This was published 7 months ago
‘My Errol Flynn’: How Ethne fell in love with a dead serviceman
By Tim Elliott
When Ethne Rodgers started transcribing the wartime letters of Garth Clabburn, she says it was “like he told me everything”.Credit: Courtesy of the Australian War Memorial
Ethne Rodgers had been married for 59 years, widowed for 11, had reared two adult sons and a daughter, and was sailing more or less contentedly into her tenth decade when, in 2021, she was introduced to a dashing Australian air force Lieutenant named Garth Clabburn. Garth was dead, but that didn’t matter; Rodgers fell in love with him all the same.
“He was very debonair, Garth,” says Rodgers. “He was my Errol Flynn, very naughty, and very defiant of rules and regulations.”
Sloe-eyed, with a long, lean patrician nose and pencil moustache, Clabburn was just 25 when posted to North Africa during World War II. He flew Spitfires and Warhawks over El-Alamein in Egypt, strafed German tanks and endured bombardment. He collected fossils in his time off, tramping through desert canyons and swimming with friends across the Suez Canal.
Ethne Rodgers says she can read “terrible handwriting”.Credit: Peter Tarasiuk
In his diaries, which Rodgers spent three months transcribing for the Australian War Memorial (AWM) in Canberra, Clabburn is curious and brave. He drives through a minefield, and bargains with the “Bedowins” for a sheep. He eats bags of biscuits and pickles, sardines and tomato juice. On leave in England, he is shocked by the sight of the slums, and spends much of his time “giving the girls the glad eye”. In May 1942, he is shot down by three enemy aircraft and crash-lands in the desert. He tricks the enemy pilots by taking off his overalls, laying them on the sand nearby and hiding under his aircraft. The planes strafed his clothes, then left. When night came he emerged, and began walking through the desert before meeting Allied troops, who helped him return to his squadron.
“But what I loved about Garth was his defiance,” says Rodgers. “He loved flying around the pyramids when he wasn’t supposed to.”
Clabburn died in 1983, in Victoria, aged 66. But to Rodgers, at least, a part of him is still alive. She’s lived inside his mind and inhabited his days. “It sounds strange, but it’s like I was there with him,” she says, when I talk to her on the phone. “It was like he told me everything.”
Rodgers, who turned 91 in January, is short, with deep-brown eyes, pewter-grey hair and chunky glasses that she uses for reading. She describes herself as a “frumpy old lady” living in “an itty bitty cottage”, but this belies a whipper-snipper of a mind. She reads voraciously, plays mahjong on the computer, and worked, during the Korean War, in the Defence Signals Branch in Melbourne, encrypting and decrypting messages. “I’ve always had an active, wanting-to-do-things brain.”
Rodgers downsized during the COVID-19 pandemic, and was learning to live in isolation, “which I wasn’t happy about”, when her youngest son, John, who works at the AWM, suggested she become a transcriber. She asked what it involved and he said, “You’ll have to learn how to use a computer.” Rodgers groaned and grimaced. And then she said yes.
‘I was hopeless with the computer. Sometimes I just wanted to put my foot through it.’
Ethne Rodgers
There is an insatiable need for transcribers at the AWM, which, in addition to being a shrine and a museum, is also a library, with many millions of pages of wartime documents, including love letters, diaries, postcards and photos. The archive dates from the Crimean War (1853-56), where Australians served under British command, to the most recent conflict in Afghanistan.
Rodgers’ computer terminal, showing an original document and her transcription.Credit: Peter Tarasiuk
The museum has been digitising these records for the past 20 years, scanning each document and making them available online. (Digitisation is time-consuming and costly, and only 3 per cent to 5 per cent of the archive has been completed.) But the scans by themselves are of limited use because they can’t be searched, nor, in many cases, easily read.
“These letters are dashed out by all kinds of people in all kinds of situations,” says Robyn van Dyk, head of the AWM’s research centre. “On the frontline, behind enemy lines, and by people of all educational backgrounds, from educated nurses to young soldiers who didn’t go very far in school.”
The main problem is the handwriting. For a generation reared on screens, old-fashioned cursive, with its acrobatic stream of loops, curls and elisions, can be difficult to read. Which is where Rodgers comes in.
“I have an ability to read everyone’s terrible handwriting,” she says. “If you think about my age, I had aunts and uncles who wrote me lots of letters. One aunt’s handwriting was terrible, and so flowery. But I got used to reading it.”
