David Cox - [Autobiography 02] - The Fair Dinkum War (retail) (pdf)

The

David Cox was a young boy during World War Two. He remembers his class racing outside to watch a long line of soldiers in trucks and jeeps passing by, and how the children played war games and knew every aeroplane and tank and warship. Everyone took part in the war effort, and they all longed for the day when it would be over. A story of resilience and bravery from the creator of The Road to Goonong. ‘every page is full of action and humour’ Magpies ‘breathes authenticity and is to be treasured as a rare gift’ Reading Time

ISBN: 978-1-74331-062-5

9 781743 310625

Fair Dinkum War David COX

Photo by Caitlin Murphy

David Cox grew up in outback Queensland. At age twenty-one, David went to St Martins School of Art in England.

While in his first year at the school, he was offered his first book illustration commission. When he eventually returned to Australia, he worked as an artist in the newspaper industry. He also wrote articles, book and art reviews and designed theatre sets and costumes. In 1978, he was awarded the Walkley Award for newspaper illustration. David’s writing and drawing for children began in the 1960s and some of his books have won awards and citations in Australia and in the USA, including Ayu and the Perfect Moon and The Drover’s Dog. His illustration style is characterised by spontaneity and wit, and he has illustrated many books written by other people. In 2007 he was awarded the Dame Isabelle Rankin Award for distinguished services to Children’s Literature in Queensland. David is married to Betty Beath, a well-respected Australian composer. Together, they have written songs and operas for children, and music theatre pieces for adult audiences.

About The Fair Dinkum War, David says, ‘My family would remember events differently, but these are the impressions I had of the war as a small boy. Although we were not occupied by enemy armies, as Asian and European nations were, the occupation of at least part of Australia was a real possibility. The war came close and we were afraid. Reality hit hard when we were told that family friends, relations and even parents who had gone away would never come home. But we formed a very united community and a certain kind of humour emerged during the war. There were good times mixed in with the bad times of war.

The

Fair Dinkum War David Cox

In the second year of World War Two, my family moved from the country to the city, all except for my dad, who worked as an overseer on a sheep station out west. He had been a soldier in World War One so now he was a bit too old for the army. He would be more useful on the land, they said. I was a country boy and it was the first time I had been to a real school. I was in Grade Two and my teacher was Miss Walker. She was a walker, all right. Some of us walked with her on the way to school and we had to run to keep up.

She was a talker, too… and a chalker. One morning, she drew a kookaburra on our blackboard. It looked real enough to fly away.

I had never seen anyone who could draw like that and I wanted to draw like Miss Walker did.

That same morning, something important happened. It began with a great rumble that came in through our classroom window and rumbled on and on. We all ran down the stairs, even Miss Walker, and out into the school yard

and hung on the school-yard fence and gazed in wonder.

The American army had come to take part in the war! An endless line of trucks and jeeps and tanks and weapons carriers came around the corner and along our street, all of them with big white stars on their sides. There were big cannons, too. Soldiers in the trucks waved to us.

We wouldn’t have guessed there were so many trucks in the whole wide world. They rumbled right through the morning break and when we came out for lunch they still rolled by. Then they were gone, heading north to where the war was being fought.

The war was coming closer and closer. Japanese planes had dropped bombs on our towns to the north!

Our grown-ups were worried. They studied the newspapers, listened to the radio, frowned and talked in low voices. When children came near, they talked about the weather and other things. It was hard sometimes not to be afraid.

Montgomery is the best general But we knew all about the war. We knew every aeroplane and tank and warship. We knew the names of army generals…they were as famous as football players. I did drawings of battle scenes for other kids and the games we played were war games.

Naw! Macarthur’s the best Macarthur!

Montgomery!

You are my prisoner!

We shot one another with pretend bullets and bled pretend blood. We took prisoners of war. We were aeroplanes and tanks. We collected toy soldiers made of lead and set them out for battle.

Men dug air-raid trenches in zigzag lines across our school grounds. They were not for play; this was fair dinkum war. We kids were not allowed to go into them, jump over them, or even go near them, unless there was air-raid drill.

Then we had to file out of class, down into the trenches, shuffle along on each others’ heels and squat on our haunches with our hands on our heads in case of falling bombs.

Everybody had air-raid shelters at home, too. Some were just trenches, like ours, that filled with water when it rained. But some kids had air-raid shelters they could boast about, with cups and plates and cupboards full of canned food that would last for weeks.

Every night the town was dark. No street lights were turned on and black curtains hung on the windows of every house, so that not a chink of light would tell the Japanese bombers where we were. This was known as ‘The Black-out’.

