Gary Oakley - Vietnam War veteran

A Gundungurra man joins the Navy

My people are Gundungurra so we're from the Blue Mountains, New South Wales, and I was born in Katoomba, that's like traditional land. Where my people come from is down in the Jamison Valley, in …. I had an apprenticeship, I was offered an apprenticeship to be a pastry chef at the Hydro Majestic because I used to pick a little girl up and take her to school and bring her home for her dad and he was the head pastry chef at the Hydro Majestic.

And he said, "Do you want to, you know, you want apprenticeship? " Because I like to cook and I said, "Yeah, no worries ". So I was gonna, when I turned seventeen, I was going to do this apprenticeship. But dad got a job, because my dad worked for the council, and he ran a treatment works in North Katoomba and he got a job in … central New South Wales … so we moved there and I lost the apprenticeship.

And for an indigenous kid, in the middle of Central New South Wales, there was the mission at Cowra, which is not too far away, no jobs, not a great place. "How do I get out of here? What's the quickest way out? " and I went, "I can join the navy when I'm 15. ". So, I joined the Navy and at that time, they had bakers, and I thought, "I can be a baker ".

So I went to HMAS Leeuwin, and you did 12 months as a junior recruit and at the end of your service at Leeuwin, they basically asked you to give three choices and I had underwater control, my first choice was cook, underwater control and clearance diver. And basically they said to me, "No, you're too smart to be a cook ". But I said, "I want to be a baker " and they went, "Oh, we've just got rid of bakers ". So they said, "You're going to be an electrician, and if you fail electrical course you're going to be a clearance diver ". And I went, "Oh, clearance diver. "

Vietnam's on and I wasn't particularly interested in crawling through a swamp while the locals were shooting at me. So I thought, "Okay, I'll become an electrician ". So I became an electrician and my first ship was HMAS Duchess, they sent me the Duchess. Duchess was in refit. So, basically, we're the refit party in Sydney and I was a Ord D EM, ordinary seaman electrical mechanic. And then they took me off Duchess sent me out to Narimba for a while to paint rocks.

A good thing the Navy used to do, if they've got nothing for you to do, you go and paint rocks. So, you just, you know, painted rocks around the Depot I planted something like 300 rose bushes in front of the wardroom. And, also, and these are the days when the navy used to have pig farms on the base and I also worked in the pig farm.

Culture shock

It's a culture shock. It was a culture shock because to go to Leeuwin you cross Australia and we did by train. So we all muster down at the railway station in Central and none of us had ever … I'd always been a bit of a kid who liked the uniforms because I was in cubs, the scouts, Air League and Army Cadets before I even joined for real. So I kinda liked the military life.

You know, if your family brought you to Central railway station in Sydney, you, well, first off you actually went to HMAS Kuttabul, then the family dropped you off at Kuttabul then Navy took you over. And at that time then when I joined the Navy said, "Alright, your train leaves at eight o'clock at night, we'll take you down o Garden Island and we'll give you a look at a couple of ships and give you a bit of familiarization, which is kind of interesting, because when they took us down to the wharf, they took us on the HMAS Melbourne.

Melbourne had just run over the Frank E. Evans and she had this big chunk out of the front of it, you know, we went down there and this is handy, this is what you're going to expect. So then you went to the railway station, they bussed us to the railway station and that's when you really started to know you were in the Navy because they had a bunch of leading seaman, seamen and then petty officers who started screaming at you then and getting you all in little groups and then you got in the train.

And then in those days, too, there wasn't a straight train line so you went to Albury Wodonga change at Albury Wodonga. Then you went to bloody Melbourne and Melbourne, you went to Adelaide, change at Adelaide, then you change at Port Pirie.

So, you're doing about a three-day train trip to get there and I think we lost about 40 blokes before we even got to Leeuwin, who'd had enough and didn't want to play.

And we were two intakes Collins and Walton, 28th intake. So we were quite a big, several 100 of us and they split us into two intakes and then you did your 12 months at Leeuwin and your 12 months at Leeuwin was basically you went back to school, so you did geography, mathematics, physics, navigation, ships husbandry, firefighting, drill, PT, it was like high school with military stuff and then at the end you categorised and then you went to do your sea training, and then you went to do your trade training … but it was culture shock for me just to go across Australia in a train.

And you know, you're 15 years old, you have never left home, the furthest I'd gone to play football or something, you know, about 100 miles. And I went, "Oh my God ", you know, and that was a culture shock for some kids, they just couldn't handle it and then you went into this other world, this navy world and they made me the creature I am today.

I'm so fussy and anal about where things are stowed, how things are done and how things are tidy. I mean, that's how they turned you into that creature. I found that, you know, you make your own bed, you have to do it a special way and you have to pull it all apart and do kit musters and, you know, everything out the cupboard in your locker had to be … I came home after my first six months away and my parents, "What have they done to you? " and I couldn't talk to the school kids, the kids I went to school with because I went, "You're fools ".

They turned you into this other creature and because they broke you down and then built you up into this beast that they wanted. And I mean, I'm still that person. It worked. But it was a big culture shock from here to there. And then it's another culture shock when you get on a ship, and you're all gonna live in a space.

And if you don't get on with people, where are you gonna go, you know, and I mean in those days, too, bastardization ruled, I mean, at Leeuwin it was like if somebody did something wrong, one o'clock in the morning, you're all there with your bed rolls over your head and running around the bloody parade ground at one o'clock in the morning. It was pretty tough. But I enjoyed it actually. It was just something that I gravitated to.

