‘War does not determine who is right—only who is left.’
Bertrand Russell
On 12 October 1945, after five years and seven months, the 2/17th was declared a redundant unit. J.W. Holmes remembers how it felt when the 2/13th received the news that their battalion was removed from the Order of Battle: ‘It seemed impossible to believe that something so proud, so alive, so vital, should suddenly become unwanted. This formality brought to many a sense of loss; poignant, unwelcome and unexplained. It was over, and as individuals we went home.’
It wasn’t quite over yet. The troops still had more waiting to complete before discharge. The five-year plan meant that older vets were the first to leave. Pte Stanley Livingston was on that list, but even so, there was a waiting list for boats, with delays of up to four weeks. Pte Armstrong, a five-year veteran of the 2/13th, was furious about the delay. He called the wait a bloody disgrace, and chastised the army and the government for not supplying boats. ‘The bastards find them easy enough when there’s a blue for us to go into,’ he wrote in his diary while fuming in Labuan.
After the show, Bill Pye was asked to remain and join the British Borneo Civil Affairs Unit (BBCAU). He agreed, and was promoted to the rank of captain, before being briefed by a colonel, Bill Stanner, a former professor of anthropology at ANU. ‘He said, “I’ve got a boat down in the river here and it’s got a crew on it, and I want you to travel up the Weston Coast and call in at every village you can get into and talk to the native headmen and to the Chinese leaders and impress upon them the importance of planting rice seedlings because they are going to need rice at the moment.”’ Bill set off and at one port he went ashore and asked if there were any military people present.
They pointed out a house to me and I went down and there was this fellow there, Bill Money, he had come back from the First World War and settled in New Guinea and had plantations and also had an aircraft, and he’d made a business out of this, and when the second war came, he enlisted, and because he had this experience with the natives they put him in this area. He said to me, ‘How did you get here?’ And I said, ‘On a boat, down the river.’ ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘I’ve got 20,000 bloody people here and we haven’t got any tucker. I’m going over to bloody Labuan to blow shit out of them.’ So he went down and got in the boat and he gave me the keys and said, ‘There’s an office down there and I’m leaving you in charge.’ Well, I didn’t see him for some days, and we had all these people there. Anyway, he went over [to Labuan] and organised them to send a lot more food over. I stopped there, and Bill Money was an amazing fellow. He was much older than me and he was pretty scathing when he first ran into me. ‘What the bloody use are you going to be to me?’ he said. ‘What can you do?’ And I said I can adapt myself to most bloody things. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘There’s a piano in the front room—go and tune it!’
The mopping-up in Borneo was messy, according to Bill Pye:
The villagers had deserted their properties as the army was moving up the railway line taking village by village, and that was a dreadful thing too because the troops were not instructed to leave property alone and the people who had lived throughout the Japanese occupation, well, we went ahead, and when we came across a house, they [our boys] knocked it down, took the floorboards to sleep on, killed the chickens and ducks and ate them and destroyed the property as they went, and if they came to any place where it was difficult to get over they chopped down the rubber trees, and when the planters came back they were weeping because the rubber trees had taken years to grow . . . we did incredible damage, we were never instructed to look after the natives. So they had lived all through the Japanese occupation and then they had run away from their homes because we were bombing them, and they went back and found that we had destroyed all of them.
To this day Bill Pye thinks about these actions. ‘In many cases we caused greater loss and hardship than the Jap occupation. As a civil affairs officer [CAO] I saw and heard so many accounts. I wonder if any real compensation was ever given?’
As a CAO, Bill was transferred to Jesselton, along the northwest coast of Borneo. Australian civil affairs officers did an outstanding job of rebuilding the shattered communities, providing hospitals and schools. But after fifteen months Bill felt his work was most probably done.
By that time they were bringing people back who had worked in Borneo before the war, who had escaped and got away, and we were working seven days a week and they started bringing in these planters and administrative officers and they had quite a different attitude, they had a five-day week and they were saying, ‘Where’s the club? Oh, the club’s been destroyed? Goodness me. And where’s the golf course? And the tennis courts? Oh dear, dear, dear.’ They gave me the shits!
