THE DESTITUTE INSTITUTE

Adios amigos...Adios!

2011-12-26T22:54:00.000-08:00

I’m going to leave the topic of HMAS Leeuwin and the junior recruit training scheme alone now, except to make the following statements:

The Rapke Inquiry of 1971 was an investigation of the navy by the navy. The relevant federal minister of the time was a former naval officer and so, also, was Rapke himself.

What I want to describe are several incidents, the nature of which appear to have been entirely overlooked by Justice Rapke.

Those of you who’ve read my satirical look at JRTE, would be aware of the nutty petty officer’s assault on a lone JR with a rifle. To begin with, I have no idea what they were doing alone on the bullring. It could have been that the unfortunate junior recruit was the only one on punishment that day. That seems unlikely but can’t be entirely ruled out. It is also possible that PO Corkhill had singled out, as seems to have been his habit, this kid for special attention. Carrying rifles at the high port, over the head, was a borderline area in regulations stating that men under punishment could be given extra drill. On an occasion in December ‘63 when the Commodore was watching some early boxing bouts in the drill hall - he must have taken as look over his shoulder and seen the duty PO running kids up and down with rifles over their heads - ordered the rifles down. Clearly he didn’t go along with that practice either. There isn’t anything about throwing rifles at junior ratings in the QRs. I witnessed the incident, my attention was drawn to it by Corkhill shouting as I ran across the SE corner of the bullring on my way back from the cross-country. Neither he nor the kid he was picking on, saw me. Was this an incidence of, to quote PIAMA 29: p87, an immature, naïve or disorganised boy being set on the right track? No, it was much more a case of an unstable adult acting out his feelings on a near-helpless target.

Secondly, on an occasion where both intakes, 7^th and 8^th, were sent on the cross country run to the Bicton Baths, a caged pool on the Swan, and back, a small number of JR2s hid in bushes to avoid running the whole distance. They were detected and pointed out to all the boys on the bullring as being the reason we were to run the whole course again. Entirely predictably, some took personal exception to this and took it out, physically, on smaller, weaker boys. Jock McGregor, a heavyweight boxer, slapped one of the JR2s around on this occasion. Here, the senior man, LPTI Roesler, all but administered the illegal punishment himself.

The disparity of power between a petty officer, even a leading seaman, and a junior recruit, within the regulations, was enormous. If that power was used secretively, as in the case of Corkhill, or cunningly, vicariously, as with Roesler, one can only puzzle over the motives of these grown men.

There’s my own situation, and that of Bill Smith, and there can be little doubt the scene wasn’t repeated in other classes, other divisions, where it was suggested from above that certain individuals got scrubbed. In my own instance and Bill’s, older boys were used to carry out the mistreatment. Again, it’s peculiar how adults could behave in that way. On the one hand, unable to directly confront people so junior, yet, on the other hand, quite ready to issue covert instructions of that nature. Oh we wouldn’t want to question an individual’s personal hygiene but it’s quite all right to scrub his back till it bleeds and degrade him pretty much as we please...They’re both poms…Y’know what poms’re like…

On the radio news today, 27/12/11, there’s talk of recruiting into the RAN from the UK. This must be seen as a desperate measure on the part of those responsible for navy staffing. Before long, people, we’ll be seeing attempts to re-introduce junior recruit training or some version thereof. I’ll be watching developments on both those fronts with extra-ordinary interest. Otherwise, this is pretty well it from The Destitute Institute for the foreseeable future. I’ve both a house and family that have been somewhat neglected of late and writing some of what I have - along with an ongoing struggle to be compensated for my treatment by the RAN – hasn’t been without its emotional toll. Thanks to you who’ve read my blog and shown a continuing interest these past couple of years. Good luck with ‘012 and please feel free t’get pissed or eat a lot of chocolate. I’ll be coming back but I don’t know when. If you want to bring something up with me, email me at wahe@dodo.com.au, but be aware I’ve been insulted by experts and called names I had to look up in the dictionary. If there is a fact you feel needs correction, I’ll be glad to make room for you at a later date. To quote The Lone Ranger:’Adios amigos Adios!’

2011-12-24T00:31:00.000-08:00

Below, I’ve included a letter to the 6/7^th Intakes of Junior Recruits at HMAS Leeuwin (1963-4) website from Jim Hammond, a man who spent twelve years in the RAN; a man, I feel, of considerable courage.

Letter to the Editor
The recent article in the newsletter regarding bastardisation at Leeuwin has prompted me to write in the hope that some positive discussion on the subject may now be generated. The fact that the three Bs: Bullying, Bastardisation and Bashings can lead to debilitating illness in victims later in life should raise some questions in the minds of the perpetrators and their victims.
Do the bullies of Leeuwin now show some remorse over their actions? Or do they brush it off by using the familiar excuses such as:
It was just a bit of fun, or
It didn’t happen, or
It was all part of making a man out of the victims, or
Boys will be boys, or even
Those weak or different victims deserved it!
There is no excuse for such abhorrent behaviour. It has taken Governments too many years to make bullying in the workforce illegal. But it is now. Sure, it wasn’t illegal in 1963, but it was definitely wrong! Any caring, compassionate and intelligent person, even in those days, would not participate in the activities of the few bullies in our midst.
A scan of the mailing list of this newsletter identifies some well known bullies of JRTE. Have they changed? Have they passed on the bullying trait to their children who now carry on the tradition in the schoolyards and workplaces?
Why, you ask, am I raising such an unpleasant issue 42 years later? Because I suffer Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome as a result of bullying, bastardisation and bashings at Leeuwin. Does that still make me weak or different? In the eyes of some of you, probably yes.
Talking about one’s mental illness is part of the healing process, and I hope that your feedback or comments may contribute to my healing.
It would be great to see your comments in the newsletter for all to read. However, if you wish to keep your comments quiet, feel free to contact me by email at jimhammond36@hotmail.com

2011-12-24T00:13:00.001-08:00

Here’s the headline from the May 14, 1971 edition of Navy News. Connolly is the guilty party. And in the box below the headline, as though to shame JR Connolly further, we’re told that he and his mother had requested that he be discharged. This because four blokes had beaten the shit out of him for daring to assume ‘rights’ such as they themselves did; rights that violated naval regulations. And with utterly predictable armed service sense of right and wrong, Connolly and his assailants received the same punishment.

And now...

2011-08-01T04:01:00.000-07:00

Things, obviously, are heating up. From out there in the world, well, Canberra and Melbourne, an invitation has been made, inviting we victims of abuse in the military to submit our allegations to a review committee. That, as they say, is better than fuck all; an improvement on living with the sense of abuse, degradation, profound humiliation and the fear which has never entirely left us, in silence. Will perpetrators be identified? If so, what will they have to say in defence of their actions? I’m not into predicting the future. I have read extracts from the Rapke Inquiry, 1971, into events at HMAS Leeuwin, JRTE and on HMAS Sydney and that is a pathetic document to say the least; page after page of testimony(?) on jumping the scran line (meal queue) and biting cigarettes from juniors. Don’t go looking for names because they’ve all been expunged along with any other identifying material, leaving some pages of the transcription with only a line or two left readable. Oh, and there’s a good deal of whinging about conditions on the, at the time troop carrier, Sydney, but we won’t go into that.

That above is a sample page, containing a handwritten statement in which the only name not expunged is that of the original subject of this inquiry, JR (Junior Recruit) Connolly, remains. (Connolly’s mother had expressed concern to naval authorities through a Melbourne radio station over her son’s treatment at Leeuwin.) At the top of the page, an unknown writer states that Shane had ‘…acquired a name around the depot as a mouth…’ Whom ever wrote the report could safely, anonymously, criticise Connolly.

In the typewritten page below, again, the only name not expunged is that of JR Shane Connolly.

In both documents and in other material from the Inquiry, there’s a build toward Shane Connolly as the troublemaker since he had started a fight on the platform at Spencer Street Station on the day the group was leaving by train for WA, with some other JR who had directed a remark at one or more of Connolly’s sisters. In any event, he was ganged up on and bashed by four or five senior boys quite soon after arriving at Leeuwin.

It’s a bit of a sad tale and one we’ll very likely never know the whole truth of, but in just these two examples, we can see how selective questioning, transcription, and even copying can create a particular image for history.

Already, we’ve had a statement from a senior member of the RSL, stating that bastardisation is necessary to toughen people up for battle. What a load of shit! They’re going to have to do better than that, but, don’t lose sight of the fact that it may well be suggested that you put yourself in the way of the treatment you received…

In the Gun Plot website, some of you may have seen, or even taken part in, the Discussion Forums. One particular contributor stated categorically that that we who had spoken up about abuse at some stage of our time in the RAN were clearly people who had spent all of our superannuation and were desperately trying to build cases for compensation. Personally, I don’t have, nor did I ever have, any superannuation. My working life after the RAN, was a hotchpotch of casual work, brief periods of permanent employment and long periods of unemployment and destitution. Pretty well emotionally fucked by my experience at Leeuwin as a junior recruit which I’ve described elsewhere in this blog, I had problems, significant problems, in trusting people. However, I’m not about to fall into making excuses for myself. Let the perpetrators do that. They’re the ones who committed a variety of crimes on my person. They were able to pursue long careers in the services.

I don’t know, nor would I care to predict, what lies ahead for those of us who’re taking part in the government’s survey and what might stem from that. It’s very likely that some of us will be traumatised all over again. I hope we can draw strength through knowing that, this time, we’re not alone and that’s no small thing. Believe me, when I was stuck on a train on my own back to the East, to Sydney where I had no home beyond the single room my father rented – he had no room for me anyway – I was to experience loneliness that would go on for months, years.

Paul Gallagher

2011-04-25T01:08:00.000-07:00

Anzac Day, 2011

In fond memory of Paul Gallagher, (1947-2010) former JR at HMAS Leeuwin, 7th Intake, July, 1963. Chief Petty Officer Quartermaster Gunner. I wish we'd had a chance to meet again and have a yarn before you died. Your memory raises a smile. You were a good mate to have in our very early days at Leeuwin.

2011-04-22T05:24:00.000-07:00

PLEASE NOTE: ALL OF THE TEXT BELOW IS COPYRIGHT TO

© DOUGLAS A. HEATH 2010, 2011. All rights reserved. I acknowledge the people responsible for taking the photographs I’ve included and can assure they will be put to no commercial purpose without specific permission. Currently, they are only being used in this blog: THE DESTITUTE INSTITUTE

DA Heath

Lithgow, NSW. February, 2011.

Some Coarse language.

THE RECRUITING OFFICE was in York Street, close to the heart of Sydney’s banking and insurance community, right where the Pyrmont Power Station they said in the newspaper, deposited hundreds of tons of soot a year. However, the real business of joining the RAN happened at HMAS Rushcutter, over the hill from Kings Cross and down through Rushcutters Bay Park to the water’s edge at Darling Point. In the entrance stood a brightly-painted figurehead from the bow of an old sailing ship. Inside, there were offices and examination rooms. In a closed booth like Barry Jones sat in in Pick-A-Box, they tested your hearing through a headset and your eyesight with the usual wall chart and the paratroopers’ colour-blindness book of dots. You left a specimen of pee in a glass vessel and turned your head and coughed while a medico pressed gloved fingers lightly into your groin. That was the third time I’d gone through these routines; with the PMG (Post Office) and then the NSWGR (state railways), except at the Post Office and Railways they didn’t have a booth and a bloke spoke in a whisper across the room from you. This was comparatively high-tech; a reflection of the new electronic navy. An intense young psychologist asked a searching question about your attendance at school; not much else that I recall, and there were the IQ Tests. I did IQ tests standing on my head which is probably why the answers were often upside down. They’d notify you by mail about how you went:’You’ll be notified by mail,’ a man would have said most likely. I don’t recall what he wore at the time but I suspect it involved a slim tie, white shirt and cardigan.

Apparently satisfied that I could pee, solve anagrams and my folks didn’t depend on me at harvest time, they asked me to report back to Rushcutter on a certain day at a certain time with some personal items I doubt I even owned at the time. But no, I had an impacted molar, I couldn’t travel to Western Australia with that. I went back to the suburbs to a dentist in Cabramatta the following day and again the day after that and the day after that I returned to Rushcutter. The other junior recruits, asocial elements indistinguishable among them, had left by train three days earlier. I was to fly to Perth to catch up with them. I signed for a gratuitous blue bag (1) – for the personal items I didn’t have – and swore the oath in front of this bloke, alone, across his desk. I wasn’t entirely sure what bizarre meant yet so I didn’t notice. I made my first serious mistake by telling this man I had enough money to make the trip and didn’t need any. I was in the navy now. So far, there were no signs of impending doom. My impending doom detector must have been on the blink or it may have been that the dentist had removed the tooth which ached when my life was in danger but that is unlikely. Had everything been working properly, I doubt that I would have missed the suggestion that we would be required to go to school. Deliberately, I hadn’t told the navy that I‘d been declared a missing person by the NSW Dept. Of Education because it involved a slight exaggeration.

I hadn’t flown before, not even in an aeroplane. Then again, I hadn’t joined the navy before and I hadn’t been that far from my family before. In a navy car, I got to Mascot. It was a precise little operation that left me gasping in admiration, or sheer nerves. The driver kept glancing at his watch on the way, calculating how many beers he could have before he was due back at Rushcutter or making sure he got me to the airport on time. The plane took off and I thought it would slide backwards down again, but no, we levelled off. You undid the seat belt and you could light a smoke. It was a Vickers Viscount and a bit like sitting in a vibrating oil drum except there were comfortable seats. All you had to do to get a beer was ask for it and pay for it. The lady next to me watched me drink and smoke for a while then spoke to me earnestly about how I must be bored; she took religious literature out of her handbag and handed it to me. Was it possible she knew something I didn’t? I remember I opened the pamphlet to a picture of Iona (a Scottish isle) and a stone Celtic cross. This inordinate display of interest from an elderly religious should have set off alarm bells. These people who look at you without thinking about sex or money have a way of detecting impending doom in others; sometimes anyway. At Melbourne, we changed planes; this time it was a Bristol Britannia. In those days, you walked out on the tarmac to the plane and climbed stairs on wheels. Adelaide at night was all lights with a black margin of sea. Apart from that, this flying business was uncomfortably noisy and boring. The old lady was right. At Perth we sunk to the ground and left my stomach behind. Clutching my gratuitous blue bag which they gave you for nothing but you had to give back again in case you kept it, I went out to where they had told me a navy car would be waiting. I looked about; there were two or three taxis and an artificial lake. With a small lurch, my stomach caught up with me. I got anxious. Waiting. Nothing happened. Mustering the initiative I hoped the navy was grateful to have at its beck and call now, I spoke to one of the cab drivers. Being a cab driver stuck out at the airport at night, he tried to tout my fare. Instead, I found coins and a telephone box and a phone book. I rang HMAS Leeuwin and was told a car would be out to get me. Oh, and while I was chatting with the taxi driver, he told me somebody had slaughtered a lot of the black swans from the artificial lake for which WA was famous. I clapped myself on the back for the intitiative I had demonstrated, wondering what kind of person went out of their way to slaughter black swans. All at once, I felt lonely, frightened and a very long way from home. With a bigger lurch, my mind and body reunited, leaving my recently-recovered stomach weightless inside me. Haughtily, I lit a smoke probably.

