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When we arrived in Sydney Australia [on the 5th December 1941] there was an air of great apprehension. We went along to the Bank of New South Wales, who were always our generous mentors, and my mother managed to take an out of season flat along Manly Beach, which is one of the two heads that guards the approaches to Sydney Harbour. The weather was quite stormy, not at all what one would expect in high summer. This soon passed and we were accompanied on at least one occasion by some of our Australian airmen friends off the ship to go on the beach.
Surfing on Manly beach
Then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour [on 7th December] and everything changed. My mother was still trying to get us on a boat to take us back to Burma, but our father was sending frantic telegrams saying "Stay where you are. Don't risk the children's lives". Reluctantly she agreed, and so our next step was to find a) some money, and b) somewhere to live in Sydney for the indefinite future. The Bank of New South Wales as I recall came up with a monthly allowance, set against the security of my mother's jewellery and their assurance that the British government would pay up at the end of the war for British nationals stranded in Australia.
Postcard of Sydney from Barbara's collection
We set about finding lodgings, initially in a little flat in Rose Bay, and then subsequently in a boarding house in Cranbrook Road [Cranbrook Hotel] which was filled like ourselves eventually by refugees from Hong Kong, Singapore, etc. These were all women with their children, the husbands having been left behind to be interned by the Japanese. At the same time almost the entire Australian Expeditionary Force was caught in Singapore having just arrived to defend it when it was overrun by the Japanese. Thus the Australians were depleted of their entire force of young men to defend the country. Those that were not in the Middle East fighting in the Eighth Army were holed up in Singapore, and naturally they felt somewhat bitter since now they had no one to rely on for their defence but the Americans.
Nor alas was the behaviour of the refugees in Sydney all that it might have been. The women found themselves uprooted from their colonial cosy lives, very suddenly and with no warning. They had no men with them, no money, and children to look after. They tended to congregate in places like the boarding house we lived in, and rumours were rife, with much exchange of information about who had seen whom, and whose husband was known to be alive and well, and whose wasn't. It was a terribly stressful time for everyone.
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