Your Greatest Challenge: An Exhibition to Mark the 60th Anniversary of the Second World War

The journal Proletariat, published from April 1932 by the newly-formed Melbourne University Labour Club, increasingly focused its attention on the subjects of war and peace and the growing threat of Fascism; in the July 1932 issue a page headed 'Towards Fascism' under the sub-heading 'At the University' carried a photograph of a group watching as a man is pushed sprawling into the University lake, captioned 'The Dialectic of the Fascist'; the June 1933 issue was a special 'Anti-War Number', with a cover graphic of a worker squeezing a British militarist/imperialist; articles included one by Ralph Gibson on Fascism in Melbourne; another article is entitled 'Australia Prepares for War', in which war is pointed to as 'the solution' to the crisis of capitalism in its final stage, noting that only workers can carry out the war preparations, and thus the working class, if it is organized, has in its hands the power to prevent war, and concluding 'The enemy is in our own country'. Despite these assertions, the more general feeling was that wars occurring elsewhere would not again involve Australia, helping account for Australia's lack of defence preparedness planning until after the mid-1930s.

Kenneth Wallace-Crabbe Collection

• Copy of pages from July 1932 issue of Proletariat.
• 'Anti-War Number' Proletariat, June 1933.
• Labour Club members in the 1930s, including Lloyd Edmonds (9th from the right) who joined the International Brigade assisting in the unsuccessful resistance to Franco's rebels in Spain.

Many Australians, of course, had first-hand knowledge of European and Asian countries in the 1930s. The Melbourne Herald sent journalist Kenneth Wallace-Crabbe to report on developments in Germany at the end of 1935; he commenced filing stories in April 1936. He also sent back private letters and photographs and compiled a scrapbook of material collected, photographs taken by himself and others, from many parts of Germany.

• Cutting of Herald, May 1936, article by Kenneth Wallace-Crabbe on 'secret' warplane manufacture.
• SS and other police patrol the approaches to Hitler's headquarters in Wilhelmstrasse.

Hordern Collection

• Juxtaposed with Wallace-Crabbe's photographs are shots of Melbourne University students skylarking through a mock 'Italo-Abyssinian War' in 1936, at a time when Italy had brought in its air power and the use of poison gas to crush Ethiopian resistance.

Catholic Worker Collection

The Spanish Civil War, when Franco's rebels returned from Morocco to overturn the Republican Government, invoked a widespread engagement from supporters of either side of the ideological conflict which overlay the war. The Catholic Worker had been founded in 1936 to counter a perceived spread of communist influence in Australian society and the Spanish conflict figured largely in its columns. It proclaimed in its first issue that 'We Fight' both the old capitalism and the new Communism. In its issue of 3 April 1937, it reported on the Spanish debate at the University, when B.A. Santamaria led the affirmative on the question that 'The Spanish Government is the ruin of Spain' and the Public Lecture Theatre rang to the cry, so goes their report, of 'Long Live Christ the King', the battle cry of Catholic Action.

• In this issue of 8 January 1938 a letter from co-founder Paul McGuire in Spain puts their side of the propaganda war. Rather than Guernica's being the culmination of a series of trial runs in which Franco had invited his allies to bomb his own people, McGuire's letter begins, 'This is posted from Guernica, obviously dynamited by the Reds.'

Communist Party of Australia, Victorian Branch Collection

In at least one instance, it was the Union movement that took the initiative on a defence question, when the Port Kembla members of the Waterside Workers' Federation refused to load pig iron to Japan (though iron ore exports were suspended in July 1938, the shipment of other types of iron were allowed). It was Attorney-General Menzies' attempt to overturn this ban that earned him the sobriquet 'Pig Iron Bob' (though this tag would dog him to the grave, and his term as initial wartime Prime Minister was an uneasy one, nevertheless the later war years and the atmosphere of reconstruction would be the crucible in which Menzies astutely forged the formation of the most effective conservative party in Australia thus far).

• Communist Review, January 1939, and later (undated) Communist Party of Australia cartoon pamphlet.

(International Bookshop Collection) Postcard reproduction, Merrifield Collection, State Library of Victoria

As the situation in Europe worsened, peace groups such as the Movement Against War and Fascism changed ground. Though the Soviet-oriented International Peace Campaign maintained an ambivalent position during the early stages of the Germany-Russia non-aggression pact even after war was declared, other groups supported the war against Fascism.

• The publicity for May Day in 1939 already had most of the vanguard of the workers in uniform, bearing national flags as battle standards against Fascism.

W.S. Robinson Collection

Prominent industrialists and financiers - such as Essington Lewis (BHP), W.S. Robinson (Collins House group), Colin Fraser (Broken Hill Associated Smelters, and other Collins House companies), Laurence Hartnett (G.M.H.) - of whom University of Melbourne Archives holds collections of personal papers, had clearly seen the advent of war particularly after Lewis's visits to Japan and Germany in 1935, and the potential threat to Australia's ability to defend itself, especially in aviation. From that time, they became increasingly impatient with Government tardiness in putting in place the train of invitation for enterprises to enter the field of aircraft and other manufacturing (which could be perceived as munitions-orientated and needed Government sanction, and which were also capital-intensive and needed the implication of Government orders which would be embodied in the invitation to enter the field).

• Letter of W.S. Robinson to M.L. Shepherd, Secretary for Defence, 27 February 1936, emphasizing the need for a Cabinet invitation to undertake aircraft manufacture, and W.S. Robinson memorandum to Colin Fraser a year later, 14 February 1937 stating that without a Government initiative, their entry into 'what might be regarded as munitions manufacture...might be misunderstood by both the public and their shareholders.'

