Lest We Forget

1982 was the year I swapped my final year of high school for the world of working adults. I was a timid sixteen-year-old and more often than not felt like I should have gone outside to play while the adults talked.

These weren’t ordinary adults; I was the new typist at an army unit in South Melbourne. The 70 members of Melbourne Workshop Company were a mix of military and civilian men ranging from their early twenties to their mid-sixties and two women. I worked in the Orderly Room, right outside the Captain’s office. He had a very rigid military thinking style – which means he had the usual “break ‘em down and build ‘em up” mentality. Next to his office was the Major’s office. He was the Commanding Officer of the unit and shared the break ’em down mentality, though his approach was more underhanded. The way these men spoke to me was awful and these days I’d tell them where to get off, but in 1982 I felt like a child in trouble from the school principal. It took a while for me to learn how to be an adult in a military environment, which is why I feel that sixteen year old children should stay at school.

To my immature and unsocialised mind, the army was all about war there was certainly no war on the horizon, leaving me with the impression that we were all redundant. As conversations about war were always hushed around children I mistakenly believed the last war had ended 40 years earlier, in 1945. Without a thought of Vietnam, Korea the Falklands or Somalia, I figured anyone who had been involved in a war had since died of old age. War was a world away from us at Melbourne Workshop Company in South Melbourne.

The Unit was a highly organised place with painted walkways through the workshop, unwritten rules about who I was (and wasn’t) to call Sir , and where I was allowed to have my lunch. Typical of silly rules that I thought soldiers without a war might make so they felt important. My job was to type up anything that needed typing, which I finished before lunch on most days. It was an easy place to work after learning all their silly rules.

Many of the older civilians at Melbourne Workshop Company had served in the army and, their old military rank or their current position in the public service assigned them to do their socialising at either the Sergeant’s Mess or the Other Rank’s (OR’s) boozer. I was glad to belong to the OR’s boozer because the Captain and the Major never went in there. These places might run differently nowadays, but every lunch time we headed up to our respective boozer where most of the men had a drink or two (or more) with their lunch. Everything was priced so that there was no profit, so a beer pot cost 80 cents while spirits were $1.00; making alcohol the most accessible and affordable pass time. The men spent their hour-long lunch break drinking while playing darts or billiards and talking about the bastards in the other boozer. I’m sure it was the same in the Sergeant’s Mess.

I had no idea that many of the men I worked with had been to war but, looking back, there were obvious signs. The older military and ex-army civvies were rigid in their thinking, drank too much too often, and looked after and covered for each other in ways usual workmates don’t. But, as this was my first job and I had no idea it was unusual.

All 70 took me under their wing, treating me as a daughter or sister and made sure I was included in everything. When somebody swore at the boozer the whole room lit up in protest that there’s a lady present and I looked around for the lady, but there was only me. The room would hush like a re-set button had been pressed, and then the volume slowly built back to normal again, without the swearing. I began dating one of the RAEME soldiers and the Commanding Officer was so concerned that a nice girl like me was with such an undisciplined character that he said I could do much better and posted my Corporal 200 kilometres away. That CO often punished or posted his men away, like he enjoyed having power to shape and direct their lives. Twelve months later the corporal and I married and I found out that he wasn’t exactly undisciplined, he just didn’t tolerate bullshit – which made him quite useless to the army. The blind obedience of 1950s soldiers was being challenged by a few of the other soldiers at the unit, too.

I am writing this on the 11th day of the 11th month; Remembrance Day. And I think back to those older members of Melbourne Workshop Company with the realisation that they had lived through the awful truths of real combat and wouldn’t, couldn’t or saw no reason to talk about it. The wartime experiences of the Sergeant’s Mess civvies showed in the way they walked, sat, dressed, combed their hair and trimmed their moustache. In the amount and frequency that they drank and their ability to cover up their drunken afternoons at the desk, and in their high expectations of others and of themselves in group situations. They snuck military vehicles out on secret missions to the TAB or to take flowers to the wife because he had gone home late and drunk again the night before. It was all very risky workplace stuff, but perfectly normal at Melbourne Workshop Company.

Casualties of war don’t always have a bullet wound.