Bruce Cormack

Interviewed by Eve Klein on 4 December 2000

Bruce Cormack. I remember Mosman from – well I was born in 1930 and I guess my first impressions were around 1933 or so.

Eve Klein. Where did you live in Mosman?

Bruce Cormack. I started off in Milson Road, Cremorne. We moved there from Rockdale in about 1933. The depression was on and one of the reasons we moved into this very nice location in Milson Road, is because it was one of the cheaper parts of Sydney to live and rent in those days. Nobody wanted the hassle or bother of catching ferries. It seems a little quaint today. Then in 1935 we moved to Lennox Street in Mosman and I lived there at several addresses around the same area until 1947.

Eve Klein. You were a family unit. How many people in your family?

Bruce Cormack. We started off with myself, my mother and father. In 1937 I had a sister born, Diane, and then in 1944 a brother John.

Eve Klein. What brought your parents to Mosman, other than your saying it was cheaper. Did they choose it for any other reason?

Bruce Cormack. I imagine the attractiveness of the suburb itself was a major one. My father worked in the city at the Perpetual Trustee in Hunter Street, and obviously, ferry commuting for him was a good and interesting thing. They believed the Mosman and Balmoral surrounds were a great environment to bring up children.

Eve Klein. As a child, did you use the environment a great deal? Did you use Balmoral beach?

Bruce Cormack. Very much so. I learnt to swim in an old rock pool in Shell Cove. I noted in the SMH several years ago an archeologist had discovered the remains of this rock pool and there was a lot of speculation as to what it was. This was almost at the bottom of the steps down from Milson Road, through what I think, is called Sirius Park. From the age of two or three my father used to take me down there for early morning swims and then I graduated to McCallum’s Baths just a little further up Cremorne Point. I recently found a letter that my father’s father had written to me in 1936 congratulating me on being able to swim the length of McCallum’s Baths.

Eve Klein. Where did your grandparents live?

Bruce Cormack. They lived in Bexley.

Eve Klein. How easy was it to commute to visit them?

Bruce Cormack. I guess in those days you didn’t really hassle too much about commuting and changing modes of transport. We always walked to the ferry. We lived in Lennox Street, down towards Sirius Cove. It seemed that hail, rain, or shine we walked along the bush track outside the Zoo wall, around Whiting Beach and caught the ferry. You’d get just as wet walking up the top of Bradley’s Head Road to get the tram down to the ferry, besides which, that cost a penny.

Eve Klein. You went to school in Mosman?

Bruce Cormack. First of all, I attended one of the very first kindergartens in Sydney. It was called Nuradom (?) and it was underneath the Saint Augustine’s Church in Wycombe Road in Neutral Bay. I went there in 1934. My parents had heard of this lady Miss Seva who a year or two before had been to Germany and had seen these marvelous little things called kindergartens, and she returned to Sydney and decided to open one. There was a big family debate, some of which is still on record, as to whether the few pounds involved could or should be affordable. My parents decided – yes, and today I still see two or three of the boys who went to that kindergarten.

Eve Klein. And you went there until it was school time?

Bruce Cormack. Yes, and then in 1936 I started in, what today would be year 1 at Mosman Infants’ School.

Eve Klein. Where was that situated?

Bruce Cormack. It’s where it is now, in Belmont Road; the grounds were slightly smaller than they are today. The school has expanded; I notice it has expanded to take in a small building that used to be the Mena Private Hospital. I think my sister was born there, she was born in the Mena Private Hospital and our local GP, Dr. Elliot-Smith who in those days had his offices opposite the Kinema Theatre, which is now the Mosman RSL, also removed my tonsils in that particular place. Elliot-Smith later became the Mayor of Mosman.

Eve Klein. Which years are these now?

Bruce Cormack. From 1936, I went year by year by year through Mosman Infants’ and into the big school in 3rd class and progressed all the way through there to the Primary Final, which I did in 1942.

Eve Klein. And then what did you do, which school?

Bruce Cormack. My first possibly, only real scholastic achievement was in my Primary Final taken at the end of year 6 where I qualified for North Sydney High School, which in those days was for the first time a selective High School, and this was a big deal. However, I didn’t go there. In 1942 I went for about six weeks to Mosman Prep School, but we left after six or eight weeks into the term, because my father had decided – he was away at the war – that we should move away from the city. It was at the time of the Coral Sea and all those things, so for eight or nine months we went to live in Parkes. We then returned before the end of the year to Mosman, not to Lennox Street where we were, but not very far away in Rickard Avenue, still down in the same Sirius Cove part of Mosman.

Eve Klein. Had you sold the house in Lennox Street?

Bruce Cormack. No, we didn’t sell, we were renters.

Eve Klein. Any idea what sort of rental your parents would have been paying then?

Bruce Cormack. That’s a very good question. I think the wage of my father was looking at then, you know, the poor middle class, it was probably something in the order of five pounds a week. The rental could have been 30 shillings. That part of Mosman, Lennox Street a lot of the places down around there were old World War 1 soldiers’ settlement blocks. In other words, the people had been able to get the blocks quite cheaply. In the 1920s, they were pleasant nice houses. Two of my closest boyfriends lived opposite. Their fathers both had bought these soldier settler blocks.