[In fact, Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation Pty. Ltd. had been registered on 17 October 1936, major shareholders being BHP, Broken Hill Associated Smelters, Electrolytic Zinc Co., General Motors-Holdens Ltd., ICI and Orient Steam Navigation Co.]

This impatience with the Lyons and Menzies Governments was manifested also in a widespread feeling of dissatisfaction across many industries and unions at the 'Business as Usual' public agenda promulgated by Menzies after the declaration of war.

After undergraduate study in Sydney, Raymond Maxwell (Max) Crawford spent three years at Oxford 1927-30, and returned there after a stint of school-teaching in Sydney. In 1933 he started a research project on democratic and social change in Spain, though his interest in the growing crisis there was informed by a concern with the history of ideas, albeit a humanitarian concern also, but not a political one.

In the event, he returned to a job at Sydney University in 1935, and did produce some material on Spain, and took an interest in the material generated by the Spanish Relief Committee.

In 1937 he took up the History Chair at Melbourne and began to comment on the Spanish Civil War from a liberal democratic perspective, writing a letter to the Argus and giving addresses.

In 1938 his standing as a public liberal intellectual was enhanced when he became one of the Vice-Presidents of the Australian Council for Civil Liberties, and when Vice-Chancellor Medley took him on to the University National Service Committee he became a forceful critic of a proposal of Professor Copland in 1938 that service be made compulsory.

Crawford maintained that the University's most useful contribution to National Service, and, later, the War Effort, was to continue to operate as a teaching institution. There followed support for the ACTU boycott of National Registration, and a letter to The Age with thirty colleagues in May 1940 protesting at the curtailment of liberties by the National Security Act. This provoked controversy such that they wrote a further letter proclaiming their loyalty.

Amongst Crawford's other interests were developments in Soviet Russia, which took a practical turn when, as President of the University's Fine Arts Society, he organised a Russian cultural event to raise money for the Sheepskins for Russia appeal.

And after the election of the Curtin Government just before the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Crawford wrote to Evatt (Minister for External Affairs), offering his services - for example, in Moscow or elsewhere. When the M.P. William Slater was appointed the first Australian Minister to the USSR, he lobbied to have Crawford go with him as First Secretary, and so in October 1942 they were farewelled by a meeting of 4000 at the Australian-Soviet Friendship League.

While engaged in routine work with the legation, and a spell working with Polish refugees and Displaced Persons, Crawford formed ideas for a book on post-revolutionary Russia. Ill health eventually saw him back in Melbourne in 1944, where he became foundation president of Australia-Soviet House. One of several organisations fostering friendship and understanding of the ally country, it encountered rapidly changing attitudes as Cold War positions resumed early in the postwar period. And before the end of 1946, Hawthorn M.L.A., F.L. Edmunds, named Crawford as a 'pink professor' in the House; and in 1947 renewed his attack on him for not relinquishing his connection with the 'subversive Communist subsidiary Australia-Soviet House'.

Further attacks saw the University leadership and SRC supporting Crawford, but his rebuttals were revealing a seachange in which he more explicitly distanced himself from Communist doctrine, and also stated he would not seek re-election to the Australia-Soviet House position. Crawford was for a time in the early 1950s denied a visa to enter the USA, but by decade's end he would be embroiled in a fresh controversy about Communist activity at the University, in which he would now be an accuser.

[much of this information was provided by Crawford's biographer, Fay Anderson.]

• Professor of History R.M. (Max) Crawford in the late 1930s.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick Collection

• Local Spanish Relief material from R.M. Crawford Collection.
• Professor Crawford's annotated copy of the Memorandum on the University and National Service by Professor D.B. Copland, 28 November 1938.

and

• Crawford's draft letter to Vice-Chancellor Medley in which he attempted to elaborate on some of the misgivings expressed by him at a meeting of the National Service Committee that day.
• A large meeting of students in May 1937 appointed a sub-committee including Professor Max Crawford and Zelman Cowen to draft a constitution for a University Fine Arts Society. Professor Hunt was first president, succeeded in October 1940 by Max Crawford.

Under his Presidency, the Society's most successful event for 1942, recorded in this copy from the original minute book, was an afternoon in the Union Theatre in conjunction with the Labour Club, at which Russian cultural films were followed by folk dancing, marionettes and a Russian ballet, all in aid of Russian War Relief (Sheepskins Appeal), September 1942.

University of Melbourne Fine Arts Society Collection

• In June 1942, Crawford joined Prime Minister Curtin's Committee on National Morale, and an extract from his own The Study of History was among material circulated to members at that time by Chairman A. A. Conlon.

By October, however, Crawford was off to Russia as First Secretary to the Australian Ministry to the USSR

R.M. Crawford Collection

• Crawford's pocket diary for October 1942 notes an appointment for a briefing with Evatt on the 22nd.

R.M. Crawford Collection

• V-E Day 1945 in the History Department. [Left-to-right: Kathleen Fitzpatrick, George Paul (Philosophy), Max Crawford, Joyce Dunn, Pat Gray and Dorothy Crozier. The photograph was taken by Norman Harper.]

Kathleen Fitzpatrick Collection

• Transcript, newscuttings, and copy of Civil Liberty May 1947 relating to F.L. Edmunds M.L.A.'s attacks on academics.

R.M. Crawford Collection

Hume Dow, whose father had attended the University of Melbourne then worked in literary journalism before becoming Australia's official representative in the USA in the 1920s and 30s, was educated at Staten Island Academy, New York, and Harvard University (graduating 1938). He then returned to Australia, had some engagement with the peace movement and soon moved through journalism into the Australian Army Educational Service, becoming a staffer and editor of Salt. Demobilized in 1946, he returned to journalism and after a teaching stint joined the staff of University of Melbourne English Department in 1953, retiring as Reader in 1981. He died in 1997. It is of interest that his future wife Gwyneth, then married to journalist Rohan Rivett, was one of the team of young women employed to collect data from households selected for the Prest Social Survey (see case 8).

