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00:03 When I joined the Army, my name was Valerie Jean Blackett.
00:13 I was 18 years and a few days, and my rank was gunner.
00:19 I think we might have been some of the first.
00:24 I went to Victoria Barracks.
00:27 We had a pep talk, and then we all
00:31 walked from Victoria Barracks down to Central Station.
00:36 Looked like a gaggle of peacocks and things,
00:40 girls in high heels, some in flatties, some with hats,
00:44 and everybody calling out, you'll be sorry,
00:48 you'll be sorry, all the way down to Central.
00:52 And we went on the train to Ingleburn,
00:56 where I did my rookies.
00:58 And then we weren't told much, and got on a train,
01:03 and we got off at Broadmeadow onto a truck,
01:07 standing up on the back of a truck, about 20 of us,
01:10 crossing the ferry.
01:12 The ferry in those days took trucks and cars.
01:17 We pulled up outside a beautiful home called The Laurels,
01:21 and we all said, oh, I'll have that room.
01:24 I'll have that room.
01:26 We walked in through the hallway and out
01:29 into a hut in the back garden, which was a rude awakening.
01:36 So that was the first day that I realised
01:39 I was going to be a gunner.
01:41 My father had been in the First World War on the Somme.
01:46 I think he was pretty proud, because he and two brothers
01:51 and five first cousins all went to the First World War,
01:54 and they were all gunners.
01:56 When he found out I was a gunner too,
01:59 it was just-- he rang everybody he knew to tell them, yes.
02:20 When we got to Wave Battery, the men were pretty aghast.
02:25 They couldn't believe that women were
02:28 coming in to do the same job.
02:31 I think they complained a bit, and the CO promised them
02:38 there would be no difference in the chores,
02:42 so we did exactly the same as the men.
02:46 We got a lot of respect for that too.
02:49 We weren't treated as women.
02:51 The first day, we had a wonderful sergeant
02:55 came to give us a bit of history,
02:58 and he said, you girls have got probably the most important job
03:05 in the whole of Australia.
03:08 You have to protect BHP and the port.
03:11 And we all-- we're only girls.
03:19 That little pep talk, I'd say the girls were 200% always
03:27 their job came first.
03:29 We had night after night on red alert,
03:46 sitting in the concrete gun pit, not
03:50 knowing whether it was planes or submarines,
03:55 but everyone was ready to go, whatever we had to do.
03:59 Wonderful spirit, and the most amazing lot of girls.
04:05 From the first day, we were trained
04:07 in the theory of gunnery, so we understood what we were doing
04:14 and how gunnery works with the trajectory of the missile.
04:18 And aircraft recognition, we could recognize any aircraft.
04:24 And the theory of gunnery was all about mathematics.
04:29 And I think I topped the class, from the men and the women.
04:35 And that caused a bit of a problem,
04:37 because some of the men said-- I was 18, going on 12.
04:44 And the men said, go back to kindergarten.
04:49 And they were a bit peeved that maybe my maths was
04:53 a bit fresher.
04:54 Even though we were frightened, we knew what we knew was good.
05:06 We did the technical work on what
05:09 was called a height and range finder, which
05:12 was a telescope with eyepieces on each end,
05:16 and what they called a predictor.
05:19 We weren't supposed to photograph anything,
05:21 and these have come to light lately.
05:25 Four girls were on the predictor,
05:27 and we got the guns aligned to the target.
05:31 And then we would call fire.
05:34 The gun sergeant would order the gun to fire,
05:37 because we were on target.
05:40 Aircraft pull a drag, what they called a drag, behind,
05:45 and we fired at those.
05:47 But we did the technical part, and the men
05:51 loaded the shells and fired.
05:54 There was an awful rumor that went around
05:57 that when Rathmines found out that it was the girls that
06:01 were going to do it, every pilot turned in sick that morning.
06:06 That's the rumor that went around.
06:12 We were so good at the job that they had nothing to worry about.
06:17 We knew we wouldn't fire at their plane.
06:20 We went for the drag.
06:22 Where we were at WAVE, we were right on the water.
06:28 A worry for us, because we were really anti-submarine.
06:34 Instead of firing up, it was very difficult to fire down.
