Dave Lassam - Flag flying

Transcript

The first trip I did, we've sailed from Sydney through the bight to Fremantle, worked there with the Americans, they had a fleet over there, the Midway was there. And then we sailed up to Indonesia. My first port of call was Jakarta, which was an eye opener for a young bloke from out the scrub in Tassie to Jakarta was a bit of a shock.

And we did, in those days,, a lot of touring around. I say touring around, what we called flag flying. So it's not like, in later years when we were doing over in the Gulf and performing war tasks, we would sail from Singapore to Hong Kong to India, and look out for the Russians in the Indian Ocean and then come back and then just go to different places and fly the flag, as it's called.

We're just there. We enjoy the locals hospitality, then we go back to sea and exercise. So I spent two years on the Melbourne, did two big trips and I did her last trip that she ever did as well. So I had a great time.