The Colours of my Life

SECTION 1 – THE EARLY YEARS

My earliest memory

My earliest memory is going to a pig farm near Nobby on the Darling Downs. It was owned by my uncle. I remember him walking around the sty in wellington boots. My parents said I was about three when this happened. Why would that be one’s earliest recollection? What was yours?

For contextual purposes, I believe it is necessary to give you a summary of both my ancestry and youthful years. It covers the good, the bad and the ugly. Every one of us has a legacy that has influenced our future actions as an adult.

So here is mine.

My ancestry

My great grandfather (Johann Kanowski) on my father’s side came to Australia on the ship Herschel. It left Hamburg on 1 April 1874 and arrived in Brisbane on 16 July 1874. Johann was 24 years old at the time.

His son was my grandfather - Johann Heinrich Kanofski. He was born on 16 July 1885 and died in 1969. My father, Henry Kanofski was born in 1923, the third youngest of nine children.

My great grandparents on my mother’s side were of German stock. They were Thomas Henry Saal (born in Allora, Queensland in 1864) who married Hester Booth Barkman (born in Toowoomba, Queensland in 1866). They produced seven offspring.

Their eldest daughter, Olivia Jane, was my grandmother. She married George Frederick Smith in 1919 and they had four children. My mother (Phyllis) was their second child, born in 1923.

That makes me the third generation of Kanofski’s born on Australian soil who came from German and Polish stock.

You may have noticed the change of spelling in the surname that occurred somewhere along the way. Family rumour has it that my great grandfather stepped onto Herschel with the surname Kanowski and disembarked with the spelling Kanofski. English would not have been their strong point at that time, so who knows?

My parents – the war years

Dad never spoke about his four and a half years in the Australian Imperial Force in the Second World War until extremely late in his life. It was a taboo subject in our household until after he had been retired for some time. Given my parents’ German heritage, it would have been interesting to hear their thoughts on the European aspect of the Second World War, but I am not aware of any family discussion on this subject. They were second generation Aussies so I doubt they ever gave this a thought as their war efforts were spent defending Australia from the Japanese invasion.

My father first tried to join up at the age of seventeen and a half. At the time, you needed to be nineteen and have your parents’ consent. He eventually enlisted (with his parents’ consent) on 17 September 1941 and described himself as a ’raw bushie recruit’. He said he was keen to go in the artillery division rather than the infantry because, that way you ride in vehicles, rather than walk.

After being granted a transfer from the 8th Division, he was put into the anti-tank artillery regiment of the 7th Field Artillery Division. His division was commonly called ’The Suicide Boys’. In his words, ’Imagine taking on a tank with a weapon containing a two-pound shell.’ He said their advantage was that they were a high velocity, high-tech piece of equipment for their time. Again, in his words, ‘We wiped out many a tank, filling it with gaping holes.’

On 4 December 1941, he was sent on embarkation leave (commonly known as ’final leave’). It was too ’final’ for far too many. Two days after arriving home, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, which changed the whole aspect of the war for Australians. My father’s former 8th Division was assigned to Singapore, which fell twenty-four hours after their arrival.

After returning from final leave, he thought he was bound for the Middle East. They did a march through Sydney and were aboard a ship bound for there when the call was made to stop. As the Japanese were fast approaching Australian shores, his Division was sent to Townsville on full alert. He was stationed there to defend Australia’s shores while the Battle of the Coral Sea took place.

The Division was then moved to Darwin which, by then, had been severely bombed. The bombings continued during his service in Darwin where his unit, in his words, ’Suffered a few casualties.’

He recalled what he termed ‘a very funny experience’ while on maneuvers in the Northern Territory.

We were using blank cartridges which went off with a similar sound to firing live ammunition. One major who disliked me (the feeling was mutual) threw a cracker behind me while I had my back to him. My automatic reaction was to turn around and say, ’You would be a bloody prize idiot.’ The major immediately put me on a charge for insubordination to an officer. On return to base, I was paraded before the colonel who stated that he believed my reaction was a spur of the moment one for which I would not be punished. He did add in a comment to my major that he deserved what he got.

Later in my story I recall a similar incident in my life where I uttered the same comment.

Dad spent his nineteenth birthday in the Northern Territory. After approximately eighteen months’ service there, he was sent back to Brisbane and was given leave. Following that he was stationed at a camp site on the Hawkesbury Racecourse in Clarendon near the Richmond RAAF Base.

On New Year’s Eve in 1943, my father and his mate met, and started dating, two ladies from the Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force (WAAAF). This later led to the marriage of my mother and father, and their dynasty of four offspring.

In April 1943, dad was sent to Bougainville Island in the Solomon Islands. It was here he went into the ’real’ conflict zone for the first time. He remained there until the end of the war in August 1945 before being sent to Rabaul to assist with the transport of Japanese prisoners of war from their camps to their daily jobs. This ended in early 1946 when he returned to Brisbane.

Dad never expanded on his two years and four months of active service except that he saw all the aspects of ’bloody’ combat. As soldiers did not get access to any psychological support, they just had to deal with their issues the best way they could. Obviously, my father chose to bottle it up inside and keep it firmly under lock and key.