Sea time and training

Some of us in my class, of all the classes that came out of Leeuwin with me, some of those guys went to the Vendetta. Vendetta took over the gunline I think when either the Perth or Hobart got shot up and so they did gunline stuff. But Sydney was also a training ship, so it was chock full of bloody ordinary seamen.

I mean, there was at one stage when I was on, there was about 60 odd of us because after you left Leeuwin you had to do at least a minimum of six months sea time to get all that seamanship stuff sorted out, like, you know, you had to be on the helm and you had to do look out and you had to do boat stuff.

So that was the way the Navy trained its young recruits, it's junior recruits, six months sea time. And that was the problem too, because as an electrician, the electrical course lasted longer than most other courses. So, if you got on the Sydney and your course didn't start until next year, you were on the Sydney until your course started.

Some guys were on there I know for three or four weeks did the Sydney and they were gone and they were back as rated sailors before you'd even left because they'd gone to the seamanship course, which might be two months long, or whatever somewhere else.

Instructors and educators

There were some really good ones. There were some right bastards too, you know, because it's a power trip. You got 100 bloody people that you can boss around and I ran into some of them later on. And I actually was a higher rank then because they'd been busted back. And I went, you know, "I remember you when you were a right bastard. Look at you now ".

But the majority of them were there because they were good at what they did. They were good trainers. They were usually blokes who are a little bit older than most. They'd been around the world and seen a fair bit and it was also a place for them to basically relax in a sense.

So, they were more about telling you how things work, I mean, yeah, on the playground, you're getting screamed at, the PT guys were screaming at you and, you know, military training. But a lot of the other instructors, I mean, you know, we did geography and things like that. So, they were Navy but they were schoolies.

They were in the defence force because they were educators. So, they weren't really there to be bastards to you. They were there to educate. And that's the thing, too, they wanted educated ships. Ships had to have firefighting, and damage control, and nuclear, biological, chemical, chemical defence stuff. They wanted you to learn what you needed to learn it. So they didn't go out of their road to really make life miserable for you. It was a learning curve.

HMAS Sydney

They drafted me onto the Sydney to do my sea time training, HMAS Sydney, and Sydney was doing the trips backwards and forwards to Vietnam. So, I did a couple of those. I think it was either 3RAR up and 7 back or the other way around, I can't remember. And we took a bunch of trucks as well, International trucks, up to Vietnam as well.

So, yeah, I spent about six months doing trips backwards and forwards backwards and forwards and as a trainee as a trainee electrician or Ord D EM, my job was also to be the dogman for the seaplane crane. The Sydney had a seaplane crane, which was an electrical crane and it had a really smooth movement to pick things up and down.

So, my job was to be the dogman. When we'd come alongside in Vietnam, Sydney carried landing craft, so you need to drop the landing craft and load stuff into the landing craft and take them ashore or you take troops ashore. When we had troops on board, they would either go off in Chinooks or they would go off in barges. Two times I was there they both went off in Chinooks. But we used to run our landing craft backwards and forwards to pick stuff up.

When we had the tracks on board, my job was to basically get the trucks onto the seaplane crane and lift them off onto the barges alongside, which can get a bit frightening too, because they slipped in the nets or whatever because you run them on a net, and if the bloody things tipped sideways, the stuff in the back of it might fall out all over the place.

chael Thwaites: The Jervis Bay

I turned 17 on the way there, my first trip, it was kind of funny. When I joined the Navy. I had no concept of Vietnam, I had no concept of going there. I didn't pay attention to the news. So you know, it was just something that when it happened, I went "Oh ", it just happened, you know.

I didn't actually join the Defence Force thinking that I would go somewhere like that. I just joined to basically get away from a middle of nowhere bloody town … my dad's the indigenous one of the family, my mum's not. My mum was adopted as baby and her adoptive parent, father, was a Church of England minister and he was an ex-chaplain in Darwin during the Second World War.

And he always had a thing about the Navy and he gave me a book for a birthday present called HMS Ulysses and it was this book about a British ship in the Second World War. And I'd been interested in poetry too and learned a part of a poem called HMS Jervis Bay, the Jervis Bay and that sort of sparked an interest in me in about the Navy.

And then because I wanted to get away from this country town, the quickest way that I could do that and get a wage and travel the world and do the things that I could probably never ever do as an indigenous kid in a country town was joining the Navy and the Navy opposite that opportunity, to get away at 15 which is quite interesting, because many, many, many years later, when I was working at the War Memorial, and I started the service up the back of the War Memorial, now we have an indigenous service every Anzac Day.

We have a service every November 11. And we used to do it up the back of the hill behind the War Memorial, there's a little memorial up there. The guy and his wife who put that up there, it was a private memorial, was a fellow by the name of Michael Thwaites.

Michael Thwaites wrote that poem, The Jervis Bay, and I got to meet him and things just sort of clicked together. But really, it was a case of the quickest way out of this town was to join the Navy.

Living in the past

I can remember on ships, there were guys on ships who'd served in the Second World War and Korea, you know, very rarely did you see a set of Vietnam ribbons. I can remember see more guys wearing Korean War medal ribbon bars than Second World War ribbon bars.

We used to have these things, they used to call them Queen's calyx or King's calyx, Queens calyx, they were leading seamen, they'd been in the Navy for so long, that was all they were going to be, they were given that rank. And these guys you know, had three, four ribbon bars because they'd been in the bloody Second World War, in Korea.

And the thinking was the same and when I trained at Leeuwin you were trained with film footage and documentation from the Second World War and Korea. So, the thinking is still living in the past, it was still very much in the past so all the damage control stuff was done from training films, which were made in the Second World War about British ships, how to save ships if they were sinking.