A navy car arrived with a driver in a uniform and and one of those Dutch names six inches long beginning with Van on his shirt. At first glance, he appeared human.

We drove through darkened suburbs; the kind you swear you’ve driven through before because they’re all essentially the same – a traffic light here, a phone box there, darkened windows and light poles everywhere.You never give up despite knowing it’s pointless looking for signs of life; a murder victim lying on the road for example. Van…..the driver, told me a bit about Leeuwin; dances, hikes in the bush. He sounded suspiciously like a brochure. My dis-ease at encountering the elderly religious on the plane was resurrected. I’d been in Fremantle with my mother and brother a couple of years before on the ship coming to Australia so it wasn’t as though this was completely foreign territory.

The gangway (main gate) at Leeuwin. Notice the Pussers’ bike leaning against post; the new

electronic navy’s back-pedal brake model with the up-turned racing handlebars circa 1930.

At Leeuwin, they had to find me a bed; growling adult voices that left me out. I followed a man with a torch through a scene a lot like a POW camp, into a hut with torn lino on the floor. In a bed in a row of beds, a small face appeared above the blankets – a boy I’d met at Rushcutter grinning up at me - Eddie Burrows – I think he’d been peeing in the bottle next to mine but Eddie was one of those guys who mixed readily. Nonetheless, With an utterly unjustified sense of security by the familiar face, instead of jumping the barbed wire fence and feigning insanity when found wandering the streets of East Fremantle by Police in the early hours of the morning which any fully sane person would surely have done, I undressed and lay down to sleep for a moment or two.

‘Wakey! Wakey! Wakey! Call The JRs! Call The JRs! Call The JRs! Wakey! Wakey! Wakey!...Lash up and stow Lash up and stow Lash up and stow…’ and on and on.

You could almost see them digging one another in the ribs down at the Gangway, spilling their tea and near pissing themselves laughing: This’ll wake the little bastards up eh Chief? Too right it will eh? I couldn’t testify to it in a court of law, but I presume I got out of bed, got dressed and ate breakfast. Nobody seemed entirely sure who I was and what I was doing there, having arrived in the middle of the night like some kind of interloper but an older young man who was an officer made the decision to allow me into the place. The next thing I remember is standing outside the CLOTHING STORE feeling exactly like I’d flown entirely across the continent and had about ten minutes sleep before being woken up abruptly by a comedian with a PA system at his disposal:’Feelin’ like a fish outta water eh?’ said an older man in uniform; Stan Dyson, formerly coxswain in HMAS Diamantina. I don’t know if I answered him or not. He wasn’t hostile so I probably nodded or muttered something. He’d hit the nail on the head. That said something about his people skills even if he spent at least one afternoon a week taking his feelings at being duty watch out on us. So I looked the way I felt; that was a comfort.

The inside of a donga (hut). This wasn’t a picture they displayed in

their recruiting posters. In those, they showed the Winjan block

which was, in 1963, brand spanking new.

I’d spent the night in the wrong accommodation and they moved me to a brand-new two-storey brick place, the Winjan block, again with a bit of muttering between themselves. By that time, we all had a great big sea bag full of kit. I recall folding my civvies into a cardboard box. In my case, I didn’t need a very big box but they were a standard size. Having all those clothes was a novelty to me. One of the first things I was told that actually penetrated was that you had to double across the bullring. Oh, and you weren’t supposed to aim the 4.5 inch guns on the other side of the parade ground at the wardroom. All in all, it was an excellent place to site a marina, high-rise apartments, an international hotel, that sort of place where water, or water views, could be a selling point. Demolishing the brickworks on top of an escarpment across the Swan River could have followed in a general modernisation of the entire area which had obviously been overlooked since submarines were moored 12 deep there in WW2; a poignant memoir handed down by someone whose old man had been there. But I digress.

The Winjan Block. This featured in recruiting posters. The out-of-focus JR leaning on

the railing probably didn’t.

G donga: This did not feature in recruiting posters.

That evening, after a hectic day of standing in line waiting, Paul Gallagher and I doubled across the bullring and had a close up look at the guns. There were some boys inside toying with the controls, trying to aim them at the wardroom. Soon, we were learning how to do everything by numbers:’To the front…Salute. Up – two, three – Down.’ I don’t know, but there was something about the place at the beginning that brought out the comedian in me. He’d been dormant for some time. Perhaps it was because it was the sort of situation where you stood about a lot waiting for someone to tell you what to do next. That wasn’t good for me. We were in a division called Winjan, after a WA tribal chief; the other tribal chiefs were Mokare, Kaiber and Nakina. They weren’t called huts but dongas: Aboriginal for a dry creek bed. When you weren’t inside your donga, you had to be in the Dress Of The Day. One of the dangers of sleeping in a donga was flash flooding, that is, if you did it in the desert as an aboriginal. One danger that didn’t exist for us in RAN dongas was flash flooding.

Compared to being at school six hours a day, having Mum cook you breakfast and having to carry your school-bag on and off the bus, we were kept busy. The fact is, if you weren’t on chooks, you had about eight-ten hours a day to yourself. Try calling that busy to a young mother and she’ll laugh in your face. Chooks was MUPs, Men Under Punishment, with various numbers such as 9s and 14s. What you did for a couple of hours in the afternoon varied from picking up litter to running back and forth with a rifle, sometimes held above your head, that is, unless the Commodore happened to see it, in which case, you lowered them again.

The Bullring (parade ground) artfully half-lit as the sun sets. Note the funny-looking sloped

roof of the Gunnery School. Inside, there were marvellous acoustics.

Men Under Punishment or five rifle drill enthusiasts honing

their skills to a fine edge. Note the Pusser’s bus and the poor

little bugger struggling at the back.

We learned all about Admirals. Commodores and Leading Seamen. We never actually saw an admiral; we rarely saw the Commodore and when we did we had to stop and salute. The Commodore was genuinely important, having about half of the Australian coast under his aegis. There were quite a few lieutenants about the place. They were extremely important. There were Petty Officers and Chief Petty Officers and they were absurdly important. A couple of them were just absurd and there was one who was a headcase and should’ve been locked up but the RAN didn’t acknowledge mental health; not in Western Australia anyway, and particularly not among senior sailors.

As I have said, I must have missed a couple of important parts of the joining up thing somewhere along the line because I’ll swear no-one told me you’d be going back to school. Now, they were dealing with a kid who’d lied about his age to get a job and get the hell away from school. I’d travelled half way around the world to be given the cane instead of the strap, been embarrassed and deliberately humiliated by a line of school teachers reaching back to Scotland in the 50s. Let them punish some other corporal. I’d wagged school for about three of the last six months I was there. I had no idea about anyone else’s opinion of higher education but I was very sure of my own. I had stopped listening. Therefore, I hadn’t been in a school for close to two years and the idea of going back gave me the shits. When responding to The Call Of The Sea, you should read the fine print.

For several weeks, we didn’t get any leave. That was okay because Fremantle and Perth were dead anyway, especially on weekends when we did get leave. The only exciting thing to do was go surfing. Two of us visited with one Perth family and ate tea and cake, prickled with sweat and shifted in my chair. I think I said something to them but I’m not sure. Oh, and we had dances on Friday nights that were spoilt by the presence of a dance instructor. He wanted to teach The Surfie Stomp by the numbers:’Stomp –One – Two - Stomp.’ That was fun to watch but the instructor must have known that and he abused Eddie and me.

You could go to the movies in Fremantle on Saturday nights. You could also go to the Flying Angel Mission which was exactly like a place for real mariners who don’t drink. It even had Gideon bibles strategically placed next to the ashtrays. We used the ashtrays. At the end of Cantonment Street, sat The Cantonment which meant, literally, there was an Indian military station at the end of the main street, although, troops lodged there would have been entirely safe from forms of conventional ordnance except perhaps a grand slam bomb since the walls were umpteen feet thick. Generally, Fremantle had the air of a place much passed through but rarely stopped in. Seamen on a piss up rarely venture past the first pub anyway. There was a kind of cute little rail motor which went into Perth because there was nowhere else to go most likely. Otherwise, you stuck your thumb out. What patriotic Australian could resist this call to duty from two teenagers in naval uniform?

Meanwhile, back at the Junior Recruit Training Establishment, things were hotting up as they say in ovens. We did an exam called the ET1. I didn’t do so well in that which isn’t surprising when you factor in my virtually complete lack of attention to what the instructors were talking about. As was usual in civilian schools, they taught Mathematics from the beginning like you’d come in halfway through. Also, as was the case in civilian schools, they taught English like it was Latin. As a consequence, I was downclassed which also meant moving from the shiny new brick dormitory to a wooden hut further up the hill. Oh, before that I’d had my first time on chooks. We picked up litter; peculiarly, that was called skirmishing:’Skirmish around the Admin Block!’ shouted the pissed-off leading seaman in charge of us. I’d been caught with a slack belt. A petty officer with many years experience in detecting these things had been able to get his finger between the belt and me because there is little else to do in a peacetime armed force. I’d told the divisional officer - Lieutenant Daish, who hailed from the Isle Of Wight - I had no excuse. It was probably caused by running from place to place and losing weight and forgetting to tighten up the belt you see but I was not about to demean his lofty position with lengthy excuses. The very act of running to a classroom as though in a hurry to get there, was sending my central nervous system into paroxysms of conflicting sensations, coming out in fits of the giggles and causing my mouth to remain open for long periods. No-one else seemed likewise afflicted, although, many gaped without apparent stimulus. Speaking of mouths, the navy had shown an inordinate interest in my teeth since the outset and that went on with weekly visits to the dentist for nearly two months. This was a sad reflection on the fact that the town I come from in Scotland had been selected with one other to have fluoride introduced into the water supply in 1955 either that, or my folks sought to keep me calm by feeding me chocolate; not advisable.

The Sick Bay at Leeuwin. Note the asbestos cladding on the pipes at Upper Left.

Seven days of the week, pantheism in the form of sun worship was the prevailing belief structure. The passage of Sol into the Indian Ocean was marked by a solemn ceremony involving the lowering of flags:’Attention on the upper deck for Sunset!’ barked the PA and, if you were anywhere out of doors, you had to stop and turn to face the mainmast. There may have been a long, sad note on a pipe. No-one could play bugle well enough the risk a Last Post. The more conservative religions had Sundays as they did in larger society before noon anyhow, after which, cults involved in animal sacrifice held their protracted ceremonies on altars known as bbqs. We marched up the hill outside the base to the presbyterian church where the padre often found the excuse for us all to stand and sing the Naval Hymn:’For Those In Peril On The Sea…’. is all I remember. Suitably inspired, we all marched down the hill. There wasn’t much to do on Sundays except maybe double across the bullring and fiddle with the control on the guns and point them at the wardroom. Speaking of wardrooms, I had a new divisional officer, Lieutenant Hector Donohue, but he was away a lot diving on the wreck of the Batavia up north somewhere. He had dundrearies, those streaks of hair high on his cheekbones like Admiral Hastings-Harrington. Oh, and we visited Mundaring Weir. It was difficult to contain one’s excitement and some boys may well have peed themselves, doubling double the flow of water. I had thought previously that only school teachers had the knack of turning any outing into overly-regimented misery but, no, naval officers and petty officers also possessed that ability.

An OXP was an Overnight Expedition. We drove north along the coast in a Pussers’ bus (see picture) some way and then turned inland. Toodyay appeared unoccupied, the land-locked equivalent of the Marie Celeste, as though some plague had caused the residents to flee their dwellings; or maybe experience had taught them to avoid us. More likely they’d all buggered off to Perth for the weekend. We struck off into the bush, packs on our backs, water bottles at our waists. I think someone had a map. It pissed down with rain almost from the beginning. I saw what the called blackfella bushes, which looked just like a man standing holding a spear, well, sort of. We spent the night in the back of an old abandoned furniture van, very likely left there by early pioneers or, perhaps, later pioneers. Come morning, stiff as only sleeping on boards can make you, we headed off through the bush, struggled through a barbed wire fence, across a paddock and into the base camp where they had brewed tea and fried sausages. We were obviously too young to drink the beer they had drunk overnight in any case.

It was getting hotter in Western Australia. It’s a peculiar place with little or no twilight. The sun goes, sizzle, into the ocean and it’s dark. While it was still daylight, some kids walked around and took photos of each other. One took a photo of me and I sent it to my father. We drew rifles. I mean, we didn’t draw pictures of rifles. We drew rifles from the Armoury and practised with them on the bullring, shouldering arms, fixing bayonets, resting on our arms reversed and standing at ease all over the place. An older man who was good at shouting – he wore starched shorts that sort of stayed still while he walked – led us through these moves, again, by the numbers. Up – two, three – Over - two, three. Down – two, three. I thought I got quite good at it but I suppose everybody else did as well. If you dropped your rifle, the little man in the starched shorts, Wally Walton, went red in the face. Come to think of it, he was pretty red in the face most of the time especially when he rousted you all out of bed after dark to ensure you knew what combat readiness felt like. Still, if my missus lived just up the road and I had to spend the night in that dump amongst us, I’d have been pissed off too. You never know on a ship at sea when you might be called upon to run around in circles with your hands over your head at night by a half-pissed Chief Gunnery Instructor. You can only hope that a potential enemy wasn’t watching these antics. This kind of recruit school (boot camp) garbage was to go on for an entire year rather than the usual length of time of around 3 months. However, we were younger than adult recruits; younger, more impressionable and, therefore, more likely to cop any old shit they cared to dish up in the name of personal development.

