Meeting Max Speedy
We met in the bar at Nowra at the Air Station. I'd been posted there while Max was part of the A flight that was away at sea. So he came back with the flight and I'd already been there for some time at Nowra which was a sort of a fairly new event.
There had only ever been two other women who had gone to Nowra air station. So having the women on base was a fairly new event. So yes, and so I found that as time went on, every time I turned around in the mess, he would be behind me. It took me a while to work out who this strange boy was. So we met while we were both serving at Albatross.
Land jobs for women
I went there as the third officer which was basically a sub-lieutenant equivalent and I was promoted while I was there. So I was basically lieutenant, which was, yeah, so that was what I did. So I was essentially the assistant secretary in the Captain's Office initially and then I also was the unit officer for the women's side of life.
Usually, there were two female officers there. One was the admin job that I had but the main one was the unit officer to look after all the young women. And that was pretty much what the serving women did, all across the forces, we did the land jobs, looking after the women who invariably were either technical people, they were communicators, and they had their own offices, or all the admin jobs that the girls were employed on in the services at that time.
Supporting wives
That is something that I think I grew up with in as other women did in those days, we're going back now to the very early 60s. The number of jobs that were open to women in those days were very limited. So joining the Navy was something sort of fairly outrageous, because you either had teaching and nursing were the professional jobs that were available on the whole and most of most of it, and then you had things like secretarial retail and so on.
But professions and jobs as a whole were very limited to women and leaving when you were married was a very common event. I mean, it sounds you have to really sort of think, "How could that have been the case?", but it was common. So as a young woman growing up, choosing what you wanted to do if you wanted to work after school was a fairly serious thing.
You were either pigeonholed, or if you did something that was a bit adventurous in those days, run off and join the Navy, you were still in same situation of once you married that was the end of your career as such. It was common. So you grew up knowing that was going to happen. It didn't make it any easier and I think one of the things that gets forgotten, too, is that in those days, for young women, and particularly young mothers, there was nothing like the support there is now because one, we all left home, left our families to join the Navy.
So you didn't have that support that you might have, if you were still at home living in the town you grew up in, and there was very, very little available in the way of childcare. So you really were on your own and it was not an easy road, particularly when the fellows left and went away, for whatever reason, because they went away regularly.
Going to Vietnam was something different which affected everybody in a different way. I actually, more probably in retrospect, count myself as being very lucky in those days. I grew up with a navy family, in a navy family. I joined the Navy, myself, I was very much enamoured of the services and I had a real sense that, you know, there was a right way to do things and not, so the there was a responsibility to be the stay-at-home person with the family, but also that if you did a good job of that, it meant that the guys could go and do a good job without worry, which they needed to be able to do, in my mind.
So the time when they went away, it was just another level up and it reminded me very much of my mother and father who were children during, literally, they always said they were so young when they got married, we all grew up together during the Second World War. So there was this sort of ethos in the family that I'd grown up with, didn't necessarily make it any easier but I did go home to a father who patted me on the shoulder, "You'll be right girl, you'll manage" …
Again, go back to the days where they were there was very little in the way of social welfare support or anything externally and certainly not in the services you basically got on with life, the network that we did have that was very valuable was the network of supporting wives because it was really the only thing we had and it was very strong.
And the other thing that happened was, when the guys were away at sea, long before it was Vietnam, when the guys were away at sea then the guys who weren't away at sea would be very helpful they'd make sure, you know, that you could mow your lawn or that sort of thing.
So there was the service family that was really good that looked after you in that sense, but from a personal point of view, it was really, I mean it sounds corny but it was really stiff upper lip stuff, you got on with it, you didn't make a fuss and you coped with what needed to be done and they got to hear about it eventually but it was usually sort of as part of a joke, something dreadful had happened at home, but you know small things like the washing machine blowing up and whatever were no cause for alarm and that was part of it.
guess it was a certain sense of independence and pride in being able to get on and do it and we had good examples, because our mothers had gone through the Second World War and if you had any close family ties like that, they were a pretty good example.
