Alfred White: That’s all right by me.

Alfred White: Yes my full name is Alfred William Harold White of Delamere Street Canley Vale.

Alfred White: In Redfern as far as I can tell you.

Alfred White: In 1921.

Alfred White: My parents were – do you want their christian names?

Alfred White: My father’s was George Henry White and my mother was Alice May White.

Alfred White: No my father was born in Sydney, my mother was born in New Zealand.

Alfred White: Well I had one sister, but she was about 12 years older than me, and she died in about 1980.

Alfred White: I moved here with my parents in 1926.

Alfred White: Oh yes it was quite a day for me as a young 4 or 5 year old. You get into the big truck that brought the furniture up and it was like an expedition you know. I was going somewhere where I’d never been before, and doing something that I’d never done before. And I thought that I was wonderful!

Alfred White: In Redfern as far as I know.

Alfred White: Well coming to Canley Vale was like coming to a new country I suppose you’d say. The bush was there. Around our place was all bush, and scrub, and tracks, and things like that. It was a kid’s dream.

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Alfred White: Well it was a very nice small place. It was big enough for what we needed it for at the moment of course, only being the three of us. And it’s still standing as a matter of fact. I went past it the other day and it’s still there.

Alfred White: It’s on the corner of Hampton Street and The Avenue in Canley Vale. There’s two houses side by side and both almost identical. We owned (rented) the one that was right on the corner. And… so… I don’t know how long it will stand there now the way the high rise and buildings are going up, but it’s still there at the moment.

Alfred White: Oh only a matter of a few months then… it was just somewhere to go while my parents were looking around… for something better.

3:18 minutes

Alfred White: Yes we moved up to Railway Street Cabramatta. I keep calling it Railway Street… it’s force of habit. It’s now Hughes Street. It was a semi-detached house. It was owned by one of the locals whose name was Charlie Money. A well-known local. And we stayed there for… oh until the depression… and… when my father was injured - he worked on the railway and was injured during the depression years. There was little or no compensation in those days. And he was made redundant, and put onto an invalid pension. And then when the depression really hit, the aftermath of the depression, we moved from Railway Street out to Wrentmore Street as it was in those days, it is now Evans Street in Fairfield West, and we rented a place there. You won’t believe this, it cost four shillings and sixpence a week. And we stayed there for two or three years until we - in the meantime - previously my mother and father had bought a block of land in Delamere Street, the one we have now, and we decided - they scrounged a little cash for the loan somewhere. I think it was £95 they borrowed, and were able to put up a part house. Since then when I came out of the army I’ve rebuilt the place.

Alfred White: At the same house. I’ve added to it.

Alfred White: Radio. Well early in the piece, I suppose during the depression years, when us kids were getting around to about 10 or 12 and things like that, we used to make crystal sets. Now they were called spider sets. All you needed was one earphone, a piece of this crystal whatever it was, it looked like a lump of metal with silver flakes in it, and you’d have a cat’s whisker, as it was called. And you’d touch the cat’s whisker (a short piece of fine wire to make contact) on the crystal until you found a spot, and you’d get a radio station. Now the radio station we got was 2FC. They had their radio mast out at Liverpool. It was quite handy we could catch that. And another thing too, if you couldn’t get a piece of that crystal, you could get a steel safety razor blade, snap it in halves, and put the cat’s whisker on the broken edge of the steel and you could pick up the station that way.

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Alfred White: Well I thanked 2FC at one stage because listening to 2FC I heard the opera Madame Butterfly. And I was quite taken with the singing and the music of Madame Butterfly, and I’ve been an opera lover, not a fanatic, ever since I heard Madame Butterfly, and that’s one thing that I thank 2FC for.

7:16 minutes

Alfred White: With my mother…with my both parents in the late 30’s…they were both pensioners. The pension those days was only a pound a week. And so I didn’t have a lot. But we used to go out to Fairfield West, along Hamilton Road. There were lots of market gardens out there and particularly people growing tomatoes. So we’d go out there and we’d get a day’s work off the tomato growers when the season was on. They were pruning the tomato plants and tying them up. Some of them were about six feet high. And you’d get out there at about 8 o’clock in the morning and work through to about 6 o’clock at night, you could have anything you wanted for lunch as long as it was tomatoes. And that was - you got paid when you knocked off… that was two shillings… for a day’s work.

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Alfred White: Ah. Well but only a childish memory. It was… I remember getting… I remember I couldn’t get what I wanted. I didn’t have the worries that my parents had. And of course there was always food on the table. My biggest worry was whether I could get enough money to go to the Saturday afternoon pictures. So I wouldn’t say that I wanted.

Alfred White: Canley Vale.

Alfred White: I went when… I was five in the August… I think I started in the following year. I would have been… five when I started.

Alfred White: 14.

Alfred White: No I didn’t go. Couldn’t afford it.