In the Physics Lab, I saw a Wheatstone Bridge for the first time. You turned a handle quickly and it made little lightning bolts, well, blue-white sparks. Standing around the instructor looking at Wheatstone Bridges and the like, I could handle, Anywhere else in the EDUCATION BLOCK a malaise came over me, blocking my ears; my mind turned to porridge and my eyes were drawn to the windows. One afternoon, I saw an odd thing. We were at Stand Easy, a lot like the civilian smoko, and lying or sitting on the lawn, when we smelled burning flesh. This older boy had been to the dentist and, still anaesthetised, had accidentally burnt a hole in his cheek with the tip of his cigarette while lying on the grass, propped on one elbow, smoking.. Shit eh? as we used to say. As is the case in maximum security prisons, the trade in cigarettes, bludging (borrowing) them or the money to buy them – was a significant feature of daily life.

Despite the regimentation, or maybe because of it, characters started to emerge from the general swarm of white hats, blue workshirts and sun-tanned arms, legs and faces. They emerged gradually, like butterflies from chrysalii. Like the bloke who’d burned a hole in his cheek, they began to become famous for something. For example, the sports-minded found one senior boy had admirable thigh muscles. There was a little short fella with an outsized head they all said was the most intelligent among us. One kid only lasted 5-6 weeks because he’d possessed a disability on entry. DPOE. I suspect he feigned sanity at the psychological tests. That, or he feigned insanity when he got a taste of the place. To get famous, you could do things. You could get a tattoo. You could get drunk. You could jump the fence and wander abroad. Apparently, you got a WARNING from the commodore for doing those things. One guy, I only found out many years later, jumped the fence several times and didn’t become famous; he got the bullet (discharged) instead. UFTRO. It should have been a warning; things were slipping under my radar right left and centre. That’ll happen to you every time when you’re being re-made in an image based on a theory extracted from a myth concocted out of imported Bullshit from Victorian England. Well, a lot of the time anyway.

It seemed just by being neat and running about on time and doing your sums correctly, you were 1^st Class for Conduct. If you got 2^nd Class For Conduct, you better watch out. Before you knew where you were you services might no longer be required. SNLR. Oh, and you could get a Commodore’s WARNING for not doing your sums correctly. Or did I say that? Anyway, being slack was viewed dimly. Intensity was also viewed dimly. Striking a balance between slackness and intensity was difficult. You had that to add to the unrelenting pressure of adolescence; the kind that makes you check if your forehead is high enough, your chin square enough and you don’t walk like a - well – your voice has to be deep enough too. The psychologists ought to have devised a scale of 1 to 10 for these things but they hadn’t. Oh, and there was the length of your dick and searching for hairs sprouting on your chest. Even the boys who had no beard yet had to shave. How weird is that? Who could tell? Kissing a girl after the Friday night dance was another element of the Prac’ side of the Adolescence Examination. By mistake, I kissed a girl who had been carved out of several pieces of hardwood stacked on top of one another but I think she had just been warned by her mother. Still, it was an uncomfortable experience kissing someone who kept her lips pursed. Ah, but she turned out to be the only person to inquire after me later on.

The teachers were all officers so you didn’t stick drawing pins on their chairs or call them boring arseholes out loud. Apparently, there was a subject called English Expression but I was too busy learning the language to bother with that. Also, to remind us that we were in the navy, they took us out in big rowing boats on the Swan River. You didn’t row, you pulled manfully to the sound of a weaker kid, the coxswain, crying,’Stroke…Stroke…’ at intervals. Row, heave, stroke, pull, the result what the same. The thing moved through the water from A to B. It turned out later that this kid was good at mock-growling instructions like,’Stand by to come about’, so he got the job of sailing master as well. At least, he got in the big rowing boat first and grabbed the tiller. Despite the diet, few of us seemed to have pimples. It goes to show that pimples really are caused by eating chocolate and if you smoked you couldn’t afford chocolate as well. There was one teacher who tried to give orders like Wally Walton did, only this bloke was not good at shouting and we fell about laughing, later of course in our donga, at his efforts. We called him Yug because that was what his shouts sounded like:’Classes…Classes–YUG!’ Stiles did a good impression of him. Stiles should probably have realised he was a comedian. We could have done with a few comedians; of the conscious variety.

Now, like I’d learned to tie knots in the Cubs. The navy, they assured us, didn’t have knots; it had bends and hitches, so, they showed us a reef knot first. They were the same bends and hitches I’d learned to tie in the Cubs that we called knots. I was good at those. A lot of blokes fingers were all thumbs. They couldn’t tie bends and hitches in cordage to save their lives. Rope is really cordage. It was made out of all kinds of stuff; coir, hemp, manilla, nylon, sisal. There was a thingy called a Robinson Disengaging Gear which lets a big rowing boat fall evenly into the ocean so as it doesn’t sink at one end. We sat in a whaler – the real name for a big rowing boat - on the edge of the bullring, practising how to use that. Sitting in a seaboat on dirt took feeling silly to entirely new dimensions only the new electronic navy could dream up. Being tipped into the river nearby might have fixed the procedure more firmly in young minds. Oh, and there were other state-of-the-art pieces of technology called Bottle-Screw Slips and Blake Slips that hold back an anchor. Isn’t it amazing what sticks in your mind when you’re being indoctrinated if not fully brainwashed. Our minds were reeling with all this new stuff to learn. It got so as you couldn’t sleep at lunch time and in the classrooms with all the reeling going on in your mind. The best that could happen to you if you did things right was that they would leave you alone; the disciplinarians and the ones who seemed to get a charge out of smacking, metaphorically, little pink bums, who seemed to run the place when sane men’s backs were turned. Often, there wasn’t so much as a functioning hierarchy as acting out your feelings on the blokes below you and we JRs were on the bottom of the heap.

They’d taken the comedian off the PA gig but he was replaced with a grimmer bastard who shouted:”JRs muster on the parade ground for PT.’ Muster meant the same as it does for cattle; gather in an irregular group and make noises of discontent. When it was still dark, we dutifully mustered and did deep squats and other twisty, stretchy moves scientifically designed to guarantee you’d need joint replacements if you lived past 40 and then ran around in circles before heading back to our dongas to wake up. Only, when it was raining, the grim fella called,’JRs negative PT,’ and everyone made noises of gratitude and sank back onto their pillows. But not for long. They were getting us ready for the new, technologically advanced navy of the future. Everywhere, you bumped into cutting-edge technology. The Commodore’s barge, for example, was a WW2 vintage thing called a Seaward Defence Boat (SDB). They did have a decompression chamber; the only one, apparently, in the western half of the continent in 1963, but, no JR was going to have any use for that. No JR was actually permitted to risk life and limb except by running around in circles with an SMLE over his head.

The bo’sun, who looked after that kind of stuff and even more advanced shit like wire brushes, was a ex-Royal Navy man who, they said, was Gunners Mate on a whale catcher. In fact, he was a rigger from South Shields but who was delving into other shipmates’ pasts? Isn’t the sea traditionally where a man goes to leave his past behind; that or the Foreign Legion. Besides, he looked like he could easily have been a Gunners Mate on a whale catcher. Accelerated mythologising and instant fame weren’t unknown in this new navy. The navy didn’t seem to care much whether a thing worked or not, only that it wasn’t rusty, slack or grubby.

HMAS Leeuwin looking roughly to the NE. Note the Education Block hidden away behind trees at Top Right. A combination of doubling (running) everywhere – a practice usually only found in military prisons - and WA’s heat, meant you arrived there in a state of considerable funk.

By the time we got into the City Of Perth on any given weekend, we could familiarize ourselves with what it would be like in a post-apocalyptic world. I thought that was a master stroke on the part of our instructors. You could gaze up at the windows of the Peppermint Lounge and wonder what went on there. You could even climb the carpeted stairs and longingly stroke the closed doors; decadence at the finger tips. Sixteen year-old boys, as though it was normal, walked through Kings Park on Saturday afternoons; some even with bloody cameras draped around their necks. There was a tallish building in the city. And they seemed to be worried that we might overstay our leave and get back after midnight? Doing what, staggering back onboard with a gutful of Lemon Delite and Smiths Crisps? You could be charged with Absent Without Leave which, by the sound of it, brought with it a penalty of public

Here are two real JRs at a Perth beach with what looks like a

swarm of killer bees…Note the disciplined way in which they

disregard the threat. (Then again, it could be a dirty photograph…)

disembowelling at the very least. Other punishments included doing deep squats in front of an older man in brief shorts after hours and having an officer examine your underwear every night for a week. In an attempt to create a wholesome environment, you could be charged with swearing unless you were responding to pain in which case it was alright. Instructively, you could be made to hang from gymnasium wall bars until your arms hurt very much but you weren’t allowed to swear in those circumstances because that was punishment not pain. Combined with the doubling with rifle held over the head, there was a definite fixation with mock crucifixion about the place; one needed to be wary.

There was an instructor of the physical training variety, PTI (endorphin addict), they said had tattoos on each buttock of a devil shovelling coal up his backside. He was famous. At least his backside was. I never inquired how they found that out. There are some things it’s better not to know. Believe me, he didn’t have enough mystique that it would bear meddling with but they called him Stroppy anyway. That lent him a kind of rogueish air he didn’t deserve. Nicknames were a kind of bumper sticker for the mind that allowed you to know one John from the other. Not everyone had one because there were a lot of kids you didn’t need to be able to distinguish in that way. They performed various useful but not essential functions such as occupying chairs in classrooms and waiting in line for their fortnightly pocket money. Oh, and they served as extras, eagerly waiting in the wings to play ostrich at the first sign of real trouble. Real trouble was brewing. So was the Master-At-Arms tea. September merged into October and it went on getting hotter. We now wore shorts with our blue workshirts. Recklessly, I thought, we were allowed to roll our sleeves up but only just above the elbow. A combination of bared legs and forearms might prove too much of an enticement to some of those about you.

Colours wasn’t colourful really, except that the white hats and blue shirts would have, from a couple of thousand feet in the air, formed a nice pattern on the background of orange clay and gravel of the bullring. Pop Art hadn’t been invented yet. We had a drum and bugle band which Wally Walton deeply resented because those blokes didn’t do rifle drill. I think Wally suspected them of being musicians. The din they made was terrible; discordant musical finger-painting. Moose Jeff (RIP), their instructor, beat the bass drum mightily and on the couple of flagpoles, the ensign and national flag were raised. Moose himself had the profile for a bass drum. Oh, and they told you sunburn was a self-inflicted wound. I knew that from my father who’d been wounded self-inflictedly(?) at the First Siege of Tobruk and then wounded properly by the Jerries with their mortars. Boys were getting letters from home and they withdrew further into themselves. I suspect the classroom was a welcome touch of home for many of them. I suspect home would have been an even more welcome touch of home for the more discerning.

The trouble with brass is it has to be polished, otherwise it looks shithouse. Ask any doorknocker with some sense of itself how it feels when left unpolished. The trouble with whitener on a belt is it has to be daubed on again every night, taking care not to smear the brass which has to be polished. Boots were another story. Gunnery Instructors (GIs) were men who had an unrequited boot fetish. To properly spit polish boots, you need the patience of someone with nothing better to do for several hours but rub a rag smeared with boot polish in small circles. It helps, I would imagine, to have a leather fetish. You should be able to see your face in them; if your face is a very odd shape. We had a bloke in our class who could see his face in his boots and none of the girls at the dance would kiss him, poor bugger. Towering above the GI, there was a Gunnery Officer but he didn’t lower himself, so to speak, to examining feet and waists. His concern was the big picture. His vision was of the whole outfit advancing in review order and coming to a halt with swooping rifles and flashing bayonets:’Parade will advance in review order! Parade…Quiiick march.’ is what rings through his dreams. Oh, and if you dropped your rifle, like if you were fainting, you had to hit the ground before it did; not an easy thing to arrange for the unconscious. Garbage like this was put about as though it meant something.

It turned out that I, too, was good at shouting. I don’t know whether it was genetic or not because my father never raised his voice, but, he had been in a couple of armies for like a century or more, well, fifteen years ending up as a weapons and fieldcraft sergeant instructor. That, or I’d watched too many war movies. Anyway, there was one poor bastard who’d been born round-shouldered and carried away by my power of command, I told him to straighten up and he couldn’t. The other fellas told me what was wrong and I moved on, duly chastened. Donohue, the DO who spent a lot of time underwater in the north somewhere, inspected the class. Donohue clearly loved being saluted. He was on the absolute verge of being a master of the universe. I suspect he dreamed of planting deadly mines on the hulls of communist ships deep within enemy territory and coming back to the wardroom to drink expensive scotch and jiggle ice in his glass…and get a medal. He had the people skills of someone who spent a lot of their time underwater.

Generally speaking, self awareness wasn’t high on the RAN’s list of priorities, indeed, you get the feeling that if they’d known it existed back then, they’d have added that to the list of disbarments from service along with developmental delay.

