I remember great excitement at school because one little girl was evacuated from Alice Springs, which we felt was very close to the war. We sewed handkerchiefs for soldiers and we thought she should be given one!
– Shirley Davies
The Standard (Frankston), January 1942, complains: ‘Many people are suffering from an evacuation complex - a word which has become too common in our plan of life. It’s spoken as a matter of course, as though it is the only thing to do - evacuate. If needs be, children must be evacuated; that is obvious; also the aged and infirm, but why anyone else?’
Mrs Vola Howe (nee Robertson):
I am now 85 years and with my mother and three siblings evacuated from Scott Street, Dandenong to live for about 18 months in Maldon Victoria. My parents were frightened that the Japs were coming South! My Mum was especially scared as where we lived in Dandenong in Scott Street there was a petrol dump down the road and Mum was quite sure they would come and bomb it! My father boarded in Brunswick where he worked making trailers for the war effort. I was 12 years old when we moved and transferred from Dandenong High School to Castlemaine High - they didn’t have higher than Primary in Maldon. I was the eldest with two brothers and a baby sister, in 1941 when the fear was that Japan had attacked Darwin and concern they were coming south! We eventually moved back, and my father was sick of travelling each weekend by train to see us. My mother kept the car with us in Maldon to get around in!
Shirley Davies was at Frankston Primary School during the war:
I remember great excitement at school because one little girl was being evacuated from Alice Springs, which we felt was very close to the war. We all wanted to be her friend and give her things. We sewed handkerchiefs for soldiers and we thought she should be given one!
Myrna McBain lived in Richmond:
I was born in October 1940 at East Melbourne the first child of Elsie (Williams) and Frank Jones and they lived in Richmond. At this time my father worked for a tannery in Richmond and was exempt from war service. My mother had grown up in Lilydale. Richmond, Victoria was a factory area and Lilydale was rural. I am guessing some time in 1942, my mother and I went to stay with her parents in Lilydale. A brother of my father had enlisted in the RAAF in January 1942 from Sydney where he lived at Quakers Hill. He was married and had a son born in January 1941. He left Sydney for Melbourne and was at Ascot Vale before leaving Melbourne in May 1942 for ‘the islands’. This was probably when his wife and son came down from Sydney, and stayed with my father in Richmond to look after him. My recollection is that my cousin slept in my cot and my Aunt used a lot of my mother’s preserves, jams etc. and they left Sydney for Melbourne as it was felt to be safer. Also Lilydale was safer than the factories of Richmond if the Japanese bombed it.
My mother and I were definitely back in Richmond when my sister was born in April 1944 and my Aunt back in Sydney when her second son was born in May 1945. My uncle returned to Australia in December 1943.
Mrs Bassett-Smith:
I was an evacuee and I went not because of invasion fears but because my father was away with the AIF. I had a governess with a friend’s family at Eltham. In the thirties, it was not unusual for a governess to be part of a country family and stay on for years. I don’t remember being frightened and I don’t think Victorians feared an invasion because of the topography of their coastline. I thought air raid drill was fun. One of the evacuees with us had her home in Sydney shelled by the Japanese.
Elizabeth Paine from Brighton Historical Society along the same lines:
We do not have a lot of information. One of our volunteers was a student teacher in 1942, the Hyde Street, Footscray School suburb of Melbourne. Her job was preparing the identification tags for the children to prepare for evacuation. Some children had to be sent to a cleansing station. Fortunately the evacuation did not have to take place. Some schools were relocated at short notice at the beginning of the war for servicemen’s use of their buildings.
Melbourne Girl’s Grammar School at South Yarra was evacuated for Air Force use. Some girls went to Marysville, some to Doncaster, some had governesses. East Melbourne St Catherine’s was evacuated to Warburton, the vacated building used as a WAAAF training base.
A Dr Weigall from the Bush Nursing Association said in January 1942 that evacuee children were in greater danger in small country towns because if the enemy dropped incendiary bombs in dry forest or pastoral areas, fire could be life threatening.
In 1946 although much material was censored and not available, armchair strategists reviewed the evidence and offered opinions. In August 1946, the Brisbane Worker reported the Minister for Information, Mr Calwell, saying at an election meeting in the Melbourne Town Hall: ‘The threat of a Japanese invasion at Port Phillip Bay through Bass Strait was very real on Boxing Day, 1941. So near was the danger he said, ‘that the officer in charge of defence for Victoria sent urgent messages to municipal councils calling in old German howitzers, given as souvenirs after the First World War’ Mr. Calwell strongly attacked the Menzies and Madden Governments for Australia’s unpreparedness for war with Japan. The howitzers were rushed to Maribyrnong to be rebored and used for defence and one division was stationed each side of the Bay. ‘Australia was 300,000 rifles short at the time,’ he said.