Dad married my mother on 16 February 1946 at the Nanango Wesleyan Methodist Church and was discharged on 28 March 1946 with four years, six months and one week’s service.

He said in his memoir that he had no regrets about his army service, but he was glad to get back into civvies. He had a definitive answer to the question of what his uppermost thought was during his war service. It was ’to be a returned digger’, to which he added, ’Thank God that eventually became a reality.’

My mother never got to write her war memoir. She died suddenly on 18 September 1988, just a short period after my father retired. On 5 August 1995, marking the 50th anniversary of the end of the war, dad penned a brief record of Mum’s war service. He noted that she had also enjoyed her time in the service.

All service women were enlisted in the same manner as Australian Imperial Force (AIF) volunteers. Mum served for two years commencing in October 1943, with time spent in Bundaberg, Sydney, and Tocumwal.

Apparently, she would have been in the WAAAF much sooner, but she had two hurdles to clear. Firstly, because she was under twenty-one, her mother would not sign her application. Secondly, she was employed in an ammunition factory in Brisbane, which was considered an essential service.

My parents – the postwar years

Following the war, my parents lived in Nanango where dad, in partnership with another returned serviceman, bought a firewood business. He went on to supply cordwood to a brickworks company in Nanango before starting work in the local sawmill. He later worked in sawmills in Townson and Maryvale, before leaving sawmilling for a while and working as a dozer and loader driver for Allora Shire Council.

It was in Maryvale dad lost two fingers in an accident. My older brother followed suit when, as a late teenager, he lost half a finger in a windmill accident. Yours truly then made it a family tradition in 1972 when I lost my right index finger in a sawmill accident in Duaringa.

I do recall the strange looks we would get in later years when my father and I were together and shook hands with people. By the time they shook hands with me, you could see the look of amazement on their face as their gaze moved down to my hand.

Born in 1957, I was my parents’ third child. My sister was nine years my senior and my brother ten years my senior. Much later my younger brother was born. He was seven years my junior. Talk about a spread-out family! ’Surprises’ were quite common in those days when contraception was not what it is today.

It was in early 1961 my father caught what I would loosely term ’the Jesus bug’. He uprooted me and my mum to the Presbyterian Aurukun Mission, ran by the Presbyterian Church on Cape York Peninsula. Aurukun is about 70 kilometres south of Weipa on the west coast of the Cape. In those days, the only access to the town was by air or sea. It was not until recent years that road access became available.

Dad was what they termed a technical missionary. He ran the sawmill and organised the construction of houses at Aurukun. They used to build the small houses at the sawmill then tow them up into the village with a tractor. They were possibly the first modular homes in the country.

During our six years in Aurukun, my elder brother and sister completed their high school years in Warwick, southern Queensland. I know this was a very tough time for them - two young teenagers 2,000 kilometres away from their parents. They certainly had a case to say that they were part of a ’stolen generation’ because the church and the mission stole their dad but, more importantly, their mum from them.

I believe my father was blinded by his faith and the preoccupation that he was serving ’God’s calling’, because he recorded in his memoir: ’I do not think the separation from the two children harmed them as they became very independent young people.’ That may well have been the end result, but I know for sure that this period broke my mother’s heart.

My Aurukun years

I was three years old when we went to Aurukun and we left the day after my ninth birthday—in July 1966. This was where my cognitive life really began.

Aurukun was a mission station run under strict control by Presbyterian missionary, William Frederick (Bill) MacKenzie. I mention his name because several books were written about his time at Aurukun.

No alcohol was permitted on the mission. Aboriginal teenagers were locked up in separate dormitories at night and the entire community attended church on Sundays.

I remember movies being shown on a big outdoor screen. It was where I first saw the jingle for the introduction of decimal currency in 1966.

From a child’s perspective, it was an idealistic lifestyle. I used to go fishing and hunting with the Aboriginals. I got to eat and enjoy kangaroo, crocodile and emu long before it became trendy to consume them. I learned to throw a spear using a woomera or ‘throw stick’—a wooden Australian Aboriginal spear-throwing device that enables a spear to travel at a greater speed and force than is possible with only the arm.

I remember spearing my first fish and being so excited about it. Bloody unlucky fish if I do say so myself. I also recall spearing my first wallaby. The spear pinned his two hind legs together and my Aboriginal mates took care of the rest.

On occasion I would go hunting for mud crabs. This involved walking through salt water up to my knees and literally spearing them. They were just there for the taking. If there was a size restriction on crabs, or laws against taking female crabs (as it were in those days), we simply overlooked this issue.

The Aboriginals used a different spear for fishing and hunting. The fishing spear had three barbs at the business end, where the hunting spear went to a sharp point with a bone inserted at diagonals to stop it coming out when it penetrated its prey.

Swimming at Aurukun did not come without constant risk. You always had to be on the lookout for crocs and in the summer season you could not go in the water because of marine stingers.

We used to take short breaks and go to the mouth of the river in the mission punt. We camped there for weeks at a time with fishing being the main pastime. I can recall a few incidents that occurred there.

Mum went fishing late one afternoon and caught some grunter. She moved up about twenty metres from the water, where she began filleting