Someone – people like that should never be permitted around the young and impressionable – said we’d be at war with Indonesia soon and this would be the last peace-time Christmas we’d see for some time. A cynic, Gawd luv im, said if there was a war we’d all be sent home till we were 17. As it turned out, but we don’t want to spoil the future too much, neither of them was quite right. By that stage, a lot of us would have been entirely happy to see a Christmas of any variety. Let the Indonesians rain shells on our barracks huts in a cowardly surprise attack the likes of which hadn’t been seen since Pearl Harbour, just so long as we got leave. What does I harbinger do for a crust? I wondered, being from northern climes, where Indonesia was. I’d heard of Borneo and New Guinea because David Attenborough had been there when I was a kid; there were Dyaks and birds of paradise. We went to an island a short way off the coast for a weekend. Good stuff. Close to the beach in Careening Bay, there was an old minesweeper, the Junee, being scrapped. It was there at Garden Island, that our sailing master came into his own. Sitting in the sheets - that was what they called the seats round the back - hunched over, intent on minute changes in the wind, Haggis cried:’Stand by to come about.’ And we came about. Later, Haggis and I tried the death-defying, two-man version of sailing the whaler and came a gutser against a large raft holding bits and pieces of the innards of the old Junee. We hadn’t come about in time. You just pushed off and sailed away on another tack. That was the procedure for running into old minesweepers. Haggis was from Glasgow. It could have been that his proximity to the great Atlantic Ocean and that renowned centre of shipbuilding had made him an embryonic master mariner but I doubt it. Oh, and to come about means to change direction and you have to duck your head to avoid getting sconed by the boom. You needed to keep the sails filled or else they just flapped their like dirty tarps and you lost way; nautical stuff indeed. We slept in an old barracks they said had been used by highly-trained men being even more highly-trained to get behind Japanese lines and cause no end of mayhem and large explosions. Someone saw a dead snake on top of an old gun emplacement. Oh, and Donohue and Clifford went ashore for a beer while Haggis and I guarded the workboat at Rockingham Pier. Jesus it was hot. While we sweltered on the boat, they drank in the cool interior of the pub and not so much as a cold goffer (soft drink) for your trouble when they came back.

Back on the mainland, things were also hotting up. Boys dying from starvation were being sent food parcels from home. Well, they weren’t really dying exactly but they wouldn’t eat anything except steak or chicken; spoilt bastards. Just to prove how they were turning into men before your very eyes, they tossed food about the JRs Café in the afternoons. The training was reaching peaks of intensity unheard of since the month before. Haggis and I visited a real naval vessel painted grey, HMAS Diamantina, which lay at North Wharf in Fremantle Harbour. You stepped onto the deck, did a half turn toward the quarterdeck and saluted. Precision stuff, straight out of Hornblower. Apparently, the ship was closed for the weekend and they were all over in Fremantle in a notorious flesh-pot or hunched around a radio, drinking beer and listening to the races; something like that. Haggis and I wandered about, up and down ladders, in and out of boiler rooms. You could feel the whole ship, like a living thing coiled about to strike at the very heart of Indonesia. On the foc’sle, there was a 40/60 Bofors which was there so as they didn’t have to pay harbour duties; tight bastards. That, too, was painted grey all over so it didn’t matter whether it worked or not. On the bridge, there was a radar set, also painted grey like it didn’t really work. The foc’sle is the flat bit at the pointy end. The quarterdeck is the rounded flat bit at the other end. The bridge is the high bit roughly in the middle. Oh, and Diamantina did important oceanographic work even further north than Donohue’s beloved Batavia, sounding depths that hadn’t been sounded since some RN lieutenant did it back in 18-something and got, like within inches, the same results using a leadline.

Leeuwin Heads. Note receptacle holding 4X4 almost useless toilet paper.

Workship Days were great fun for me. Out of the classroom for a whole fucking day, I began to regain some sense of myself. Steve Stokoe, the rigger from South Shields, ran the Buffer’s Store with a rod of iron, well, wire brushes and tins of silver paint. They were painting things silver for the upcoming end-of-year ceremonials:’Wire brush and scraping party…Wire brush and scraping party HO! Wire brush and scraping party - right turn - by the left quiiick march.’ And off we went to the wardroom railings to scrape and wire brush to our hearts’ content. Steve had been through a real war and had a sense of humour, unlike many of the other ncos. Bloody hell it was hot. From up there, you could see the 4.5 inch guns trained on the wardroom. Haggis was there since he was alphabetically close to me on the work roster, daily orders posted, surprisingly, each day on a board somewhere outside the café. Some of these kids clearly thought work wasn’t part of the deal they’d made with Her Majesty. Strategically situated to give a panoramic view of the Swan, the wardroom looked pleasantly cool from the outside. Those officer characters had it made. One even spoke to me once. If you turned your head to the left, you could see the top of the wool stores next to the Passenger Terminal; gateway to Australia.

The object of a shake-up was to make you see the error of your gymnastic ways. Often, a shake-up was run by the fella with the demonic tattoos. Dirty sandshoes, it has been recorded, often led to a shake-up. Hiding in the crawlspace in the roof instead of going down to the bullring for morning PT, got Haggis and me a shake-up. We were duly shaken up. You sweated a lot; if I got any trimmer, tauter and terrificker I’d have to run about the shower to get wet. As well as get punished, you were supposed to repent. I was never good at that. These shake-ups were rumoured to leave you clinically dead but, again, that was an exaggeration. Somewhere between exaggeration and understatement lay the truth about this place; damned if I ever discovered it though. Some who were there, now adults, claim to have ‘loved the place.’ A poorly-administered, run-down naval base full of 15-16 year-old boys is a very strange object of the affections but I did meet a man once who loved his time in the Afrika Corps. One needs to be broad-minded in these circumstances.

I wonder what Stroppy’s grandkids thought of the demons on his nether regions? I mean, if they ever saw them, no, it doesn’t bear thinking about really. I got tonsillitis and ended up in the Sick Bay for a night or two. In the heat, tempers were fraying. That was probably not for the best as we had the BOXING coming up at the end of they year nearly. If the angst that knowledge generated was little floaty things six inches square, you could have walked from there to Kings Park and had your photo taken by a bored-shitless JR with his own camera. The crazy petty officer appeared to be plotting the downfall of civilisation or good order and naval discipline, single-handedly. Even Wally Walton cracked up one night and had us running up and down the bullring, arms above our heads, for making a noise after Pipe Down, Lights Out. That is a very annoying thing to have to do. To give Wally his due, I think he’d been drinking. I spent my first time ever on a tennis court; it’s hard to see those lines through that net. I also had a go at Aussie Rules, trying not to laugh. Bill Smith – that was his real name – got caught on the wrong end of a fraying temper one day and was smackt in the mouf for his trouble. There was a TV room and your could almost see the screen through the fag smoke. No programme which contained anything longer than six-letter words was permitted. I got a letter, with photos, from my girlfriend Jacqui. Despite the fact that she lived 20 miles from the sea, she was now a surfie it seemed; nothing like dedication. It seemed that I was to be a surfie too when I went home on leave. That wouldn’t be easy considering all my mates were rockers with an R. Never let it be said that being two contradictory things at once was beyond me however.

Left: Bill Healey Centre: Lindsay Stiles; Right: Glen Washbourne

Seated: Dunno. Note fence to be jumped.

They talked a lot about jumping the fence, you’ll recall. I missed doing the crossword in the morning newspaper as much as anything. I caught myself staring through the fence, wondering what the bloody hell there was to do if you jumped it – wander deserted friggin suburban streets aimlessly? More than once, I caught myself staring in those days. That summer, they tore the fence down to replace it with a stouter cyclone-wire effort. A couple of our blokes had to go to court because they’d been caught drinking booze. I believe they pleaded insanity. Haggis was one of those that seems to know everybody. Through him, I discovered there were even Germans among us, like, born in Germany, walking about free. Now, I’d seen films of Belsen on television and I’d been in London and Glagow only a few years before and seen the ruins and I wasn’t at all sure about having Germans about. There were also two or three Poles so that sort of balanced things. I’ve always had trouble moving with the times. Bill Smith was from New Guinea but he didn’t wear a head-dress or anything. Fuck me it was hot and it was a long time to Christmas yet.

Back L to R: Grant Dernedde; Me; Bill Healey.

Front: L Glen Washbourne; R Alan White.

My own temper frayed. I got Bill Healey in a headlock and tried to rip the thing clean off. It wouldn’t budge from his shoulders though. I think he got the message that he shouldn’t be making up cheap rhymes about my girlfriend. It had been like three years since I’d lost my rag like that. I just felt guilty and stupid for a while. Officers didn’t sweat, I noticed. Their white sleeves sort of stuck out sideways with a crease you’d cut yourself on and their Bombay Bloomers were the same. Things were starting to come apart. October dissolved into the next month. Doing anything was extremely uncomfortable. Birds sweated in the gum trees. I think there were birds. They showed us a film of how to unroll a fire hose at Chatham Dockyard thirty years before. They, unsurprisingly, had a bullring too. And, I suppose, a fire hose is a fire hose.

Across the country at Hervey Bay in Queensland, four midshipman drowned. That was bad. Nobody knew what had happened. Poor buggers and their families. RIP

Bizarrely, I took to cross country running every afternoon. To make that an easier option, they didn’t seem to want me in any other sport. In any event, about six of us started doing the cross country every day. It got you out of the place, sort of. You could be by yourself and not have to listen to shit like who was going to fill in who. Along the banks of the Swan to Bicton Baths and back; 3.6 miles. All there was was the sound of your feet and your puffing. Yes, a little bit like the film with Tom Courtenay: The Loneliness Of A Long Distance Runner.

One day we played Deck Hockey without a deck. Well I mean, we’d lowered a ship’s boat on dirt so why not play deck hockey on grass? You used a walking stick held at the wrong end and whacked a tennis ball up and down. I think that was for playing on aircraft carriers. On the same grass, we played Cricket with Moose. They showed us a film about venereal disease and when to use a prophylactic if you were in the U.S. Navy. We also got a little talk on naval law from an ex-cop. Oh, and coming back from my run one afternoon, I saw the mental petty officer throw a rifle at this kid, and I do mean throw. They didn’t see me. The ex-cop who gave us the lecture seemed to think the other blokes needed to know that I’d joined the navy for a feed. That was very nearly true. They didn’t have confidentiality in those times. Being filled in was being bashed. A lot of them talked about filling someone in for something or other. I held my peace in that regard as did many of the others.

Now, they had the Basic Seamanship Exam and I did really good because of the two women who’d taught me to tie knots in the Cubs 5-6 years before. I came Second out of several thousand entrants, well, thirty odd. There was a Basic Seamanship book that showed you, among other stuff, kind of how to function in an ancient warship of Hitler’s day or a bit later on in Stalin’s day or Mao’s day; some fuckin barking mad dictator’s day anyway. Gradually, we were taking our place as the lowest form of marine life. You could see that around you, although, they hadn’t taught us a rollicking sea shanty with bawdy lyrics and we hadn’t spliced the mainbrace or anything. The Fremantle Doctor, that divine, cooling wind from off the ocean that they talk about on the cricket, seemed to be having a spell that summer. But if you walked across to boil some socks in the laundry, it still got dark in twenty minutes, so the sun was functioning. In a sense, that was a comfort. Generally speaking, weather wasn’t permitted without NOICWA’s approval.

Speaking of socks, the Great Mystery Of The Disappearing Underwear And Socks From The Hills Hoist had left me short, if you’ll excuse the pun, like in the first two days I was there. Even talking makes me sweat; Some kind of genetic thing. And then there was my brother who’d told me I must be some kind of beatnik which I, in my innocence, had taken as an accurate summation of myself. But more of him later. Haggis, on his sorties around the joint, intelligence gathering and making connections, should have identified at least one harbinger. Maybe he was too busy sniffing out blokes with funny names like Zegenhagen. It goes without saying that there was no room for beatniks in the navy. It never occurred to me that some kids might be jumping that bloody fence to escape the rough time they were getting at the hands of their nominal shipmates and here was I thinking they were wandering aimlessly or having sex with their girlfriends in the granny flat out the back or in the glovebox of a Holden; somewhere like that.

So, to kill two birds with one stone, we’ll talk briefly about P. Maybe not so briefly; I suppose it depends. P was from the country; that wasn’t a good idea. The problem was, P looked like he came from the country. Like, he didn’t wear corks round his hat or chew grass or anything so obvious. But yet, he clearly came from the country. I mean he should have been at home in a shirt with two pockets and a university tie. But, we never wore university ties; that would have been a problem for him. Worse, P came from a town lying on the border between two states. P was a harmless misfit. As an overture to the great meltdown, P was the first to go. One evening - I think the navy called them evenings - I accompanied the OOW or OOD, on Rounds. It was my role to blow The Still and The Carry On on the bosun’s pipe; that’s a whistle designed by a local council. Anyway, P had a kit muster. That involved laying your folded kit out on your bunk for the OOD or Ws inspection. P’s bunk was virtually kitless; there was a shirt, some socks and a pair of football boots. P himself stood, red-faced and shaking, in a wet shirt. Oh well, no doubt there were chooks to fed or cows to me milked or semi trailers full of butchered steers to be driven back home. I did get a bit ahead of myself as P got the bullet in late October and not the next month. Bugger me if P didn’t try to re-join in that same December. They knocked him back; cold-hearted swine. Although I never knew the whole story, I got the feeling P had been pressured into the situation in the first place.

Again, I got a job on my own during Workship Day - Poseidon be blessed. That involved being talked to directly instead of shouted at by Wally who explained that I should take my tin of silver paint and paint the frame for the awning above the boards for dancing on over the lawn at the back of the Chiefs’ Mess. Wally was at least aware enough of himself that he didn’t play drill instructors all the bloody time. Oh, and they had limers in a milk churn in the fridge so you could drink all you wanted. Limers, in navy speak, is good gear. Limers was invented so as mariners wouldn’t get scurvy. It ought to be bottled and a fortune made but, to my knowledge, it never has. Brush in hand, stopping now and then to gaze over to the brickworks across the water, I painted on into the afternoon. I painted bits of myself silver as well but working was great. Sitting in classrooms was not great. I think I mentioned that previously. I wondered if you could ask to paint everything in sight instead of sitting in a stuffy room looking out the window. Oh, and there was this good trick I learned that, by wearing two pairs of socks, you can cover the holes in one with the other. Chief Rodgers, Buck to his friends, taught us Seamanship. Sports…they had them coming

Centre: Middle Row: CQMG Philip Arthur Campbell ‘Buck’ Rodgers and friends.

up. They came up. Whitey – more of him later too – peddled his guts out on a Pussers’ bike from the Start/Finish Line to the Boatshed, then with Haggis at the helm as usual, we pulled like buggery for the wharf down the river and some other kid ran like fuck back to the S/F Line. A triathlon I suppose you’d call it. Sort of. Our division didn’t win. Whitey, who was used to fancy racing bikes with umpteen gears, shouldn’t have ridden the bike leg. It was Whitey’s frayed temper that caught Bill Smith flush on the gob.