06:39 The battery, before I arrived, they
06:42 had taken part in the bombing of Newcastle that happened,
06:48 that took out the West End.
06:51 Absolute fear.
06:53 I can't believe that you could live being so absolutely
06:58 frightened.
06:59 Most of that was from not knowing
07:02 what we were up against.
07:04 But we were so well-trained that that wouldn't
07:08 have interfered with anything.
07:12 We spent a lot of time on the beach where we were camped.
07:17 And we were surrounded by these tank traps
07:21 with a barbed wire through them.
07:24 We didn't do much swimming, because you
07:27 had to go through the barbed wire to get into the water.
07:31 Under this sand here, 20 feet down, was our command post.
07:37 It was under the sand.
07:39 And it went down 20 concrete steps.
07:44 And our telephones and everything were underground.
07:49 The difference at the fort, it's a completely different war.
07:54 They had everything.
07:56 All the amenities and so on.
07:59 And we were just camped on the beach, really.
08:02 We lived on the sand.
08:04 We ate sand.
08:06 We slept sand.
08:08 One shower, 30 girls trying to get a shower together.
08:11 [LAUGHS]
08:14 And that was the funniest part of the day.
08:17 Our relationship with Fort Scratchley,
08:20 we knew that they were in charge of coastal defense.
08:24 We didn't have much to do with them,
08:27 except when they needed the shells polished.
08:31 We would go, maybe 10 of us would go over and spend
08:36 a day polishing shells and making sure they were all
08:39 clean and so on.
08:41 There was a bit of resentment, I think,
08:43 because the fort was so beautiful.
08:47 And the girls had proper toilets and all sorts of things
08:52 that we would have appreciated.
08:55 And I don't think they did dirty things,
08:58 like cleaning the shells.
09:00 We terrorized the shops in Stoughton.
09:06 We used to go down on a route march or something
09:10 and all go and buy ice creams and try and get them
09:14 for nothing, because four bob a day didn't buy much ice
09:18 creams.
09:19 That's the grocer's delivery van.
09:23 And we commandeered it and went up and down the main street,
09:27 all taking turns of being in it.
09:30 And that's sitting in the main street of Stoughton,
09:34 outside the first house next to the shops.
09:39 I'm on the end here.
09:42 Everyone seemed to be nice.
09:44 At the Ferry Wharf, there was a--
09:50 I think it was Red Cross, something--
09:53 they had a tent there.
09:55 And they had hot meals for free.
09:57 And we used to go and have mints on toast.
10:00 That was probably the best meal of the week.
10:03 Our meals were pretty terrible, mostly potatoes.
10:07 And I lived on fruit, mostly.
10:10 One of the trawlers used to come in.
10:13 I'd get a huge bag of prawns, which
10:18 would take me two days to eat.
10:21 I do know that I had received so much hospitality from locals.
10:27 And I was the only one that took advantage
10:30 of having a church pass every Sunday night, as long as I
10:36 could get back in five minutes.
10:39 And the people were just unbelievable.
10:42 They'd turn up with boxes of homemade cakes
10:47 for me to take back.
10:48 And I just couldn't believe people were
10:50 so absolutely wonderful to us.
10:54 I loved Newcastle.
10:56 Every two months, because they had
10:59 the facility of the golf course with the most wonderful dance
11:04 floor, an orchestra, a band, would come.
11:08 And none of the men at WAVE were given leave over that night.
11:14 And all the girls had to go, because LINC only had men.
11:19 So we used to go and dance.
11:22 My-- we did the jitterbug under the legs and over the shoulders.
11:28 I'd never seen dancing like it.
11:31 And that was one of the highlights,
11:34 going up, standing on the back of a truck, all--
11:38 well, if we had a Saturday night,
11:44 we used to love to go to Newcastle Town Hall, where
11:49 they had dancing every Saturday night, wonderful orchestra,
11:53 and waltzing competitions.
11:56 And they would eliminate people until they
11:59 got the best waltzes, which I won quite a few times.
12:03 And that was a wedding at the church in Stockton.
12:12 Yeah, that's one of my favorite photos,
12:14 because they're all there.
12:16 I remember the name of all of those.
12:19 At WAVE, there probably was 10 or 12 marriage, all successful,
12:27 no divorces.
