She arrived at a crucial time for Australia: the Japanese offensive had been halted at Kokoda and Milne Bay, but they were still in New Guinea and were making bombing raids on Townsville. She was placed in the personnel section and put in charge of pilot-debriefing records: she met – through their words, and then in person – the men who were flying for Australia at this terrifying time, and she had to close their files when they did not return from battle. A few of them had taken her out – one date, Skene Paterson, was killed in an Avro Anson crash on Heron Island in July 1943. A name which meant nothing to her at the time was that of a fellow passenger on this fatal flight, Ronald Douglas Robertson.
Ron was my uncle. He was the first-born (in 1918) of that branch of the Robertsons who had left the snowy caps of the Monaro to find work in the big smoke. Ron’s father, Harold, was the son of ‘Red Robbo’, the squatter who came to the city so that his boys could learn a trade. The eldest, ‘Piper Bill’ Robertson, became a tram driver and played the bagpipes in the Leichhardt town band before volunteering for service in 1914: he was among the first to die in Shrapnel Valley at Gallipoli. Harold had a bad chest, which kept him home from the war and limited the jobs available to him: the trade he chose, at fifteen, was that of French polisher – essentially, polishing the pianos of the upper classes in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. He was employed by Beale and Co., the piano specialists, and rose to become the factory foreman, supervising fifty workers and apprentices. His lungs were strong enough for him to sing in the Methodist church choir, where he caught the eye of Florence Whatson, an accomplished young woman from a large farming family around Taree. She was always called ‘Fol’: some arcane allusion to ‘fol-derol’. They married, honeymooned at Harrington (a fishing village on the New South Wales north coast at the mouth of the Manning River) and bought on a large mortgage a small house in Clements Street, Drummoyne, in which to bring up their three sons – Ron, my father, Frank, and Lance.
Then, in 1929, the Great Depression hit and Harold lost his job – piano-polishing was a luxury even the rich could no longer afford. He would tramp the streets every day, finding a job here and there, earning just enough to pay 1/6d to the local ‘rabbito’ for a pair of the rabbits which kept the Sydney poor from starvation. Once, he even pawned his prize possession – a watch. I now wear it as an heirloom.
Fol took a tailoring course, and learnt to cut down Harold’s suits to make presentable clothes for her three sons, together with a fourth boy, a friend of Ron’s called Jack Westacott, whom they took in. The boys never forgot their father’s anxious negotiations with a caring bank manager over the mortgage he could not afford to pay: suspending the repayments was the salvation of the Robertson family. In admiration, Frank aspired to become a bank manager, as did his younger brother, Lance (who did become one).
Ron was by all accounts a marvel: he did his Leaving Certificate at night while working – for 10 shillings a week – with Gregory’s Street Directories (in every car, until the advent of sat nav). Then he commenced an economics course at Sydney University – the first of my family to attempt tertiary education. He kept a close eye on Frank, who had been dux of Drummoyne but had to leave school at sixteen to earn money. The Commonwealth Bank was looking for staff and my father did an exam and passed well enough to be appointed clerk to the manager of the Bellevue Hill branch in Sydney’s east. He was there, behind the till, doling out shopping money to elderly ladies, when the Japanese bombed Darwin.
It was Ron who led the Robertsons to war, even before Pearl Harbor. He learnt about fascism and the need to fight it, and his choice was the air force – more individual, more romantic and more chance of standing up to the enemy. He gave up his economics course and volunteered in 1941: he was mortified to find that his eyesight lacked the precision required of a pilot, but he had all the qualities required of a navigator and commissioned officer. Soon he was selected to go to England to navigate on the heavy Lancasters that were beginning to pound Germany. In the weeks before this lethal posting (half the wartime Lancaster crews were killed) he was stationed in Gladstone with a squadron flying Avro Anson bombers, on the lookout for Japanese submarines.
