A diary of Adelaide life in World War II
FROM debutantes to disaster, the diary of Adelaide socialite Carys Harding Browne paints a vivid picture of the emotional rollercoaster that South Australians endured in World War II.
IN 1940, Carys Harding Browne, a 17-year-old girl living in Molesworth St, North Adelaide, is writing her diary. She lives with her mother and two brothers, Richard and Bryan. Richard, aged 19, is already a well-known radio announcer on 5AD and Bryan, aged 15, is studying at Pulteney Grammar School. Carys’s mother works in the frock department of the Myer Emporium. Carys’s father left the family seven years previously. In her diary, Carys writes about the war, love, the “Angry Penguins” poets, the people and places around her – and her desire to be a writer.
All the time, the war is coming like a train, gathering momentum and finally crushing Carys’s life and others.
February 24, 1940: Shared taxi to debutante dance, chauffeur on the pavement let us out; maids showed us about the house, went into wonderful marquees, lights in the garden and lighting up trees and roses and water lilies in ponds. Every boy there seemed in the army. I had to buck up innumerable boys. All very young, very disillusioned, very “heroic”, very afraid of dying.
May 25: The Germans are still advancing and people are still sending out dance invitations and Richard has signed up papers as a first step to becoming a pilot for the RAAF.
June 12: Paris is being heavily bombed, Italy has advanced towards France, and America is straining to the utmost. I watched Air Force marches at lunch. This morning there were raids on Hindley St in Adelaide for Italians.
June 13: Today Richard has his medical test for the RAAF, and he went, full of foreboding and spirited. It is a full day’s test and quite an honour to be accepted.
June 14: Paris has fallen. The Swastika flies from the Eiffel Tower. The Germans goosestep down the Champs Elysees and salute the Arc de Triomphe. Everyone here is marching about and waving les tricolores in a French Red Cross effort.
August 29: I sold lucky matchboxes at the Miller Anderson Red Cross Parade at the Royal. The most fashionable audience I have seen in Adelaide – from Lady Gowrie down to me. There were huge crowds selling flowers, orchids from Java and Burma, debutantes in white frocks – Vice-Regal parties are awfully slow but amusing though, and patriotic. The whole theatre shouted “There’ll always be an England” at the end.
September 8: In the evening we went to church because the King “said so”. It was a National Day of Prayer and everyone marched about the Adelaide Oval in uniforms and sang hymns and asked God to win the war for the Empire – a very laudable and good move.
November 7: We had a party for Richard, who is leaving on Saturday by train for Pearce in Western Australia, to an aviation camp. It is a long, filthy journey. The war has begun for him.
January 15, 1941: At lunchtime, I watched a march of machine-gunners, hundreds upon hundreds of them. They wore khaki shorts and open necked shirts with steel hats. I have never seen a more responsive crowd. The old soldiers urged them on with the old remarks and girls from second storey windows yelled and sang. And I wept in King William St.
June 11: The Americans will procrastinate forever, probably. We are pottering around in Libya, and casualty lists are fantastic. We are still advancing in Syria. An American ship has been torpedoed by a Nazi. Someone says the war will go on for 30 years. We are greatly depressed because Richard will be leaving shortly for overseas as a pilot, while most of his friends are remaining behind as instructors. They drew from a hat and Richard was unlucky. He is elated but we ... to draw life or death out of a hat!
July 14: Richard is embarking for England today. It has begun. We trammed down to the station to see Richard off. We talked brightly to the last minutes, then Richard flung himself into Mummy’s arms and held her tight for a long time; then he hugged me and kissed me; shook hands quiveringly with Bryan and ran to his carriage when the whistle blew. We saw Richard sitting by himself, not looking out, with his respirator and helmet beside him, and in a great coat, like a Nazi General’s, and a peaked officer’s cap – and we walked down the station, trying not to weep.
We had booked for the film Florian, knowing that would be wiser than going home to an empty, cold house, but now that it came to the push, it was agony to us. But it was successful. We grew interested in the film, and half forgot, and the hero survived the Last War. We walked back across the links, with the listless mists swirling between the trees, and white gulls bathing in the floods, and we were consoled of many things.
October 23: Bryan is leaving for his ship in a month, in a midshipman’s uniform, with all the world before him and – please God – a dearth of mines below him. He brushes silently about the halls of the house in long waterproofs reaching to his boots, and capes and sou’-westers attached.
November 19: The USA has set out four conditions for peace and they are these: Japan to keep out of China and Indo-China; Japan to let all Pacific countries have equal rights of development; Japan to give up further aggression; Japan to leave the Axis.
December 8: Japan bombed American bases in the Pacific. The fire has spread to the Pacific, and the whole globe is on fire. From Iceland to Tasmania, from America to Japan. Does the planet hang in the stratosphere and do flames leap up from it? I spent the morning listening into street radios and buying up special editions.
December 9: Bryan catches his boat tonight, but we all lunched together at Quality Inn, where my friends looked with surprise on this new brother, better looking even than the first, in his strange uniform. Officers of the Merchant Marine are scarce. There was a conscription meeting at the Town Hall, and we went. It was fiercely patriotic, and we all shouted “Rule Britannia” and “There’ll always be an England” and “Land of Hope and Glory”, while veterans from the Relief of Gordon, simply dripping medals, whipped out flags and kissed them, and everyone pledged their every penny and every drop of blood, and paid two shillings and became a member of the Service League. In the panic, I did too.
