Aged seven, Eric Lee was a passenger aboard the MV Montoro which evacuated many Darwin residents down south in January 1942 before the Japanese attacked the city. Recently, Eric, a member of the Northern Territory Genealogical Society , recalled that voyage , which he regarded as a great adventure, despite the wartime tensions. He was travelling with his mother , a sister and three other brothers.
At Thursday Island , relatives , who ran a shop , took them for a tour in a car and gave them presents. When the Montoro pulled into Townsville , North Queensland, they went ashore for a short time and Eric experienced jelly, red in colour, for the first time ; even now he smacks his lips as he savours that inital taste. Thereafter he was hooked on red jelly. A growing lad, keen on tucker , he fondly remembers the Chinese steward on the Montoro , Willie , who used to play a xylophone, to draw attention to mealtime sitting details on the ship. Children went first , and you could have seconds, Eric said . With other boys , he strolled about the ship’s deck , often at night , spoke to the Lascars in their quarters and souvenired some of their onions . There was an incident involving a woman who locked herself in a cabin and would not come out . Eric peeped through the keyhole of the cabin at one stage and saw her , in a corner , slumped forward.
He firmly states that the ship was escorted by mine sweepers , and he and other boys stuck their heads out the railings to watch the sweepers in action , which alarmed mothers. Official accounts of the evacuation state that there was a constant watch for floating mines. Most of the 1066 women and 900 children evacuated from Darwin went by sea. The first group left Darwin on December 19 aboard the Koolinda. The troop carrier Zealandia, USS President Grant, Montoro, and Koolama also evacuated civilians , the last ship sailing on February 15-four days before the attack.
On arrival in Brisbane, Eric’s family was sent to a lodging house near the Storey Bridge. He was told the woman who ran the place instructed her daughter , Brenda, to display white sheets on the building front - denoting surrender - in the event that the Japanese invaded Brisbane , as she did not want to have any dealings with them. Eventually moved to Sydney, the Lee family lived in Surry Hills. Eric noticed that many schoolchildren there “ parked” chewing gum behind their ears , so he followed suit. In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ( 1916) , James Joyce , revealing the cruelty in Catholic schools in Ireland , told how Fleming , beaten by the prefect of studies with a pandybat , a wooden bat with which to beat the hands of boys , had hardened his by rubbing rosin into them. Young Eric,like other boys, had a tin of rosin to reduce the pain of the cane .
With his mother , the family went to the entertainment centre, Luna Park, near the bridge; that night the Japanese midget submarines attacked Sydney Harbour . After the war , Eric , still besotted with red jelly , returned to Darwin. Aged 17, he received sufficient votes at a gathering of watersiders in the Cavenagh Street Stadium to become a wharfie . As you were supposed to be at least 18 to work on the wharf, he was advised to speak in a deep voice when he went along to register with the stevedoring authority .
The person he reported to was Harold Cooper , later a Darwin mayor. When Cooper asked his age , Eric replied , basso profundo , 18. His love of red jelly followed him to the waterfront. He regularly took a packet of jelly crystals down to the wharf and mixed some with water and banana, then placed it in the mess room frig for a daily treat.
Nowadays , Eric regularly meets up in supermarket cafes with three or four longtime Darwin residents who, over tea and coffee, swap yarns about the past, shoot the breeze, discuss footballers ; Eric is always receptive for red hot tips on four - legged hay burners . One of the group had a close encounter with a UFO ; an ex-Navy man , with now faded tattoos , dined out at Sydney’s famous Harry’s Cafe de Wheels ; another was owed a lot of money by a meatworks which declared itself bankrupt when he won a claim against it , and he only got five cents in the dollar. Others join the group from time to time and add colour, gusto and zany comments to the discourse .
One such person , barrel-chested Fred Corpus , now slow in gait, with a walking stick, carries in his wallet a photo of himself as a young man in a diving suit when he was a famous pearl diver , mentioned in several books . In the Senate in October 1952 it was recorded that Corpus and Joe Hunter fished four tons four hundredweight of pearl shell in one neap tide , thus breaking a pre- war record set by the Japanese . During the Broome Festival of the Pearls last year, Fred Corpus was the Shinju Matsuri Patron who visited the luggers . * Due to a strict diet, Eric, sadly, no longer consumes his beloved red jelly. Over the Christmas period , however, he admits to having had some “white stuff” which goes with jelly .
