Harry Locke - We were only nineteen

Transcript

Well, from where I came from all my friends were about the same age and we all more or less decided amongst ourselves to enlist and about 200 of us went down by train to Adelaide. We enlisted in Renmark but you had to go to Adelaide to sign up and be given your army number and put into different units and that's how it first started off, we were all mainly 19, 19 and a half, you know, and since then I've often thought of the boys from Vietnam, you know, they sang that song ‘We were only nineteen' thirty years ago , we could have sang the same song.

When I was younger, I used to go out and watch the military at the showgrounds, you know, they were like training for army and I got quite interested in that and though I was only younger they let you handle some of the guns and, of course, I finished up a Bren gunner in Tobruk.