Sometimes at night, loud air-raid sirens wailed all over town and we hoped it was just practice and not the real thing. Men with helmets, marked ‘W’ for Warden, patrolled the streets and knocked on the doors of houses where a light was showing.

Because of the war, we had to do without the things we loved, and that was called ‘The Austerity Program’. We could only dream about chocolate biscuits and chocolate ice-creams. Food and clothing were scarce, too, because of the war. We were given little books of coupons, so when we bought food or clothes, we paid with money and a certain number of coupons. So nobody, however rich, could buy too much, and that seemed fair. It was called ‘Rationing’.

Lots of rubber and metal were needed for the war, so we all collected hot water bottles and tin cans and things like that. We took them to school and they were taken away to become tyres and trucks and tanks. We were all taking part in ‘The War Effort’.

Petrol was hard to come by, so there were not many cars on our streets. Our milk and our bread came by horse and cart, and our rubbish bins left in the same way.

Give us the top of your pie will you, mate?

And little piecarts, with ovens and chimneys, were pulled by piebald ponies. They parked beside schools and movie theatres to sell us pies. They were good pies, too, with crisp tops and thick gravy.

Mothers, and grandmothers even, dressed up in their hats and gloves and rode to town on wobbly bicycles. Polite old men on Shanks’s pony raised their hats to them.

I used to ride my bike to Fredlein’s Corner Store, and one day I stopped by the Fredleins’ back-yard fence and climbed into their mulberry tree. I stayed in the tree for quite a while.

When I went to the store, Mr Fredlein looked over his spectacles at me and said, ‘I see you like mulberries, young man.’

When the circus came to town, it passed right by our school. With our Grade Four teacher, Mr Brown, we hung on the fence and stared and stared. There were lions and camels and elephants. Later on, I tried to draw all the animals.

Mr and Mrs Fredlein had no kids of their own. When they went to the circus, they took me with them … me, the famous mulberry thief. So I did drawings of clowns and monkeys, tightrope walkers, and men and women on the flying trapeze. I gave the drawings to Mr and Mrs Fredlein, to square up things for the mulberries.

Most Sundays, we rode our bikes to Grandmother’s house on the edge of town and had lunch at a long table, sitting straight like soldiers. There were always aunts and uncles and older cousins who wore the uniforms of the army, navy or airforce.

Grandmother read me books by Charles Dickens and taught me to play chess, but I had to sit very straight and I wasn’t allowed to whistle through my teeth when I was trying to think. I never got to beat her.

Grandmother told me never to be afraid, not of anything. She was not even afraid of hornets. If she had been a man, she said, she would have been a sailor.

Our father was away out west working on sheep and cattle stations, and once or twice a year he came back to us, just for a while. He would tell us stories about the bush. Then he would be gone again and far away, but at least we knew that he was safe.

Other kids’ fathers were far away in the middle of the war. Some of them were prisoners, some had escaped. Some kids’ fathers would never come back.

I used to walk to school with a boy called Des.

‘I am very happy,’ Des told me one day, ‘and I’m happy because my dad was a genius. He was a real, fair dinkum genius, and he could play any musical instrument that ever was. And that’s true and that’s why I’m happy.’

On one side of our town was an American army base. Soldiers bounced around the streets in jeeps, and sailors bounced on hired ponies. We called the Americans ‘yanks’. They called us ‘buddies’ and gave us chewing gum and signed our autograph books.

On the other side of town was a camp for soldiers from the island of Java. We never saw them on our streets, but we knew they were there. We went to them with money or gifts – chillies and corn was what they liked most – and they made us beautiful kites. We kids could make kites with newspaper and sticks, and we flew them on string. But the Javanese made them out of bamboo and coloured paper, and we could fly them high on cotton thread.

Lots of kids had Javanese kites, and they were shaped like all kinds of birds and fish and animals. There were even dragons.

People of our town lifted their eyes to the sky.

I went through Grade Three, Grade Four, Grade Five, and still the war went on. When it is over, people said, there will be dancing in the streets.

And they were right. When peace was declared, people went wild. They laughed and laughed and hugged one another and danced in the streets. Soon, we knew, there would be chocolate-coated ice-creams and our soldiers would be coming home.

And that was not all. My dad was offered a job as the manager of a big sheep station. We could go back to the country and I would draw horses. And we would all be together again.

For Emma, Sebastian and Reuben

First published in 2013 Copyright © David Cox, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone:  (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax:  (61 2) 9906 2218 Email: [email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia www.trove.nla.gov.au ISBN 978 174331 062 5 Cover and text design by Sandra Nobes Set in 16 pt Century by Sandra Nobes This book was printed in September 2012 at South China Printing, Daning Administrative District, Humen Town, Dongguan City, Guangdong Province, China 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2