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Flight Command
By John Oddie, Mark Abernethy Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2014 John Oddie
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74343-698-1
CHAPTER 1
A Military Heritage Unremarked
I retired from the Royal Australian Air Force in June 2012. I had served in the military for over 35 years, the last six of them as an air commodore. After the retirement function at the Royal Military College, I stayed in Canberra overnight with my wife, Barbara — who had been an air traffic controller in the RAAF — and my son, Tatham, a technology consultant who had flown in from Norway for the occasion. Officers in the Australian military are never quite uncommissioned; in any case, it is hard to let go of the commitments of a lifetime. Even after retirement, we commonly make our experience available to the armed forces in some way, remaining in the reserves and often working in defence-related industries. My future would entail both, as well as a renewed commitment to my marriage and family, and an attempt to revive my farming heritage.
To that end, Barbara and I had bought a piece of land, and it was there that we headed the day after the retirement ceremony. The irony was not lost on either of us: I'd initially joined the Air Force to escape the confines of the farm I grew up on. I was convinced there was something bigger and better happening out there, beyond the barbed-wire fences that separated our Victorian country schoolyard from the highway and our family sheep paddocks from the wider world.
Now here I was back on the land again, with fences to build, vehicles to fix, an endless list of chores. But after all that had happened in the previous 35 years, I was looking forward to it.
I was born in Skipton, Victoria, the fourth child of five. There was a large gap between Pat, the third child, and me. We sometimes joked that I was a 'mistake' — and that my younger sister Joanne was another one. Mum was the daughter of Stanley James Vickers, a First World War veteran, who had a terrible war and was prone to drunken rages for the rest of his life. During one of his rages he kicked Mum, then a teenager, out of home. She did not forgive him until she was 80. (I had researched his military service, and told her that he'd served with a battalion of 900 Australians — which churned through 2600 men during his time.) Mum became a teacher in the Mallee region of Victoria, and once ran a seriously under-equipped school from a country town hall. Dad came from a sheep-farming family and served in the Second World War.
Our family's sheep farm was at Skipton, and I went to school a 30-minute bus ride to the west, at Carranballac — a little town that was little more than a school, a shop and a football oval. I remember mornings so cold you could hear the ice crackling; low-angled morning sun reflecting off dried winter grasses; magpies carolling in the pine trees. The school bus would roll down the Stoneleigh Settlement Road, picking up the kids. In all, our four teachers had charge of 80 children.
We, the naïve children of an unspoken history, were oblivious to the background of our tough rural community. The area was first settled after the First World War as part of General Sir John Monash's soldier-settler program; veterans of the Second World War were also given land grants. And while our lives were untainted by the ugliness of our fathers', grandfathers' and uncles' experiences on battlefields from Europe to New Guinea, our mothers taught us to live with apprehension and uncertainty and never to complain.
Country schooling in the 1960s meant morning parades to a creaky recording of God Save the Queen, the smack of a football being kicked down the paddock, cold milk drunk from a glass bottle with a foil cap, scratching out cursive script with a nib dipped in ink, and religious studies classes where we discovered that there were two tribes: Catholics and the rest. We never saw anyone with dark skin or anyone from Asia. We could see 'foreigners' on the TV news, but I don't recall them seeming more than fictional. We were ignorant about the world beyond, but it intruded nonetheless. The Glenelg Highway ran past our school, and I would look at the few cars and trucks going past, thinking that — unlike us in our sleepy cocoon — their drivers all seemed to have somewhere to go, deadlines to make, and important things to do.
I remember seeing an Anzac Day memorial service on the TV news. It was in Melbourne, and there seemed to be a lot of people there. It didn't occur to me to ask why they had gone to war — or, closer to home, how war had affected my family and my friends' families. In our world, no one talked about such things. My dad didn't watch the Anzac services on TV and didn't explain his apparent disinterest.
On Sundays, we sometimes listened to the hymns and Bible readings on ABC Radio, though my parents did not go to church or send us to Sunday school. There was so much work to do on the farm. It dominated our lives. My siblings, my friends and I had no idea there were kids who got home from school and lay down in front of the TV until dinner was served, or who were still in their pyjamas at 9 a.m. on Saturday morning.
When I got home from school each afternoon, I had to feed and water the chickens and the dogs, then cut and stack the firewood for the kitchen stove and the fireplace in the lounge room. There was no way out of these chores — I had to do them, no ifs or buts.