One day in the heat, Rodgers had us climbing in and out of a whaler, doing the same thing over and over again – that was probably to teach us how to abandon ship eight or nine times like as though they have instant replays – and I lost it a second or two and sent an oar skittering along the thwarts (seats). So Rodgers made a huge thing out of it, ordering me out of the boat. You could almost hear him thinking: Months of the most intense naval indoctrination have had little or no effect on this beatnik. We will need to devise further torments. You could almost hear him thinking that. Oh, and they were now feeding us salads which make me near puke so I ate bread and cheese or made egg sandwiches. When you closed your eyes at night, you could almost pretend everything was okay. During the day, Whitey took to bursting out in song, some odd faux-aboriginal piece about the sun rising on the Kangaroo Paw which you could accompany using your nose as a didgeridoo. Bloody hell, don’t tell me we weren’t cracking up. One of the other English blokes, Caesar, was fun. Caesar could do the Goons, Eccles, stuff like that and he had an excellent double-take that got me giggling. Later, much more sensibly, they made Caesar a Leading JR (a kind of junior lance corporal).

December didn’t roll around. It crept up from the desert and sat just above your head like a giant steam iron. Straight out of HMS Pinafore, Lieutenant Beamish RN, had us all practising Advance in Review Order now that the Passing Out Parade for the JR1s was coming around. Beamish wore black shiny gunnery officer’s gaiters. He arranged his extras with all the meticulous attention to detail of a Cecil B. DeMille of the ocean wave. Crowd scenes were his forte. He was sunburnt a lot of the time, that or red-faced from shouting:’Parade will advance in Review Order…’. Isn’t it funny how we play right into the hands of the authorities in these institutions? School, the navy, maximum security prison. Before you know where you are, you’re calling other people by their surname. Anyway, the boxing was coming up but I missed the dress rehearsals due to tonsilitis. Oh, and there was this funny bit to do with Zegenhagen; not the kid, only his name. I know I interchange kids with blokes but it’s hard to pin yourself down at 16.

Observe the scene: The bullring. Chief Rodgers in charge of a lesson in communicating. He spaces us out around the perimeter at intervals of about twenty yards and passes a message to Communications Number One. 1 runs to 2 and passes on the message; 2 to 3 and so on…

Original Message: Stop The Watches. Negative Zig-Zag.

Message As Passed From 29 to 30: Operation Stopwatch is at Zegenhagen.

Again, we went to an island off the coast; the populated one, Rottnest. If you were coming to Australia on a ship, the lighthouse at the north-western corner of Rottnest was the first thing you saw. Now it was some kind of busy holiday weekend and there were lots of civilians about, so Lieutenant Anderson who taught Navigation, had us lash two workboats together and manoeuvre them in a tight circle so that the bows pointed out to sea like the regulation for that kind of thing says. Anderson timed it to a tee, having us all stand about nautically to coincide with the arrival of the catamaran ferry from the mainland. Talk about feeling important. That night, Footie and me got a man who was heading for the old governor’s mansion that was the pub, to get us a coupla cansa beer and a bottle of sherry. We had no can spanner (opener) so we walked along a dirt path and used a rock which near-emptied a can over us. We drank the sherry and fell asleep while the others donged quokkas on their poor little heads just like that was fun. Freedom, even relative freedom, can be a headier wine than Penfolds Sweet Sherry. Haggis got another chance to display his skills at the tiller and two of the blokes had snorkels and flippers so they went over the side of a whaler to free our killick (a small anchor just like a Leading Seaman) from under a submerged rock. Within seconds, they were back on the surface, scrambling back into the boat, gasping about a giant octopus. The Board which stuck notices about not doing things around the island ran the shop that sold over-priced soft drinks and things. Later the kids were in the shop and recounted to the bloke behind the counter the story of their encounter and the bloke responded:’Aw that’s ol’ Wally…’Been there fer years…Yez didn’t hurt ‘im did yez?’ Wally The Octopus, I liked that. I think we got the killick back.

Back at Leeuwin, no sweet little stories emerged. Beamish’s preparations were reaching a two-man frenzy; him and the other Wally - Walton. Eyes narrowed dramatically, Wally saw me fumble fixing my bayonet one morning so I had to trot out to stand in front of everyone and fix it properly. Shame. We were now getting ABCD lessons. That was real navy stuff about what you do if your ship has an atomic bomb dropped on it or THE ENEMY resorts to chemicals or germs or, more conservatively, a shell punches a hole in the side. They showed a good picture about a famous oil tanker in Valetta Harbour and Bill Storrie, a real warrior of the sea, told us what happened in WW2 where a cook had saves a cruiser thanks to an order from an officer. My socks were rotting away. Elements of the criminal element were lending money at rates that would have made the local mafia boss dob his mates in. Chief Rodgers got his own cutlass to wave about majestically; that would have been Beamish’s idea for sure. Other chiefs got cutlasses but I don’t recall the deranged petty officer getting one which is very likely just as well. I would imagine, I could be wrong, but if your ship got an atomic bomb dropped on it, it would vaporise.

Lieutenant Beamish RN

It was now so hot an egg which had escaped from the galley fried itself to death on the bullring. We got strict orders not to faint. Just to make sure that if we ever had to stand around the catafalque of a really prominent individual with our heads bowed for hours, we practised Queen Anne’s Salute, known much more prosaically in the RAN as Rest On Your Arms Reversed. That’s a tricky one; you can very easily get your arms all of a tangle doing that one. I know I did. Diplomatically, Wally spoke to me privately about that. Privacy was virtually a distant memory at Leeuwin. What was left of privacy were those split seconds between opening your locker door to look at the photos of your girlfriend and some unloved person from Bankstown leering at her from over your arm. I don’t remember when you got a chance to pull yourself off without drawing spectators; probably sitting on the toilet. The romance of the sea. Two front-line-nearly-brand-new River Class Type 12 frigates, Parramatta and Yarra, visited Fremantle. We were allowed onboard and they had a Coke machine. On a more sinister note, we saw them loading shells from the dock. Those Indonesians better watch out, the Australian government hadn’t forgotten we had a west coast thousands of miles long after all. I wondered what they were doing saluting Queen Anne; she probably died frequently. No doubt it was like that in olden times with all those plagues and the like.

They built the boxing ring in the gymnasium; sounds of hammering rang out like they must have done when they built gallows in the olden days. Commander Kemp told us how three of his predecessors had ended up in Fremantle Gaol for misappropriation. No beating about the bush in this man’s navy. Getting sprung with fingers in the till, so to speak, yes. Occasionally, we caught sight of the officer they called the Commodore’s bumboy (flag lieutenant); he wore a great bunch of golden grape-vine looking things from one shoulder. Outmoded weapons and the drill connected with them, yes. It was that hot and frenzied I forget, now, whether things happened in late December or late January so I’ll just kind of mix them all together and see what we come up with for a page or two. I think the dentist and the barber were in little rooms quite close together. Due to my love of chocolate, I visited the former seven weeks in a row; he needled, drilled and filled an awful lot. Despite all his best efforts I still love chocolate even now when it violates government health warnings or it will soon. Invasive medical treatment against your will, yes. A trickle of personal news came in from the East. My father had moved out of the dosshouse he lived in. If you’re not careful, living in dosshouses can become a habit. Often, they’re such unrestricted places. But I don’t wish to moralise.

The seven creases below the knee in a sailor’s bell-bottoms were meant to represent the Seven Seas. The three rings on his collar were meant to represent Admiral Nelson’s three great victories. More bullshit. Anyhow, the boxing tournament was at hand. All I knew about Boxing was what I’d seen on the BBC which showed that in between David Attenborough and the Epilogue. I lay on the floor back in Kilmarnock, laughing till their were tears, at the opening of a church on BBC Scotland:’There are no atheists in foxholes,’ our presbyterian chaplain said to me in our donga one evening. It was the navy, we didn’t use foxholes. I expect it was a parable. My first bout was with Nev Coghlan, the fella I’d tried not to laugh while I played Aussie Rules with him. Nev had a hard head as they say. Stroppy was in my corner so we were okay in the manhood and intimidation departments. Those mouthguards they wore, I couldn’t breathe so I spat it out but the dentist was sitting next to the Commodore so I had to put it back in again. Bill Storrie was the referee. I lost points for ducking my head too often. My next bout was with a taller kid from Tasmania. The reason I laughed at the church consecration was the Moderator Of The General Assembly Of The Church Of Scotland, you’ve probably heard Billy Connolly speak about that lot, was called Smellie. I mean I was like 11 or something. The Tasmanian told me I fought a tall bloke well. Tall, short, I just stuck my head down and threw punches. Whitey reckoned I fought like a Glasgow street thug which I took neither one way or the other but both ways. Whitey was being nasty. I still had tonsilitis and it got worse again. I had to get closer than I would normally have liked to the CPOPTI, to give him a sick note. The man called us girlies just to make sure we knew our place. Anyhow, I missed that bout and The Mill was next. I think. It was hotter. Legends had grown around The Mill. Oh, and Washie got his jaw broken, not directly from a punch but on hitting the canvas with a thump. I missed all the good bits. The good boxers - some boys had Golden Gloves (top level amateur competition) experience in their home states - danced around the ring, scoring points with skilfully-timed punches designed to score points but that was, apparently, wasted on the Commodore who made two of the finalists box an extra round; something I hadn’t seen on television, or anywhere else for that matter from that day to this. The Commodore’s knowledge of boxing was clearly unequalled; you just didn’t do that.

I had to fight Stiles in The Mill, so he came to me and asked me to go easy on him. I stepped across the ring and knocked him down. Like a goat, he got up again. You only had a minute in the ring, ten or twelve kids from each side, in The Mill, so it was over pretty quickly for poor Lindsay. The important thing was to get in there and get your jaw broken for the cause. Inter-divisional superiority, something three-quarters of us were excluded from, was what counted. It seemed there was some kind of Shield to be won but I never saw it. In those days, everything important had a capital letter attached and you could watch the really important things on television, at least, on any television except the one we had which showed only westerns and Six O’Clock Rock, I think. Televisions were brown in those days.

One o’ the guns from the Batavia and a very short JR of unknown identity.

The day of the Passing Out Parade arrived. Fortunately, the parade was being held at night so there wouldn’t be any actual passing out. The JR1s were graduating which meant we’d be rid of the superior bastards and we’d be the superior bastards. High on the power poles, crows squarked ominously. Two superior bastards with German-sounding names, Boden and Schubert, entered our donga through the back door; a surprise attack from the rear:’Outside,’ one barked, looking directly at me. Something in the atmosphere suggested I do as I was bid. Bill Smith, who came from a New Town in Kent, was also taken out. Obviously, they were striking at the heart of the formerly Great Britain. Under the washing lines on a strip of concrete much like the kind of place police find a murdered infant, I was ethnically cleansed so to speak. With great gusto, and yet typical Germanic organisation, they took to me with brooms, sand soap, steel wool and boot polish:’What’re yez fuckin doin’?’ a human voice cried from a distance. I blinked away soapy water:’Fuck off this come straight from Divisional Office they’re sicka grubby JRs in The Fleet,’ one of my assailants, the uglier one, shouted back. Oh well it was alright then, The Fleet had been sickened by grubby JRs. I went to the showers. The superior bastards weren’t quite finished with me, however. They came to stand outside the shower stall, telling me not to use the cold water tap. Fuck off, I might have thought, throwing a punch. Boden punched me in the mouth so I squeezed past them and showered elsewhere. I know now I should have fought back sooner because they quickly lost their enthusiasm when I did. I found out that it isn’t actually possible to get boot polish off your back without help; I had none.

It was pleasantly cool on the bullring that evening but you sweated anyway in case you fumbled something. One of the funny Heavyweight Boxers slipped as we were turning to pass the Commodore on his dais and almost collected me, his bayonet, glancing off my knuckles. We exchanged muted insults for a pace or two:’Eyes…Right!’ We marched past. In the Drill Hall, they handed out prizes and generally told lies about one another fit to make you puke; clapping and cheering went on fit to make you wonder. Standing there listening to the crap, because we had to be there, I felt blood seeping through my white front. Haggis helpfully pointed out a spot of boot polish I’d missed in the shower. Funnily enough, I don’t recall if we advanced in review order; we certainly didn’t rest on our arms reversed at any point. Bill Smith who was also scrubbed.

It was an idyllic time…a time of surf, sand and sea…

Well, sort of. After I stopped bleeding and the large welt on my shoulder from doubling with a rifle (the SMLE weighs 9 pounds, ten ounces (4.13 k), went down, I have no idea of my state of mind. My girlfriend, Jacqui, met us on the platform at Central which was great. That first weekend, we went to Manly together, walking around to Fairy Bower and up to the cliffs beyond as we usually had, racing for shelter in an old gun emplacement when it came bucketing down with rain. I made the mistake of travelling out to Cabramatta on the train we used to take home from work wearing my uniform, kind of showing off, but all I got was ridicule so I didn’t do that again. I took to getting around in a tee-shirt and shorts, acting the beach bum; escaping would be a lot more accurate way of putting it. I didn’t tell anyone what had happened to me on that day at Leeuwin. Shame, guilt, anger, a good deal of fear, even a totally misplaced sense of loyalty, all coming together or at short intervals, would have left me in knots. In knots, I spent my time with Jacqui, going to the beach and to the movies, spending all the money I had and even stealing from Dad’s wallet; something I hadn’t even countenanced before. I remember very clearly, walking around and around the place we lived in in Paddington for several hours, dressed in my tee-shirt and shorts. It was around noon on a hot summer day and I was waiting for Dad to go out so that I could - I had idea what really. In any event, he was still at home when I went up and I got serious strips torn off me for taking the money. One way or the other, the fantasy was over. I joined the others outside the RPO office at Central and we returned to Western Australia. I must have been nuts.