Not long after that, Bill was on the first ship home to Australia.
Pte Stanley Livingston’s ship finally came in on 15 October. He embarked on the Robert T. Hill at Labuan for Morotai, where he joined other five-year veterans aboard HMAS Kanimbla on 22 October.
He arrived in Brisbane on the thirtieth and caught the train to Sydney. The theatres of operations were now closed. During the 9th Division’s lengthy season, including encores, those killed, wounded or captured numbered around twelve thousand men, accounting for almost a quarter of those who’d served in the division.
Back home, everyone had been waiting for the final curtain. The last act had lingered far too long. There had been little thought for the thousands of Australians still fighting and dying in the last stand; with a Japanese surrender imminent, Sydneysiders didn’t bother waiting for the official announcement, and VJ Day partying began at 5 p.m. on Wednesday 15 August and lasted for three days. A reported one hundred and fifty thousand people turned out in the Sydney Domain, where radio station 2GB had set up its vaudeville stage in front of the Art Gallery. Jack Davey entertained the crowd with songs from both world wars sung under a sky-high ‘V’ beamed from searchlights on each end of Martin Place. Amid rocket fire and flares from warships on the harbour, gold searchlights hit the tops of buildings. The AWA tower featured a huge red ‘V’ against its blue steel. Trams were stopped in the eastern suburbs but people were happy to walk to the harbour foreshore. Around eleven o’clock a column of people, fifty in all, marched down Pitt Street carrying an effigy of a Japanese. They halted at the Pitt Street end of the Cenotaph and proceeded to burn the effigy. As before, a snowstorm of paper rained down on the crowds: shredded telephone directories, naval blueprints, top-secret documents, Manpower forms and applications for loans formed a carpet of paper. In William Street, a lone old man harangued passers-by with his proclamations of the perpetuity of wars and the rigours to come. No-one heard him. It was a bad day for the cynic. As on VE Day, newspapers reported that men in uniform were noticeably ‘quieter, but no less happy’. The next day, under the headline ‘Delirious Joy in Australia’, the official police estimate of the crowds gathered in the city the previous night was reported to be over a million.
It would take some time before the realities of war reached the general public, yet there were some who were not so quick to celebrate, among them the relatives and friends of the twenty-two thousand who had disappeared into Japanese prisoner-of-war camps in 1942. Almost eight thousand POWs were dead, and many continued to die even after peace was declared. The appearance of those who survived the camps was alarming. On their arrival home, dozens of ambulances lined the wharves to take them to hospitals. To those there to welcome them, waving flags seemed a pitiful means to cheer these vacant-eyed men who did their best to return a smile.
After the party, the Americans went home, taking thirteen thousand Australian women with them. Rationing continued, public transport was a shambles, power blackouts were frequent, and continued petrol rationing meant peace had come but prosperity was far from assured. A million Australians had taken part in the armed forces, and as demobilisation took place, it was deliberately drawn out to prevent overcrowding in the labour market. A campaign directed at women gave them a less-than-gentle reminder of their responsibilities now that the men had returned. They were encouraged to vacate their jobs and concentrate on creating homes for the men. Government propaganda aside, making room for the boys seemed to most women the decent thing to do. The nation certainly owed them at the very least a living. Still, the government gave little thought to supporting the women whose lives had been turned upside down for the war effort.
Evelyn retired from riveting duties. Apart from briefly taking on a part-time stint as a TAB clerk in Kogarah in the 1970s, most probably to keep an eye on her husband’s earnings, she never again rejoined the official workforce. In the early 1980s I took her to see an American film called Rosie the Riveter, a documentary on the lives of American women working in factories in World War II. As we wandered down George Street after the film, I asked her what she thought of it. Evelyn politely thanked me for taking her, but insisted her reality bore no resemblance to that presented in the film. The film lamented the fact that after the war women were forced back into the home. Yet as much as she loved her job, Evelyn insisted she and her girlfriends had no hesitation in stepping aside for the boys. ‘You were finished as soon as the war finished,’ she said. ‘When the men came back from the war they all got their jobs back, we got letters to go back to our old jobs and that was all there was to it.’ Evelyn chose not to return to her old job at the pharmaceutical company. ‘It was too easy doing that [riveting] than to go back to the other job. Working at the aerodrome was heaven after that.’