Your equipment on ships, like the Duchess and the Sydney was all Second World War stuff, so we were still, it was a different way of thinking. Soldiers were different too. I mean, you see a soldier today and they're bulked up, you know, they carry a lot of equipment, they're bulked up, I mean, most of these guys they were eight stone ringing wet with all the equipment on them. It was a totally different defence force and a totally different, we were still stuck in that Second World War frame of mind and we still had those people on board the ships.

Unloading HMAS Sydney

You'd come in early in the morning, just on sunrise or just before sunrise, you would anchor, they'd put the small craft, small boats, and the landing craft, if they weren't used, in the water and they would be dragging for divers, for swimmers and whatever.

You worked in the daylight hours, as soon as it started to get dark, you up anchored if you had not got all your … we trained and trained and trained and I remember we went to New Zealand just to train how to unload stuff and put stuff on because they wanted us to do it as quick as possible. So, we would try to get everything done before sunset, before dark.

Once you'd finished, you went out. If you hadn't finished, you would then go back out to sea, open sea, sail around till next morning, come back in but you never stayed overnight because it was judged to be too dangerous to stay overnight, because you can't see what's going on in the water … we never had to stay overnight.

We'd get in and get them done really quickly. And the trip on and off stuff was pretty quick, because the off going unit group would be all lined up in the hangars. And they'd all be relegated to one an aircraft or helicopter or landing craft.

So they'd all be ready to go on their little blocks. And as the Chinooks came in and discharged, the troops coming out, they'd go down one side of the boat down inside, and the other one would come out and go in, so it was pretty quick.

The stuff that took time was when we had all these International trucks and engines and stuff and all that and we had to unload them. And that was, yeah, you were flat chat, flat chat until you got it off.

The danger of Chinook helicopters

The Chinooks were a bit frightening too, because when they came into land, we had a lot of davits on a flight deck for the landing craft, and I can remember once the Chinook came in, it hadn't dropped the troops off yet and it got its wheels caught in the davit.

And it was like everybody run away, run away because we expected this bloody great helicopter to do a backflip on the flight deck. But, I mean, those kinds of things, you just took them as they came. It's kind of funny place.

The smell of Av Gas and protecting the ship

Vietnam, for part of that is you come in really early in the morning and you just see the lights on the hills and you'd see something happening in the background but it was a kind of a weird place because everybody seemed to be on edge. And it smelt of Av Gas.

The whole place smelled of Av Gas because everywhere you looked in the sky, there was a bloody helicopter. They were everywhere, the helicopter war, it was just amazing. We did a bit fair bit of stuff with 9 Squadron, RAAF 9 Squadron because they'd come and they were looking for fresh fruit and stuff like that so we used to cook Anzac biscuits and all that kind of stuff and they would come in and get fresh bread and fly in and out all the time.

So it was busy, busy, busy. Came in early in the morning, flat chat for about five hours just as it started to get dusk you then, if you hadn't finished unloading, you go out, back outside and then you sail up and down until the morning then you come back in and do it again.

The reason for that was for enemy divers, frogman type work. So we always had landing craft patrolling dragging grappling hooks, looking for enemy swimmers. If you're a sentry because we had sentries on board, they gave you an SLR rifle and a magazine and you're, I mean, I'd just turned 17, you had a rifle and a magazine and the magazine was in your pocket and you weren't allowed to put it in the gun just in case you probably shot yourself.

So, if anything happened, you actually had to phone up the bridge or whoever and say that, "Look, I've seen an enemy swimmer in the water " or whatever, then they would tell you that you could put your magazine in your weapon. So ,it was kinda, it was kind of silly. If something had happened, you had to actually ring up before you could do anything. But it was a really interesting place.

Basic sleeping arrangements

when we had the squaddies on board, we couldn't live in the messes because they got all the messes so we had to sleep in the hangar because Sydney was an old Majestic aircraft carrier from the Second World War and she did a lot of service in Korea.

So we would sleep in the hangars, and they just put up like a metal scaffolding framework and we were sleeping in hammocks, so you'd sleep in your hammock in this sort of scaffolding. Or if you were lucky, they actually brought fold up, these fold up beds on wheels.

They were good until they realized when they got a bit of a roll up in rough weather, you were sliding backwards and forwards and you had to saw the wheels off them. But the shitty thing about being in the hangar was the fumes from the funnel would get sucked down through the. lift wells and through the hangar so you were tasting sulphur all the time.

People on edge

Once the soldiers left it was quite, it was really interesting to look at the change in people and the change in men. The new guys we would be taking up, because we would do ship concerts and all that kind of stuff, I mean, amazing talent. Some of these guys, you know, could sing and play the guitar and all that kind of stuff.

Usually they were sort of like, either full time serving soldiers, or they were national service and you really couldn't tell the difference. That's the way they were trained. You really couldn't tell the difference. And there didn't seem to be any animosity between the full timers and the nashos, it was really good. But when you looked at the blokes going up, there was a, when they were leaving the ship and lining up to go into the helicopters to be taken away, you could tell the difference, you look at their faces.

I mean, these guys were just not much older than me and they had that look on their faces, I don't know what we're going into type thing. And then when the helicopter lands and the guys come out of the back of it, they have a totally different, these guys, they're all laughs and smiles because they're getting the hell out of there.

And it was a totally different group of people would pass each other. And the fellas we were taking over there, there was some animosity between NCOs and other ranks. I mean, I can remember walking into an argument in one of the messes and threats of violence, you know, "I'll bloody shoot, you if you give me a hard time ". But I think that was just people were on edge.