Eve Klein. The life for your mother – what would that have been like? What sort of routine would she have had?

Bruce Cormack. Our routine was somewhat different from most persons. My father, since he was old enough had been a member of the Militia, the Citizen Army Forces, so in 1938, when I was eight years old, and that was a year before World War 2 started, he spent nearly six months away with the Citizen Army in those days. People were not totally unprepared but it was still fairly early and fairly primitive days. When World War 2 started, he enlisted and my father’s Army number was 23, which in an age of telephone numbers was something he was rather proud of. In fact, he was very annoyed because he said he was further ahead in the queue, but more senior officers of the rank of Colonel and General were pushing in front of him. My father was then away and didn’t come back until the end of 1945, although some of his postings in the later years of the war were briefly in Sydney.

Eve Klein. So your mother was alone with how many children at that stage?

Bruce Cormack. Two and the war started in 1939 when I was nine and my sister Diane was two. I guess I almost became a semi-latchkey kid because my mother was involved in war work almost fulltime.

Eve Klein. What sort of work was she doing?

Bruce Cormack. My father was in the Corps of Signals, and they had a special comfort’s fund and other things that they did, and they had a very close association with Sir Ernest Fisk who at the time ran the AWA Company. He very kindly gave these people very substantive house room in the AWA building in York Street. They set up, virtually, a fulltime operation there, supporting the troops.

Eve Klein. From your point of view, do you recall any deprivation at all, during that time?

Bruce Cormack. No, absolutely none. It was a great time to be in Mosman, to be at school. I remember continually battling with my mother who would force me to wear old tan sandshoes to school when I knew a lot of kids there were privileged enough to go to school in bare feet, but I was never allowed to.

Eve Klein. Why did they go to school in bare feet?

Bruce Cormack. Times were tough. Mosman was far from being the overall affluent place that it is today. It was quite different. There were workers in the small workers’ cottages.

Eve Klein. Do you remember rationing?

Bruce Cormack. Oh, very much. I can remember being absolutely delighted when my brother was born towards the end of the war, because I knew very well that this meant more butter and more sugar and a couple of eggs. He was born at 6am in Mosman, and at 9am my mother was giving me the shopping instructions and first on the list was to go and sign up for the new ration coupons. Yes, I remember rationing very well.

Eve Klein. Do you think you did without? Was it really noticeable that you didn’t have enough?

Bruce Cormack. No it wasn’t. I guess kids of my age and stage all over Sydney were eating bare bread and dripping and we enjoyed it. We had no real sense of deprivation, no.

Eve Klein. What did you do in your spare time, out of school hours?

Bruce Cormack. I spent a lot of time in the Mosman/Mosman. When we came back in 1942 – back to Mosman from Parkes, we were in Rickard Avenue, and there was a back gate and a track, and you could get from the back of our house straight down to Sirius Cove. Sirius Cove at low tide made a marvelous mini-golf course and between three of us we had one and half golf clubs and two balls. We played a lot of golf at Sirius Cove at low tide. We used the rocks, we used to fish, we’d walk around the rocks there. Unfortunately, we offered ourselves as shark bait – in hindsight – a little too often. We’d find floating logs of wood and you’d paddle them around the bays. We went through the old canoe phase, and we literally lived on the water, and we walked on the bush tracks. Bradleys Head and Ashton Park were our back yards, as much as our own back yards, and over the hill to Balmoral where we did our serious swimming. We usually walked over the hill down to Balmoral and hung on to the penny to get the tram back up the hill again. We were early inhabitants of the Bather’s Pavilion when it was indeed the Bather’s Pavilion.

Eve Klein. Did your parents have concerns for you? Were there any restrictions on you?

Bruce Cormack. I guess not, other than the restrictions one would normally have. I remember probably around the age of five, six, seven, before I was a big boy, warned against being alone on the bush tracks and you know, strange men in rain coats offering children lollies, and those sort of things. I think we were given very good training. We used to walk a mile to school and home again. But as kids do, we probably knew half the people in Prince Albert Street in those days by name, if not by sight. It was a very local and friendly place.

Eve Klein. What about traffic?

Bruce Cormack. Quite apart from being the ‘30s, it was wartime and there weren’t any cars. My family didn’t own a car until after the war.

Eve Klein. You didn’t have to watch out for cars? Your parents weren’t concerned about you being run over?

Bruce Cormack. No, and in consequence we used to do the most ridiculous hair-raising things in billy-carts on the steep hills of that part of Mosman. It was the hill that was the problem not the cars. In fact, in the early primary days, there was still a lot of horse traffic and we would occasionally rush out with wooden fruit boxes and shovel up horse manure, which we would endeavour to sell. The other thing we used to sell, of course, was newspapers. The butcher shop in Mosman during the war was desperate for newspaper – that was a good source of income. And the first paid job I ever had was delivering ice, and the ice was in a horse drawn ice cart that came from the Glacier Ice Company, which I think was up at Cremorne Junction at the time. I used to pick it up along the way towards Prince Albert Street, and deliver ice. I still remember how big and heavy those blocks of ice were, throwing them into ice chests. Everybody in Mosman lived 50 steps up from the road.