12:28 I think the girls realized who the good fellows were.
12:33 Everyone that got together, they ended up
12:36 married and children and so on, because we
12:40 had a beautiful lot of men, too.
12:42 They were really lovely.
12:44 Maybe the atmosphere of being at war
12:48 and wanting to have something permanent and sustainable.
12:55 And when they found someone that appealed to them,
12:59 they really made it something special.
13:02 I ended up at Fort Wallace, not till we broke up at WAVE
13:11 when they decommissioned that.
13:13 They had six-inch guns.
13:16 They installed the first radar in Australia at Fort Wallace.
13:22 And we were the ones that were chosen to do the course.
13:26 So we did the course.
13:27 Instead of looking out to sea--
13:31 there was Japanese shipping going up and down the coast.
13:34 We'd see-- instead of looking at it,
13:36 we had our backs to it looking at the screens.
13:40 And we couldn't believe it.
13:43 No one had ever thought of those kind of things.
13:47 You've probably read, but I got a bullet wound to my head.
13:51 I hadn't been there very long.
13:54 But they had a boiler, which we called Bessie,
13:58 for the hot water.
14:00 And we were allocated jobs.
14:03 And that day, I was to keep the boiler going.
14:07 And I was walking towards it.
14:10 And I heard an explosion.
14:12 And then blood started to come.
14:15 I thought, gosh, you know, somebody
14:18 must have thrown something, a catapult or something.
14:22 Anyway, I went to the RAP.
14:25 And she said, oh, you've got a little round hole there.
14:30 If it gives you any bother, here's a couple of aspirins.
14:34 You can take those if there's any pain.
14:36 There was a lot of pain.
14:38 I took the aspirins overnight.
14:40 And in the morning, I had a black eye.
14:43 And of course, I thought I was Miss Australia.
14:46 And the only thing that worried me
14:48 is how I was going to look.
14:51 So I got on a bus.
14:53 And I came down to Stockton to buy an eye patch
14:56 to put over the black eye.
14:57 And he said to me, you'll have to buy two,
15:00 because the other one's going to be black as well.
15:04 So the next day, I had two eyes I could hardly see out of.
15:09 But I was on duty the whole time.
15:11 And I was on duty at the front gate with my .303 rifle.
15:18 And I fainted in front of an officer.
15:21 And he called an ambulance.
15:22 And I went to Newcastle Hospital.
15:25 They x-rayed it.
15:26 And the doctor came out and said,
15:28 you've got a bullet in your head.
15:30 So they wrote a report saying that there
15:37 must have been a missile in the coke that
15:40 goes into the boiler.
15:42 And they brought in a surgeon to see
15:45 if he could take the bullet out.
15:47 Then they sent me to Greta.
15:50 And when I got out of the ambulance,
15:52 you walk through about three men's wards.
15:57 And Miss Australia, with two black eyes
16:02 and big bandages and everything.
16:04 And I think, if only it had killed me.
16:08 I've got to go through all this.
16:10 And everyone's saying, how's the other fellow?
16:13 What happened to him?
16:16 In the back of the hospital was the women's ward.
16:20 And the next morning, all the walking wounded men,
16:24 some being pushed in wheelchairs,
16:26 they were all down, how are you?
16:29 And they'd all heard that I'd been shot.
16:33 So I became a hero overnight.
16:37 After the operation, I told them when
16:40 they were going to take the bandages off.
16:43 So they're all there.
16:44 And I said to the nurse, can we do it outside so they can see?
16:48 So she took the bandages off.
16:50 And they were saying, you're beautiful, marry me.
16:55 I had 100 proposals of marriage on one day.
17:02 I spent about eight months in and out of hospital.
17:06 And at the end of that time, I was sent to Victoria Barracks.
17:13 And I was there when the war ended.
17:15 All of my friends have passed away.
17:22 And I have this relationship with most of their daughters.
17:26 And they're as close to me as their mothers were.
17:31 We had an amazing lot of women.
17:35 Absolutely beautiful.
17:37 I loved them all.
17:39 And we kept in touch all the time.
17:43 It was a wonderful experience.
17:46 I think that was the nicest thing that came out of it.
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