Target practice

I don't understand how some of these soldiers would have done it too, because some of them flew in Qantas, they flew in a Qantas aircraft and flew out in a Qantas aircraft, you know, you're going to war and you're flying in a Qantas airplane, and you get out the airstrip and off you go to wherever you're supposed to be barracked.

They were always doing classes and we were always doing a lot of shoots. In those days you used to get, I think they were five-gallon milk cans, canisters. So, we used to save them all up. I can remember sitting there for hours blowing balloons up.

And then what we would do is, we go from the quarterdeck, the offices where the quarter deck was, which is under the back end of the flight deck, we would be there, all of us little bloody junior recruits, ordinary seaman, and we'd be throwing over balloons and these milk cans while the soldiers are up on the flight deck above us. Target practice. We were doing all that kind of stuff. They were doing their general military duty stuff, but no one had really told them what it was gonna be like at the other end.

Transfer to submarines

I met this guy, and we were both 15 at the time and we were both going to join the Navy. He said, "What are you going to do? " And I said, "I don't know, I was thinking about submarines ". And he goes, "Yeah, I am too ". So we thought we might meet up.

He became a stoker and I became a greenie. We were both at Cerberus at the same time. And then his course was shorter than mine. So he went into the fleet, I stayed. We bumped into each other as ordinaries we bumped to each other when we're both rated. And we've been mates ever since. We went through Leeuwin together.

When we both got out, and we were both in the fleet, I was an electrician and he was a Stoker, we went, let's join submarines. So I put my hand up to join submarines. got selected, he got selected. I was on the Perth in HMAS Perth. And Perth was going to do the first Indian Ocean tour that a warship had done since the Second World War.

We were gonna go to Mauritius and we went to Africa and Ethiopia and Iran and everywhere. And I went, "Whoa ". And I ripped up my submarine thing, because I wanted to do the trip. So he went to submarines and I didn't. But the Navy has a long of memory.

So when I came when we did the Indian Ocean tour on Perth, we came back and Sydney and then into Sydney and they said, "We're going to do a half-life refit and a half-life refit in the United States. So I went, "Oh, this is good ". So, I stayed on the Perth went to Long Beach, California for 14 months, did a half-life refit.

When I came back, they said, "Well, now we're gonna have to draft you off the ship ". So they drafted me to HMAS Platypus, the submarine base because they must have gone, "Oh, he'd volunteered for submarines once before ". And that's when I hooked up with me mate again, Ken. He'd been in submarines for five years, three years, or whatever it was at that time.

And I got so used to working with sub mariners because they do things differently. They're not so rank orientated. It was about you. I never saw anybody salute a bloody officer the whole time when I was at Platypus except on pay day. It was like, it was a really close-knit bunch of people and they did things differently, but they demanded a really high standard of excellence.

But when you looked at it you go, "What a bunch of pirates ", you know, and then when my time finished at Platypus I was then drafted me to HMAS Stuart, the Stuie Maru and she was just about buggered and she's looking for major refit. I mean, we went to RIMPAC and never made it to bloody Fiji because the thing broke down and we're dead in the water for two days till they flew apart to us to make us work.

We broke down on one occasion and we could only go backwards and the Admiral said, "You're not coming into Sydney Harbour backwards ", so they had to tow us in and so I was on the Stuart, they said, "Right, we got to send her in for a refit as quick as we can now ", we went to Dogtown to Williamstown in Victoria and I was the refit crew on it.

And so there's about eight or nine of us and we just at midday went to the pub, you know, we were just hanging around. And we lived at Lonsdale, HMAS Lonsdale, Lonsdale was a Second World War group of buildings and they were condemned. So you couldn't live in the end buildings all of us lived in the rooms in the middle because they reckon the place was gonna fall down.

And I was at Lonsdale for a while and then they said, "We're drafting you out of Lonsdale and you're going to Stalwart, HMAS Stalwart, building 2 – 1 – 5, bloody this horrible ship and I went there and I was mess deck leading hand and it was a ship where they put all the misfits and all the bloody useless people and those people that didn't want got to sea.

It was horrible. And well, I got sent there to be the mess deck leading hand, by then I was a leading seaman so my job was to go there and look after a bunch of people and to run a section. So, because it was a refit ship as well, so it had a whole party of refit people and their job was to refit ships alongside so it was part of fleet maintenance, so I was a part of the fleet maintenance group.

And I had a mess of blokes to look after. And, you know, because I lived on shore, I would come in and go, you know, "You're not out of your bunks in time ", so I'd get on their case and they'd leave crap around and stuff and at lunchtime, I'd make them bloody scrub the floors. I said "Look, if you lot can't look after yourself, I'm gonna hound you till you do ".

And it reached a head one day where I went, "Alright, I want you all to stand by your bunks, your lockers. And I went, "How come there's two lockers here that have got locker keys, locks on them and there's no one standing in front of them? " And they went, "On, there's no one, they're just spare lockers ". And I went, "open the lockers ". And they went, "Oh, we don't have the key'. So I went, "Go get the bolt cutters ". Pop up and they're all full of booze.

And I said to these young blokes, they'd been off whingeing about me to their divisional officer, actually, this lieutenant, and I said, "Own up. Who owns the grog? " nobody owns up to it. "All right, everybody, grab it and go into the bathroom and tip it down the sink ". I said to them later, "If you'd owned up I would have told you, you got 24 hours to get it off the ship ".

But I mean, there was a lot of booze, and I went , "Uh, tip it down the sink " and then about a two days later, I get called to this lieutenant's office and he had a go at me and he goes, "Ah, there's so many complaints about you. You're a nasty person. And I went, "No, I'm not. " I said, "All I'm doing is my job ". I said, "Those little bloody grubby bastards need to have their arses kicked " and he went, "Nah ", you know, "it's people like you, we don't need in the Navy, because you're going to drive these people out ". And I went, "Good. Get rid of them ".

