Fair Dinkum War

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Hello, my name is Carolyn and I am an Education Officer here at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne.

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We look forward to sharing some stories with you during the school holidays.

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The story we have got today is The Fair Dinkum War which has been written and illustrated by David Cox.

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In the second year of World War Two, my family moved from the country to the city, all except for my dad, who worked as an overseer on a sheep station out west.

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He had been a soldier in World War One so now he was a bit too old for the army.

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He would be more useful on the land.

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I was a country boy and it was the first time I had been to a real school.

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I was in Grade Two and my teacher was Miss Walker.

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She was a walker, all right.

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Some of us walked with her on the way to school and we had to run to keep up.

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She was a talker, too…and a chalker.

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One morning, she drew a kookaburra on our blackboard.

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It looked real enough to fly away.

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I had never seen anyone who could draw like that and I wanted to draw like Miss Walker did.

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That same morning, something important happened.

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It began with a great rumble that came in through our classroom window and rumbled on and on.

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We all ran down the stairs, even Miss Walker, and out into the school yard

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and hung on the school-yard fence and gazed in wonder.

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The American army had come to take part in the war!

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An endless line of trucks and jeeps and tanks and weapons carriers

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came around the corner and along our street, all of them with big white stars on their sides.

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There were big cannons, too.

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Soldiers in the trucks waved to us.

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We wouldn’t have guessed there were so many trucks in the whole wide world.

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They rumbled right through the morning break

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and when we came out for lunch they still rolled by.

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Then they were gone, heading north to where the war was being fought.

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The war was coming closer and closer.

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Japanese planes had dropped bombs on our towns to the north!

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Our grown-ups were worried.

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They studied the newspapers, listened to the radio, frowned and talked in low voices.

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When children came near, they talked about the weather and other things.

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It was hard sometimes not to be afraid.

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But we knew all about the war.

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We knew every aeroplane and tank and warship.

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We knew the names of army generals…they were as famous as football players.

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I did drawings of battle scenes for other kids and the games we played were war games.

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We shot one another with pretend bullets and bled pretend blood.

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We took prisoners of war.

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We were aeroplanes and tanks.

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We collected toy soldiers made of lead and set them out for battle.

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Men dug air-raid trenches in zigzag lines across our school grounds.

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They were not for play; this was fair dinkum war.

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We kids were not allowed to go in them, jump over them, or even go near them, unless there was air-raid drill.

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Then we had to file out of class

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down into the trenches, shuffle along on each others’ heels

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and squat on our haunches with our hands on our heads in case of falling bombs.

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Everybody had air-raid shelters at home, too.

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Some were just trenches, like ours, that filled with water when it rained.

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But some kids had air-raid shelters they could boast about

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with cups and plates and cupboards full of canned food that would last for weeks.

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Every night the town was dark.

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No street lights were turned on and black curtains hung on the windows of every house,

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so that not a chink of light would tell the Japanese bombers where we were.

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This was known as 'The Black-out'.

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Someone at home was sewing the curtains in this picture here.

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Sometimes at night, loud air-raid sirens wailed all over town

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and we hoped it was just practice and not the real thing.

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Men with helmets, marked ‘W’ for Warden,

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patrolled the streets and knocked on the doors of houses where a light was showing.

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Because of the war, we had to do without the things we loved,

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and that was called ‘The Austerity Program’.

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We could only dream about chocolate biscuits and chocolate ice-creams.

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Food and clothing were scarce, too, because of the war.

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We were given little books of coupons, so when we bought food or clothes,

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we paid with money and a certain number of coupons.

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So nobody, however rich, could buy too much, and that seemed fair.

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It was called ‘Rationing’.

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Lots of rubber and metal were needed for the war,

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so we collected hot water bottles and tin cans and things like that.

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We took them to school and they were taken away to become tyres and trucks and tanks.

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We were all taking part in ‘The War Effort’.

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Petrol was hard to come by, so there were not many cars on our streets.

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Our milk and our bread came by horse and cart,

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and our rubbish bins left in the same way.

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And little piecarts, with ovens and chimneys, were pulled by piebald ponies.

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They parked beside schools and movie theatres to sell us pies.

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They were good pies, too, with crisp tops and thick gravy.

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Mothers, and grandmothers even, dressed up in their hats and gloves and rode to town on wobbly bicycles.

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Polite old men on Shanks’s pony raised their hats to them.

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I used to ride my bike to Fredlein’s Corner store,

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and one day I stopped by the Fredleins’ back-yard fence and climbed into their mulberry tree.

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I stayed in the tree for quite a while.

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When I went to the store, Mr Fredlein looked over his spectacles at me,

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‘I see you like mulberries, young man.’

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You can see his red face. He's got lots of red mulberries squashed over him!

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When the circus came to town, it passed right by our school.

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With our Grade Four teacher, Mr Brown, we hung on the fence and stared and stared.

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There were lions and camels and elephants.

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Later on, I tried to draw all the animals.

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Mr and Mrs Fredlein had no kids of their own.

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When they went to the circus, they took me with them…me, the famous mulberry thief.

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So I did drawings of clowns and monkeys,

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tightrope walkers, and men and women on the flying trapeze.

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I gave the drawings to Mr and Mrs Fredlein, to square up things for the mulberries.

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Most Sundays, we rode our bikes to Grandmother’s house on the edge of town

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and had lunch at a long table, sitting straight like soldiers.

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There were always aunts and uncles and older cousins

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who wore the uniforms of the army, navy or airforce.

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Grandmother read me books by Charles Dickens and taught me to play chess,

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but I had to sit very straight

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and I wasn’t allowed to whistle through my teeth when I was trying to think.

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I never got to beat her.

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Grandmother told me to never be afraid, not of anything.

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She was not even afraid of hornets.

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If she had been a man, she said, she would have been a sailor.

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Our father was away out west working on sheep and cattle stations,

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and once or twice a year he came back to us, just for a while.

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He would tell us stories about the bush.

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Then he would be gone again and far away, but at least we knew he was safe.

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Other kids’ fathers were far away in the middle of the war.

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Some of them were prisoners, some had escaped.

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Some kids’ fathers would never come back.

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I used to walk to school with a boy called Des.

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‘I am very happy,’ Des told me one day,

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‘and I am happy because my dad was a genius.

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He was a real, fair dinkum genius, and he could play any musical instrument that ever was.

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And that’s true and that’s why I’m happy.’

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On one side of our town was an American army base.

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Soldiers bounced around the streets in jeeps, and sailors bounced on hired ponies.

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We called the Americans ‘yanks’.

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They called us ‘buddies’ and gave us chewing gum and signed our autograph books.

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On the other side of town was a camp for soldiers from the island of Java.

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We never saw them on our streets, but we knew they were there.

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We went to them with money or gifts—chillies and corn was what they liked most—and they made us beautiful kites.

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We kids could make kites with newspaper and sticks, and we flew them on string.

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But the Javanese made them out of bamboo and coloured paper, andwe could fly them high on cotton thread.

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Lots of kids had Javanese kites, and they were shaped like all animals.

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Birds and fish. There were even dragons.

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People of our town lifted their eyes to the sky.

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I went through Grade Three, Grade Four, Grade Five, and still the war went on.

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When it is over, people said, there will be dancing in the streets.

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And they were right.

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When peace was declared, people went wild.

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They laughed and laughed and hugged one another and danced in the streets.

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Soon, we knew, there would be chocolate-coated ice-creams

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and our soldiers would be coming home.

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And that was not all.

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My dad was offered a job as the manager of a big sheep station.

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We could go back to the country and I would draw horses.

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And we would all be together again.

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Thank you for joining us for that story.