December 26: New Australian war measures have been introduced: no petrol for pleasure, huge forces sent to Darwin, air raid precautions, no window lighting at night or late shopping, and no weekly races or night sports. At Glenelg, I met my friend Nob Good, who is stationed there to register militia conscripts and we fled in his new car “The Red Devil” to Brighton. We swam on a beach with a mesh of barbed wire and machine gun nests. That night I went to bed and slept during the blackout, hearing dimly the banshee wail and the church bells, and seeing the impudent moon in a dark world, and then I heard nothing more.
January 18, 1942: Coming home with my friend Sibyl, we danced along the pavement and licked ice creams, and I came home late, in the dark. Mummy was in bed, but the Telegram had come. Richard missing in air operations two days after his 21st birthday. The thing refused to penetrate me. Then it did. I lay and sobbed, and howled on my knees. Mother had sat all day by herself, waiting for me, while I danced crazy dances. I pulled down all the photos she had put up of him, and we had quite a fight in the dark. I couldn’t bear them. What’s it for? He did nothing for the war but throw away his life, and bits of ours.
January 23: The BBC warns Australia that convoys were approaching from Japan and that Rabaul in New Guinea had been overcome. They also announced that all capital cities were fully prepared for raids, which horrified me, knowing that only a few trenches had been dug in Victoria Square and a few buildings possessed buckets of sand and a borrowed spade.
February 4: Outside, the world is blacked out and Bowden below North Adelaide shows only a few stars. The blue trams pass through street after street without a light, and cars are hurled out of the darkness.
February 22: We had afternoon tea at the Harley Hoopers. We examined their notorious dugout which is a miniature mine; steps leading into the earth, sloping down to a cabin lit by electric light 16 feet underground; down further to another room. Later that evening, I heard the Japanese warning to expect a raid on the 28th February. I suppose this warning is part of a nerve war, but it is dangerous and discomforting. I find myself wondering more and more how I will take a raid. The thought of it fills me with terror. Panic. It is a beastly world.
February 23: I had enlisted for Air Raid Precautions (ARP) services. My first evacuation officers meeting was tonight at Madge Church, our area (8) comprising Hutt St, Wakefield St, South Tce and Carrington St. There are about 20 of us, and it is a job which demands common sense, courage, leadership and discretion. The registering will be amusing; asking elderly women their ages, symptoms and occupations.
March 12: There’s a bit of romance in war after all. Adelaide (and Australia) is filled with American army and air force men in khaki uniforms and little cook’s caps; they stand about and admire this lil’ being and the ankles that go by – and often stop. Australia is a land of excitement. The Americans slouch about the streets laden with water bottles and hip revolvers as though they don’t quite know what to expect; Dutch and Javanese rabble troops have crossed here in battered, lopsided planes or unarmed boats over which Japanese pilots have leant from their planes, waved and dropped their bombs: their stories are unreal, of families left to be raped and murdered. Our own men are coming back in droves, ringing up, saying “Darling I’m home” as though it were Armistice and not their last stand. My friends are playing fast and loose with the American and the Dutch. Excitement, madness, the streets a mass of men. Men everywhere.
April 18: I have been given a job in the Programme Department of Radio 5AD. Richard makes sacrifices, gives up his adored work there as a radio announcer, and his life, while I, being a woman, come like a vampire into his kingdom. I recognise and sicken at the unfairness.
June 11: Sydney has been shelled and two submarines sunk inside the Harbour. Very worried about Bryan. Merchant ships being sunk off the coast about Newcastle. The Japanese audacity is amazing. Bryan’s letters are full of dodging enemy submarines and of biscuit tins full of tobacco and sweets to last him months on a raft in the sea. God bless him.
Carys ends her diary in July 1942. By November she has joined the Australian Army Medical Women’s Service and is nursing at the Northfield Army Hospital. In 1987, she recalled that tumultuous time.
“We were the first of the clumsy, heavily dressed, newly named AAMWS privates, cleaners of latrines and luggers of hot boxes. We all lived comfortably in tents. We had swinging kerosene lamps, and the lights blew out and the tents blew down. Later we moved from the tents into long iron sheds where we hurdled the iron beds. We cleaned out the sisters’ huts. We boiled crockery in the Infectious Wards. We made beds with mitered corners. We woke in the dark to bugle calls and began work at seven thirty, across fields, with no roads.
“My own love affair with a long-absent airman flying in England, was kept going by those tiny, shiny microfilmed letters or cables, until one day, his parents – he was an only child – rang to say he was posted as ‘missing’. ‘Missing’ meant died. I went to see them in their desolation. Thereafter, continued in the wards, in a sort of black hole.
“Two days later, I was passing through the mess, when the flighty little girl who looked after the switchboard, yelled out, ‘There is a message for you. Sorry! Something about John turning up?’”
On August 1, 1943, John Portus’s Sunderland aircraft had been shot down by a German U-boat in the Bay of Biscay. Half his crew perished, but he was rescued. Six months later, Carys and John married in Adelaide.
Yet tragedy still stalked the family.
Carys’s brother Bryan died when his merchant ship was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine on June 29, 1944, in the Indian Ocean. Bryan, 19, was killed when returning in his lifeboat to rescue the captain from the sinking ship.
The war came to an end. On August 15, 1945, there were victory celebrations in Adelaide. There was shouting and singing in the streets. Carys wandered into the revelries but could not join in, knowing that her two brothers were never ever coming back.
She died in Adelaide in 2004, aged 81. Her daughter Ann Barson has captured her story in a book based around Carys’s WWII diary.
Excerpts from Carys: Diary of a Young Girl, Adelaide 1940-42. Edited by Ann Barson, published by ETT Imprint, $26.99 in good bookshops or online at booktopia.com.au