And we had a bit of an argument, and I went, "__ I'm leaving ". And went, "Oh I shouldn't have said that " so I bolted down to the ship's office and said, "Could I put my submarine thing in? " And they went, "Yeah, yeah ". So within two days I was gone back to Platypus and when I ended up at Plat everybody at Plat said, "Where did you go? " And I went, "What do you mean? " They said, "I thought you were a submariner ". "No, no I had to go back to skimmer land ". And they went, "Oh, okay ". So, then I went to do my submarine training in the UK and then the rest of my Navy career was in submarines.

Submariners: Friends for life

I was lucky because I came there as a surface ship. They used to call surface ships skimmers because they skim along the surface. Used to call them skimmers or targets and I'd been at Platypus as a skimmer. So they, so I'd got used to what how it works.

So it wasn't such a cultural shock for me, actually it was quite interesting, because there was two Oakley's, it was me and another Oakley. And I was indigenous. And we were both electricians. And they used to call us both Annie Oakley. And someone would go, "Which one? " They'd go, "Positive or negative? " I was negative and he was positive. The bloody play on the electric thing. But I got used to the place and I got used to how they do business.

So when I joined boats, there was another five of us, we went to do the part one and two in the United Kingdom at HMS Dolphin. In those days, we didn't have a submarine school so you had to do it in the UK, and also, that's where you did the tank, the scope training. So we went to the UK, the five of us, yeah, the tank was dry so I thought, "Oh, I'm gonna have to come back to England to do the tank ".

We did our part one and two, then I came back to Platypus, then you do your part three on a submarine, first mate and watchkeeper, all that kind of stuff. Within a year, I was the only one left out of those five. Because it's just, the attrition rate for submarines was just horrendous. We could never man six submarines ever. We were always lucky to have one in major refit and one in minor refit, the other four we could just maintain the crews on them. So, yeah, and then, basically you just get used to it.

The job was crap. I mean it was long hours, you know, if you are on a patrol or your, you know, your six on three off, six on or not on a patrol, on a trial patrol your six on six off, you're in defence watches, six on, six off, and when you're six off, you can't get to sleep. You have to clean the boat and if there's anything broken, you fix it. So, there are times where you don't sleep for days.

Normal routine is usually six on, three off, six on, three off, something like that, unless you're transiting anywhere and that could be two on 20 off, 10 off. It depends on the watch system. But the job, submarines themselves are horrible, but it was funny. Blokes talked about it and went, "Ah, this sucks. This is a shit job " blah, blah, if anybody else outside the group said that, they'd go for them.

You were only allowed to bitch if you were a sub-mariner, you can't bitch outside of that. But what I found with him, the manpower, the guys, which is a problem, it caused me a problem, was these guys would die for each other. Even if they didn't like the bloke, they would die for him, you know, and they literally would die for him. And it got to the point where you thought more of the guys you're serving with than your family.

If you went away and did a patrol, you went away for a while and you came back home, there used to be Platypus family, meet the boat in the wharf 10 o'clock, you all go up to the messes, have a smorgasbord, you know, meet and greet, have a good time. And then all the wives and kids go, and the blokes would stay there. And get liquored to the eyeballs and get the anger and all that shit out of the system and go home the next day.

They'd either sleep on the boat or sleep in the mess hall or whatever and try to get that anger out. But that was the problem. Every second guy I met on submarines was on a second marriage or you know, went through girlfriends like bloody water because they were so dedicated to the job and to the people.

They thought more of the people than their own family life, I mean, I had a failed marriage out of it. It was just one of those things where I thought more of these guys than I did of my home life. A crap job, a horrible job, the people were just, you've got them for life.

These guys I mean, in their eyes, even though I'm in Air Force now, I'm still a sub-mariner, you know, that's the way it is. And these guys, if I died tomorrow, there'll be 20 of them at the house saying to my wife, "What can we do for you? ", you know. Yeah, that camaraderie that bond was the best thing in submarines.

The bonds that tie

Ships had the bonds, but the bond in the ships tended to be the electricians did things with the electricians, the stoker's did things with stokers, the cooks did things with the cooks, you know, and sometimes you got together but you tended to move around in those little groups and socialized in those groups.

Submarines, there were all the different trades ratings but because you lived so close together there weren't all that many, you weren't … there wasn't the electricians' mess, and there wasn't a stokers' mess, there was the fo'r'ard mess and the after mess and the wardroom mess and the senior sailors' mess, so it didn't matter what rate you were, you all live together.

So, you know, we had a chef and we had seamen and stokers and greenies all in the same mess. So you tended to bond closer, so the whole boat was the bond, not the trade group. So that was different, that was the different part of it, too. And a lot of the officers that you got, were either ex senior sailors, who then went away and became officers.

So there was that other bond, too, with the officers. And they weren't so priggish and stuck up, like more so in surface ships, because an officer on a surface ship, you might not come across him for days. On a submarine, your bumping into them, you know, every two minutes, you know, because you have to travel, you've only got one passageway, and to go anywhere, you've got to go up there, that passageway and everything comes off it.

So, you know, you're bonded to them as well and they tended to be, a different group type of officer as well because they had to be, you had to be able to work with these people and get these people. And that's what I found I was really good at.

How a submarine works

You've got a diving panel and on the diving panel, it's a 24-volt system if I can remember, and what it does is, your submarine works basically on the upturned boat principle, you turn your bloody tinny upside down or whatever, it'll float because it's got air underneath it.

