Story by Algernon

A child came home with an assignment about family secrets. Don’t ask you parents the teacher said ask you grandparents.

Dad recalled life in the Loo where he spent much of his early years. His father owned a fishing trawler his mother a fruit shop on Bondi Road. Mother had arrived in the country shortly after the First World War with her first husband. She had attended University something her father disapproved of but being the headstrong women she was she completed the course she had enrolled in. Her first husband died not long after her arrival. She married again sometime after. He was a fisherman from one of the small islands off the coast.

Much of the family emigrated and was sponsored by the family with the proviso that that they naturalized at the earliest opportunity. Many did, some however didn’t.

Now the son had an idyllic lifestyle in the Loo. He proudly attended Plunkett Street Primary and recalled much of his time spent on or around the wharves and on the fish trawlers.

My grandfather had fought in WW1 on the allied side, and when the Second World War broke out he chose to enlist. He was at the time 48 years old and not surprisingly the armed forces chose not to enlist him. He continued plying his trade trawling off the coast of Sydney anywhere between Newcastle and Wollongong. They of course had their favourite fishing spots. On returning they’d stop and sell some of the catch to the odd fish restaurant on the way to the markets. WW2 curtailed how far they were allowed to trawl and eventually they were stopped completely with the trawler acquired if you like for the war effort.

One day, in the first half of 1942, my grandfather was approached by some oriental gentlemen, Japanese. The asked if they could hire the trawler for cruising the harbour, to look for picnic spots. Now a little concerned about this request he reluctantly agreed, he felt he should as military intelligence what he should do. Take them and note what the take interest in.

A few days later the Japanese men returned, he said to them what if I don’t take you to where you want, well we shoe shoe (we’ll shoot you).  He took them on their “cruise” and noted where they had been taken to, and reported back as he had been asked.

As Japanese subs had entered the harbour and parts of the Eastern suburbs bombed, fishing in open waters off the coast ceased. With the bombing my father was packed off to boarding school in the country as it was then. My grandfather would work in the fruit shop until the end of the war, when he returned to trawling until he finished working.

Dad had a love of boats and managed to work on the odd one or few when he worked in the Department.  Catching ferries occasionally to work as I do now I can appreciate, why he had that love.

This event was a family secret for the better part of 60 years, not a word to anyone from what I could gather. That he’d tell a child after all that time well perhaps it’s a story whose time had come to be told.