Radschool Association Magazine - Vol 29

Page 11

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481 Mntce Squadron.

Rob Richards sent us the photo below of 481 Maintenance bods, all done up in their 1A’s (that’s Rob in the second last row, third from the right). The photo was taken at Willytown about 1977. If you’d like a copy in much better definition, click HERE.

1968 Caru Girls.

Ernie Gimm says, re the CARU girls Vol28, he can’t put names to most of the girls, but he’s pretty sure the Flight Officer is Margaret Baxter. Can anyone help with the remainder??

Examination day as I see it.

From Ron Clayton’s copy of the 1965 Appy year book.

Anyone who has spent a period of time at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology is familiar with procedure at study break. Groups of students with ten minutes or longer to spare, push, shove, jostle and in general relax by exertion. Others lounge around reading comics, talking, or sit and think, or just sit. The lucky ones with cash shoot off to the canteen as if the Institute coffee is worth the haste.

Instructors move through the human throng with ease born of long practice, heading for their next rendezvous in the College of Knowledge. Yet on this particular day, a casual observer finds the scene, again at study break, vastly different in concept. RAAF apprentices, usually noisy, always a moving, energetic groups, are now a picture of lethargy, no movement, no talk, except an occasional two-sided conversation; no horseplay. It is as though each man desires to be alone with his individual thoughts.

Yet there is an atmosphere of group tension; individual feelings contributing to a mass expectation of the unknown. It is a puzzling scene, an unexpected change in character. Have you guessed the reason? It’s the first day of end-of-year examinations. Now let’s have a RAAF radio apprentice’s view on the subject.

“Examinations—you can have them. The written ones, I mean. The physical ones are OK. After all, you have to be fit to do a written exam. You are either stuck at a desk with perspiration streaming down your face at 95 in the shade, or sit shaking with the cold at 28 in the sun. And you have to be mentally fit to pass a verbal exam on your knowledge. Or lack of it. I mean to say, for example, a character holds out a nut and says what is this and you say its a quarter inch Whitworth and he says: “No It’s a nut; you should have said its a nut then I would ask you what type of nut”. So then naturally you say well what type of nut are you and you have flunked another exam. It isn’t fair. What I’m getting at is I failed my English and why should I. You have read what I have written so far, haven’t you? You have? Well, how come you passed English? Even my mate did better than me; or I; or both of us. He flunked radio and then did a welder’s trade test. The Examiner marked his papers ‘Joint excellent’ and now he’s one of the best cooks in the RAAF.

“Anyway, I don’t see why we can’t write as we speak. John Lennon got a lot of money for writing funny, funny peculiar not funny humorous, and what’s more, no one goes crook on him for not getting his hair cut. You don’t know John Lennon you say? The BEATLES?? You wouldn’t even know a quarter inch Whitworth either, I’ll bet.

Ah well, see you at the supplementary exam next week.”

J. QUINCEY.

We had a bloke!

We had ‘this bloke’ in our flight in Nashos.  He shall remain anonymous but any one that was there at that time will remember him.  Nashos then were for 154 days January till June and most of this time was spent at Ballarat.  This ‘bloke’ had been in cadets so he was way ahead of most of the rest of our flight.  All the same he was not picked as our ‘honorary corporal’, wisely.

He was an organiser and a scrounger.  Eventually the WRAAAFs nick named ‘this bloke’ “heavenly head”, he just had a crew cut like the rest of us, so why him?  He was the one that organised four of us to buy an A model Ford, and that led to many escapades. 

‘This bloke’ was the one caught syphoning petrol out of a tractor left parked near the mess hall late one Sunday,  the duty officer felt sorry for his story and even let us keep the petrol rather than putting it back.

It was suggested that our car could do with a coat of paint so, as a favour (trips into town) our DI gave as some blue paint and some brushes.  We also managed to get out of Saturday afternoon drill.  After the first day the DI asked how we had done “Just cleaned it and papered it down”.  In fact we had no sand paper and had just done a bit of spine bashing in the long grass near our hut.  Next week same question.  “It looked like rain and we didn’t want to waste the paint”.  After about four weeks we were back drilling with the rest of the flight.  We were worried that IF we had painted the car, the letters RAAF might have come out all over the car.  That’s because we knew that our DI did not buy the paint anyway.

On our first guard duty, just after it became dark, ‘this bloke’ was on the tarmac area; he came bursting back into the hut “quick I need help”.  We all thought the Japs had landed and went for our 303s (without ammo of course), but no.  “I have found all sorts of good stuff and I need help to pinch it”.  We declined.

At one stage the camp PA system was being extended, as ‘this bloke’ had worked for a PA company he got the job of a week up poles connecting speakers and of course was without instruction.

As you know, there was no swimming any where near the camp, but of course ‘this bloke’ volunteered for five days at Laverton (???) so that an RAAF team could be chosen.  About eight I think went down including a couple of WRAAAFs.   Hours before the events kicked off, he had bad stomach pains “I have previously been diagnosed with appendicitis”.  A week in Melbourne and never put his swimming costume on.

“This bloke’ was also the guy that broke the ice with the nurses at Ballarat Base Hospital and ended up with a number of us taking nurses out.  We were 18-19 so we did need help to break the ice but we were well capable on our own after that.

When any one took a photo ‘this bloke’ was always the most prominent in the print.

Everyone knew someone like this, we all had a ‘this bloke’ in our unit didn’t we?

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