After their return, many of the men had no intention of rushing back to work. Blending back into normal society was a trial for some and many took extended leave on their own account. After six years of absence from the civilian workforce, readapting wasn’t easy. Apart from the nervous effects of war, recurring bouts of malaria dogged many men. Often a man suffering a sudden attack in the street was mistaken for a drunk: frequently they were drunk and having an attack of malaria. Long-distance courtships, like Stanley and Evelyn’s, had been conducted primarily through letters. Many other men returned to children who didn’t recognise them.
Peter J. Jones had problems adjusting. He was especially concerned that the ‘prolonged lack of female company, especially of my own age, had made me embarrassingly shy and self-conscious. At parties soon after the War I sometimes deserted the company for an hour or so in order to recover some composure.’ Another fly in his post-war ointment which Jones believed hardly deserves mentioning, deserves mentioning. Because Jones had joined the army at a tender age, with little in the way of life experience, on his return his parents failed to understand he was not a little boy anymore. They had missed his crucial years of transition to manhood, and they obviously felt that loss. They didn’t want to give up the child in Peter so easily.
G.H. Fearnside wondered what the future might hold, and if he would cope. He trusted that a return to old friends and family and the memories of an innocent childhood would see him through. The freshly demobilised Norm Pope put it more bluntly. ‘You just wandered about and tried to pick up the threads that you’d lost over two or three years . . . People didn’t fall over you the way you expected them to.’ For Norm the transition was far from smooth. ‘I’d sit down at a table and I’d just feel like throwing everything and going somewhere . . . You have got to experience it to know what it was like.’ Nyorie Davies, a former member of the South Australian Symphony Orchestra who was recruited to tutor air force recruits in basic mathematics during the war years, summed it up for many: ‘We lived our early manhood and womanhood with fear, loss, uncertainty, terrible responsibilities . . . It was a tragic and hard rite of passage. We will never forget it, and it should not be forgotten when we’re gone.’
On 14 November 1945, Pte Stanley James Livingston ceased to be a private. On his certificate of discharge, under the heading ‘Disability’ are the words ‘General Debility’, giving some hint as to the state Stanley was left in when hostilities ceased. This general term hides a fuller story, one the army has a history of glossing over. There were no official programs in place to ease the men back into society psychologically. Instead, efforts were focused on clearing a way back into the workplace, which had more to do with boosting the economy than any individual’s spirits, and now he had to get used to being an individual. Stanley Livingston was officially demobbed. A man without a mob. He was no longer an ‘us’, he was a ‘him’. Before that, the last time he’d been a him was in 1940, aged twenty-two. He was now twenty-seven. He had not been himself for 1786 days, his ‘Total Effective Period’, as the army would have it.
Stanley arrived back in Sydney to no fanfare, and home was not as he had left it. Both his parents were now dead, all of his sisters were happily ensconced in marriages, Roy was married, Gordon was married, there were children on the way. Tramway Street belonged to Dorothy and Jimmy, who unhesitatingly accepted him back into the old family home, but this was another world, and another Stanley. He was out of sorts. He still had a home at the Tennyson Hotel, where many other recently discharged, generally debilitated single friends sat and swilled to six o’clock. Evelyn the ex-riveter, and the newer, quieter version of Stanley Livingston, sans uniform and not quite so dashing, were working through the new him and the new her to see if there remained any possibility of forming an ‘us’. Evelyn was twenty-four and had survived her war well, but she shared one thing in common with Stanley: all her siblings were married. Being twenty-four and single in 1945, she was on the verge of old maidenhood.