• Salt (an acronym of sea, air and land troops) was a weekly, then fortnightly, magazine produced by the A.A.E.S. from Victoria Barracks in Melbourne 1941-6 and distributed to all Australian troops in Australia and adjacent territories. The Service also produced other material, notably the Current Affairs Bulletin series which was taken up by the University of Sydney after the war.
• Items relating to Dow's involvement as student chairman of the Harvard Committee of the Medical Bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy, 1937.
• Ephemera relating to Dow's war service with the rank of Captain.
• Corrected draft of typescript responding to criticisms of Salt.
• Sample copies of Salt and of Current Affairs Bulletin 1944, 1945.
• Manuscript of John Thompson's review of the reprinted edition of Leonard Mann's Flesh in Armour, set in the First World War.
• Part of a contribution about the work of the Army Educational Libraries, with photographic illustration.
• A contribution by F. Ryland about the Lae Swi (Two-Up) School, with photograph showing the roof modification to allow the coins to be spun freely.
• Covering letter to an epic poem written by an Indian prison-of-war, now convalescing with 1 Aust. P.W. & I Unit and accompanying graphics.
• Draft screen and sound-track sheet for a proposed documentary film on Salt.
• Final issue of Salt, 22 April 1946, showing part of a spread of cartoon drawings of Salt staffers, captioned by Dow, whose cartoon is top left Capt. 'H.D' Next is the editor who preceded Dow until mid-1944, Major 'M.B.M.' (being Mungo Ballardie MacCallum, later a respected journalist and television critic who died in July 1999).

After the fall of France in 1940, Australia was faced with the necessity of finding a substitute for the imported optical glass needed for gun sights and other optical munitions.

Laurence J. Hartnett was seconded from his role as Managing Director of General Motors-Holden Ltd. to be Director of Ordnance Production, Ministry of Munitions, and Chairman of the Optical Munitions Panel.

E.J. Hartung, Professor of Chemistry, experimented with various local sands to produce a glass of the required purity, and with blends of fire clays to make suitable pots. Within months satisfactory results had been achieved, and optical glass was being manufactured in Australia.

The Department of Natural Philosophy (Physics) under Professor T.H. Laby was almost entirely devoted to experimental work, testing, and small-scale manufacture of optical munitions.

Related projects of the Optical Munitions Panel (or Scientific Instruments and Optical Panel as it became) were the Aluminizing Process for producing mirrors for Optical Instruments, the production of graticules (small discs inscribed with measuring marks or scales for determining the size, distance, or position of objects viewed), and the development of methods of tropic-proofing optical instruments against fungi, a problem particularly acute in New Guinea. The Archives holds material on all of these projects.

Summary of the contributions made by the University of Melbourne to the Australian War Effort from The University of Melbourne Annual Reports 1939-1946. Many University Departments are mentioned in the Summary. Here, the activities of the Chemistry School are described.

Hartung Collection

• Professor Hartung's graticule samples box.

Hartung Collection

• G.A. Ampt breaking apart pot containing glass.

Hartung Collection

• Professor E.J. Hartung removing white-hot pot from furnace.

Laby Collection

• Members of the Optical Munitions Panel in c. September 1943. Chairman Professor T.H. Laby seated centre, in dark suit.

J.F. Richardson Collection

• J.F. Richardson and Ken Dean test a product, 1941.

Hartnett Collection

• The text of the silver plate on the base of the small mounted piece of glass reads: 'Presented to L.J. Hartnett Esq. Director of Ordnance Production, Ministry of Munitions & Chairman Optical Munitions Panel 1st Optical Glass Melt 1942'.

Hartnett Collection

• Hartung's progress report No. 6 on the manufacture of optical glass to the Ministry of Munitions - Optical Munitions Panel, 6 November 1941.

The University of Melbourne Archives holds the papers of two medical men who served in both World Wars, Clive Disher and A.P. Derham.

(Harold) Clive Disher was born on 15 October 1891, in Rosedale, Victoria. Having spent his early childhood in Gippsland, often visiting the family property, Strathfieldsaye (which he later inherited), he then moved to Melbourne to board at Scotch College. After matriculating in 1912, he enrolled in medicine at the University of Melbourne and resided at Ormond College. His keen interest in rowing, gained during his school years, continued as he became a leading oarsman for both the College and University.

Disher obtained an M.B. B.S. after the outbreak of the First World War. Soon after his graduation in 1916 he enlisted in the A.I.F. Between the years 1917 and 1919 he served in France as a medical officer. Between the wars Disher continued his association with the army. Joining the Reserve, he was elevated to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.

In World War II he once again enlisted and was appointed the Assistant Director (and later, Director) of Medical Services for the First Australian Army. This position took him to the Middle East, Greece, Crete and New Guinea.

After the second World War Disher retired from medicine and managed Strathfieldsaye, which he bequeathed to the University of Melbourne when he died, aged 84, in 1976.