The threat from Japan increased, and Frank was next in line to volunteer. He chose the RAAF, for much the same reasons as Ron, and just before his twentieth birthday was accepted for pilot training. He had never flown before, but was soon doing aerobatics in a Tiger Moth. ‘My first spin – nearly scared me to death and found myself trembling when the ordeal was over – don’t think I’ll ever master the queer sensation,’ Frank recorded, frankly, in his new logbook. Then came his first solo flight – ‘I feel as though I must tell the world!’
In no time he’d mastered the Tiger Moth, and moved on to the Wirraway (the Aboriginal word for ‘challenge’), Australia’s unique contribution to fighting aircraft, too cumbersome and slow ever to win a fight. It was the FJ Holden of the air force, the only plane that was Australian-made and designed.3
It was on 30 May 1943 that Frank made his miraculous crash-landing on the roof of the house at Chiltern. A month later he received his commission. ‘I feel as free as the air on a still summer’s day,’ he recorded in his log.
Ron, while waiting for his transfer to England, was supervising the family from his bomber base in Gladstone: dispatching fresh Queensland fruit to his mother with directions to make it into jam for his brothers; advising his father on legal matters; writing long instructions about life to eighteen-year-old Lance, who had just been accepted by the Europe Air Training Scheme to train in Canada; and congratulating Frank on getting his wings (‘May they always bear you up and bring you home’). His letters told how the pilot of his Avro Anson would go on target runs a few feet above the waves, so they could see schools of sharks, a whale and her calf, and a jumping marlin. He would pull back on the stick just in time. It may have been this kind of daredevil flying which caused the pilot of AX-471 to fly as low as he could over Heron Island, and then discover that he couldn’t.4 A wing clipped a pisonia tree, the plane crashed (on what is now the tennis court of a luxury resort) and most of the young airmen on board died instantly. Ron survived, was rescued by a US ‘sub-chaser’ and was brought back to the mainland with critical injuries.
It was a terrible time for the family. Fol was flown to Gladstone, to take up a hopeless vigil by his bedside, and Harold joined her the next day. My father, by then at Mildura practising aerial combat, received two telegrams from his parents on 30 July:
Ron dangerously ill – pray hard. Mum
Ron suffering internal injuries and pneumonia as result of crash – can you come to Gladstone? Dad
Frank took compassionate leave, flew to Melbourne and hitched a lift in a DC-3 to Rockhampton. He arrived in Gladstone a day after the funeral: Ron’s crushed body gave up its ghost on 1 August. He had survived in a coma for a week, coming out of it only once to tell his distraught mother that he was in pain and could not feel his legs (both had been amputated). He was a remarkable young man, aged twenty-five, and it was my family destiny to be born to fill his legless shoes.
Ron haunted my life, in the sense that I was named to replace him, for my grandparents at least. Theirs was a private grief that lasted all their years – I went once with my grandmother to Ron’s war grave at Gladstone cemetery and will never forget the anguish on her face. Sometimes I arrange to put flowers there on Anzac Day, and when I first mentioned him on a television program, I received letters from some who had known him in Gladstone, remembering his charisma so many years later. I spent a lot of childhood time with my grandparents, and imbibed their sense of how war, rather than being glorious, arbitrarily destroyed what is good.
I have never, to tell the truth, much enjoyed having ‘Ronald’ as a middle name – the Reagan presidency has a lot to answer for – but there was a magic moment, sixty-five years after Ron’s death, when I met John Westacott, then the executive producer of Channel 9’s 60 Minutes and the son of Ron’s best mate, Jack. I had a story I w
anted the show to tell (about how the Church of England had lost the body of White Australia’s founding father, Captain Arthur Phillip), but I was an ABC type and a bit suspicious of tabloid television. I cold-called John, whose secretary said he would meet me at once. He advanced with a smile and held his hand out – ‘John Douglas Westacott,’ he said. ‘Geoffrey Ronald Robertson,’ I replied, as we both mentally saluted Ronald Douglas Robertson the remarkable young man after whom we had been named. The Arthur Phillip story was told, on 60 Minutes, just as I wanted.5
Providence, having preserved my father in the Wirraway crash, brought me closer to existence because of his need for a pair of long socks. These accessories – looking slightly ridiculous below the khaki shorts and bare knees of the fighting men in the tropics – were required of every young recruit. Fol, for all her trauma over Ron’s death, had another son to groom for the air war against Japan, and her misery could not overcome her lower-middle-class need to send him forth to battle properly dressed. It was, of course, unthinkingly cruel of officialdom to send Fol’s second son into harm’s way a few weeks after the loss of her first, but such considerations did not bother officials. Frank was ordered to board the train to Townsville then fly to New Guinea and join in combat as a member of 75 Fighter Squadron. But first, insisted Fol, a trip must be made from the grieving home at Drummoyne to a city haberdasher.