We were back in the JRTE, JR1s. Junior Recruits First Class. Now, I’ve never been good at being a human sacrifice; I’d have made a rotten Inca for example. There’s a great deal I admire to be found in the notions of self-preservation and self-respect. But first, we had to do another OXP, along the same route I had taken before but with different blokes. This time, however, there were two immediate threats to survival; a lack of water and LJR White. On leaving Toodyay, we emptied our water bottles within five miles. I don’t know about other people, but give me the Scottish countryside anytime; not because it’s more beautiful or any of that, but simply because there aren’t snakes and spiders to speak of. We refilled our canteens from the bottoms of commercial bee hives. On we plodded through the afternoon. Haggis was having a tough time at the back so I did what the new Leading Junior Recruit should have been done, fell back and waited for Haggis. I took his pack. Haggis moaned along behind me and we caught up with the others. The old furniture van was still there; rolled in blankets, we spent the night. Naturally, he’d been promoted which can often bring on dementia praecox, White wanted to go the wrong way in the morning. To cut a long walk into the middle of nowhere short, I insisted and they all followed me into the base camp which was just through the trees and across a paddock. We won. We drank tea and ate sausages first. Donohue even told a humorous story. I missed it but the others assured me he had.

HMS Tiger paid a visit. They absolutely hammered us at soccer. LJR White, who was captain, put me in a position at Right Back I’d never been in. 14 – 3 was the final score. I wasn’t sure what a Right Back did on a football field. I’d never been that far back on the field before; their goalkeeper was a tiny figure in the distance. To be fair, they were a good deal older than us and they got tea and cake afterward which we didn’t. How’s that fair? Clearly, White’s mental state wasn’t improving. As for myself, an instinct to survive had sharpened my wits. I was going to need them it seemed, because my feelings were headed for trouble. Damn it when you seem to be going in two directions at once. I did have a few minutes in praxis. I went to tell Hec’ – the guys called him that behind his back - Donohue I’d had enough of their navy and they could stick it but the words wouldn’t come so I visited the base psychologist instead. What with it being only 1964 and all, I think he took me for a crazy mixed-up kid. I was kind of shunned by the others from then on which suited my state of mind almost perfectly. Indeed, it could be that I shunned them. Haggis and Bill Smith were moved to another class, to split us up, somebody opined; White, I think. Weird shit. Nationally, paranoia was on the increase. Even in red rags. Oh, and I think Lieutenant Beamish had returned to England. As for me, I’d done, at that time, what I perceived to be the right thing inasmuch as I’d kept my mouth shut about the treatment I’d received at the hands of Boden, Schubert and those who helped them. Common sense suggests that two blokes couldn’t hold me off the ground, with a leg each, grab a bucket of water and try to sluice it up my arse without help. Two or three others assisted them; at least one, I saw, was a classmate of mine. Even during the three weeks in Sydney over Christmas-New year, I told no-one. You didn’t dob was the law. Back in July, I hadn’t said anything to any of the hierarchy about the theft of some of my kit from the rotary hoist, partly because it was some kind of offence to lose kit, partly because I felt it was pointless and partly because you didn’t dob. Again, in December when I was scrubbed, I took it and kept quiet. Boden had said what they were doing came ‘straight from divisional office’, suggesting higher ranks – that would have been Donohue or Rodgers, or both – were involved. However, because I kept quiet, I’m having enormous difficulty proving to Veterans Affairs that it happened at all. For nearly forty-eight years I’ve kept quiet and this blog, THE DESTITUTE INSTITUTE, is my way of breaking that silence. Likewise, for forty-eight years, I’ve suffered the physical, mental and emotional effects of what happened to me; I take seven tablets every day to be like everybody else; normal. Fuck you, fuck the lot of you who were involved. And to hell with those of you I’ve tried to contact to get help and gotten only silence or ‘I can’t remember’ as a response.

Lt. Beamish, Gunnery Officer

in 1963.

Peace and Love were about to rule the world in any event so there wouldn’t be war any more. At that time, there was something called The Indonesian Confrontation going on…and on…

The Showers at Leeuwin. It was to here that Boden and

Schubert followed me after the scrubbing and tried to make

me scald myself.

Uglier, is what it got for me. LJR White was on my case, sniffing at my dirty socks and checking out my underwear. No shit. I didn’t know it at the time, but they’d already recommended that I get the arse from the place. Since I had a powerful feeling I might be set upon by an angry mob and burned at the stake or tossed into the Swan River with several killicks (small anchors) tied to my feet, I was ready not to argue with their recommendation. LJR White organised an angry mob, well, a couple of incensed JRs and an audience, but again, not wanting to fight back in case the situation got worse for me, I held the pair of them off and a couple of blokes shouted for them to run me in not fill me in (have me charged not bash me). Then HMAS Melbourne and HMAS Voyager collided. More Australian naval personnel, 82 men, (RIP) were lost in that since WW2 and until today – 2010.

At the Naval Board, I think I was placed on the back burner. At Leeuwin, they were now queuing up to harass and humiliate me. Depasquale, the bandy (musician) who’d taken over from Moose, called me ‘a bagga shit’. I was passed over for my turn as class leader. Having stolen a towel from a washing line, I was charged with that and had to front the Commodore. An instructor lieutenant, McMurtrie, and Buck Rodgers, expressed their opinions of my character at that hearing. Mac said I was inclined to act the village idiot. Rodgers told the commodore he wouldn’t want to go to sea with me. The Commodore asked me what I wanted to do. Was this a trick question? ‘I want out,’ I told him. I didn’t say anything else. I could hardly feel my feet on the floor under me much less speak about the previous nine months. I was sixteen; I have no problem with describing myself as confused; angry, hurt, bewildered, fearful and helpless, all at once. I don’t know what happened to Bill Smith except that he continued in the RAN, becoming a Stores Assistant (SA); a job nobody wanted.

Unfit, now, to mix with my classmates, I was placed in the cells; funny little rooms at the back of the gangway with Cyclone wire nailed over the boards of the ceiling, walls and small window. Because I wasn’t yet 17, they had to leave the cell door open, so, you just kind of lay there and smoked. Every now and then, they let you out into the tiny exercise yard to sit there and smoke. I don’t recall how long I was there; a week maybe. To alleviate the boredom, a couple of characters, Naval Reservists on duty for the weekend, tried to make me work. They led me up to a patch of dirt that was being re-sown for lawn close to the Chiefs’ Mess. I’m not sure what they wanted, for me to dig or rake or something and I stood there looking at the ground, up in the air, anywhere but at them until they took me back to my cell, one muttering to the other:’Jus’ ferget about ‘im mate.’ The other character growled alarmingly at that but they left me alone. For me, there was nothing to be gained by playing the silly games any more.

So, it took until late March for me to be escorted to a train heading East. Clearly, it was the navy’s intention to make my humiliation and degradation complete, because I was sent off from the Perth Rail Terminal with only what I stood up in; a white front and bell-bottoms. Being able to drink beer on the train helped. I spent four days five different trains to get to Sydney were Dad was waiting on the platform. At Melbourne, instead of buying like a civvy shirt and jeans, I went to the Red Anchor shop and bought a cap; they’d even kept my cap for fuck’s sake. I’d even bought another cap for fuck’s sake, so profound was the effect of the indoctrination. I felt nakedly out of uniform, something like that, walking the streets in a white front and bells, three fucking days after they’d tossed me out on my ear. At Central Railway, Dad said to me:’That wasn’t a very long stay son.’ The passage of time, I was learning, is a relative thing. I’d been in Australia a little less than four years.

I’ve never spoken to anyone about the period directly after I was discharged. A big part of me had expected to spend the next twelve years in the navy; no part of me had thought I’d be headed home just a matter of weeks short of completing my time as a junior recruit. Somewhere in between lay the reality of what had happened. At 16, with little support except from Dad who thought I should have been locked up for stealing the towel, I couldn’t handle it. Well, I had no choice but to handle it but all I could actually do for quite a long time, was to take up where I’d left off and that isn’t entirely accurate either. It was impossible not to feel resentment and a sense of injustice. Within my first few days at Leeuwin, I’d had the greater part of my underwear and socks stolen:’I stole a towel,’ I said to my brother, John, when he asked what had happened. In fact, I stole a pair of shorts, picked up a pair of underpants from the sand under our donga, and took a towel from a washing line. Good grief, I was a serial offender. Spending a week in their fucking cells, even with the door left open, should have been punishment enough. White had wanted me punished in several ways; but he was probably only doing as had been instructed from above. But, I’d said I wanted out. After standing in front of the commodore listening to McMurtrie and Rodgers abusing me with only a veneer of legitimacy, I had wanted out. In fact, I’d wanted to disappear right there and then through a hole in the floor. Even holes aren’t easy to find when you actually need them. One way or the other, I’d been hammered flat, well, there might have been an inch still sticking up. I’d been scrubbed, bashed, reviled, abused and alienated, but, I’d survived all they could throw at me; not without cost, however. I was flesh and blood; nerve endings and feelings. I should have been grateful to be out. I should have fuckingwell danced along the platform at Central. I wasn’t, and I didn’t. I couldn’t.

I don’t know what I told them I’d been doing when I went to the Employment Office (CES); some shit I cobbled together on the spot, to cover the past ten months, I suppose. Somehow, as further proof that I hadn’t come to my senses, I found myself staying in the YMCA. Now, if you wanted to feel really alienated from the world of people, a good place to stay in Sydney in 1964 was the good old YMCA. I’d been In The Navy and stayed in the YMCA and the Village People hadn’t been invented yet. It was featureless corridors, box-like rooms well I mean, I knew that anyhow because Mum used to clean there. You shared with whomever they stuck you in with, breakfast included; usually an egg, and a sausage in a thick gravy, cooked by someone who couldn’t. Get a job, the socialised self screamed insistently in time with the old man. He couldn’t put me up because he didn’t have the room. I went back to my old rooming house in Surry Hills. I got a job as a factory hand and stamped out lids for curry tins in Woolloomooloo for a while. Dead set. Peter, the Ancient Greek fella with a face like pottery, was still there in Devonshire Street. So was Hungarian Joe, the zoologist who worked for the railways sticking up signs. And Alex his mate who always had a bad back. I shared a room with Johnny, the Russian dealer in a blackjack club for a while then moved into a room out the back on my own. Jacqui visited there and we talked about respecting her in the morning and. Oh, and Kevin, the Welshman who wrapped a towel round his head like a turban and spoke like an Indian, visited now and then. This place was a kind of home and these guys were sort of family. It was sad. I was sad. I even tried writing a sad song lying in the dark in my room but I couldn’t get past:’It’s a cold lonely city…Ah-oooh.’ I didn’t know about depressed yet in any real sense except that there was something worse called melancholic which seemed to be reserved for ladies in Victorian days. You got medicine for depressed which I wouldn’t have taken for long anyway, well, I would have taken it but I would have lost it if I’d had enough money to buy it in the first place. Around about the time I left the job making curry tin lids, I got a room nearby in Woolloomooloo so the next job I got, working casual at Central Station was further away which was pretty much the story of my life that far. They were all students except me and an English cartoonist and comedy writer who had come to Australia to escape a glut of those at home or a paternity suit or something else. We rode around on their little electric cars, towing trailers with passenger luggage, kangaroo meat, oysters and the occasional coffin to and from trains until Christmas was over. The so-called rooming house in Bourke Street, Woollomooloo, housed a surprising number of real people. Maurie Smiff worked on the Council and wore blue workclothes. Maurie’d been in the army and his first love was very large machinery like tanks and bulldozers and he dreamed of working on the Warringah Expressway excavation. Old Bill McDonald had a leg brace and didn’t work anywhere. He lived in a room under the stairs with rows of highly-trained – probably ex-navy - bed bugs in his mattress he showed me. Upstairs in the front room, Millie and her pal Lily, locals to Wooloomooloo, drank sherry, poured from a teapot into teacups just in case anyone thought they were into the sherry. No-one cared but Millie and Lou hadn’t noticed. Millie’s boy worked around the corner as an apprentice motor mechanic and I took messages asking him for money for her. Now, there was an evil bastard operating up on William Street who took money off unsuspecting punters to visit the place believing it was a brothel. So, these guys came down, found they’d been had and kicked the shit out of the staircase on their way out. Every Friday, Saturday, that staircase took a kicking. Oh, and Tony the university student who collected the rent and lived in the attic room, tossed me a spare girl he had lying about one night. There is no other way to describe that awkward coupling. Paul ate pizza at Lorenzini’s. That was pretty damn avant garde for Sydney in 1964. Just when you thought the year would never end, it did. I was working with the railways again, so I had money. Upstairs in the front room, we brought in the New Year with Millie and Lou. At the railways, I was so mixed up I signed for my wages with my real name and hurried away before they noticed. Never mind though, I’d be back there soon under another bodgie name to do some other dangerously heavy work for peanuts. I didn’t know whether I was coming or going a lot of the time. You needed to have a job and a car, enough money to go to the pub on Friday nights, buy a spear gun, fashionable clothes, the whole box and dice. If I’d know then what a lifestyle was, I would have done something about changing it.

2011-04-22T03:18:00.000-07:00

What happened in Australia in the late 60s and early 70s, served to make significant numbers of people unemployed, taking the actuality of that condition into the lives of families and individuals, in many, for the first time since the pre-World War Two Depression. Almost immediately, the term ‘dole bludger’ entered, or re-entered, everyday language:’Good t’see these Relief blokes workin’,’ I heard a railway worker announce to his mates, loudly enough for all of us to hear. Obviously, some people had finally found someone to look down on. About ten of us had been sent from the Paddington CES to work with a gang, maintaining track between Redfern Station and Central. On the first morning, one of our number was too drunk to sign on. One or two didn’t turn up at all. We were a motley crew – I’d be the first to admit that; myself; Ralph, the jack-of-all-trades, Cornish merchant seaman; Irish John, a fairly-recently arrived carpenter and a few older men who, frankly, hadn’t worked anywhere in any capacity for quite some time. It was work of a kind I’d done before, replacing old sleepers, with a bit of shovelling and tamping down of ballast involved. Within a week, we held a quiet rebellion, insisting that we be paid some of our wages in advance; we got that. Within a fortnight, there were only a couple of us still there and, within three or four weeks, it was all over. All in all, it was a bizarre little exercise. Back down at the MT, Frank B talked a little excitedly about the work he was doing over at Rozelle, also on rail track, adding a touch of pathos to a scene which didn’t especially need it. Of the people I knew involved in this scheme, one managed to get an ongoing job. Otherwise, it was an ugly and unsettling time for most men. We hadn’t, according to the relevant minister, Clyde Cameron, been going to be placed in menial jobs; however, we were. For men who’d been driven into survival mode, a few weeks of paid work meant very little. Most of us had been there and done that. For men on the outer, the Relief scheme meant nothing but another example of distant, uninformed parentalism; government playing with lives with the hope that it had guaranteed positive outcomes. Men who wanted to work would be given the opportunity. Those who didn’t, would be driven out of what were perceived as comfortable niches they had carved for themselves. A newspaper article from this period reported that one man had told a magistrate he had been unemployed since 1942. There were also tales of people collecting the dole under several different names and of those in full-time work collecting unemployment benefits. In the MT, one man was, reportedly, prosecuted and forced to pay back money he’d gotten in this way. A good many more men, myself included, didn’t report the odd day’s casual work they got while getting the dole. I expect that was kind of balanced out by the tax rebates we never claimed. Using a bodgie name was one way of getting around a very bad work record.

