I learnt that when World War II came, Weabonga families, already living in conditions of some privation, had additional worries. All were concerned that the men might have to go off to fight. Reports that living conditions actually became a little easier, though, surprised me—as more nations joined the war, prices for farm produce began to increase. The Weabonga parents explained things to me.
‘Well, armies and soldiers everywhere. Everyone needed uniforms, didn’t they? Everyone needed wool. Everyone needed bully beef. Prices went up and the farms began to pay again.’
‘And country men from around here began to sign up. So any work became shared by the fewer able men left around about.’
Max told me, ‘Our dad was too old to go so he got steadier work and the family had more money. Things were still tough but we could always have a proper feed.’
Later the war extended to the Pacific, and further changes came. I was shocked by some of what I heard happened then.
‘We kind’a loved the Japs,’ Bill claimed.
‘What? You actually loved the Japanese?’ I had to ask.
‘Yeah, mate. As soon as the yellow peril started their war in the Pacific, things improved for us.’
Incredulous, I said, ‘Tell me more.’
So Bill went on. ‘Prices for rural stuff continued to get better. Our dads got even more work. Things improved for us all.’
‘Mum began to put on some pounds. She got a bit roly-poly. Bit pudgy. Different Mum.’
‘Sure thing. We were all a little bit happier.’
No one denied, though, that although living had improved, they all felt in danger.
Monica told of the worries of the time. ‘Everyone was talking about a possible invasion. And everyone was talking of the atrocities of the Japs in all the countries they’d invaded. Rape, torture, the killing of women, children and babies. Starvation. All that stuff.’
The parents told me that everyone knew Java and Timor had fallen to the Japanese Army. Although the government tried to hide the bombings of Darwin and Broome from the public, these events quickly became known even in a place as remote as Weabonga. All felt an invasion was just a matter of time.
Max said, ‘As kids we’d play at killing the Nips. And we were prepared to do it. We were too young to join up. But we weren’t too young to get ready for an invasion.’
Between Max, Bill, Tony and Vic, I heard much about this.
‘We knew the bush. We’d wandered the country around here since we were kids. We’d camped out, become hunters, we could shoot and trap, we got to fish and catch yabbies in all the back-country creeks. We knew the bush and were ready to fight for it even as youngsters.’
‘Yeah, mate. The bush could be our shelter. We could work with it. But the bush can be dangerous—it can work against you if you don’t know it. We would have made sure the Japs were slaughtered if they followed us into the bush.’
Through these discussions I learnt a lot about the surrounding country.
I was told, ‘All the farms back on to Crown land. All empty and wild. No tracks or roads into a lot of it. No fire trails. Nothing.’
‘On the western side, behind the Williamson, Moran and McCrae properties, there’s just wild country until you get almost to Dungowan, about fifteen miles as the bird flies.’
‘We all used to climb the Sugarloaf. She’s south of the village. You see her as you take the Weabonga turn-off.’
The men pointed in the direction of the mountain.
‘Well, she’s well over three thousand feet. Bloomin’ rocky country, bushy, and with huge darn trees and thick scrub. Hard to move through. No Jap could follow us or beat us there.’
All the village men, as boys and lads, knew the back country. They’d spent weekends and holiday periods exploring and enjoying the wilderness. They said they loved the bush as much as they loved their own homes. And they loved their homes and their families, so they wouldn’t stand by and watch while the ‘little yellow bastards’, their enemy, came to destroy them. They said they would have been prepared to kill invaders. These Weabonga men, even as lads, were used to slaughtering stock for their meat and shooting feral animals and wildlife—to kill a person wouldn’t be easy for any of them but, if necessary, they probably would.
‘If it was us or them, mate, what would you do?’
As lads they’d concocted a plan to escape into the bush together to engage in a running war with ambush and fast escape overland on horseback or on foot, as soon as any invader got anywhere near Weabonga. They thought their parents probably knew of their plans but turned a blind eye to them. Their mums and dads were being realistic as well.
What a feeling of horror I had that as boys and young lads, these men had needed to think about and come to terms with fighting and killing other men and, perhaps, being killed themselves.
While I’d been at teachers’ college, at the age of eighteen—just a little older than the Weabonga men had been, as younger teenagers, during World War II—I’d done my six months’ military training in the National Service.
My then 18th Battalion, in camp at Bardia Barracks outside Ingleburn near Sydney, was encouraged to see the enemy we were preparing to kill as ‘slanty-eyed commie bastards’, targets for our pretend rage. I knew Australia had a long-term fear of invasion by people from Asia, but our trainers acted as though the Asian invaders were on our shore and resistance would be needed in just a matter of time. The description of our probable enemy, given by our NCO Trainers—all Korean War veterans and all pretty dysfunctional men—was always of ‘slope-head, yellow bastards’.
In fact, we conscripts were browned off about the whole experience, and our enemy was more likely the army itself, which kept us in thrall.
In our barracks at night we talked quietly, trying to disentangle the puzzle in which we were trapped. What we worked out wasn’t a pretty picture.
