Transcript

I don't know that there's much more I can tell you. It was a pretty routine, everyday job in some ways, and startling in other ways.

I was in Sydney with him when the news came through about the bombing of Darwin. Now in Sydney we had a most extraordinary set-up: we were in Commonwealth offices there and we had a little room in our room about the size of a telephone box, and that was the secret box, and it had the teleprinter in it which would take these secret cables and you would also, if you wanted to have the secret phone, it would have to go into that. And I was there taking the calls coming through - they'd been to Canberra and they were televising them through to ... televising, we didn't have television in those days! I was receiving them on the teleprinter. And Don Rodgers was standing behind me and you had to shut the door on this thing and it was jolly hot. The ships were coming down like that - the list of the ships that were sunk in the bay, and his face was getting longer, and longer, and longer. 'Oh, God,' he said, 'Oh, God.' Mr Curtin hadn't been very well and he was back in his hotel. Anyway, we had to get through this, get it all typed out for him and then we went back to Canberra on the night train.

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