Travels in Atomic Sunshine by Robin Gerster

Author:Robin Gerster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS004000, HIS003000, HIS021000
Publisher: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Published: 2008-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

FRANK CLUNE thought the presence of the BCOF wives debilitating, but recognised that it was ‘a great experience for the kids, who’ll have something to blow about for the rest of their lives’. As the sons and daughters of an occupying power, the Occupation children enjoyed a life of rare privilege. Remembering his stint teaching the boys and girls of the BCOF community, Hal Porter lampooned ‘the sort of luxury-cruise life Occupation armies seem always to bring into being’. Rosemary Jeanneret, the daughter of Keith Philp, an electrical engineer with the RAAF, takes up this idea. The ‘special’ experience of living in an enclave (at Iwakuni, in her case) with ‘so many people from so many different backgrounds’ could only be likened, she thinks, ‘to living on board a ship’.20 That the children who were aboard the SS Taiping, the first shipload of dependants entering Kure Harbour at the end of May 1947, now call themselves ‘First Fleeters’ extends the nautical metaphor.

The first civilian Australians in post-war Japan were entering a new world. The seasons, the vegetation, the food, the religion, the customs, and the people were all different from what they knew. Some of them were apprehensive, and some were scared witless. This was the land populated by a race caricatured as bestial and unpredictably violent. The kids had heard the stories of Japanese wartime atrocities, and it was hard to dissociate the people from the propaganda. To Geoff Ockerby, who arrived in Japan as a 13-year-old aboard the Westralia on Christmas Eve 1947, the porters who came on board to take their luggage ‘were attired as though they had just crawled out of the New Guinea jungle’; these were the creatures seen on the newsreels at home. Ockerby says, ‘Nobody knew just what to expect. How will the Japanese treat us and furthermore how should we treat the Japanese?’ For some youngsters, the experience verged on the traumatic. Jennifer Collier, one of Elsie Boyd’s four children, was aged just five years and four months when the family settled into the house in Nijimura. She remembers being ‘very frightened’ of the Japanese people, often dreaming the family had returned home to Australia only to wake up still in Japan.21

In most cases, fear was quickly dispelled by the kindness of the domestic staff. The two house girls assigned to the Ockerby ménage on Etajima ‘proved to be the most devoted people one could imagine’. Lyn (Lambert) Thompson, a major’s daughter, was very frightened at first, hiding behind her mother when her ship docked at Kure. But, she says, ‘as it turned out the Japanese were wonderful to us’. While the nature of the children’s experience differed, the characteristic memory of Japan is of a ‘wonderful time’ and an ‘idyllic’, if ‘artificial’, way of life. The excitement began on the two-to-three week trip over from Australia, with the tearful send-off at Circular Quay, the dizzying array of shipboard activities, the occasional typhoon to contend with, and the exotic ports of call en route.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.