Recollections of Service in the Bureau and RAAF
Foreword
Recollections—Mascot and Rose Bay—the Early Years
Sojourn in the Far East 1942
References
Endnotes
Index
Search
Help
Contact us
Later that day, 16 February, we got on board MS Sieberg again. Coincidently this was the small Dutch vessel on which we travelled from Batavia to Singapore. We had 73 RAAF and RAF people for the crossing of Sunda Strait to Merak on the extreme northwestern tip of Java. Other vessels brought more people from PII. We passed a couple of US flush-deck destroyers in the Strait and docked at Merak that evening. There were a number of troops and airmen there. We got on a train with them and travelled all night in it to reach Batavia the next day. We were taken to a transit camp, which was under British command, and we were given part of the marble floor of a Dutch former convent for our quarters. I had only a sarong (bought in Palembang) for bedclothes and was glad to get down on the hard floor for some sleep that night. Andrew Murfett, rediscovered, was located in a tent nearby. He washed his one and only pair of shorts and hung them out to dry. They were stolen! He was enraged saying 'Some Pongo . . . has pinched my shorts'. So Doug Forder and I went for a walk to a shop in the city and bought him a pair. Then the two of us got billets for two nights at the private house of the manager of the KPM shipping line, Mynheer ter Braake, in the posh part of Batavia Centrum. He was a generous host; but he had planned to leave everything and depart for South Africa (probably with the headquarters of KPM as well) with the near approach of the Japanese—Singapore and Palembang and parts of Borneo had fallen by 15 February, and it was now the 20th. So the four of us got further billets with den Heer J Herben in van Heutzplain 8, Batavia Centrum. He was a captain in the Dutch Army.
The RAAF meteorological party then got orders to proceed to Bandoeng to join (or re-join) the RAF meteorological section which had arrived there. But these were cancelled. Instead, orders came for our return to Australia. We met up with Grimes, Lee and John, our colleagues from Singapore, in Batavia, and on 21 February they returned to Soekaboemi, near Bandoeng; while George Mackey alerted us to be prepared to leave for Australia at short notice.
People in Bright Sparcs - Forder, Douglas Highmoor (Doug); Hannay, Alexander Keith (Keith); Mackey, George William; Murfett, A. M. (Andy)
 |
Bureau of Meteorology |  |
© Online Edition Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre and Bureau of Meteorology 2001
Published by Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre, using the Web Academic Resource Publisher
http://www.austehc.unimelb.edu.au/fam/0358.html