And there, in the menswear department of (believe it or not) the Cooee Clothing Store, Bernice Beattie awaited, ever ready to be the instrument of fate. She had taken the job for three days a week to supplement Harry’s teacher’s salary and to help the war effort. It relieved her from the parochialism of Dapto, and brought her into the bright lights of the bustling city, where she met a protective mother dragging a son who, although somewhat woebegone, had an Errol Flynn moustache and a courteous bearing.
‘Long socks?’ she inquired helpfully.
‘Yes, he’s off to Townsville tomorrow. He’s to fly to New Guinea.’
Bernice leapt in: ‘Townsville! I have a daughter in Townsville. He must look her up for me …’
The young man pricked up his ears. The word in the RAAF was that Townsville was a dreadful place with a severe shortage of women. You couldn’t swim – the beaches were covered with barbed wire against the expected Japanese invasion – and for the same reason the local wives had been moved to Brisbane and the girls’ school was closed. Having an introduction to a WAAAF – a blonde no less, as her mother hastily added (‘but very reserved’) – might be just the ticket. ‘Perhaps I could give her a message from you?’ offered Frank as he scented a possibility. Bernice helpfully dictated Joy’s name and the telephone number of the WAAAF accommodation.
When Frank arrived at Townsville, with an order to fly out to Port Moresby the next day, he dialled Joy’s number from the train station. Perhaps they could meet that evening? Joy had no particular desire to step out, but at nineteen she was still a dutiful daughter: if her mother had vetted this stranger, she could at least meet him. She instructed Frank to collect her at the WAAAF barracks, St Anne’s Church of England Girls’ School.
Frank Robertson turned up at the hostel at the appointed hour to request the receptionist to call Joy Beattie’s room. There were other women in the badly lit foyer eyeing the evening’s male visitors, and suddenly one of them let out a heart-rending scream. She fell to the floor, pointing at Frank. ‘Robbie – Ron – Ron Robertson!’ She thought she had seen the ghost of the man she had known in Gladstone, whose funeral she had attended a few weeks before, and who now, as if resurrected, had walked through the door. Frank knelt down by the traumatised woman. ‘No, I’m his younger brother. Tell me about him.’ She had worked in the officers’ mess at Gladstone and Ron had been her favourite – ‘We all loved him.’
It was, by any score, a remarkable scene that greeted my mother– although in a war which was claiming so many lives it was not all that surprising. But it gave a certain otherworldliness to my parents’ first meeting, when Frank stood up to salute (really) and to introduce himself. It was not love at first sight, but you could say there was definitely emotion in the air.
Then fate took a hand, in the form of one of those bossy-booted, kind-hearted, no-nonsense alpha females who are at their best when organising and administering what would, if left to males, be chaos. She was responsible for transporting men and materials to Port Moresby and the islands, and must have had a soft spot for Joy – a tireless and reliable worker – and thought she needed a break. Her escort was gentle, well-spoken and genuine, and flying into battle the next day. Or was he? In an act of total defiance of her duty, which should have had her cashiered, she decided to remove Francis Robertson from the next day’s transport roster. And the next. And the next.
So Frank and Joy were vouchsafed a full week to get to know each other and the city of Townsville, which they toured. There was barbed wire on the beach and the town was peppered with bomb craters – the Japanese were making night-time raids. There were, however, some of the attractions that followed American servicemen around the world: an open-air cinema with the latest films (Casablanca, inevitably), late-opening bars and something that shocked the inner-city Methodist and Brethren part-raised girl – brothels. Even more shocking was the fact that the American forces had segregated brothels – one for black soldiers, another for white. Frank and Joy took themselves off on the ferry to Magnetic Island, a pleasant sanctuary half an hour from the coast, to swim and talk and take tea at the Arcadia guesthouse.