Working for the Barnardos Family
My dad had been a Barnardos boy in England when he was young and when it came time to leave, when Max went off to Vietnam, it meant, because I had just left. I'd been out of the Navy about eight months, myself, I suppose. But I didn't and I could have gone back in but I really didn't want to do that.
It was sort of like the end of an era and, and I had this notion that I'd like to run off and do volunteers abroad for a year, but their year didn't coincide with Max's year away. So then I thought, I'll go and check out Barnardos. So I ended up being housemother for a year and that was, that was great because there was six kids we had.
I was just the assistant, I wasn't in charge but in any event we had, yeah, I had a family for that year and that was a great thing to have to do, to be able to do. Lots of kids to cuddle and it was good … Bernados is a worldwide organization started in England years ago, basically, look after kids who are either orphaned, started off specifically for orphans but over the years developed for kids who were from needy families or whatever. So I think, I don't think they were only orphans but their families weren't able to look after them for whatever reason.
Hello, goodbye
They were all allowed to take two different weeks of R&R or, yeah, I think they were close to a week. But in any event, he basically decided that he would prefer to wait and do one. Do it after eight months and then have a second one a bit later. I think though, they had a week by the time they're actually flown home, flown back again, probably had five days.
So yes, he came to Sydney both times and I was working in Sydney … we were pretty good at ‘Hello, goodbye'. It was different. It was totally different from what became family comings and goings in later life and the difference was always there was the element of this was not a trip away to fly airplanes on or off an aircraft carrier or that type of thing.
This was serious. And it could well happen that he didn't come home, or he could come home in bits. It was, it wasn't like anything else because this was real life, you know, serious stuff. And, and this is where I think I appreciated my father because he, we didn't talk about it in massive detail and we didn't need to, because he knew as well as I did that that was the underlying thing.
So it was different, things that you sort of read about now, but actually did happen, walking down the street in the city, a car backfired, it would be, and for Max, it would have been infinitely more difficult than it was for me because I was in my home ground. And he was coming back from a situation that you could only imagine, and probably not very well.
So, that, I think from a Vietnam experience was something that has always been adrift. There was no sense of anybody having any understanding of what it was like for them while it happened and certainly none when they came home, which made it extraordinarily difficult for personal relationships. And anyone who thinks they came home and the war finished is sadly mistaken, because it doesn't end and talk to their children and they'll tell you the same, it doesn't end.
And the great tragedy, I think, with all of that was that nobody, including the service, including the Navy, in this case, nobody was prepared to actually live with it afterwards and they still aren't. The only people who write about it are academics or people who were actually there. And the trouble now is, so much water has gone to the bridge, that a lot of the damage, personal damage that happened could have been avoided, if based on everything that was learned during the First World War, particularly, but also the Second World War about how do you treat people when they've been to war and they come back into normal life if there is such a thing.
And how do you prepare families to be to be able to deal with that, but also to be practically of some use? We are terrible at it. As a civilization we don't learn how to die very well but we certainly have no notion of how to deal with the people who actually go to war and if we had, then you would find that those poor souls who finished up in Afghanistan, they wouldn't be having anything like the trouble that they are now because we still don't know how to deal with it. We don't prepare to deal with it. So how did we deal with it in Kings Cross for a week? Probably not very well.
Improved family support
As an aside, our son, when he was still in the army, he went to Timor when that kerfuffle was on and we were astounded that this gorgeous sounding young woman came on the phone from East Sale and she said she was from the family care unit basically, and we had a son, uh, you know, going to Timor.
So she just wanted to check in and say, "Would we like to go to the morning tea that was being put on for all the relatives and it would we like a care package" and all this sort of thing. And I'm sitting there at my desk working and I'm listening to this lovely young thing on the phone and I'm thinking how things have changed.
And I mean, that was a long time ago now, obviously, but it was such a departure from anything we had ever experienced. So I felt like clapping and give her a cuddle and it was really funny because not long after a package arrived and it was a package designed for children. It had pencils and a drawing book, a colouring book in it, like with daddy's in his outfit, he's off to wherever he's off to. And yeah, so there's obviously lots of things have changed if you're a family from when we were young things, which is good to see.