When Dad bought the farm from his uncle Frank after returning from the war, our house had four rooms. By the time I came along, he had added a dining room, a lounge room, a sunroom, a kitchen and — luxury! — an indoor bathroom. The original rooms had become bedrooms. The biting south-easterly gales off the Southern Ocean made winters harsh and unrelenting, while in summer the roaring northerly winds dried the paddocks to a crisp and turned the house to an oven. During one drought in the 1960s, the dust and dried sheep manure piled nearly a foot deep on our front verandah, and biscuits of dried grass tumbled across the paddock in blast-furnace winds. It was hard country, where farmers worked for every penny and stared down disaster without blinking.
Early in 1968, my final year at Carranballac primary school, Mum told me I had to sit for an important exam. If I did well, I might earn a half-tuition scholarship to Ballarat College. This was the first major test I'd faced outside our little community. We drove up to the school's impressive entrance and I was ushered into the hall along with the 200 other contenders. I did the only thing I knew how to do: sat down, got on with it, and did my best. And I won the half-scholarship.
So I left my mates behind and became a boarder at the college, which my Dad and my brothers had attended. My sisters, Pat and Joanne, attended nearby Clarendon College. The boarding house became my home — the place where my friends and I ate, slept and studied. I guess we all learned to get on pretty well. There were a few fights and the odd bit of tough behaviour, including bullying. But there wasn't much to be done about that except to toughen up and get on with things, while trying not to become too much of a target.
Mum and Dad would drop by to visit during their infrequent trips to Ballarat, which was a 45-minute drive from our farm, a long way in those days. Mum would chide me for not making a decent effort with my letters; apparently it was not enough to say, 'Dear Mum and Dad. I am fine. Love, John.' Dad would always slip me a couple of dollars and tell me to work hard.
The weeks were marked off by Sunday services either at St Cuthbert's Church across the road (where Mum and Dad had been married) or at St Andrew's, a big church in town, a couple of kilometres away. The long walk to St Andrew's was made up for by the chance to glimpse the Clarendon College girls, who also attended the church. During the sermons, which moved like treacle, I would drift off to sleep or muck up with my mates, hoping not to get sprung by the master on duty. After church we would chat briefly with the mysterious girls, including my sister Joanne, before they were formed up in their lines and marched away. Sometimes we would dress smartly, summon all our courage, and ask the mistress of the Clarendon boarding house for permission to speak to one of the girls, in hopes of inviting her to an upcoming dance.
Life at Ballarat was energetic and sporty, with rowing, footy, cricket, tennis or hockey dominating our spare moments when we weren't horsing around. Rowing involved hard, two-hour-plus workouts under the eyes of old 'Hutch' Hutchinson, a lovely man who tolerated the idiocy and competitive anger in the boat and still made a great crew out of us. (To the surprise of many — including me — we actually won our final race on Lake Wendouree.) Back at the boarding house after training, we would eat as only growing boys do, devouring a huge pile of meat, vegetables and fruit and downing a huge jug of milk each before heading off to study.
One night, our house master came around the dorm asking if anyone knew where Charlie Bulsuke was. No one had seen him, and he wasn't in his bed. The next morning he was found dead on the school running track. We were told he had died of a heart attack while running late at night. Charlie was a big boy, very fit, a good sportsman and very popular. His family came out from Thailand for his funeral and to take his body home. This was my first encounter with death, and I still remember the shock and the sadness. I couldn't help thinking about how Charlie's family had sent him to school in a foreign country, hoping it would give him opportunities he didn't have at home.
The school breaks were not 'vacation' time in the traditional sense. Like most of the other boarders, I returned to the farm, where there was always work to do. Each summer holidays we all — including Mum sometimes — cut, carted and stacked 20,000 bales of hay to feed the sheep and cattle over the winter. If it rained, we would have to go out in the paddocks and tip over thousands of pressed bales so they would dry out and not get mouldy. There's no way to minimise or shirk that kind of work. It just has to be done.
When the season put an end to the haymaking, the flyblown sheep kept us busy. The tragedy of fly strike on sheep and the disgusting work required to remove the maggots and protect the sheep from further damage took some getting used to. In the autumn break, it was ploughing and lambing season, with daily efforts to control the foxes, help the ewes give birth, and collect the carcasses of lambs and ewes that died. Sometimes the spring break also coincided with shearing, and long days would be spent working in the woolshed with local shearers. So life in the 'holidays' was demanding, and while I missed the fun and lazing about that other boys seemed to enjoy, I was a better boy for the experience. Looking back I think my farming childhood gave me a capacity to endure, but also to find pleasure and reward in working hard shoulder to shoulder with good people.