‘Populate or perish’ became the post-war shibboleth for Australia. Evelyn, for one, was prepared to do her duty. Stanley needed to lift his game or risk losing the spoils of peace, but unfortunately his games were two-up, poker and an attraction to the horses that landed him in trouble more than once. Fortunately, his bookie of a brother-in-law Jimmy kept that gun on the top of the wardrobe, and the debt collectors at bay. There was a dark cloud over Stanley; his lack of ambition both personal and professional was palpable. Dark clouds aside, a working-class boy wasn’t one to brood; his job was to breed. In early 1946, Stanley secured a job as a toolsetter in the Westinghouse factory in Rosebery, a short walk from Tramway Street, and then he asked Evelyn Lonsdale to be his wife. She agreed. She wouldn’t even have to change her initials. The date was set for 4 May 1946. That they would marry in church was a given in those days, but choosing the appropriate venue presented a problem. The daughter of a high-ranking Freemason was to wed the son of strict Roman Catholics. A marriage made in limbo.
The Lonsdales were a practical lot, not given to metaphysical reflection. On their enlistment forms the boys dutifully wrote C of E, but this was mere formality. The Lonsdales were Church of England Lite. Meanwhile, Stanley, while brought up Roman Catholic, had somewhere along the way strayed from the path. Most likely Stanley’s four devout sisters, fearing for their brother’s soul, influenced the final decision. The Livingston sisters were not taking any chances: the venue for the nuptials was to be St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney’s Roman Catholic HQ.
Photographs of the big day belie the facts. Behind the beaming couple, there’s Gordon and Lilly, and Ernie Snr and Annie, the epitome of parental pride, flanked by their own brood and a sea of less familiar faces. Inside the church, however, the atmosphere had been less congenial. It was a large turnout. Seated in the epicentre of Roman Catholicism in Sydney, those gathered there that day watched the bride walk down the aisle on the arm of her grand-masonic father. Stanley was waiting, sober, at the high altar. When Evelyn arrived, the bride and groom were swiftly ushered by the priest from the altar and shepherded through a back door. The pause that followed was beyond awkward.
These days there are three wedding areas in St Mary’s: the cathedral itself, the cathedral crypt, and the Lady Chapel behind the high altar for smaller weddings. The area where Stanley and Evelyn’s knot was tied fits none of these descriptions. The couple were led to a small room in the rear of the church the size and proportions of a broom closet. The reason for this was that it was a broom closet. Complete with brooms. When the priest asked whether anyone here present knew of any reason that this couple should not be joined in holy matrimony, requesting them to speak now or forever hold their peace, not one broom spoke up. In no time at all the pair were led back, and it was announced with little ceremony that they were now man and wife. So it came to pass that Stanley and Evelyn were joined in unholy matrimony.
Mixed marriages were perfectly legal in 1946, but frowned upon, and the furrowed brows of the holy powers saw fit to remove any semblance of ceremony from such a ceremony. No-one had warned the couple—or anyone else for that matter. It was a demeaning and humiliating start to the marriage. Whether it had happened right there in St Mary’s, or in the trenches, or earlier, there was no doubt that Stanley Livingston’s Catholicism well and truly lapsed. The marriage was off to a rocky start, and before long Stanley was spending more time worshipping at the bar of the Tennyson Hotel, completely off his faith, than at home with his bride, home being 1187 Botany Road, Mascot. The crowded little shop was now even more so with this latest married couple, and, with Jack Lonsdale, one confirmed bachelor fresh out of prison to complete the tribe.
The government were pushing home, family and marriage as the key to progress. Building one of these happy homes was not so easy. Australia was experiencing the worst housing crisis in its history. A depression and a world war had virtually brought construction of new housing to a halt. This was one reason the couple moved into the barber shop; another was Stanley’s increasing apathy.
By 1950, with most of the Livingston and Lonsdale couplings producing copious issue, Eve and Stan needed to populate soon, or perish. In 1952, Evelyn was rushed to hospital with excruciating stomach pain. She was found to be suffering an ectopic pregnancy, a life-threatening condition, especially in the early 1950s. Doctors insisted that much of her reproductive equipment would need to be sacrificed to save her life. Evelyn could be stubborn and resolute, even when racked with pain. The ectopic pregnancy removed, she arrived home, the bulk of her breeding apparatus intact, and two years later, on 14 December 1954, a son, Brian Ernest Livingston, was born. Fourteen months later another boy muscled in on young Brian’s turf at Botany Road. His mother wanted to call this second-born Roydon, after her two brothers Roy and Don: Roydon James Livingston—a fine name for a writer. At the end of the day, they settled for Paul.