Eve Klein. Did you have an ice chest yourself?

Bruce Cormack. Oh yes. The big job was to be responsible for emptying the ice-chest, that was if you were not fortunate to have a hole drilled through the floor to let it leak away.

Eve Klein. What else was delivered by horse and cart?

Bruce Cormack. I can remember bread when I was at kindergarten age being delivered. .I used to be given money to go out and get the loaf of bread, but when we were in Lennox Street, in the middle ‘30s there was a mad little van that used to deliver bread. We also had the old butter and egg man down there, also in a very ancient motorcar. We often wondered if he’d ever get back up the hill at Lennox Street again.

Eve Klein. And milk delivery, did that come daily?

Bruce Cormack. Yes, into a billy, and you either had a billy with a tin lid, or one of those mad little covers with glass beads over it to keep the flies out.

Eve Klein. Did you have any difficulty accessing anything at all that you can remember? Was it a chore, or was it an outing to for instance, buy clothes?

Bruce Cormack. Yes, I can remember the wartime difficulties and shortages of clothes. I guess, because from 1942 to ‘44, those couple of years, I suddenly grew from being five foot six, to six feet, and I was growing out of my clothes. I can remember being severely embarrassed at having to wear secondhand sports coats that came halfway up my forearms, or to be wearing long pants when I was just into long pants. They’d be four inches above where they should be. I can remember at those ages being enormously embarrassed by those things.

Eve Klein. Where would those clothes have come from?

Bruce Cormack. We had clothing coupons, but I think that bought one jacket and one pair of pants a year. My mother had a source of secondhand clothes she was able to tap into from time to time – pretty horrible hand-me-downs. I had an uncle who had gone into the army, as well who was the most immaculate dresser with superb clothes and he left them all in storage at our house. I was tall enough, but I was as thin as a beanpole and they looked absurd on me.

Eve Klein. Those were teenage years, we’re talking about. You’re talking about 1946 when you left Mosman.

Bruce Cormack. When we came back from Parkes and went back to Mosman again, I went to school at Shore at Sydney Church of England Grammar School.

Eve Klein. Where were you living then?

Bruce Cormack. In Rickard Avenue.

Eve Klein. How would you commute to Shore?

Bruce Cormack. Walk up and get the tram that originated at the Zoo, and in those days there were a couple of school specials. There were the old fashioned buck jumpers that used to rocket around the place.

Eve Klein. Of course, Shore was fairly well established already then.

Bruce Cormack. Oh yes, it was a very well established school. The reason I went there – ironically, because it was wartime, suddenly we able to afford it. In peacetime, we certainly couldn’t. My father was promoted well in the army and he ended up for a period of time being the youngest full Colonel in the AIF. One of the things that bought you was, not only a red hat, but it gave you fairly decent pay. In those days, it was enough to send me, as a dayboy to a private school.

Eve Klein. And that continued after the war also, for him?

Bruce Cormack. No, the war ended in 1945, and in 1945 I was in 4th year, bearing in mind that High School then was just five years, and not six. So at the end of ‘45 my father came out of the army and went down to Walgett. Could we turn the machine off?

Eve Klein. You were talking about the 1930s in Mosman, could you tell us something about what Mosman was like, what impressions people would have got of Mosman at that time?

Bruce Cormack. Living in Mosman swimming was a big part of one’s life. We were always very, very shark conscious even though, earlier on I said we sometimes offered ourselves as shark bait. One of my best friends at the time lived in Lennox Street and he had an uncle who had lost a leg to a shark in Sirius Cove, which was the reason why they first erected a shark net there. That was back around WW1, in the early 1900s. The shark net down at Balmoral was well and truly erected and we were very conscious of the fact that we put ourselves at some risk, which we obviously ignored when we swam outside the shark net. But they were the days when we knew other kids whose fathers were shark fishing in the evenings, up around Middle Harbour, and they sure as hell were there. So that was a sort of a consciousness we had all the time.

Eve Klein. Shark fishing to just catch sharks, or for food?

Bruce Cormack. No, they were shark fishing for sport. In those days they used to get a four gallon kerosene can, which are square cans and screw the top back on it and use it as a float and dangle a butcher’s hook with a chunk of meat underneath it – fairly primitive, but he used to catch sharks from time to time.

Eve Klein. Would you eat shark?

Bruce Cormack. In those days, we probably had shark at the fish and chip shop, but it was well concealed, not like the later years when flake and other euphemisms were used, and people knew they were eating shark. Mosman was terribly interesting because there was so much bush, and there were tracks. Before he went away in 1939, I can remember my father taking me for walks around Middle Head and George’s Heights. Today we have the headland preservation people all leaping around, but I can remember walking over the golf course at Mosman on Middle Head, and the golf club house was there – a lovely old sandstone building. I don’t know if it’s still there. During the war, it was taken over as an Officers’ Mess for one of the many units that were around there. Similarly, at Balmoral, on the odd occasions when my father would take me down there at the weekend, and instead of jumping into Edward’s Beach, or wherever, we’d walk around to Cavil’s Baths, which would cost three pence for me, and sixpence for him to get in.