So that's how a submarine works, you've got a water pressure tight tube in the centre where you live, and then you've got the outside tanks, tanks are open to the sea at the bottom, and then on the tops of them they've got valves and these valves are controlled from the panel. And if you push one of these panel buttons, you can open and shut those valves. So, that's how you dive.

If you open them all, they open, air rushes out, boat sinks. That's pretty basic, how it works. So, when you shut off from diving, what you've got to do then is you go around to where all these valves are in the boat, and you key them off, you lock them all off so that someone doesn't just push the bloody buttons mucking around or something and you dive, so it basically shuts it off so physically, mechanically, they cannot operate.

Once you do that, you surface sail and then and then your watches get longer because you go into different watch system and usually if you're transiting somewhere like to going to RIMPAC, it takes nine days, about nine days to get to Hawaii to RIMPAC.

So, basically what happens then is there's only probably a half a dozen people are watching inside the boat, there's officer the watch and seamen up in the fin, everybody else is just laying on the casing and you have a barbecue every day and barbies and stuff, go swimming and whatever.

And that's when you shut down from diving so you don't dive anymore.[So that trip out to Hawaii, do you…] Always travel on the surface if you can because it's the quickest way to get there. Underwater is not as fast and you burn up your battery.

Submarine battery power

You usually do an equaliser when you leave, which means you run the battery down pretty flat and then you charge it right up to its maximum point and then you'd trickle charge it. You do what they call float the load so that when you're propelling through the water and what you're burning electrically wise, ampage wise, it's coming out of the battery but the generators are trickle charging enough so that you're floating the load, so you're not losing anything in your battery and that's what you do on the surface.

So, they work out how fast the boats got to go, for whatever distance. and then we work that out so that the battery and you just scoot along on the surface, and you're not losing any power, but you're not making any power, you're just floating a load. And when you dive, you're on your battery because O boats, there is no mechanical connection between the diesel and propulsion.

The diesels are basically two big battery chargers, they charge your battery. So, when you dive, you've got to charge the battery. If you can't charge the battery, the battery gets lower and lower and lower and lower and lower until there's nothing in it and that means you don't go anywhere, nothing happens.

So, yeah, that's when you do snorting and all that kind of stuff. So if you're on a patrol doing sneakies, you really got to watch the battery. That's where the greenies, we battery dip every watch, every two hours just to make sure the battery's not playing up, all the cells are blowing up and things like that … Well , you can operate the tank tops, you can operate them and surface.

Well, you don't need to if they're shut Anyway, you've got compressed air in bottles and you just blow the water and you surface, you can blow the water out of the tank, and you surface. But you never run the battery down to a point where, because if you run it down to a certain point, and it gets too low, it may reverse polarity. If it reverses polarity, you're stuffed.

So you would run the battery right down, you know, 15% or 20% or something like that. You try not to go any lower than that. But that battery, if you're not charging it, it runs everything. Everything. Propulsion, conversion machinery, lighting, air conditioning, refrigeration, you name it, communications, everything. 448 cells about a ton each.

Pent up emotion

It's not so much about anger, it's about, it's a living on the edge thing that you've got to get off. There is anger too, because when you're on a boat, and you're doing a patrol or you're on a boat, and you dive for a long time, there's always a bit of angst.

And I've been in a mess where you know, blokes "Are you going to eat that sausage? ", you know, fighting over the food. What happens, too, if you're going on patrol and you're way three or four months, three months, you end up at the end of that year, not eating the best of food in the world because it's all frozen and usually, when you're on a patrol, you get fed four times, when the watches changed every six hours.

So basically, there's a lot of pent-up emotion and blokes, you try not to do it, you don't want to be fighting the guys that you mess with. So, there's that pent up emotion and you've got to blow it out of the system, and usually what they used to, and, I mean, this is the bad old days of the defence force where, you know, I can remember at Platypus we would go up to the bar at lunchtime and put away six schooners and go to work.

I mean, when I first joined the Navy, a question, I was asked the question, "Do you drink? " And I went, "Yeah ", and they went, "Good ", because blokes didn't trust you if you didn't drink. People, you know, it's one of those kind of jobs and, I mean, it was nothing for guys to be in the bar at lunchtime and put away six or seven schooners in 50 minutes, you know, and go back to work.

And I knew blokes and we'd go back to work on an AB switchboard with open bloody switches and stuff half cut. The bad old days. But it bred that kind of a thing, too, but when you came back alongside, you had all that pent up emotion, all that other stuff that you've tried to keep in you and you don't want to take it out on the wife and kids when you get home.

So, basically blokes would go up the bar, they'd all go home and they'd get a skinful. Submarines, we used to have a thing, what they used to call horoscope reading Friday, where half the boat would go somewhere or the branch would go to a pub and the officers would come and then there'd be no rank and then you'd all have a few beers and then you tell people what you thought of them.

You usually did it on a Friday and if an officer had been an arsehole that week, you told him, "You're an arsehole " and you got stuck into him. So, you had a weekend to get over it and a weekend to have a think about it and then on Monday all would be worked out.

On Ovens, we used to have a thing called the drip book and if anybody on the boat come down there, if someone was pissing them off, instead of taking their anger out on somebody, they could write it in the book. So you'd write, such and such is a right bastard, you know, whatever, whatever, you get it out of your system, because it was in the book.

And the captain he'd come down and read the book every week or something, just to get a gauge of how the crew are feeling and who has been an idiot and whatever. So, there were these other things that you did to try to get all that pent up feeling, you know, I mean, it's a bloody hard job, and it could be monotonous, monotonous, and, and your best mates could get on your nerves like that, you know?