• Disher's identity card.
• Framed photograph of Disher in World War II uniform.
• Clive Disher spent Christmas Day 1939 at sea bound for the Middle East and finding things a bit clammy as they approached Colombo.
• A light-hearted letter to Disher from 'your fat Aunt Ethel' in East St Kilda in which she writes, 'Well I am always thinking of you so far away and dining with the Sheiks and puffing at the pipes..'; she mentions her sadness at seeing another three boatloads of soldiers depart; things have gone wrong, and 'then the War just about puts the Kibosh on'.
• Disher's Soldier's Pay Books, one showing the cover, the other pages inside, when he had landed in Jerusalem in 1940.
• Secret and Confidential letter to Colonel Disher (A.D.M.S.) in Gaza from Major-General S. Roy Burston. 15 June, 1941.
• Photograph of Disher (left) with a fellow officer in the Middle East.
• Book entitled Keeping Fit in the Tropics.
• Letter, Disher - General Rupert Downes, 23 October 1942, while on jungle warfare training in North Queensland; discusses training theories and criticizes a proposed reorganisation of Field Ambulances.
• Disher's miniature dress war medals.
• Letter to Disher from General Blamey, Commander-in-Chief, Australian Military Forces, commending him for his service to the army. Dated 17 May, 1945.
• Disher's Certificate of Release from War Service. 22 June, 1945.

One who served in New Guinea and returned there to a distinguished civilian career was John Minogue. He had been active in the Melbourne University Rifles while a law student in the 1930s; he was called to the Bar in 1939, but entered the Army in 1940.

He worked with Intelligence in New Guinea, in 1942 with a lone companion making an epic crossing of the Kokoda Trail.

From 1944 to 1946 he was with the Australian Military Mission to Washington. He returned to New Guinea in 1962 as a Supreme Court Judge, Chief Justice 1970-74, and Pro-Chancellor of the University.

• Items shown include his officer's map case; two styles of epaulette; miniature dress set of medals; Field Service Post Card addressed to his wife; his passport and itinerary/ticket wallet for the trip to Washington, and his Demobilization Procedure Book, 22 May 1946.

With outbreak of World War II Alfred Plumley Derham left practice as a leading paediatrician in Melbourne to enlist as a Colonel in the Australian Army Medical Corps, and Assistant Director Medical Service 8th Australian Division A.I.F. With the fall of Singapore he was taken prisoner in Malaya by the Japanese. In prison camp he served as medical practitioner to fellow prisoners (his son, Driver T.P. (Tom) Derham, was a prisoner with him and acted as his batman).

• His personal diary 'Commenced 15 September 1939' records that when he went to Victoria Barracks, St. Kilda Road, Melbourne to see about enlistment General Rupert Downes (also a University of Melbourne Medical Graduate) said to him 'We have decided to keep you in Australia for the present at least - we are treating this war as if it were a Sunday school treat and giving the easy jobs as far as possible to men who did not have so much of the treat in the last war' (as, it was assessed, Alfred had).
• Shorts made by Alfred while prisoner of war on Formosa (Taiwan). The note by his wife Frances ('Frankie') states 'He had never sewed previously'.
• Confidential Medical Record cards. Paper being in short supply in prison camp, Alfred used the inside of Japanese cigarette packets to record medical histories of inmates - often harsh: note the record of weight loss. The outside of the covers showed Mount Fujiyama, flight of great white herons, and other scenes.
• Photograph of group packing books and games for Prisoners-of-War in Japan, 1944. Mrs. A.P. Derham, is seated at the table.
• Frances Derham's diaries (that for 1945 shown): her diary entry for 9 February 1942 notes 'cable from Alfred - 'Tom Self well Love Derham''; for 15 February it reads 'During meeting c.9 p.m. I was rung with news of surrender', and on 16th 'Surrender of Singapore I received is announced in paper'. Her work with the A.I.F. Women's Association now became focused variously on the North Pacific P.O.W. Committee (Vice President), and the Auxiliary for P.O.W. Japan (Vice Chairman) as her husband and son's further places of confinement became known (eventually, it seems they were held at Hoten, in Manchukuo [Manchuria].) Frankie Derham's diary for August 1945 records the usual busy round of POW, AMC Welfare, Executive A.I.F. W.A.-V meetings as well as K.T.C. (Kindergarten Training College) and other teaching commitments. There is no note about the Japanese surrender, but on 20 August 'News in Herald 44 Amb. P.O.W. located in Hoten', and not until 14 September 'Cable from Alfred in Calcutta'. Finally, on 25 September 'Rang Gen. Burston 11.30 and was told A.P. & Tom would arrive 7.25 - staff car would take us home..'
• Newscutting from The Argus, 24 September, 1945 concerning the repatriation of father and son.

University staff members to enlist included the Professor of Dental Science since 1934, Arthur Amies, who joined the 2nd A.I.F in June 1940, having been a member of the Army Medical Corps Reserve since 1935. He served as a major in the dental services with the 4th Australian General Hospital at Tobruk and the 2nd A.G.H. in Egypt. Returning to University duties in 1942 until his retirement in 1967, he also became Patron of the Victorian branch of the Rats of Tobruk Association.

• Prospectus for 'Beach Hydro' proprietors B.J. Doran and Arthur Amies, a satirical description of the hospital at Tobruk ('opposite Côte d'Azur').
• Perspective sketch of 2nd Australian General Hospital, A.I.F. El Quantara 1941 (centre), with snapshots (clockwise from top left); Amies with mobile dental unit; 6,256 1/4 miles to Griffiths Bros. Tea; Abbots' Lager hoarding - 'bloody hard to get'; 'Is this any better sartorially?'; Dental Centre and Eye Clinic - ' My dental caravan is between the two'; 'Me and the Barber from "Pentridge" but he's a good barber!'; 'some of my jaw cases'; 'Amies Bey (very sore) on Camel'.
• Melbourne University Rifles Commanding Officer's cap, Lt.-Col. Francis Norman Balfe.