Rodgers’ first assignment, in 2021, was to transcribe the manifests of all the ships that came and went from Japan after World War II as part of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force. It was, she admits, pretty boring. And frustrating. “I had to put a spreadsheet together. I was hopeless with the computer. Sometimes I just wanted to put my foot through it.” But the jobs – and her IT skills – soon improved.
She transcribed a series of letters sent by Captain Reg Saunders, who served in Papua New Guinea in World War II, to his then wife, Dorothy. (Saunders, who was the first Aboriginal man to become an officer in the Australian Army, would play poker and send Dorothy the winnings.) She also worked on the diary of a young boy who fought in the World War I trenches in France: “He was up to his hips in mud, but he still had time to sketch. All he had was lead pencils, and sometimes a yellow stub pencil. He drew soldiers being killed, and people firing from the trenches.”
A continuation of Garth Clabburn’s writing from 1942, with some of Ethne Rodgers’ transcriptions.Credit: Courtesy of the Australian War Memorial
Then came the dapper Garth Clabburn, and another World War II Australian airman called John Dodds, who flew Lancaster bombers over Germany. “John always flew in the same crew with the same bomber,” Rodgers says. “His entries were short. He didn’t elaborate much, but you could tell how much he loved flying and loved the aircraft and the crew. They loved each other in a deep way, with admiration.”
Lieutenant Garth Clabburn.
One night, in April 1944, Dodds took the place of a sick crew member on another plane. He never came back. “There I was happily typing his story, and then it just stops,” Rodgers says. “John could zigzag a bit, but he couldn’t avoid the fighters, and he went down, and it broke my heart. I lost a boy I was so involved with.” She was so upset she thought she might give up transcribing. “I thought, ‘I can’t do this.’ But I did. I had to push my emotions aside.”
Rodgers works in the corner of her sparsely furnished home office for about two hours a day, usually between 6pm and 8.30pm. “I do my best work at night,” she says. The computer terminal is about three times the size of her head. On one side of the screen is a scan of the original pages, accessed through the AWM’s website; next to that is a Word document, where she types her transcripts. AWM staff then do a final edit before publishing them.
Being true to the text is a key part of the job. Transcribers must type whatever they see, exactly as it appears in the original document, including the slang, bad spelling and profanity. “Stuff you can’t print now,” Rodgers says. The word “ladies” is generally a euphemism for “prostitute”. “One fellow was on a troop ship that went via the West Indies in World War I, and well, there’s a lot of the N-word used.”
The work is eerily immersive. When Rodgers’ ‘boys’ don’t have enough blankets, she feels their cold.
The work is eerily immersive. When Rodgers’ “boys” don’t have enough blankets, she feels their cold. When they’re short of food, she feels their hunger. When they get shot at, she winces in fear. “A lot of them loved going ashore and exploring,” she says. “They found old buildings, and you wander through, right there with them.”
Rodgers has only transcribed the diaries of one woman, an Australian Army nurse named Vivian Bullwinkel. Bullwinkel, who enlisted in 1941, became famous for being the sole survivor of the so-called Bangka Island massacre in 1942, when Japanese soldiers marched a group of captive Australian nurses into the water and machine-gunned them from behind. Bullwinkel was hit in the leg, collapsed face first and pretended to be dead. Twelve days later, after hiding out in the bush, she surrendered and was taken to a prisoner of war camp in Sumatra.
Rodgers spent six months transcribing Bullwinkel’s diaries, and the letters she wrote to her mother, Eve, while interned. Bullwinkel’s story is remarkable: the diaries contain recipes for favourite dishes, which the nurses relished in lieu of actual food. But her handwriting was virtually illegible. “Imagine the words swimming across the page,” she says. “I had to study it for a while for it to make sense, to learn her idiosyncrasies.”
She considers such work to be a privilege – “an amazing journey at this stage of my life,” as she puts it. “I mean, I should be sitting in a nursing home with a blanket over my legs, but I’m not, and I love it.” Sometimes she’ll show her grandkids the old letters. “I’ll say, ‘You want to see what 105-year-old writing looks like?’ And they’ll go, ‘It’s just scrawl! It’s rubbish!’ But it’s not,” she says, with a quaver in her voice. “It’s very meaningful.”
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