What was it like - living in the Australia of the war years? Part A

Much of what follows comes from my own memories as a young boy. I hope that my memories will encourage you - if you are old enough - to travel back over the years to your own younger days and to remember what happened.

My experience of the war came between the ages of seven and thirteen, and my memories range over:

• Making camouflage nets (or helping the Country Women's Association (CWA) ladies do it) - the CWA made hundreds of thousands of nets across Australia
• Helping to pack Comforts Fund parcels
• Trying to dig an air-raid shelter under the clothes-line at home (it ended up about big enough to house a small dog)
• Having zigzag trenches dug in the playground of our little country school at Bexhill, near Lismore on the north coast of New South Wales
• Sitting on the school horse-paddock fence watching long convoys of Australian and American servicemen heading north
• Later, at high school in Lismore, hearing the air-raid sirens being tested each week
• Meeting and helping entertain servicemen when they bivouacked on our farm and others

Singing and playing instruments with my family at the soldiers’ send-offs and welcome-homes - singing songs like...

'There’ll Always be an England while there’s a country lane
The Army, the Navy and the Air Force have made old England’s name
We’re Swingin’ Along the Road to Victory and
We’re Gonna Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line if the Siegfried Line’s still there'

And we formed a kids’ version of the VDC (the Volunteer Defence Corps) - the Home Guard or Dad’s Army as the British version was called.

Obviously one of the biggest effects of the war on those at home occurred when a loved one went off to fight and wasn’t seen perhaps for years. Much worse was the impact - the tragic impact - when news was received of a loved one who had been killed or wounded, or captured, or was missing. And after it became known that prisoners were being subjected to barbarous treatment, the anxiety of their families became much greater.

The Second World War touched many thousands of Australian families in these ways, although not to the same extent as the Great War, in which 60,000 Australians had died. About 39,000 died in World War Two.

One of the difficult questions that arose was how the news of servicemen’s deaths should be broken to their families. This was a real problem - whether the local clergyman (who in those days was much more a part of the community than, sadly, is the case today) should deliver the news, or whether it should come via the telegram boy. The churches felt that their ministers were best equipped, by training and experience, to perform this task.

Eventually there was a compromise under which local committees of clergy and postmasters decided how the telegrams were to be delivered in their areas. Even this led to confusion, and in the end Arthur Fadden, as Acting Prime Minister, announced that all telegrams would be delivered by telegram boys. That is what happened until the war ended and all such terrible messages had been delivered.

In 1941 the Jehova’s Witnesses were proclaimed a banned organisation. People of German and Italian descent, some of them long-time citizens of this country, were interned in considerable numbers. At the peak of this process, in September 1944, nearly 7,000 people were behind barbed wire in 18 camps spread across the country.

I suppose the most evident inconvenience of the war for those at home was rationing - mainly of petrol, food and clothing but also things like tobacco and newsprint. This led to displays of greed and selfishness by some in the community. It also produced two other wartime phenomena - hoarding and the black market. One man was found to have hoarded 200 44gal drums of petrol.

Petrol rationing began on 1 October 1940. The day before, motorists in Melbourne (and no doubt other places) indulged in an orgy of petrol-buying, carrying away full tanks and drums, cans and even bottles. A lot of petrol was spilled in the buying frenzy.

When it was announced that rationing of clothing was to be introduced, shoppers in some places rushed the stores and carried away armloads of clothing in what was described as a ‘frenzied, unedifying stampede’. I remember the shopkeepers cutting the coupons out of the ration books with a pair of scissors as purchases were made. Then they would put the money and the docket in a cylindrical container, attach it to a pulley on an overhead wire, pull the cord, and send it flying up to the cashier’s office, high above the floor. The cashier would send the change back in the same way.

Tea, sugar, meat and butter were rationed. In 1942, each person over nine years of age was entitled to one ounce of tea per week (I think it was increased to two ounces later), and you had to register with a shop to get your ration. Some people soon tumbled to the fact that they could register with several shops, but I think something was done to stop that from happening.

Because of the petrol shortage, many cars were simply put up on blocks. A family friend, got her old sulky out of the shed, harnessed up the pony, and started using this, to me, very novel and exciting form of transport. I was delighted one afternoon when she gave me a ride - my first - in the sulky from my grandmother’s place back to our house.