I won’t attempt to discriminate what was a perceived threat to a person with the entire weight of a society pressing down on him or her and what was a real one. Saltwater Jack, for example, worried that he could be charged with misappropriating public monies because of his lifestyle. It was generally believed that having the MT’s postal address stamped on your dole form meant you probably wouldn’t be offered work. Who could tell? Perhaps even the idea that you were at the bottom of society’s heap was an erroneous one. Perhaps we had too much time on our hands to be pondering these things in the first place. There was more than enough to be anxious about without inventing things. While it may have been deemed just about the ultimate in irresponsible lives to live, there was no sense of the carefree that I could detect. On the contrary, anxiety was almost always high. Even if you were safely bedded down in the MT, that was as good as it got.

When the Kevin Rudd-led Labor government took power in 2007, the plight of the country’s mentally ill people and of the homeless, were high on the agenda; the new prime minister’s rhetoric is well enough recorded. My own politics are my own business and I greeted Labor’s victory with mixed feelings. Having been homeless but basically sane, insofar as I knew who I was, where I was and when, in 1972 when we elected the first Labor government in twenty-three years, firstly, I was much more directly affected by that change and, secondly, much less able to consider its implications. John de Hoog, then-academic and author of Skid Row Dossier, had hinted to me as far back as 1968 that one of the effects of a Labor win would be a radical increase in unemployment benefits (the dole). In that year, 1968, I’d gotten one cheque – for $9.60 – the standard payment for a single male. In inner Sydney, that wasn’t, by half, enough to keep a roof over your head, even in the smallest space in a rooming house. An article inside a daily newspaper of that year, made mention of a national unemployment figure of less than 60,000; virtual full employment.

A bed in the Salvation Army’s Foster House (House O’Bricks) in the late 60s, cost 60 cents a night – another 40 cents for two meals; a dollar a day. Again, if you got only the dole, theoretically, you couldn’t afford to stay there. I don’t know how much the Sydney City Mission’s Night Refuge (The Soupie) cost, only that it wasn’t free and more than half of the beds were taken up by permanent lodgers. In the early 70s, it was $1 a night; meals included. At the Methodist Mission’s refuge in Francis Street, East Sydney, it cost 60 cents for a bed but the food was free. To the extent of my knowledge, apart from isolated, and very small, refuges in country towns, those were the options for a homeless man in New South Wales. Those, and the Matthew Talbot which was free and held 500 men, including staff and permanent guests (pensioners). In the main dormitory, there were 300 beds, roughly one-third of the beds available to homeless men. For women, there were 12 beds in total, all at the Sisters Of The Good Samaritan(?) in Surry Hills.

Until Labor took power in New South Wales in 1976, out-dated laws existed which could seriously affect the lives of the homeless. There was a Vagrancy Act, including ridiculous clauses containing phrases like ‘insufficient means of support’ which could, and were, used to gaol homeless pensioners and other men found committing no more serious act than sleeping among bushes in city parks. You could get up to six months in gaol for that. There was no defence really, except money, and no opportunity for bail. There was an Inebriate Act which was applied, to any extent, only to inner city men and country-dwelling aboriginals. Again, you could be sent to a psychiatric hospital for up to six months. Behind the scenes, so to speak, no psychiatric facility wanted people admitted under this Act and a system of rotating men, and some women, was developed so that ‘you could end up anywhere’ – anywhere being Goulburn, Orange or Morriset (country-situated hospitals) as well as the urban psychiatric hospitals. Again, there was no defence and no opportunity for bail. People were sent for psychiatric evaluation - whatever that might have involved - usually for fourteen days to Long Bay Gaol, appeared again in court and then escorted to whichever hospital. I should add that it was possible to voluntarily commit yourself under this Act. Some men did this to avoid gaol time on Vagrancy charges or to have a break from the grind of living on the street, or, in the case of a couple of men I knew personally, to hide. Other men told of how they were escorted in the front door of the hospital only to walk out the back; some bragged of having beaten their escort back to the city. In truth, I did hear one man speaking at an AA meeting who was grateful to have been given the Act since he’d gotten sober that way. Generally, however, it was regarded as a bit of a joke or another harassment. One man, William Leonard Stinvics, made the newspapers after being injured in the cells at Central. A sergeant, Colin Crawford, claimed to have accidentally fallen on Stinvics. As his personal history emerged, Stinvics had done more than 200 Acts. Since that would involve a minimum of 50 years, he’d obviously completed very few of those terms.

In New South Wales it was, effectively, a crime to be poor and, to some degree, to be different. While no particular Act specified this, the list of forbidden behaviours, even lifestyles, forced on people due to misfortune, bad management, disability or choice, proscribed by law, was extraordinary. Until 1970, for example, there was a law against fortune telling; a leftover part of anti-witchcraft legislation. Picking up cigarette butts from the pavement was forbidden. Within the law, paying an amount of rent higher than a decreed percentage of your income was illegal. Outright begging could have you charged. You needed to have in your possession, sufficient money to book into a hotel for the night. There was a publicised case of a man in country NSW, driving an XK-120 Jaguar, who was locked up for not having $10 in cash on him. And on and on.

When the Vagrancy Act was created in the late 1910s, some of its clauses had been included to combat prostitution and living off prostitution. Periodically, into the 1970s, this Act was used to that purpose. Indeed, a team of detectives led by a sergeant, Donald Robertson (Robbo) had been given the job of clearing prostitutes out of the lower end of Albion Street, Surry Hills, and stayed on to perform the Sisyphean task of doing the same with drunk people in and around the Haymarket. Robbo told Jan Sharp, an ABC producer, in 1973, that he saw his job as being ‘to move them on.’ A glowing report in a Sydney newspaper, on his retirement, painted him as a father-figure and helpmate to homeless men. As was the case with the now-repealed Summary Offences Act, a policeman at or above the rank of sergeant had inordinate power to determine what, for example, was offensive behaviour. He, or she, could recommend people for consideration – which included detention – under the Inebriate Act. Plea-bargaining, although it wasn’t known as that, was common, taking place when people, usually sick, sorry people, were in the cells at Central Police Station. It was a starkly simple process; take the Act or do time for Vag. Robbo, in his grey suit and heavy-rimmed glasses, seemed to be on the street all day and into the night, turning up in back lanes, outside the Matthew Talbot, generating fear as he prowled through pub lounges down in the Haymarket.

Always present in the mornings at the Central Court of Petty Sessions, was a Salvation Army officer and, in his way, he contributed to a recruitment programme for Skid Row. Men, usually younger men, were able to elude custodial sentences with the provision that they go to live and work in Foster Street; the House O’ Bricks as it was known to stiffs. In its turn, stiff, was the term generally used to describe a man on Skid Row but only at that level. In larger society, he was a plonko (cheap fortified wine drinker) or derro (derelict). In itself, Skid Row was an American term and never used by stiffs that I ever heard. As well try to criticise Nellie Melba’s voice or Don Bradman’s batting technique as criticise the beloved Sallies in the post-war years. The Sallies had been there in the jungles of New Guinea, handing out mugs of tea and wads of cake. No-one seriously questioned the Salvation Army’s activities. Hadn’t the Sallies, since Victorian times, been on the frontline of the battle against the drink? There were those images of an SA officer protecting mother and child from drunken father and showing that same man the deep error of his ways the morning after. In the world of 60s and 70s Australia, the approach of the Sallies was moralistic, punitive and Christian, despite AA’s insistence on a personal understanding of a deity. I did hear an SA officer, addressing a group of young visitors, say how he liked ‘to get them the morning after – first thing.,’ suggesting, clearly, that the ‘cold, grey light of the dawn’ produced significant and lasting insights into your own behaviour. However, I didn’t personally experience the Sallies approach to what are now known as de-tox and re-hab (detoxification and rehabilitation). There were reports from men who’d gone through the process, however. Some expressed amusement and bewilderment that they’d scrubbed pigs’ bums with toilet soap in the course of their daily jobs on the farm; being, usually, city types, they found that rated a mention. There were other, far more sinister, reports of violence; of men being punched and kicked; in the name of therapy, no doubt. The average man on the street, if there was such an entitity, hadn’t benefited behaviourly from any punches or kicks he’d taken in his life that far. Indeed, punishments, bashings and the forms of bastardisation in the armed services or in boys’ homes and gaols, or at home, had undoubtedly contributed to his current situation. It had in my life.

Structurally, men were admitted to the newly-opened Challenge Clinic, on the first floor of the House O’Bricks, to sober up and dry out. They then moved to Bridge House, some sort of accommodation and indoctrination centre in the inner suburbs and then to Miracle Haven – the old HG Palmer (electrical retailers) estate on Lake MacQuarie. In its effects, this was extremely similar to the judicial processing of a man through the holding cells and magistrate’s court through Long Bay Gaol to a psychiatric hospital; an institutionally imposed ‘geographical’ – a term used among AA members to describe moving from one place to another in the hope of escaping their problem. I don’t know what the Sallies’ success rates were, or are today, but no doubt they operated on the basis that one person saved justified the existence of the treatment programme. Men on the street expressed opinions of the process as being a destructive one, reducing a person to a malliable and dependent state. One man I spoke with, J O’S, a former journalist, described acts of violence at Miracle Haven, by one SA officer in particular; some kind of ‘thump therapy’ no doubt. Jack, despite his qualifications, probably wasn’t the most reliable witness on the planet, but he definitely wasn’t drunk, raving, out of his mind or anything like that, when he told me these things.

Like self-imposed geographical cures, these periods of sobriety, essentially imposed through an external discipline, didn’t last. It’s difficult to judge whether they did more harm than good. Some men claimed they’d only gone away ‘to build up a bit of a bank’ in any case so I suppose they’d achieved their aim. It was never clear, however, what their purpose in saving the money was since they appeared to drink it all on returning to the city unless, of course, that was their purpose. Single, whether through circumstance, choice or inevitability, these men didn’t have any responsibility outside of themselves and there was always the Talbot to fall back on. This last notion seemed to make some men uneasy, leaving them wondering whether they had tried hard enough on their last venture into the general run of society or, worrying whether their next would be successful. It wasn’t as though, in reality, there was some kind of impenetrable barrier, but, being on the outer had a profound effect on a person.

AA maintained that it was all about a person hitting rock bottom, achieving a moment of clarity and building a new future one day at a time, keeping it simple. I knew that there was further to fall. More than likely, so did many of the other men. AA peddled a more frightening, message; again, a simple one. If a man didn’t stop drinking, he faced death or the dreaded ‘wet brain’, becoming a shambling, incoherent wreck in permanent hospitalisation. Members spoke knowingly of Korsakoff’s Syndrome; the only brain disease, some revealed, that was visible to the eye on dissection. The only person in the Matthew Talbot who was, sadly, a shambling, incoherent wreck was an ex-boxer, DL, who lived there as a pensioner and had been brain damaged due to punches to his head, caused by poor or negligent management. However, frightening the life out of us was deemed necessary because we were at the end of the line, the bottom of the heap and, not incidentally, a captive audience. At the lunch-time AA meeting held in the basement of the Sallies’ building in Goulburn Street, for example, Gordon gave out tea and biscuits at intervals from around ten in the morning and there were often less than a dozen men left there by meeting time. At one of those meetings, I sat with Davie S, listening to a little bald bloke who claimed to be an ex-jockey who’d been brain damaged, he said, due to a fall from a horse. We’d heard him speak before and the content was boring, repetitious and a little incoherent. In any event, after chairing the AA meeting, he went directly to the Town Hall pub for a schooner. We saw him there. Still, if I had spent an hour and a half addressing a largely empty room on any topic, I, too, might have needed a drink. AA meetings were, for most of the men, also a bit of a grim joke. Most of those blokes who went to Gordon’s around nine in the morning, were up at the Methodist’s in Francis Street watching the lunch-time movie or playing cards by noon.

What was it, this antipathy toward Alcoholics Anonymous and its speakers? Was it that individuals wanted to invalidate the message of AA’s speakers; that alcoholism was a disease? I’ve given an example of one of the reasons above in the hypocrisy of the character who chaired the meeting at the Salvation Army and went directly to the pub for a beer afterward. Who was he kidding, us, or himself? Most of us, myself included, were there to be off the street and for the tea and biscuits. That, in itself, could be described us more than a little hypocritical. Also, often there was little a man living on the street could relate to in what many of the speakers had to say. While it was true that speakers told of having lost everything, they were addressing audiences of men who had never had very much to begin with, so, despite the obvious honesty of many, acceptance of their message tended to be tinged with disbelief and even scorn. Further, at almost all meetings, we were a captive audience and that was no small thing. While it was true that you weren’t compelled in any sense to be there, it was also true that you felt resentment at being made to wait, as was the case with the hand-outs such as Commonwealth Street and the Lifeline where the service came first. And, of course, there was that dangerous assumption that we must be alcoholics and the lesser one that we were lapsed Christians struggling to regain our faith. Such was the power of the first assumption, that they said around AA, you hadn’t been to a meeting until you’d been to a Matthew Talbot meeting. Clearly, members viewed this as the heartland of alcohol-induced misery and displacement. Inevitably, there were a few who saw AA as an opportunity to hone their stand-up comedy routines. They got the laughter they evidently wanted, or needed, but little else. There were others who wallowed in some torment, speaking half-inwardly to some personal demon, who only alienated the entire audience because that is what we essentially were; an audience. Unlike other AA meetings, when they were over, there was no general mixing of people; the chair and the speakers pretty well stood around chatting amongst themselves. This tragi-comedy was played out day after day, week after week, so that we came to know the speakers and their stories quite well. No doubt, from their angle, we became the usual crowd.