They were marvelous baths around on Penguin where the navy is now. It’s absolutely disgraceful that in the year 2000 we don’t have a proper swimming pool in Mosman. We had one in 1938, for heaven’s sake.

Eve Klein. What did your parents do for recreation – for instance in the weekends? You talk about your father being with you a lot and taking you to places.

Bruce Cormack. His hobby was really the army, where he spent odd weekends, as well as weeknights. He used to take me to army depots, as a small child, and I’d be put in a room where there was a blackboard and given pieces of chalk, and left to amuse myself. My parents also, walked a lot. Even when I was four or five, and I don’t have a great memory of it, but a Sunday outing would be to walk from Milson Rd, around to the bridge – across the bridge and get the ferry home. I was obviously capable of doing it because they wouldn’t have carried me at that stage. They did a lot of walking. I guess in those depression days one did a lot of walking and stayed healthy. They enjoyed movies.

Eve Klein. Do you remember going to the pictures yourself?

Bruce Cormack. Oh yes I do. We went to four theatres. There was the Kinema in Mosman, which was the theatre beautiful and was very Art Deco in the mid ‘30s – very, very swish. It is now the Mosman RSL. That’s where I saw Errol Flynn in ‘Robin Hood’ for the first time. They used to have an afternoon of cartoons, which was great stuff. Really, one of the objectives of the part time weekend job delivering ice, was to earn enough money to, not just go to the movies, but to sit upstairs at the movies, or buy an ice cream – the mock ice cream – Polar Frost, you’d get better value for those. If you could earn a shilling for half a day’s heavy work, it was money well earned and then well spent in the same day.

In those days, I think from memory, my pocket money probably would have been about sixpence a week and once a week I was allowed to buy my lunch – this was in about 1936/7, and I remember being given four pence. But you could buy a very good meat pie for a penny, and still have three pence left over to buy an American comic. And the best pies in Sydney in those days – there was a pie shop next to where the Mosman Post Office is now, and they served absolutely marvelous meat pies.

Eve Klein. Was there a consideration of a health risk with that?

Bruce Cormack. Absolutely none whatsoever.

Eve Klein. So once a week you would maybe have enough money to buy your lunch.

Bruce Cormack. I would either buy junk lunch, or buy minimal lunch and spend what was left over.

Eve Klein. How did you get out of school to buy a pie? Was there a recess at school?

Bruce Cormack. Yes, at lunchtime we were allowed to go out. Not down at the Infants’ School but in the Primary School. We used to have those mad flag pedestals that we would put outside the school to stop the traffic so the kids could cross Military Road. But back to the movies. After the Kinema , I don’t know what you call it, but just below the Fire Station in Military Road, was what used to be the Mosman RSL, and before that it was the Rex Theatre. They used to show old movies and old black and white movies, in the old black and white days. I remember my grandmother loved going there because they used to serve a nice line in the tea and scones at the matinees upstairs. I can remember my mother taking me to – it was one of the rare times I was taken to the movies in the evening, and we saw ‘The Lost Horizon’. From memory, it had somebody starring like Ronald Coleman, and at that time Ronald Coleman’s sister lived in Mosman up at Effingham Street which is a nice little piece of trivia. But I remember having nightmares for days after we saw this one hundred year old man or this two hundred year old man in the movies.

Eve Klein. How old would you have been then?

Bruce Cormack. Well, we were in Lennox Street, – seven or eight, possibly. When the school went out, every now and then, like on Empire Day, we would be let out and we would be taken to the movies, where we would sing patriotic songs and be shown patriotic movies. In those days we always went up to, what was then called The Kings Theatre at Spit Junction, it’s still the theatre at Spit Junction. A couple of hundred kids would all pour out of Mosman Primary and march up to the Kings Theatre – that was always interesting because we had a half holiday after it. If you lived in Mosman the other one you went to was the

[tape break]

Eve Klein. ….The Orpheum, which opened in the ‘30s.

Bruce Cormack. I think it was around 1936, or so. It was built and owned by the Vergona family who had earlier opened the North Sydney Orpheum, and we knew the Vergona’s because they operated the vegetable store at the Mosman Wharf at the Quay, from memory. Later on, incidentally, in 1943 when I was 13, it was a time when one went to dancing classes in those days. My Mosman friend and I discovered dancing classes at the Orpheum Theatre upstairs in what are now executive offices I think. It was Percy Jups’ Dancing School. We used to go to Percy Jups on Friday nights, and we did that for several months until my mother found out what sort of a place it was and the ladies who went there, and we were promptly banned.

Eve Klein. What sort of dances did you learn to do?