Balfe (born 1900) studied science subjects at the university, 1920-22, when he joined M.U.R. Again in 1937-38 he was back studying Commerce subjects. By then, he had risen from Lieutenant to Major (1934), and in April 1938 to Lt.-Col., when he took command of the regiment, succeeding Lt.-Col. W.S. J.P. Heslop. He is mentioned in the Committee of Melbourne University Women's minute book in August 1940 as being C.O. of an Officer Training School at the University, whose trainees were entertained by the women at a dance at the Conservatorium.

Balfe transferred out of M.U.R., and joined the A.I.F. in 1942, serving in New Guinea in 1943. The badge on the cap was a style introduced in 1930, used until replaced by a slightly modified version in 1948

Andrew J Ray Collection (with loose badges from Minogue Collection)

A company of Volunteer Rifles was formed at the University in 1884, of whom two Privates (John Monash and John William Purnell) later became Generals. This was disbanded and succeeded in the 1890s by the University Corps of Officers, and in turn it gave way to the Melbourne University Rifles, two of whose companies were based around leading Melbourne and Geelong schools.

Though the unit itself has no battle honours, it has made its contribution to the Australian Army, providing 23 officers and 771 other ranks to the 1st AIF (of whom a further 180 gained commissions on active service). During World War Two, 1162 officers and many other ranks from M.U.R. joined the AIF. After that war, the unit was reformed as Melbourne University Regiment.

Letters from here and there

The letters and diaries of William ('Scotty') Scott Heywood (whose final letter-diary entries prior to his death in a prisoner-of-war camp in Japan are shown in another case) reveal a fairly typical soldier's odyssey. Born in 1911 in Daylesford, he joined the Australian Instructional Corps in 1938, was seconded to the A.I.F. in 1940 and sailed for Malaya in July 1941, leaving a wife and two young 'bairns'.

Heywood's frequent letters - nearly all of them love letters to his wife - came from camps and other army establishments as diverse as Seymour, Caulfield Hospital, Ballarat, Ocean Grove, Bathurst (one shown here), Stawell; somewhere in South Australia as his train headed for the Nullarbor Plain, Broadmeadows, Bonegilla, the Small Arms School at Randwick, and from his point of embarkation (one shown here with a lock of his 'curls' from their final haircut), 'at sea' (one shown here), and from Malaya prior to its fall (one shown here). The cartoon shown was popular with Heywood and other Warrant Officers (W.O.s).

Scott Heywood Collection

The Melbourne Teachers' College (later incorporated into the University) set up a War Effort Committee in May 1940; its activities included a War Effort Fund, registered under Victorian Patriotic Fund legislation, to provide comforts for ex-students on war service, and a large file of correspondence and cards built up as a result. It established a register of war service, in which was also entered the date and summary of contents of items of correspondence received.

• Letter from Flight-Sgt. Geoffrey Raymond Emmett on the beauty of New Guinea, 16 June 1943.
• Register of War Service, open at Emmett's record; it includes newscuttings about Emmett's tragic death a month after he wrote the letter, when his Beaufort was accidentally shot down by a U.S. plane, and details the circumstances which hampered rescue attempts, even though the life raft was sighted at different times as late as 6 August 400 miles away, before a severe storm is thought to have sunk it.
• Letter from Air-Vice-Marshall Frank McNamara, who had won a Victoria Cross as an airman in 1917, describing his present 'parish', which covers Ethiopia, British Somaliland, Socotra and much more, plus a vast area of sea to patrol, 25 December, 1944.
• Card from Lieut. A.G. Austin, later a Professor of Education at the University, Christmas 1942.
• Letter - Arthur Hayes, RAAF, India, 13 October, 1944, recounting pleasure in reading the College magazine The Griffin; trip from England to India via 'a lonely desert station in Iraq...met Jack Devine. We 'nattered' like two of the local 'wogs'...'

Melbourne Teachers' College Collection

Ormond College also kept a war service record on cards, arranged in the following groups: Dead; P.O.W. or missing (including E.E. Dunlop); Army; Navy; Navy Chaplains; Army Chaplains; A.A.M.C.; R.A.A.F.; R.A.A.F. Medical; Released; British Forces; and Home Service.

The Vice-Master, H.W. ('Barney') Allen acted as conduit for correspondence with former students and a clearing-house of college news.

• Card index, Ormond College service record 1939-.
• Postcard of Alexandria, Egypt from Col. Clive Disher, 24 March, 1941.
• Letter, Capt. E.E. Dunlop, Jerusalem - Allen, 2 February 1940, recounting a discussion with Col. Clive Disher; Dunlop had arrived at Port Said from England ten days earlier.
• Lletter, H.J. Tippett (a principal of Ballarat engineering firm Ronaldson & Tippett, shown in another case in the exhibition) - D.K. Picken (Master), 2 March 1943, enclosing copy of a letter concerning the disappearance of his son Arthur on a costal air operation with the Royal Canadian Air Force.
• Letter, David Derham, New Guinea - Allen, 16 August, 1943; recounting meetings with other Ormond people; recently had his first beer for 5 months (David P. Derham was another son of A.P. and Frances Derham, and would later be Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne, 1968-1982).
• Letter, Lex Rentoul, London - Allen, 29 March, 1941, describing life in bomb-ridden London.

As well as letters to and from family, the Archives has several other sources of letters from enlisted personnel in diverse locations.

For instance, the remaining staff in the University Registrar's Office in June 1941 established a contributory scheme to enable them to purchase canteen orders or vouchers to send to colleagues in the field. Office staff took turns to write a periodical letter with news and anecdotes, and those in the field sent letters of reply and cards, often printed for their particular units. The first such letter, 27 June 1941, went from Registrar John Foster to only four names, but in time there were a dozen or more on the list.