The rationing of petrol led to the appearance on top of buses in Lismore of large canvas bags filled with ‘town gas’ and to the fitting of gas-producers to many vehicles. Our baker had a gas producer on his van, there was one on the school bus, and the butcher delivered the meat in a horse-drawn cart, with a saddle horse alongside to take the meat to houses that weren’t close to the road.

My brother, only 16 years old, constructed a gas-producer in the cow-bails on our dairy farm, out of four-gallon drums, 3/4in galvanised pipe and other bits and pieces. He only did it to see if he could, and actually got it to work - which I thought was a pretty good effort. He made his own charcoal by burning old wooden fence posts in a hole in the ground, covered with earth.

The only problem with my brother’s gas-producer was that, when the charcoal was loaded into the burner and the contraption was fired up, the heat inside the burner melted the air intake pipe.

Petrol rationing didn’t end until almost 10 years after it began. In the 1949 federal election campaign, the coalition ran the slogan "Empty out the socialists and fill up the bowsers" and, after being elected, ended petrol rationing on 8 February 1950.

On all those nights driving to and from concerts and dances in our 1935 Hillman Minx, we could travel only very slowly because the headlights were fitted with things like top hats, with slits in the top of the ‘hat’ that allowed only a weak gleam of light to fall on the road. The car had wide white stripes painted along the edges of its mudguards and running boards in the hope that it would be more easily seen in the dark by other drivers.

The austerity campaign which began in 1942 was designed to conserve scarce resources and make it possible for Australia to feed and clothe Britain, as well as free-up workers for war-related work. Meals in hotels, restaurants and cafes were limited to three courses, and the maximum prices that could be charged were four shillings for lunch, five shillings for dinner, and three shillings for all other meals. This is just one example of the mass of regulations and restrictions that affected almost every aspect of daily life.

On beef-less days it was an offence to buy, sell or eat beef. The 'Australian Women’s Weekly' ran a competition for the best meatless recipe. The winning recipe was for mock sausages:

'Boil one cup rolled oats in three-quarters cup salted water for 15 mins, then add finely chopped onion to flavour. Mix well, empty into basin. When cool add one beaten egg, pepper and herbs to taste, one cup breadcrumbs. Shape into sausages, roll in flour and fry in deep boiling fat until golden brown.'

The Minister for War Organisation of Industry, John Dedman, introduced the Victory Suit for men - no buttons that weren’t functional, no trouser cuffs, slimmer legs and fewer pockets. There was also the short-tailed shirt. For women there was no evening wear, no excessive fullness in garments and little decoration. We were told: watch out for the ‘Squander Bug’.

Attempts were made to reduce consumption of alcohol but these attempts largely failed. So did efforts to curb gambling. These things consumed much of the money that Prime Minister John Curtin wanted invested in war bonds and loans.

You could get a new tyre or tube only if you were an essential user, and produced the worn-out article. To get tobacco, cigarettes, meat or boot polish, you had to be a good customer of the shopkeeper. Building materials, nails, screws, tools, tinned foods, chocolates, bacon, biscuits and washing blue either disappeared or were hard to find. For many people the beer shortage was both a national and a personal catastrophe.

You needed a permit to travel any distance. By applying a zoning system to bread deliveries in Sydney and Melbourne, the manpower authorities freed up 1,214 men for other work, 361 motor vehicles and 770 horse-drawn vehicles.

There were limits or prohibitions placed on the production of furniture, jewellery (except wedding rings, for which there was a big demand), lawnmowers, fur coats and many cosmetics. Icing could only be used on wedding and birthday cakes, and it had to be white. You could employ only one domestic servant, unless the manpower authorities said you could have more than one.

The austerity campaign had another purpose. Curtin was very concerned that while soldiers were dying in the green hell of the New Guinea jungle, people at home were, as he put it, ‘fiddling their leisure away’. He wanted greater equality of sacrifice and stronger commitment to the war effort. Austerity, he said, would improve the quality of the nation.

This story is continued in Part B.....

Barrie, Jerrabomberra, NSW

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