Bruce Cormack. Oh, all the traditional stuff. The quickstep, the slow foxtrot, jazz waltzing stuff – slow, slow – quick, quick slow – all of that was rather funny, I guess.

Eve Klein. So you were already in High School then?

Bruce Cormack. I was in the early days of High School.

Eve Klein. But you were still living in Mosman when you went to Shore. You were living here until 1945?

Bruce Cormack. Yes, and the war ended. My father was sent down by his Company when he came out of the army, and sent down to Wagga to live. They went down there around Christmas of 1945. I still had a year of school left, so I boarded for my last year at Shore, which was 1946.

Eve Klein. And then you also went to live in Wagga?

Bruce Cormack. Just briefly. I got my matriculation. I was 16, I thought I wanted to be an industrial chemist, but I failed one necessary subject, so I was faced with this awful dilemma of either repeating a year at school, or going in those days to Sydney Tech at Ultimo for a year, just to catch up on one maths subject. As I was only 16, it was decided I could afford to spend another year at school, so I did my Leaving again at Wagga High School. I lived in Wagga for about nine or 10 months, and then came back to Sydney where I’ve been for the rest of my life.

Eve Klein. You say you qualified to go to North Sydney Boys’, which was then already a selective school, was that a great achievement?

Bruce Cormack. Yes, because it was a merit exam, yes, just to have qualified to get there, and made the pass mark, whatever that was for the school. We, my contemporaries and I regarded it as quite an achievement and I was by no means sure that I was going to reach that mark.

Eve Klein. Was a private school considered to be a greater advantage?

Bruce Cormack. In those days some of the private schools were, on academic grounds. In those particular days, the Leaving Certificate tended to be dominated very much by Shore, Sydney Boys’ High School, not so much North Sydney Girls’ High School, on the north side. They were competing with Sydney Girls’ High School, Fort Street High, and not many other private schools. Grammar was very ordinaire, back at that time. Forget about Kings. Saint Joseph’s was a good private school academically, but we were conscious, particularly, of the ones that had a good academic, as well as a good sports record.

Eve Klein. Can you describe the house you lived in and the facilities of the house? Either in Lennox Street, or in Rickard Avenue?

Bruce Cormack. Number 10 Lennox Street – we moved to number 8 Lennox Street in 1936, and probably stayed there until 1938 when we moved next door into number 10. There was my mother and my sister. When the war started an aunt – my mother’s sister who was unmarried came to live with us for some of the war years, so there were three bedrooms and my sister had one, my mother had one, and aunt Rona had one. I slept on an open front veranda for all my childhood years. To me it was not unusual; we all sort of did those things in those days. There were two canvas blinds, which could be put down if the storm and gales blew nightly. You didn’t really think about winter, or being cold. Obviously, there’s enough things piled on a bed to do it. I guess I was rather piqued because I didn’t have a room. My father and I had a room about the shape, and probably the size of a coffin out the back that just held two small wardrobes where we kept our clothes and that was euphemistically known as the pressing room. It was Federation style.

That house in number 10 actually, and unusually, for that part of Mosman had a garage in the front. We didn’t use it and nor did anybody in the street want to use it because nobody had cars, including us. They were not polished boards, they were varnished boards in those days. There used to be a black lacquer, which looked hideous. Didn’t like them even then. Every now and then you knew one of your friends who was lucky enough to have feltex down on their floors and that was absolutely brilliant. We thought that was marvelous.

I remember when we got our first radio set, which would have been in 10 Lennox Street, and it wouldn’t have been until about 1938, at about eight years of age that we experienced radio for the first time. Prior to that my mother and father were always terribly interested in cricket and most particularly in test cricket in those days. My mother, almost literally, till her dying day would sit up and watch every test match, no matter what hour it was, and her father was a first grade cricketer. He was a great mate of Victor Trumper who used to give my mother his old cricket bat. We were a cricket mad family.

Eve Klein. From where did they come from?

Bruce Cormack. In those days, they lived over in Waverley in Bondi.

Eve Klein. Were they all born in Australia – your parents?

Bruce Cormack. Yes they were. I’m a 5th generation Australian born. My children are 6th and my grandchildren are 7th.

Eve Klein. Where originally, did their families come from?

Bruce Cormack. On the maternal side, the Cormacks came from Wick in Scotland. We think they were originally of Scandinavian Viking stock – the name Cormack is not unfamiliar in those parts of the world. Wick is a bleak place; it’s about as far north as you can get in Scotland without falling off. The graveyards there are full of Cormacks still. There are other Cormacks who started out in Mosman who also came out of Wick. On my mother’s side, she was a Grace, descended from Dr. W.G. Grace, which reinforced all the cricket stuff.

Eve Klein. They also came from Britain?

Bruce Cormack. Her father’s family came from Hastings.

Eve Klein. Going back to the house in Lennox Street. One bathroom?