Alfred White: Well there was… there the infants’ school. First, second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth. There was only the… . first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and the infants, there’d be seven classes.

Alfred White: Seven rooms.

Alfred White: Each class had its own room.

Alfred White: It’s still standing. They’ve added to it.

Alfred White: Well there was a few there that were coming and going sort of thing, but there was one teacher, Miss McGregor, she was rather strict, but then again she had a lot of nonsense to put up with I suppose. There was Mrs Saunders… and there was Mr Higgs, he was the sports master. He was an English Gentleman. Quite a nice fellow. He ended up — something was wrong with him and he died while I was at school. Then there was Mr Lawless, he was… a funny bloke Lawless but a nice bloke and then the headmaster… was Mr King. That’s about all I can remember as far as the names go.

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Alfred White: Oh typical boys games. Football, Cricket, marbles… there was a deck tennis court there… we used to play that. And… we had running races and things like that. We had rather active sports.

12:08 minutes

Alfred White: Oh I did quite a lot of dancing. I enjoyed dancing. I can remember the old Butterfly there in Fairfield when it was a dance hall, then they ruined the floor putting skates on it. And the old School of Arts in Fairfield was another place we went to. The Butterbox at… that was at Carramar I think. Cabramatta Town Hall… the old town hall. And there were a number of places around. There was a Kings Hall out at Fairfield West. And… I got around quite a lot dancing.

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Alfred White: No. No. We never went in that far. I wasn’t - the only time I went into town was when this place I was working for, the textile place, had an annual staff ball… and we went to the Dungowan and we went to Grace Brothers Auditorium and Mark Foys. Ah… and a few of those places like that.

Alfred White: As I said, I joined the… actually I went into the army, and being an orphan, I was under 21. I was called up. Our unit wanted to join the RAF and I agreed with them. I said yes. But then they found out that I couldn’t get parents’ consent being under 21. One of the officers said to me…well he said ‘hang on until your 21^st birthday, we’ll keep you here if you want to join the RAF with us’. I said ‘Yeah righto’. So he kept me in the unit and I signed onto the AIF on the 8^th August 1942, which was a couple of weeks before my 21^st birthday. Then we went to… we were then moved after a series of training… we were an artillery unit…a field artillery unit, with 25 pound field guns. And a lot of people don’t realise this but there was a scare on in those days. Everyone thought of the Brisbane Line…up through Darwin and the Gulf of Carpentaria, as the likelihood invasion.

Alfred White: Well it was, but also if you look at the map… of the Pacific area, you will find that the west… the north-west and the northern coast and the north western coast of Australia was very, very undefended. And if you go directly north of there it’s not very far to Borneo. Now the Japanese were in strength in Borneo, and there was nothing to stop an invasion coming straight down to the shores of Western Australia and landing unopposed they would have done…landed unopposed. Then they had the flat country all the way through. There was no jungle or no great mountains or anything like that. There was good country for fast manoeuvring, and so our unit and a few others were put over into Western Australia as a mobile force to be there in case anything like that ever happened.

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16:13 minutes

Alfred White: Well…we did not belong to any of the recognised divisions. We were what they called Corps troops. Now we were the Second Corps. The First Australian Corps was in the First World War, and we were the Second Corps we were in the Second World War. We were mobile troops attached to headquarters. We could be moved anywhere. Like a division is a division it stays compact. But we - if a division had lost its artillery we could be pulled straight in. We were more or less a mobile unit. Highly trained I’ll say that much for them, because we did a hell of a lot of training. We were trained as a unit that could move on the spur of the moment. ‘You’re wanted in so and so.’ Right! Three or four hours! Pack up and leave! And that’s the type of unit we were. We were staying in WA until November of ’44, that would have been after the… after D-Day when the — and — anyhow, the threat to Australia died down and our unit was disbanded. We were brought back to Sydney and we were all scattered in amongst reinforcements everywhere.

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Well I was allocated to the Second 32^nd Infantry Brigade. And I was sent north went to Morotai, and then at Morotai we were all ready to leave and we found out that the reinforcements had already been sent and we weren’t needed - as I said I was damned lucky. And things like that happened a couple of times, and then finally they started to get the servicemen with long service, they started to give them a point system and bring them home on leave. Well then we was spread around as reinforcements to take the place of those that were there. And I was then allotted to the Second 5^th AGH and that’s where I spent the rest of the war in the Second 5^th AGH until that disbanded…when the war had finished that was disbanded… and then I went through different stages, because the war was over by this time and it didn’t matter where you went. And then I was brought back on the …landed back in Sydney on 27^th December - incidentally my wife’s birthday - I landed back in Sydney on 27^th December 1945 and I then went to the 101 AGH at Hearne Bay which is now Riverwood. And from there we finally... in July of ‘46 we were finally demobbed.