Whether the person who was speaking at an AA meeting was genuinely a non-practising alcoholic or suffering some other problem wasn’t the issue. Indeed, whether men among the audience took private solace from identifying with various speakers and their messages, also, wasn’t an issue except to themselves. The fear, anxiety, self-doubt and confusion; the implied hopelessness; the either/or message that a person had to stop drinking or die or become as dead…Those were the issues. People looking for help in getting out of the sorry state they’d found themselves in, didn’t need the added load that they might be suffering from a terminal illness like cancer. Most places, including the Matthew Talbot, that invited the homeless and jobless into them, had a hanging scroll or a more permanent reminder of the AA Twelve Steps somewhere on the wall. Between those and messages of the God Is Love variety, we were given daily, indeed hourly, reminders of implied shortcomings beyond our inability to keep a roof over our heads, hold down a job or feed ourselves. Our major problem, it was definitely suggested, was a spiritual one. A person in that position - sharing large dormitories at night where it was difficult if not impossible to sleep; traipsing the streets for miles in several directions to meet needs like clothing; kow-towing to any junior clerk in government offices, such as the CES; and a myriad other daily humiliations, some of which were virtually ritualistic - was frequently physically ill, exhausted, troubled and depressed. Most, however, didn’t need lessons in living from day to day, taking things as they came and hoping for better things to come. Indeed, some might have, tongue in cheek perhaps, claimed that that kind of world view had gotten them where they were.

No-one, however, could have any meaningful knowledge of why all these people were there. No-one had ever taken that kind of survey. A survey, when it did come after Labor came into government in 1972, was of the quantitative kind; how many homeless people were there? Before that, only the unemployed had been counted and that meant how many people, homeless or otherwise, were actively looking for full-time work and/or had applied for or were getting, the dole. A rough estimate of the percentage of unemployed a

At the Matthew Talbot, at least one man in ten worked on the staff. If he was getting any, he was allowed to keep his dole or pension money. Variously, men were employed in the kitchen as cooks or kitchen hands; some worked in the laundry; some served meals, swept floors and wiped down tables in the eating area; some swept and mopped floors in stairwells and other areas; some stripped beds and swept the floors in the main dormitory; some kept the covered way and outside yard free of litter. A few, mainly pensioners, helped collect and sort incoming mail; acted as watchmen and gatekeepers; and two men did the work of the hostel’s clothing store, sorting, storing and handing out clothes to staff, guests and pensioners. All of these men lived in the hostel. Ordinary staff, waiters, laundrymen and so forth, were given four ounces of Champion Ruby cigarette tobacco a week. Cooks, the I/C, 2I/C and the I/C of the laundry, were given six ounces a week. All staff who worked seven days, were given one day off in that time. While the length of a working day varied, for example, on those days when sheets were changed on all of the beds, roughly 1000 of them, laundry men put in 12 to 14 hours. Men in the kitchen regularly worked 15 to 16 hours. Again on laundry days, which preceded the re-allocation of beds twice a week, dormitory staff and the I/Cs worked 15 to 16 hours. At least weekly, the floors of major areas of the hostel were scrubbed by machine and, upstairs, the floor of the main dormitory was also scrubbed periodically. Other jobs included unloading the hostel’s van of bread and other donations. The van driver had a paid job. Men on the staff slept in small dormitories or in the pensioners’ quarters. The I/Cs had cubicles within a staff dormitory. Off-duty nightwatchmen had cubicles in the main dormitory. There was an entirely tacit agreement that, if you were on the staff, you kept your drinking to your days off, stopped or otherwise kept it under control. It was a variation of the Honour System and, by and large, it worked. Those were the working and living conditions for staff around the time 1970 – 1975.

In that time, Brother Geoff Tarlinton worked as both staff manager and hostel maintenance man. Below him, an I/C and 2 I/C ran the staff generally and there were local I/Cs in the kitchen and laundry. In paid positions, there were a hostel manager, his secretary and a clerk. Volunteer brothers of the Society, handed out the large amount of mail in the form of Social security cheques. Around 74-5, a new job, Night Manager, was created. This, it was said, was due to problems with the behaviour of some unsupervised nightwatchmen. Those of us who’d been turned away when we tried to get in after hours, thought we knew what that meant. The first man in this role, CP, was an outsider in the sense that he hadn’t lived in the hostel as a guest. However, he was expected to live-in; the first paid staff member to do that to my knowledge. A cubicle in one corner of the main dormitory which had been used as the Dispensary, was fitted out as his room. I recall him as a bustling, energetic man who seemed determined to be everywhere at once; kind and fair with no macho agenda. By the early 70s, more younger men, under 35 year-olds, were living in the Matthew Talbot and some of those had been joining the staff and one or two were made nightwatchmen. Discretion was a necessary quality in watchmen at the hostel, as it is in other forms of security work. We’d all seen what happened when one ‘air-raidin’ (noisy) drunk was allowed in, but, there was no sense in leaving empty beds upstairs when a man turning up at the gate, risking arrest, or, when it was wet or cold, needed one. The simple fact was, many men saw the Matthew Talbot as home and it was a homing pigeon instinct which brought them there when they’d had a drink. There was nothing particular to men in the MT in that. Inevitably, there were accusations of favouritism directed at various nightwatchmen. The original cyclone-wire front gate got many a kicking and a lot of watchmen took many a cursing from irate men looking to get in. The Tank (Drunk Tank) a room with four bunk beds, was there at basement level for men who could stand up and behaved calmly but who’d obviously been drinking. Because of fire regulations, the outside door to the Tank had to stay unlocked. Some men went further than giving the front gate a kicking and scaled the walls, getting up as far as the flat roof of the shower and toilet area where, one night, a man, TW, was hosed off by a couple of watchmen, GM and BD. Men also climbed the fence around the open yard, attempting to get inside.

The first alteration to the hostel since it had been built, was the creation of a covered area, covering about a third of the yard at the south-western corner. This did serve as a place where men could be under shelter and off the street but not in the dormitories, TV or eating areas. The Matthew Talbot was getting busier, however, and on many nights, men were sleeping on folding beds on the floor of the eating area and on the benches of the covered way with a blanket and pillow. For the first time in a long time, several years, sober men were being turned away entirely; the hostel was full to overflowing. The economic pressures on society in general are well recorded elsewhere. There was no longer full employment and strikes in the building industry had left men who usually lived, not all that far from the Matthew Talbot, both geographically and in their lifestyles, were compelled to use the place. The deinstitutionalisation of psychiatric patients also put greater, enduring, pressure on all varieties of low-cost and no-cost accommodation. Derelict buildings around Woolloomooloo and Kings Cross, left vacant for the building of a road tunnel, had the floors boards torn up so that men couldn’t sleep in them. Squatting, that is, occupying and living openly in houses which had usually been ear-marked for demolition, wasn’t yet a political statement and alternative accommodation. While it was true that many men slept in derelict buildings in and around the area of the Matthew Talbot and further away in the inner suburbs, they did so in secret, often keeping the location of ‘a good empty’ hidden, even from other stiffs. Men who had a reputation for ‘air-raiding’, loud and seemingly endless rants when they were drunk, presented a security threat if you wished to keep your quiet little corner private from often irate neighbours and the police.

2011-04-22T03:02:00.000-07:00

I'll be reporting on what occurs in the near future regarding the many cases of torture, abuse and thuggery which have happened to former servicemen and women under the label of bastardisation as the situation develops. There had already been talk of some kind of apology. Personally, I don't think that's acceptable. Who would apologise, the current defence minister, Stephen Smith? More as it comes to mind on this one...

2011-04-22T02:49:00.000-07:00

On the day that the boys senior to us by six months (JR1s), were to have their Passing Out Parade (11/12/63), without warning, I was ordered out of our hut to a space under washing lines by an Ordinary Seaman (OD), Wayne Boden (R93790) and JR1 Ian Schubert (R93925). I knew these boys only vaguely in that they were in a senior class of the same division and I’d heard their names. I’ve since obtained some of their service details through the National Archive. (Boden had been made up to OD only a couple of days previously due to the fact he was already 17.)

Once outside our hut, Boden and Schubert had help from at least two others, possibly three. I had trouble seeing because soapy water from buckets was dumped over my head. However, I was assaulted with yard brooms, blocks of sand soap (pumice), steel wool and boot polish was smeared around my anus and genitals. At one point, I was lifted off the concrete and a bucket of water was sluiced, with force, into my anus. A mental health expert has assured me that at least this part of the assault on me was of a sexual nature. In any event, it was a deeply degrading and humiliating experience that has stayed with me. I can still hear the noises of disgust from other boys watching. When they had finished with the scrubbing, I was left alone for long enough to pick up my towel and go to the Showers. Once there, I was about to take a shower when Boden and Schubert came in, telling me I had to shower using only hot water. I’m not sure what happened immediately after that, but, I was no longer going to, for want of a better word, co-operate. Boden threw a punch that caught me on the mouth. I squeezed past him and went to another shower stall and was left alone to clean up. I was still bleeding from abrasions on my back during the parade that evening and into the following couple of days. I didn’t report what happened to me and I didn’t get any medical treatment for the wounds on my back.

The scrubbing, according to one of my attackers, had been directed from our divisional office. A small group of boys had stopped to watch what was happening to me and one shouted:’What’re yez fuckin’ doin’?’ Boden answered them with:’Fuck off. This come straight from divisional office…They’re sicka grubby JRs in The Fleet.’ I recall his precise words to this day. I had no way of knowing, indeed, I still don’t, whether that was true. Later on the same day, a threat issued by Schubert was passed on to me through a mate. Within twenty-four hours of the assault, we went on leave, in my case, to Sydney. With the wisdom of hindsight, I should have stayed there. At the very least, I should have told someone, however, I did neither of those things, instead, returning from leave to Leeuwin. Some part of me, obviously, thought that I’d deserved what I got, or I was afraid of the consequences, especially since Boden had let slip that men far senior to me had approved of my treatment. While my personal hygiene may not have been great, partly due to the fact that I had had items of kit - underwear and socks - stolen during the first couple of days at the base, I don’t think, now, that I deserved that extreme kind of degradation and injury.

Returning to Leeuwin and cleaning up my act as best I could, didn’t help. In many ways, I was treated as though I shouldn’t be there any more. On several occasions, I was openly reviled and abused, by both my peers and superiors, leading me to approach our divisional officer (DO) and ask to see the base psychologist. I couldn’t seem to make it clear to him, or to the DO, Lt. Donohue, exactly why I wanted out because I still kept silent about the assault and there are, according to the DVA, only some notes from Mr. Bramich, the psychologist, stating that I was homesick and didn’t like the place. A reading my Ratings Record Of Service Card shows that I was recommended to be discharged UFTRO in mid January ’64 but not actually sent home until late March of that same year. During the intervening period, I was assaulted and harassed, driven to the desperate action of stealing a couple of items of kit from washing lines. Eventually, I was charged and appeared before the commodore, WBM Marks, basically bad-mouthed by an officer and chief petty officer, and asked by the commodore what I wanted to do. I told him I wanted out. For the rest of my stay at Leeuwin, I spent my time in a cell behind the gangway (main gate) although, because I wasn’t yet 17, the door was left unlocked. Six or seven days later, I was escorted to the Perth Railway Station with little more than what I stood up in and seen onto a train back to the East.

I won’t go into any detail on what happened on my discharge and return to Sydney, only that I wasn’t able to take up where I’d left off. Before the RAN, I’d worked with the PMG (Australia Post) for a year. After the navy, I couldn’t stay in a job for more than a few weeks or months and I took to riding on suburban trains at night and wandering the streets during the day. I’d hitchhike to Melbourne and back for no good reason. I lost my girl, my friends and was alienated from my family. Within a year of exiting the RAN, I was hospitalised due to a suicide attempt. That didn’t actually help except to make me avoid the psychiatric system; certainly as it was in those days. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I tended to work and mix generally with older men and drink with them. Despite odd breaks where I had a room or shared a flat, I was homeless for the much greater part of those years. I went to gaol a couple of times. This pattern of living went on for at least twelve years and, even after I met my current partner, I wasn’t able to stay in a job for more than six months. It’s my very strong feeling that my experiences at Leeuwin left me more or less permanently disabled. There weren’t the supports, avenues of assistance or for airing a grievance in those days that we enjoy today, particularly for younger people. Society judged us as no-hopers.

In several letters to the DVA, I laid out all that I’ve said above in considerably more detail. In those communications, I made it as clear as I could that there wasn’t likely to be documentary evidence of what happened and that was for a number of reasons:

What happened to me – and I wasn’t the only one – while it may have been sanctioned at some higher level, was illegal. It was hardly likely to be written down.

I didn’t report it when it happened because I was afraid to. In any event, there was no-one to report it to, no-one to turn to, not even a friendly ear, let alone someone with the power to do something about it.

When I was eventually free of the RAN, frankly, I was in a state of deep, personal chaos. What happened to me at Leeuwin wasn’t the kind of thing I could share with, for example, my mates in civvy street. On one occasion where I tried to tell my father, like many men of his generation, he interrupted me by saying I shouldn’t ‘make waves’.

In spite of this, the DVA insists upon some kind of evidence from that time which, I think, is utterly inappropriate under the circumstances. This entire process has taken around sixteen months to reach this stage. During this time, I’ve tried to contact several men who were in my class through email and had no replies. I did manage to contact my mate from those days, Ian McLean. He was the one who was threatened by Schubert. After several months, he told me he couldn’t provide me with any supporting evidence. So far, all that has occurred in my contact with the DVA, is that I've been met with evasion and gobbleygook. Initially, I was told that my depression was only possibly, not probably, caused by my experiences in the RAN. My claim was, therefore, refused. I asked for a reconsideration and was then told I didn't have any supporting evidence. Again, my claim has been refused. There has been a good deal of publicity recently on the topics of bastardisation in the military. The vultures are circling. Neil James of that funny little defence association, has said on tv, more than a little smugly, he didn't know how we were going to prove anything. A representative of the national RSL has denied the reality of bastardisation. Senator Nick Xenophon's staff is collecting evidence to the contrary as we type.