Bruce Cormack. One bathroom, but I was just going to mention a bit about the cricket. We got our first radio and we bought it from Mr. Ferris’s radio shop who was in Middle Head Road, opposite the Buena Vista Hotel, and Mr. Ferris almost invented the first Australian home grown car radio. The Ferris radios. He did it in the back of the shop up there. Prior to that when my parents wanted to listen to cricket, my father would bring home this giant army radio set – God knows how he got it home. They erected it out in the back lawn at Lennox Street. They erected huge aerials and listened direct on a short-wave, they’d just take a couple of blankets out there and spend all night out in the backyard listening to cricket.

But yes – one bathroom, and outside a dunny, it was attached to the house, but you had to go outside the kitchen door to get to it. A gas heater – in the kitchen was the ice chest. When we moved from eight to number 10, we graduated to a hole in the floor for a drip line so we didn’t have to do that terrible ice water emptying trick. I couldn’t tell you what the stove was like because I never used the stove.

Eve Klein. You literally, never would have – or your father would not have used anything in the kitchen.

Bruce Cormack. No, neither of us were kitchen people. We didn’t lay a glove on anything to do with food or fruit preparation. Washing up was as close as we got.

Eve Klein. Was that a ritual – washing up?

Bruce Cormack. No, I don’t remember it as a ritual. It could well have been, but I certainly don’t remember it as a ritual. Out the back we had – as a lot of Mosman did – we had the remains of an old chook yard and a falling down clapped out shed, which was very useful for a boy to have. We converted it into all sorts of things.

Eve Klein. No pets, or livestock?

Bruce Cormack. No. No livestock, but in those days we grew vegetables in the backyard, we grew them to eat because things weren’t too flash. I remember rhubarb always grew very well in Lennox Street. We did OK with beans and tomatoes. I think we lost the battle for lettuce to predator insects and some year’s later potatoes did very well in Rickard Avenue.

Eve Klein. Were meals a ritual? Was that something that one sat down to at certain times?

Bruce Cormack. Yes. I think pretty much at the same time, and one was disciplined about meals and schools and showers and baths, and all those things. Yes, I can’t be more specific for you than that. We would have had the classic roast and two veg on Sundays, and all the rest of it.

Eve Klein. What other involvement did your family have – did they participate, or did they join anything else other than the army involvement?

Bruce Cormack. No, my father was only there for a couple of years before he disappeared. And I grew up without a father. From the time, I was eight, I never lived with my father again.

Eve Klein. Did you receive mail constantly?

Bruce Cormack. Yes. One of the interesting things about mail – at one part of the war my father was locked up in the siege of Tobruk, and the Australian Army organised a super duper mail service, and my mother in Mosman would receive a letter my father wrote in Tobruk no more than eight days after it was written. This is pretty extraordinary. They used to send the mail out on Destroyers down to Egypt and then they’d put them on a succession of planes until they got to Colombo, or somewhere, and whoever was flying the courier plane things, – they had a special arrangement for mail. It would be a very interesting story for the postal people to follow up. It didn’t happen with the rest of the war, it was just a special one offer for people who were locked up in Tobruk.

Eve Klein. How long was he in Tobruk

Bruce Cormack. Nine months. He came out of it rather deaf. As he said – 900 air raids in 300 days is a bit much, and he never quite got his hearing back after that.

Eve Klein. How much were you aware of what was going on overseas? Not so much you as a child, but people here, do you think?

Bruce Cormack. As children, we were into everything. We saved up money and we bought war savings stamps to convert into a 16 shilling war zone certificate, that at the end of the war was supposed to be worth a pound. I don’t think too many of us ever saw it at the end of the day. I can remember going to the Mosman Town Hall, probably at the age of around 12, because I was allowed to go out at night by myself with a couple of my mates, and we used to attend lectures on what to do when in air-raids. We learnt how to cope with incendiary bombs and we even learnt what to do in the case of a gas attack. When we would go home we would put brown paper strips over our windows so our windows didn’t shatter when they came to bomb us. At the age of 12, with our fathers away, we would go and dig air-raid shelters in each other’s back yard. I think our parents tolerated that and it sort of kept us busy and out of the way, rather than letting us do anything desperate, out of a sense of safety.

Eve Klein. Was there an air-raid shelter at school?

Bruce Cormack. No there wasn’t at Mosman. There was at Shore. I left Mosman a bit early. The Shore oval was dug up and there were big shelters there, and I imagine at that stage back at Mosman Primary there would have been shelters, as well. But we knew what was going on with the news of the war. One of the more interesting things – early in the war was when the ‘Queen Mary’ came to Sydney. The ‘Queen Mary’ made its first voyage

