort of being buried.

Yes it’s been reintroduced, yes, and even the old Australian history that we were brought up on was a bit skewed one

way and I think that needs broadening.

Thank you Graham [interviewer] and thank you Rebecca. I’m very pleased to think that I’ve pleased you so much. I would never have dreamt of it, would never have thought of

mentioning it and the twice I did mention it I felt guilty about it.