Of staff shown in the photograph (from c.1937), communications are on file from seven men, and there are others from personnel who joined the staff after this photograph was taken. The cards shown are from the Middle East, HMAS 'Bingera', Malaya, HMAS 'Shepparton', Darwin, HMAS 'Manoora', R.A.A.F. locations unnamed, Naval Beach Commando unit somewhere in the Pacific, and, closer to home, Flinders Naval Depot.

They include a card from Bill Berry (from Accounts, 2nd from left in back row of photograph), at that time a L/Cpl with the HQ 23 Australian Infantry Brigade based at Larrakeyah, Northern Territory. Rejected by the R.A.N. in 1940 because of colour blindness, he enlisted in the AIF, becoming Intelligence Sgt and serving also in New Guinea.

After the War he was a long-serving head of the Graduate Union. Bill Berry died in July this year, aged 78.

• Letter John Foster (Registrar) - Ted Finn et al., 27 June 1941.
• Selection of cards and letters from office staff in the services.
• Photograph of administrative, library and other general staff associated with the Registrar's office c.1937.
• D. Lewis, circular letter, 7 October 1942 with news from the office and the University generally, including air raid drill and a strike by medical students.

The Australian Comforts Fund was formed after a 9th January 1940 Melbourne meeting of delegates of various State funds to provide better coordination than during World War I.

The function of the Fund was to provide services to fit and well members of the Australian Forces, men and women, within and outside Australia. The function of the Red Cross was care of wounded, sick and POWs. Both were officially accredited to the Forces. Three other bodies came to be officially recognised - the YMCA, the Salvation Army and the YWCA (the last a bit later, when increasing numbers of women in the Forces called for a separate organisation to care specifically for their needs).

Generally, the ACF was accepted as the coordinating collecting body in most States, and the other accredited bodies agreed to make no separate public appeals except by mutual agreement.

Many functions were for the joint benefit of a combination of bodies.

The conjunction of the six-pointed ACF Red Star with other organisations' emblems became a feature of letterheads, posters and programmes.

YWCA

The YWCA embraced the war effort on a number of fronts, affiliating with the Australian Comforts Fund, forming linkages with the Land Army and Garden Army, and establishing a network of 'Leave Houses' in Australia and beyond.

• Photographs of leave house, Plympton, South Australia.
• Samples of YWCA Welfare Officer's epaulettes.
• Victor Harbour Leave House guest register 1942-1946.
• Documents of late 1941 and early 1942 concerning a request to the Prime Minister for accreditation for National Service and other matters, and the draft position description for a secretary for extension and war time service.
• YWCA newscuttings book showing press coverage of the Association's Garden Army, April/June 1942.
• Photographs of Magnetic Island leave house.
• Dorothy Powell's combined log-diary-scrapbooks from Townsville YWCA, 1943 and 1944.
• Photographs of YWCA Transit and Services Club at Kure during Allied Occupation in Japan after the War.
• YWCA Australian War Services Photograph album.
• Association News April 1943 with text of Mrs R.G. Casey's 'Broadcast of the YWCA Services' Clubs'.
• Association News Souvenir Issue, January 1947: YWCA War Services.

Some other services and surveys

Conservatorium Collection

Another organization connected with the ACF was the Conservatorium of Music at the University, which also had strong linkages with the Victorian Symphony Orchestra through conductor Bernard Heinze and many of the other members who taught at the Conservatorium.

Heinze conducted performances of Coleridge-Taylor's 'Hiawatha' in Aid of War Charities in October and November 1939.

• Programme for production of 'Hiawatha'.

By early 1940, the University Conservatorium Group of the Red Cross and Comforts Fund had been established, and it continued to contribute to the Australian Comforts Fund - Victorian Division and the Lord Mayor's Red Cross Appeal Fund into the postwar period.

• Group bank passbook, in account with the University Branch of the National Bank, May 1940-January 1946; receipts for transfers in January 1946: Group financial statement for year ended 31 December 1941.

Committee of Melbourne University Women Collection

Other groups at the University to engage in Forces entertainment and fund-raising included the Committee of Melbourne University Women. For instance, a dance was held on 30 August 1940 for interstate and country soldiers doing a course at the Officer's Training School stationed in the M.U.R. hut. The University Women's Ball of 1941 was in aid of the Women of the University Patriotic Appeal. A picture night on 12 September 1941 was in aid of the Women of the University Patriotic Appeal, who would pass the money to the Red Cross Ambulance Appeal.

• This report of a May 1941 dance for interstate Naval Men recommends stricter scrutiny of the type of women being allowed entry!

Clothing Trades Union, Victorian Branch Collection

Many other groups were involved in fund-raising or providing facilities for Service personnel, for instance a Fund with illustrious patronage (and Professor Crawford as a Vice-President) opened an Appeal to provide Australian Sheepskins for Russian Sick and Wounded.

• Letter from Secretary, Clothing Trades Union, to a member seeking a donation to the fund.
• Letter of thanks from President of the Fund to the Secretary, Clothing Trades Union 19 February 1943.
• Report and Balance Sheet of Fund, August 1942-June 1943.
• Invitation to Union Secretary to Russian Ball 1942, organised to raise funds by the Russian Group of the Australian Red Cross Society.

Miscellaneous items:

Another organization to establish an Allied Services Canteen was the Allied Services Patriotic Fund of Australia-Soviet House (of which Professor Crawford was President, and several other Professors were Vice-Presidents).

• Brochure listing attractions at Canteen in Flinders Lane.
• Notice of raffle and covering letter from Secretary of the Fund to the Secretary of the Clothing Trades Union, 24 September 1945.

Olympic Consolidated Industries Collection

• Lord Mayor Frank Beaurepaire shows two US servicemen the portrait of John Batman in the Town Hall, and chats with US and Australian servicemen on the roof of the Town Hall.