Refusing to go to sea

I was domestic leading hand on Ovens, my last submarine, and I was on a boat for three years, and you're supposed to be about 18 months, not even 18 months, the longest 12 months, because they mentally stuff you and I got to a point, we were in Hawaii for RIMPAC, we were going to RIMPAC and I just went to the WEO, I went and I said, "I can't do this anymore. I've been on his boat for three years. What's going on? I've watched three captains come and go and three WEOs come and go, why am I still here?"

And then I just went down on the wharf and went, "I'm not getting on this stinking submarine ", and I remember the captain, he's got the phone in his hand and he says, "Gary, talk to your wife " and I go, "No, I'm not talking to her ", this my second wife and she goes, "If he's not getting on the submarine, he's not getting on the submarine. "

So, they sent me home with about another three guys and flew us home, which is a story in itself. And then I had to front the captain, Captain SM of the depot because basically I'd mutinied and refused to go to sea. And he just said to me, "I'm going to give you two weeks compassionate leave, go home and come back and then we'll talk about what we're going to do with you ". "Okay ". I went home, came back off caps. And he goes, "The Weapons Electrical Officer will apologize to you ". I went, "Okay ".

The base WEO who I'd known previously in surfaces, he goes, "Yeah, I'm sorry, I stopped your promotion to keep you on the submarine. " I went, "What? " And he went, "Yeah, because you're really good at managing young men. Your boat had the least amount of guys, submariners run away all the time.

The weekly running, some of them will disappear for the week, come back, because that's the way they get it out of their systems. And then they come back and then they get fined or whatever. And life starts again. And he said, "Your mess was the best mess because you had very few guys who ran away, you looked after your people really well, your greenies were all happy, and you're really good at training people ". And I went, "So you penalized me for doing a good job ". And he went, "Yeah, we stopped your promotion. And we kept you on a submarine ". And I said, "You mentally broke me. And you did not promote me ". And he said, "No ".

I walked out of there promoted to a petty officer and basically, "What job do you want? " And I said, "I want an inboard job because I used to work in the powerhouse. So, I said, "I don't want to work in the powerhouse and I want to go to sea ". In the end, they said, "Hey, would you like to go to West Australia because we're just building up Fleet Base West? ", new submarine base, we had the new Collins class boats coming in.

And I went, "Nah, I got a daughter, this big. I don't want to go over there". I said, "I want to go to a place where I don't lose my submarine pay and I'm as a far away from the frigging water as I can get ". So, they sent me to Canberra, to the submarine billet in Canberra. And that's how I came to Canberra.

Cultural differences

When I joined, we didn't have, there was no such thing as Indigenous Affairs. I mean, there used to be a joke on board, they'd say, "Oh, where's such and such? ". "Oh, he's gone walkabout " because he'd shot through and then he turned up a week later and everybody'd go, "Why'd you do that? ", "Black fella ", you know, and you'd get fined or number nines or whatever, people didn't understand at that time there were things called sorry business, you know, and I can remember, like saying that, you know, "My Auntie's died, I gotta go to my Aunty " and they go, "But she's not a blood relative ", or she's an auntie of somebody, whatever, whatever. And I'd would go, "Yeah, but she's my auntie, I gotta go ". And defence would go, "No, she's not a blood relative, so you can't go ". So they buzz off.

Now, Defence understands what an aunty means because a lot of indigenous people, kids, were not brought up by mum and dad, they might have been brought up by granny or an auntie or who they call an aunty. So, defence has gone from "Don't be trying to pull the wool over my eyes " to "I understand there is a cultural difference. now, you are culturally different ".

And we join the Defence Force for different reasons, you know, we join defence force because it's about serving country, yeah, I get a job, but there's also a thing in me that says, "It's my duty to serve my country, it's my duty to look after country ". It's in my DNA and I've been in the military over 50 years, you know, it's just the way you serve.

I can remember when they were bringing in the first Indigenous Affairs unit in the Navy and I volunteered to be a part of it and I had a non-Indigenous person say, "Oh, you're not black enough to be in it ", so there was still, you know, you try to set something up and you people don't understand what culture is and you don't understand the colour your skin, and this kind of stuff.

I mean, we still get that today, you know, he's really cultured, he plays the didge and he speaks a bit of language and he's got dark skin, I go, "No, no, no, you're missing the point. That ain't culture, it's other things. So we've changed considerably on how we do business.

Indigenous affairs

All three services have their own Indigenous Affairs units. I sit on a thing called ICAG which is the Indigenous Cultural Advisory Group for defence. So that's uniform and non-uniform. Air Force has a thing called SILC, which we're going to change the name soon, which is Senior Indigenous Leadership Circle, which is made up of senior, when you say senior, that's not by rank, it's by culture, group of people who are an advisory group to Chief of Air Force, Deputy Chief of Air Force, management, on how we use culture in Air Force.

So, we've changed a lot and I was working, I was still in the Navy Reserve but I was working at the War Memorial as a curator at the War Memorial, and I was the War Memorial's first indigenous liaison officer and as such, I'd done some work with the new Defence Indigenous Affairs when that was set up, so I did some reserve work for them and Air Force was setting up their indigenous affairs unit and a guy that was a non-Indigenous guy that was working there, he said, "I'm going back into Air Force to help set it up ".

And he worked for Indigenous Affairs, Defence and he went, "Hey, would you like to come across and work for us? " And I went, "Oh, I don't know ". And then I saw what they were doing and the Air Force was doing it really well. They're looking at culture differently. They're not siloed and stovepipe like the army does.