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We were always interested, as Mosman people in what went on in the harbour and we knew all the ships and we clocked them in and out, and we even illegally took photographs of them in wartime. One of the biggest thrills was when ‘The Queen Mary’ first came to Sydney. It was early in 1940, I guess it would have been around February, and obviously, it was a big secret, but for some reason the whole of Mosman Primary school knew about it, and we were all let out of school early. It came in, in the afternoon, and we ran – and we ran all the way to the lookout above the entrance to the Zoo, and some others ran all the way down to Bradley’s Head and it was absolutely stunning. The ‘Queen Mary’ maneuvered and anchored in Athol Bight, which is the deepest part of the harbour and about the only place where it could safely do it. It was there for about four or five weeks and became a regular ferry stop on the Zoo to Mosman run. It left in about March and my father, and part of the 6th Division went on ‘The Queen Mary’ in its first voyage as a troop ship. It still hadn’t been converted to hold troops. The exterior was painted battleship gray, some areas had been semi-gutted and they were starting to build bunk-type beds for the Forces, but my father traveled from Sydney to South Hampton in a first class cabin. You know, full peacetime fit out. The ‘Mary’ was originally destined to be part of the second convoy from Australia and to go to the Middle East, however, when it reached Durban, Dunkirk, and nasty things were happening in Europe and Churchill, as usual overrode the Australian authorities and personally directed ‘The Queen Mary’ back to England. And it did, taking with it a good part of the Australian 6th Division and other supporting services. So my father then spent about five months guarding Salisbury Plain against German paratroopers before they were shipped off again to the Middle East. On its trip it was diverted via the USA, where it was converted into full troop ship mode, then it came back to Sydney and kept doing, for a while the London, or Sydney, Middle East run.

The most spectacular time, of course, was the one occasion – it might have happened more than once, when ‘The Queen Mary’ and ‘The ‘Queen Elizabeth’ passed each other – one entering the Heads and one leaving. The other great ships at the time – I can remember when ‘The Queen Mary’ was here in Circular Quay, there was ‘The Mauritania’ on the ocean terminal side and opposite where the Opera House was later built, was ‘The Acquitania’, the old four funneled ‘Acquitania’. For ship watchers it was quite a stunning time to be in and around Sydney, and you were particularly privileged if you lived in Mosman.

Eve Klein. How did you get to see these ships? Did you have a view over the harbour?

Bruce Cormack. There were three places, we either went to a little point on Whiting Point, we went all the way out to Bradley’s Head, or there was a high lookout up near the Zoo entrance where you get a fairly good panorama of the harbour.

Eve Klein. Would you be aware of what was coming in, or did you do this automatically, just go and see which ships were coming in?

Bruce Cormack. Every now and then we were aware of major coming ins, like ‘The Queen Mary’, ‘The Queen Elizabeth’. I cannot tell you how we got the news, but we did, and one of the most stunning – I went down to Bradley’s Head when the very first American fleet came in, after Pearl Harbour. That was really stunning. They were led by the heavy crews of ‘Chicago’, that was the one the Japs later tried to torpedo at Garden Island. But they came within 50 yards of Bradley’s Head, and to stand there and see these 20 ships coming in. It was absolutely mind boggling. We knew then, without any doubt that we were going to win, and win quite handsomely, even though it was going to take us a while.

Eve Klein. Do you have any recollections of American troops landing?

Bruce Cormack. Oh, very much so. It was all around Sydney. They were here, and if you lived around the harbour, or around the Quay you just saw them. They were a fact of life.

Eve Klein. When your father returned, it would have been in 1945, what was the feeling among your friends in Mosman, and generally, when the soldiers came back?

Bruce Cormack. Mmm – that’s a good question. We’d been very euphoric with, you know, VJ Day, and we’d all gone into the city with the grown-up people. That was a wild party time and a lot of fun. We were, of course, particularly as teenagers, avid devourers of everything to do with atom bombs. I guess the troops coming back – unless they were the people who impacted you personally – suddenly you were seeing a relative you hadn’t seen for years, particularly the ones who weren’t much older than you. I can remember particularly, some of our friends who had been POWs, and the horrifying state they came back home in. They made a lot of individual impacts really, rather than a mass feeling. I guess there was a kind of a hiatus for a year or two while everybody looked around. There was a housing shortage and people wanted to build houses and there was nothing to build them with. There was no materials, and it was only a year or two after that again that the first serious migration started. That was an interesting time.

One bit that I omitted to mention earlier on, going back into the middle ‘30s were the arrivals of the refugees from the Nazis in 1937/38 and 1939. The particular ones I remember – a lot of them came into Mosman. Several of them moved into our street and into the house next door. Quite a few of them came from Austria. I had also heard of others from Germany and also a few from Poland.

I would have been in 4th or 5th class in Mosman when a lot of these kids came in speaking German – no English, or only a word or two of English. The teachers couldn’t speak German except my 5th class teacher had a bit of very basic German. But within six months those European kids had caught up with us and by the end of the year they were well and truly in front of us, and they were kids like Gustav Nossal who came and lived in Mosman. They were a very, very bright lot.

Eve Klein. What was the attitude of the average child towards the refugees?

Bruce Cormack. We looked askance at them, rather than down on them. We called them ‘reffos’, and then we – not so much got to know them, but got to observe how bright they were, and the names quietly dissipated or disappeared and became a non-issue. A few years earlier than that, there had been an influx of Italians and Greeks in the depression time, and we used to look down our noses at them, and there were a number of them we went to school with. I can remember them in the Infants’ School as well as the Primary School. Yes there were racial taunts and jibes and there were ‘wogs’ and ‘dagos’ in those days, but none of it was particularly vicious and kids say very hurtful things to each other anyway. I don’t think it was ever a real or significant issue.