University Newscutting Collection

• University Unit of the Lord Mayor's Mobile A.R.P. Canteen serving in Collins Street, copy of a cutting from The Argus 28 December 1943.

Citizens' Welfare Service of Victoria Collection [now the Drummond Street Relationship Centre]

As well as organizations raising funds or providing services to the Forces, there were others that looked after the civilian needy, whether individuals or families, many of whom had their life circumstances exacerbated by the contingencies and disruptive effects of war.

The case-files of the Charity Organization Society during these years often reflect the exigencies of life in a decade beset by the Depression and extended unemployment, followed by a decade uniquely affected by defence and wartime circumstances.

In this case, a Melbourne artilleryman stationed in Queensland in 1943 (who had been unemployed for four years during the 1930s) has on the advice of his C.O. written to the A.I.F. Women's Association Welfare Branch asking if they could help his family in Melbourne. A covering letter from the C.O. related that the man has several times gone A.W.L. in order to go to Melbourne.

The Women's Association has forwarded the letter to the Charity Organisation Society, and the ensuing case report reveals that his 25-year old wife, with six children under the age of 8, has to regularly take one child to hospital, during which times her husband had looked after the other five children. After his posting interstate, this task was sometimes performed by the next-door neighbour. But now this woman, her husband in the Navy and a son on Active Service, has herself been called up by Manpower for laundry service.

• Case report and associated correspondence, August 1943.

Prest Collection; note: Wilfred Prest, who had come from Britain with knowledge of urban social surveys there, was Senior Lecturer in Economics from 1938, becoming Professor in 1946.

The University of Melbourne Archives also contains valuable data in the Wilfred Prest Collection relating to 'normal' suburban families in wartime Melbourne. The creation of this material originated with the postponement of the 1941 census because of the War, whereupon a grouping of the University, the Department of Postwar Reconstruction and local businesses financed a survey of 1 in 30 households across Melbourne, with a follow-up to households in the industrial west, the latter being the subject of the monograph by Prest, Housing, Income and Saving in War-Time: A Local Survey (1952).

• The original questionnaire was a fairly closed one, on the back of one page of which the interviewer would sometimes note her own or her informant's observations where pertinent. In the follow-up survey, an open-ended page of headings was included on which were recorded the informants' information and impressions of such matters as the effect of the war on the cost of living, opinions about rationing, the extent of savings and of insurance cover, and expectations of the postwar period. These returns, of which samples are shown, reveal a widespread experience of a higher cost of living, a high rate of participation in war savings and war loans, fears of postwar depression with the scaling down of wartime production and the return of demobilized personnel to the workforce, though most felt that things would be better than after World War I, and others thought there would only be a short-lived slump.
• Comments noted allude to the 'shocking' rise in the price of fruit, and of meat and butter; a perception that rationing is good for savings; one couple are 'great admirers of Prof. Crawford'; another expects the 'workers to be downtrodden once more' after the war; one hopes to take her grandmother home to Scotland to die in the family home 'if the Germans have left it alone'; a head of household 'thinks married women should be put off after the war, thought [to be] doing a good job now and providing for future, men must have jobs back', believes that Australia will have a good opportunity to export more wheat and wool to 'knocked about' European countries, while his wife believes that bottled liquor should be rationed - at the moment, hotels get it all, and one 'can't get any in shops for husbands coming home from long day's work'.

J.H. Reeves Collection

• Melbourne graduate Jock Reeves in 1944 produced for the Church of England Men's Society and the Brotherhood of St Laurence the tract, Housing the Forgotten Tenth, in effect a plea that provision for the welfare of the 'problem tenant' be factored into the prevailing debate about the best means of addressing the question of postwar housing. Reeves subsequently worked as a lecturer and administrator in the Faculty of Economics and Commerce, and was prominent in the Fabian Society and in ALP economic policy development.

Young Men's Christian Association

The Y.M.C.A. was one of the organizations accredited to the Forces as a provider of services to members of the Australian Forces, in Australia and elsewhere.

The first meeting of the Victorian Y.M.C.A. Military Service Committee occurred within three weeks of the declaration of war - but as the statement 'The War and the Y.M.C.A.' recalls, negotiations between the National Committee and the Defence Department had begun as early as 1936 against the possibility of such an eventuality.

• Minute Book, Victorian Y.M.C.A. Military Service Committee, 22 September 1939- 11 June 1943.
• Copy of statement, ' The War and the Y.M.C.A.'
• Copy of Report and Proceedings...of the Eighteenth National (Centenary) Convention of the Young Men's Christian Associations of Australia..., 18-20 November 1944 (cover title being Three More War Years 1941-1944).
• Y.M.C.A Defence Services newscuttings scrapbook.
• Selected photographs from Y.M.C.A. Defence Forces Committee 1939-1947 album.

The Myer Emporium

Even before the War had started, Chairman and Managing Director of Myer's, Norman Myer had been commissioned by Prime Minister Lyons to visit the United States to seek information about military clothing.

The day after the declaration of war, Myer had written to Menzies offering the services of his business empire. Myer was soon appointed Honorary Business Consultant to the Defence Department, and the manager of Myer's Ballarat Woollen Mills advisor to the Department of Supply and Development, one task being to advise on the clothing requirements of the Army, Navy and Air Force.

However, Myer in January 1942 resigned from the Board of Business Administration amid allegations in the House and the Senate of price-fixing and profiteering by the firm. This matter hung over the reputation of the firm for some months. A letter from W. Massy-Greene soon after his resignation suggested that Professor Copland was the one 'out of step' in the interpretation and implementation of price control measures and had made 'horrible examples' of some firms in order to create a climate of fear. Though he resigned, Myer offered to serve in some other capacity. And he would soon found a services club under the aegis of the Australian Comforts Fund.