You would think the army would have the best Indigenous Affairs in all three services because they're the service that has had the longest group of indigenous people in it, but they're not. Air Force has got like a flat, a lot more flatter set up, so I went, "Yeah, I'll jump ship " and he said, "Alright, well, we're going to bring you across from the Navy " because I paid off as a petty officer and they said, "We'll bring you across and bring you in as a squadron leader ".

I went, "Oh, well, a flight lieutenant first and then they bumped me up to a Squadron Leader, and I actually believe that Air Force was doing such a good job, I quit a full-time job to work as a reservist in Indigenous Affairs but that's how air force, which is defence, but how Air Force took it seriously.

You know, and today, it's very serious today. But today, we've also got to look, at you know, we got Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander people, First Nation people, our defence force is totally different to what it was when I joined.

Cultural diversity issues in the ADF

I remember when I came to Canberra, we never had a Fed guard. So, Ross Smith, Warrant Officer Ross Smith, he was ceremonials Vietnam vet, a really efficient soldier. Smith, I used to call him Ross Smith and Ross would come around and he'd stick his head in, he goes, "You, Gary. Two o'clock this afternoon, such and such, be there".

And then you go around, and you turn up and there'd be 20 of you and you'd be the Fed guard, you'd be the guard and it was Army, Navy and Air Force, you all have different drill and you all had to do your own different drill, it was really strange. But we used to do all that stuff. Now, the Fed guard is the Fed guard, it's a unit in its own right.

My time, I would be the odd one out, the indigenous guy. You look at the Fed guard today, the face of the Fed guard, there are there are people with turbans, there are Sikhs and Muslims and bloody you know what, all different kinds of people in the Fed Guard.

Defence has totally changed, the people in Defence Force, totally different to what it was when I joined because it was very Anglo in my day, very rarely did you see any Asian and Indigenous members, and that is causing problems and I brought this up with Indigenous Affairs and I've said, "Oh yeah, we're all about looking after Indigenous Australians but we got Sikhs and Muslims who've got cultural differences too, "You haven't even looked at how you're bringing those … "

Yes, we're First Nation people and this is traditionally our country, but your defence force now is so culturally diversified, you know, I can see that there's the, you know, they still haven't looked at how they're going to assault that. [Q: A natural question that those peoples might say is, Why don't we get our own?] Well, they're already doing that, going, "Well you've got a Department of Indigenous Affairs, who do I go to if I've got a problem? " And that's a problem, "Who do you go to? " I did some work for the defence chaplains and the defence chaplaincy handbook has nothing in it, it has stuff about Muslims and Sikhs and stuff, and I went, "There's nothing here about Indigenous Australians, First Nation Australians ".

So, I ended up writing the thing on spirituality for Indigenous Australians for the defence chaplaincy handbook. So, you know, somebody's looking at some things and missing others. Some people are looking at other things and missing others. So, we're 100 times better off than we originally were.

A long way to go

In my 50 years of service its totally changed but we've still got a long way to go. We've still got some dinosaurs. We've still got problems, even within Indigenous Affairs we have problems because we mirror just like we do outside, non-military there are always, we're our own worst enemy sometimes, First Nation people, you know, we can be the worst bloody bitchy bastards and not working with people and, you know, we will shaft ourselves really badly.

So, I mean, we've got to stop that. We've had problems where we've gone, "Oh, hang on, we have to step back from this because we sound like a dysfunctional community, because we're all arguing about stuff ". So, you know, there are certain problems within Indigenous Affairs, which we're working through and we're figuring it out. But it's like everywhere, it's never going to be perfect.

But I'm working on the principle that one day, we won't have Indigenous Affairs because it'll just be business as usual, you know, why should we have special things? We should all be respected for who you are and what you are where and where you come from.

The ADF and tribal links

The Australian Defence Force was the first equal opportunity employer of Indigenous Australians, even when we were not supposed to be allowed to join the Defence force, we got into the Defence Force. The race bar was lifted 1949, yet we served in two world wars when we're not supposed to because the Defence Force saw us as something different.

But what I tell people and I found this when I'm talking to young kids, young First Nation kids, and I go, "Why did you want to join the Defence Force? " And they go, "Oh, you know, I want a job. I want to make money. I want to travel. But I want to protect country ". And then they go, "And because my dad served in Vietnam, and my granddad served in Second World War, my great granddad served in the First World War. And you go, "Woah ".

There's this long connection of service for First Nation people. And it's about being treated as an equal, being able to protect country. But the other thing is, Defence is kind of like a comfort zone because it's like traditional life. It's tribal. You have Army, Navy, and Air Force. You have tribal groups. Within those tribal groups you've got clan groups, so you got air crew and submariners, and whatever, there's clan groups.

You wear totemic symbols, you wear badges, you know, Army even has animals, so totem animals, you know, they've got goats and a bloody tiger and whatever. And it's got an ethic, an ethic that's very much like traditional life. No one's better than anybody else, you all look after each other. You never leave anybody behind.

You share everything. It's very, it's very first nation. It's very Aboriginal, a Torres Strait Islander Aboriginal thing. It's what you do in your life. So, it's like a family. It's like moving from another family group to another family group. So, I think that what makes it comfortable.

What we're finding in air force is First Nation, people who join tend to stay in longer than most people, they tend to take it on as a … "I'm only going to be here for six years and do a trade". No, "I'm going to be for the long haul. I'm gonna do 20 years or plus", you know, they do it.

But we do it for other reasons, too. We do it … It's in our DNA to protect country, you know, I say to people, you know, "I didn't join the defence force for the same reason you do". Because we think different. We think differently about how we do business.