Eve Klein. What about from the teachers?

Bruce Cormack. I can only speak from the point of view of the Nazi refugees who came. I think the teachers we had then – bearing in mind they tended to be older and a lot of re-treads during wartime, I think they were remarkably helpful and forbearing and went out of their way to help these kids settle into the country and into the school. Certainly, that was the case in Mosman.

One of the interesting teachers we had at Mosman Primary then, was Douglas Darby who later became a fairly notorious, independent member of Parliament for Manly and other people. Douglas was always a very strong personality, and he had a very strong wife who started a movement called ‘sheepskins for Russia’ in the early 1940s. In those days, we were quite ambivalent about Russia. They were the Communists and they’d just been fighting our good friend the Fins, and we didn’t really like them. We put them in the same bed with Hitler, and it wasn’t until a year or two later that it all turned around and Hitler attacked Russia, and we had to change our minds. But I can remember in those days the school kids being quite abusive towards Douglas Darby’s wife who was trying to raise money to buy sheepskins to send to Communist Russia.

Eve Klein. When would that have been?

Bruce Cormack. It had to be probably around 1941.

Eve Klein. So politically, there was a certain awareness, or certain exposure for children.

Bruce Cormack. Yes, there was a political awareness in Mosman in those days, and we used to know who was elected to state and federal Parliaments and in the Mosman area there was a fair sort of tradition for independence, which was interesting in those years. I’m probably wrong, but I’ve got a feeling that Percy Spender was our member, as an Independent. I’m not sure, and then later on there was a Presbyterian Minister who became another Independent, probably, at the state level. I have this consciousness of when I was a kid of the Independence.

Eve Klein. What would your father’s attitude have been when he returned in 1945, towards settling down, and towards immigration and so on?

Bruce Cormack. Hard to tell. He turned into a model civic citizen in Wagga, I feel. In a couple of year’s time, we re-raised the Citizen Military Forces. He raised a new regiment down there. He became the President of Legacy, he joined Rotary and later became a District Governor and started a local bowling club. I mean, he was involved in community and things.

Eve Klein. So you didn’t actually come back to Mosman until…

Bruce Cormack. ….I was the best part of a year, away in 1946, and I came back to Sydney to work at the end of that, having got the qualification I wanted.

Eve Klein. Did you come back to Mosman then?

Bruce Cormack. No, I didn’t. I was a refugee from Mosman at that stage. My first job was working in a chemical laboratory out at Rhodes – a place called Timberall (sp). I used to make chemicals there that later quaintly became known as ‘agent orange’. Going to Tech four nights a week and going to the job, I had to live out there, so I became a refugee in Burwood.

Eve Klein. When did you come back to Mosman?

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…talking about returning to Mosman, you were living in Killara.

Bruce Cormack. I spent most of my adult life living in Killara, that’s where my family was raised. I always wanted to come back to Mosman, but at that stage, I was an economic refugee. The economic character of Mosman had changed and it was very hard to get back. So I came back here in 1993. I’ve been back in Mosman and very happy with it. Nothing has changed. I moved into Glover Street. The man who was my ‘best man 45 years ago in those days used to live just down in Glover Street, it was just like coming home.

Eve Klein. When you say nothing has changed, from your childhood, or what?

Bruce Cormack. The streets haven’t changed. The streetscapes are very, very similar. Nothing has changed there. You remember, suddenly the Geography comes back and you remember the names of all the streets, you even remember a lot of people and who and where they lived. The community atmosphere? It’s had to tell. I’m one step removed now. If you have children and your living in a suburb you feel the vibrancy and the reaction a lot more. All I can is that I’m very happy to be back in Mosman, but I’m appalled at the Parish politics and the neighbourly fights that occur, whether it’s over a headland, or people wanting to put up a fence, or something. I feel that Mosman has lost something in the translation.

Eve Klein. Do you use the facilities in Mosman, at the library and the ….

Bruce Cormack. …yes, we find the library is very good. With grandchildren now, they don’t live in Mosman but we are strong users of children’s facilities, which I find quite appalling in Mosman. The lack of them. Mosman has just spent thousands and thousands of dollars upgrading facilities. There’s one particular playground just at the back of Mosman oval there, and I think after they’ve done all their tizzying up, it’s possibly even smaller on facilities then it used to be. I think they’ve done a very poor job, having become interested in children’s facilities and seeing what happens in other places. I think Mosman doesn’t rate very highly at all.

Eve Klein. Do you still use Balmoral Beach?

Bruce Cormack. Yes. Both myself, and for children. I am desperately anxious for Mosman to get another Cavill’s baths, or a 50 metre pool. I cannot have a swimming pool where I live, it’s too small, but I desperately need the therapy of a pool. I haven’t got it in Mosman. There’s so much area available without alienating headlands, I think we ought to go back to where one Commando used to be and give the children, as well as the adults at Mosman the facility they desperately need.

Eve Klein. Thank you very much indeed.