As a protected industry, the Ballarat Mill retained sufficient staff to work double shifts. In the Melbourne store, many younger staff enlisted, their placed being taken by 'those Grey Haired Girls at Myer's'. As the War progressed, many goods became unobtainable, especially imports. With petrol rationing, delivery fleets were pooled, and the familiar badges of Myer's, Foy's and so on were painted over.

A Norman Myer initiative for servicemen was to pay for the establishment of the 'Dug-Out', two cafes joined together beneath the Capitol Theatre in Swanston Street, providing bathrooms and a clothes mending room as well as food and entertainment. It was opened by General Blamey in May 1942, a representative of General MacArthur also being present. It was open daily from 9.30 a.m. to 11 p.m., staffed by 150 volunteers from Myer's during the evenings.

Linkages between Myer's and wartime production facilities continued into the peace, the company leasing the munitions plant at Maribyrnong as a furniture factory, and also marketing cheap prefabricated houses made for them by the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation.

• Certificate of introduction to Norman Myer, signed by J.A. Lyons, 24 March 1939.
• Exchange of correspondence between Norman Myer and R.G. Menzies, John Curtin and W. Massy-Greene, 1939-42.
• Copy of Store News around the time that war was declared.
• Photographs at the 'Dug-Out', including the opening by General Blamey, 8 May 1942, and a July 4 dance 1942.
• Sample pages of the 'Dug-Out' visitors' book.
• Sample page of Myer 1942 scrap book which included a time-line of events in the War and in local regulations, their implications for the business, and an account of other activities such as the 'Dug-Out'.

Leonhard Adam Collection

More than 25,000 enemy prisoners-of-war were held in prison camps in Australia during World War II. Many had been captured initially by other Allied forces, and the largest single group were Italians. As well, a number of aliens and civil internees were held, the number peaking at 6,780 in September 1942. These included a number of refugees from Nazi Europe who had fled to Britain and were detained there after the outbreak of hostilities, then shipped to other countries in a curious reprise of Britain's much earlier policy of transportation to the colonies. The most celebrated of these were 2,800 who arrived on the 'Dunera' in September 1940, mainly Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria.

• Among them was Berlin-born Leonhard Adam (1891-1960). He had studied ethnology and law, and became a District Court judge in Germany; but stripped of office under Nazi anti-Semitic laws in 1933, he in time moved to England. His seminal bookPrimitive Art was published there in 1940, but in the same year he and his brother Manfred were interned as enemy aliens, and shipped out on the 'Dunera', whence they found themselves placed in an internment camp at Tatura, in up-country Victoria. While there, Leonhard Adam drew and painted aspects of his enforced environs, as in the sketchbook shown.
• In Melbourne, Lady Masson - whose son-in-law, the anthropologist Malinowski, was known to Adam - helped secure Adam's parole in 1942. Thus began an association with the Museum of Victoria, with Queen's College and the History Department, University of Melbourne, where Professor Max Crawford provided Adam with research grants, some of which were used to further his knowledge of Aboriginal art and use of stone; the University's Museum of Art houses the ethnological Collection that Adam built up during these years of association
• While in Tatura camp, with many other highly-educated refugees, Leonhard Adam taught primitive religion and ethnology at their 'Collegium Taturense', and became its Pro-Rector. Shown is the first anniversary issue of their house magazine, October 1941, and a 1942 New Year card designed, cut, and printed by Adam. Many other distinguished inmates of Tatura and Hay camps went on to make important contributions to Australia's intellectual life. The Archives also holds the papers of Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack, artist, designer, composer, Bauhaus member, and teacher (and a very substantial collection of his art works is in the University's Museum of Art, including studies of the internment camps at Hay, Orange and Tatura.), and a member of other internees, some of whom, like Adam, would make distinguished contributions as members of staff of the University.
• During 1918, Prof. Joseph Kohler of Berlin University (with whom Adam had studied prior to the outbreak of World War I) suggested he go among Indian and Nepalese prisoners-of-war in Rumania to collect ethnographic and anthropological material. It was evidently during this eight months in Rumania that he met and befriended Roland Carter, an Australian Aboriginal Serviceman. Thirty years later, after the irony of Adam's internment in Roland Carter's country, he managed to locate and contact Carter, then living at the Point Macleay Mission on Lake Alexandrina (now called Raukkan and owned by the Ngarrindjeri). This is a letter and photograph sent by Roland Carter to Leonhard Adam, by now living in the Melbourne suburb of Brighton.
• Letter, Marjorie Coppel, Honorary Secretary of the Victorian Refugee Immigration Appeals Committee to J.D.G. Medley, 3 May 1941, drawing attention to the plight of the 'Dunera' internees.

Registrar's Correspondence Series

While Adam and other Jewish refugees were often able to gain early release from camps and enlist or take up positions with the University, one who experienced the reverse process was Japanese instructor at the University since 1922, Mowsey Inagaki. He had arrived in Australia via Thursday Island at the turn of the century and in 1907 married Rose Allkins.

At 5.45 a.m. on Monday, 8 December 1941, news reached Melbourne of Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor and Manila. When Rose Inagaki returned home from work that afternoon, she found the house 'a shambles', her husband removed, along with Japanese dictionaries, literature and other items. He was interned at Tatura, and his wife's attempts to have him released had proved unsuccessful when she died in August 1943.

• Letters between Rose Inagaki and the Registrar of the University, 1941-42, expressing among other things, her 'hurt, that after Mr Inagaki's long and faithful service, the University did not...offer me a little sympathy at this treatment of an ageing, frail man, who above all things has been a loyal Australian'.