My platoon mates, mostly students at the University of Sydney, treated the National Service experience as a joke, and we all resented deeply what we saw as this complete waste of time. In our minds, it was a totally unjustifiable interruption to our lives. Much of the government reasoning behind our conscription as eighteen-year-olds we believed to be either fictitious or without serious grounds. None of us had any fear of an imminent invasion in 1957 or 1958, so we thought it was all made-up. All play-acting.
Behind our being expelled from normal society into military camps, locked up behind wire fences, our impression of society was one with a general fear of young men: greater, we believed, than any fear of an Asian communist invasion of Australia. We believed our society wanted young men to be tamed and brought to heel. We convinced each other that fear of youth, fear of us, was quite widespread, as could be seen reflected in popular films and novels: The Wild One, Lord of the Flies, Blackboard Jungle (which we’d all seen a few times), and the appealing films with James Dean, Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden. Most of us had seen Rock Around the Clock many times in 1956 and had danced ourselves ragged in the St James Theatre. We’d no doubt that youth frightened adults.
So, to us, National Service was a desperate method for controlling young men. None of us believed army service would make us better citizens, as was often claimed by politicians. We saw it all as a game loaded against us, with young people having too poor a hand, and no vote, so no chance to win against strong political forces. Besides, we believed that any imminent invasion would have young guys like us enlisting voluntarily by the truckload. No need for pretend military training: we’d have been there if required.
As well, the call-up for service, supposed to apply to all eighteen-year-olds, missed so many. It was a deeply flawed strategy and deeply unequal. At night, in our gossip and musings, we convinced each other that, of course, we should have realised the government didn’t have the resources to take all the nation’s eighteen-year-olds into the military. The costs would have been prohibitive. Neither did the military have the capacity: their resources would have been overwhelmed. As it was, even with the limited numbers in the nation’s camps, the military found itself doing little other than inadequately training teenage conscripts. We supposed the government had to find a way to limit intake numbers without appearing to do so.
Out of eighteen regular players of my Rugby League team at the local Kensington Church Youth Group, I was the only one conscripted. All the others had flat feet. From the Balmain Teachers’ College group of my peers, comprising about fifty physically able young men, I remember only three of us being called up. Yet these trainee teachers had all been passed medically and physically fit to take up a college scholarship. In the barracks, we surmised medical testing was being used to contain numbers. That the majority of eighteen-year-old Australian males failed the intake medical test was an indictment on the nation—if it reflected reality, then our generation was so unwell and so desperately unfit. We didn’t believe the medical problems were real, so those of us forced into the training voiced our bitter resentment. Political make-believe; political claptrap.
In Weabonga, I heard there was nothing new in that. As I matured I was becoming less surprised by political chicanery, so I readily accepted the corresponding view being conveyed by the Weabonga parents of their experience in the 1940s. I heard from them of deliberate government obfuscation and outright lying during the war. The parents spoke about government plans to abandon much of Australia if an invasion occurred—a plan totally denied by the government at the time but widely discussed.
The Weabonga men were giving me facts. Their intention to take to the bush hadn’t been a joke. For them, back then, this was real: the enemy was almost on the Australian shore.
A couple of the local men, including Lawrie, had joined up. Lawrie never spoke of it, but neither did the other ex-servicemen. Others, too young then to enlist, had lots to say, though. They’d taken on the message of scorched earth. All understood, as thirteen- to sixteen-year-olds, there was a government plan to abandon much of the country to the invaders, to the enemy. The men claimed, ‘We were going to become guerrilla fighters. We were good shots. We were going to hit and run, kill and disappear. We could have beaten them.’
Monica had grown up in the area, but the other women had married into Weabonga families. They backed their husbands, though.
‘If we’d had been teenagers in Weabonga during the war, there’d have been ways we could support the boys who’d taken to the bush. I think we’d have been game enough to help them.’ ‘We’d have done food drops, message drops. Gosh, we’d have sabotaged Japanese equipment if we’d had a chance.’
Such stories told me that, through necessity, the Weabonga lads and girls had needed to become self-reliant, committed and loyal, determined and ready to accept the hardest of realities and work creatively together to overcome difficulties. They had carried all the positive outcomes with them into parenthood.
I asked the parents how their own growing up and the way they’d been parented were affecting the way they were raising their own kids.
‘Greatly,’ they all admitted.
‘We did pretty well, even in difficult times. The way we were brought up helped us. We reckon our mum and dad did right by us. Why would we change? We want our kids to learn the lessons we learnt. We want our kids to be good, hardworking and truthful, just as our parents wanted us to be. Don’t you think that’s right, Pete?’
‘Mate, the only difference,’ I would hear, ‘is we want our kids to be happy and free from worry. Of course our own parents wanted that for us. But, gee whiz, life is a hell of a lot easier now than when we were growing up. No need for our kids to miss out.’
In many significant ways, though, the life of the present-day village children was, I thought, at its core not that different to the life led by their own mums and dads twenty years or more before, in the 1930s and ’40s.
Actually, the lives of the 1960s village children weren’t that far removed from agrarian life in medieval times. Sometimes, on a hot day in summer of our final term together, as we worked through the morning, I found myself daydreaming that an Angelus bell might ring out at noon over the village from the Catholic chapel. A teaching monk from the Middle Ages would, I daydreamed, feel right at home in our company.