The idyll could not last. After the week in which Frank’s name had mysteriously disappeared from each day’s transport roster, the commanding officer of 75 Squadron visited the main office. Joy introduced Frank – by now almost her boyfriend – to his commanding officer, who hit the roof: ‘Frank Robertson! What the blue blazes are you doing here? You should have been with us a week ago! Get on the transport tomorrow, or there will be hell to pay!’
Pilot Officer Robertson was dispatched to war the next day.
Frank became a useful Kittyhawk pilot, to judge from his reports, and he was soon promoted to flying officer. He explained up front to the commanding officer that he was still shaken by his brother’s death and he was given kid-glove treatment for a few days. Then it was decided that the best way of unshaking him was to put him in the most perilous position the RAAF had to offer – wingman to notorious daredevil Les Jackson. Les had not been able to cope with his own brother’s death in battle and he flew with a courage that bordered on madness, a rage not only against Japan but against death itself.6 He took his wingmen high into the darkest clouds, then down to strafe the enemy at treetop level.
When Les moved on, my prospects of being conceived increased, the squadron sighed with relief and then settled down to an important late-war role, winkling the Japanese out of their redoubts up the northern coast of New Guinea and then from islands further to the north. The Kittyhawk (the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk) was built for this role: its powerful cannons could rip through enemy aircraft fuselages or enemy armaments on the ground, and its missiles and underbelly bomb could rain havoc on enemy soldiers in dugouts and slit trenches. It was brutal, single-minded warfare: my father could never forget the smell of burning flesh as he came out of his cockpit onto a captured runway after one island assault. The Japanese, told by their demigod emperor to fight to the death and never surrender, had to be exterminated in their trenches.
They were – so much later – called the great generation by their children, these fliers and fighters of the South Pacific. I have always been proud of my father for being one of them, although I suspect he was terrified much of the time, inconsolable over his brother and simply found himself in a position where there was no alternative to courage. They had exotic women painted on their fuselages – Betty Boop was on the nose of his plane – and they played silly games featuring a character named ‘Foo’, finding anarchic fun in their rituals and roundels and in tormenting their enemy. Of course there were more innocent pleasures
– the grass skirts and coconuts, swimming in clear mountain pools and coral-paved beaches, meeting the occasional infusion of nurses, and always the sunshine (which planted the melanomas that later killed many of them– sunscreen was barely invented). But the war in the Pacific was as cruel as war anywhere, and as ironic. Whenever I read a denial that Robert Menzies sold scrap metal to an aggressively militarist Japan just before the war started, I think of the entry in my father’s logbook after his airbase had been bombed: ‘One of our kittyhawks holed in tail by a NSW Government Railways bolt – our scrap metal returns’. It certainly did, thanks to ‘Pig-Iron Bob’. But these kids were not for the most part political: they were doing their duty, and in the moments before their deaths their minds filled with images of their mothers.
My father returned to Townsville, and to Joy, quite often after his first six-month tour. He had earnt the trust of his squadron, so he was selected to do the ‘grog run’. This was essential to the well-being of men at war, as everyone except obtuse bureaucrats in the RAAF would come to realise. (They court-martialled Australia’s top gun, Clive ‘Killer’ Caldwell, for bringing back beer and whisky to thirsty mates.) My father at least had his commanding officer’s permission, and his Methodism made him the one man in the squadron who could be absolutely trusted with its money as well as the grog. So they raised £50 and ordered him to fly grog runs to Townsville, which reconnected him with Joy. They had corresponded, of course (the letters, sadly, are lost), but as friends rather than lovers. Joy was asked out by other officers, although by this time she had been put in charge of the personnel section, which enabled her to scrutinise their records to find out if they were married or diseased or might otherwise be unsuitable companions.
Rather His Own Man Page 4