While sport was big at my school, so were scouting and Army Cadet training. While I joined the Boy Scouts and valued the skills I learned, I largely hated the experience because our school troop was infested with bullies and none of the staff seemed to care. Like most boys, I also joined the school Cadet unit. Although the ethos was simplistic and militaristic in many ways, there appeared to be less bullying here, perhaps because of a founding emphasis on discipline and respect and a more attentive leadership. A number of school holiday camps I went on were fantastic, as they allowed us to do things that in those days we could have experienced nowhere else. A signals course, for example, taught us to communicate using high-frequency and very-high-frequency radios and field telephones. Later, a combat engineering course gave me experience using powered shovels, windlasses and field construction techniques. At one point, we recovered a heavy truck that had been deliberately bogged in a deep creek. We learned to shoot with .303 rifles, and occasionally we even got to fire an old Bren gun. Our unit often camped in the Mount Cole area, north of my family farm, and we had the chance to operate radios and make treks through the bush, mostly without adults around and in the most demanding conditions of rain and cold. An occasional bout of dysentery gave us a sharp lesson in the importance of food handling and hygiene. On Anzac Day we would stand guard at the Cenotaph, dressed in kilts and holding our heavy old rifles. (We would even be allowed a coffee and a tot of rum in the early dawn.) Resting the rifle butts on the toes of our boots made our feet go numb, which was a problem when we had to march off again. Unfortunately, my dad never came along to Anzac Day ceremonies. I never asked him why, but maybe he was not keen on seeing one of his sons in uniform.
The annual cadet camps at Benalla were held at an old camp on the edge of the airfield. While we made good friends and learned a lot about communications, engineering and general Army matters, the courses were tough physically and to some extent emotionally. We would be woken at 6 a.m., scrambling out to the road in underpants, singlet and greatcoat. After roll call, we would dress and prepare the room for inspection; have breakfast; spend all morning training; have a disgusting lunch; train all afternoon; have 30 minutes' personal time followed by dinner; train all evening; then go to bed. This went on for two weeks. By today's standards, our training was not especially safe or 'child-sensitive', but in those days there was nothing exceptional about it.
For me, the toughening effects of military experience were consistent with the rest of my life as a farmer's son, a boarding-school student, and an adventurous kid generally. During my teenage years, I had two especially memorable adventures. My brother Neville and sister Pat were experienced bushwalkers, and one morning we headed off to climb Mount Bogong, along with a mate of mine named Graham. Graham and I used to spend weekends sliding down mullock heaps (the mine tailing heaps that result from Ballarat's gold-mining heritage) on sheets of old iron, whizzing between the trees and stopping with a thump at the bottom. We were all fit and reasonably well kitted-out as we left the car park at the bottom of the long and steep mountain trail. The weather was clear and bright. Graham and I ran ahead as much as our heavy packs allowed and we were all enjoying the climb and the scenery.
Soon, however, the weather started to cloud in, and the temperature rapidly dropped. Within minutes it started raining, and then suddenly it was snowing. I was happy to trudge on. But what with the rain and the sudden onset of snow, my body temperature started dropping rapidly. Neville and Pat were still behind us, and neither they nor I realised that I was starting to suffer symptoms of hypothermia. I kept going as best I could, but I found myself growing tired and sleepy. The snow was piling up and, more disastrously, the wind had picked up behind it — a mountain blizzard howling in directly from the Southern Ocean.
Fortunately, we were only several hundred metres from a shelter hut. The shelter was basically a wreck, but it would help us survive the blizzard conditions. I didn't know this at the time, because I was not mentally competent. But the others forced me to crawl and walk and rest and crawl again until we eventually made it to the hut. There, Graham and I were quickly dumped out of our wet, cold clothes and put into sleeping bags. I was fed warm mashed-potato soup as Pat and Neville struggled with tents and skis borrowed from another sheltering party, to board up the hut against the arctic blast of the blizzard. As the winds tore into the mountain and pounded the hut with snow and ice, I drifted in and out of delirium.
The next morning we awoke to silence, with beams of bright sunlight coming through chinks in the hut walls. Outside lay the serenity of a steep mountain snowfield. Neville asked me what I remembered of the night and the day before, but I couldn't tell him much. I think I was lucky to survive, because one of the few things I did recall was the intense desire to fall asleep alone in the snow, even though some part of me understood it would kill me.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Flight Command by John Oddie, Mark Abernethy. Copyright © 2014 John Oddie. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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