Bega’s oldest Returned and Services League of Australia sub-branch member watched the Anzac Day services on Tuesday from the comfort of his Tathra home.
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This year was the first Anzac Day service 97-year-old Jim Perrin has been unable to attend the Tathra service, he once organised, in over 40 years.
Conscripted into the military at just 17 years of age, Mr Perrin was stationed in Darwin when Japanese aircraft bombed the city during World War II.
“You couldn’t do much about conscription, it was all part of the country’s defence laws,” he said.
The city was hot, and those enlisted were “lucky to get a drink of water”, he said.
The raids were intense, and Mr Perrin was cooped up in hospital suffering from ptomaine poisoning after eating tinned salmon.
“They [the Japanese] were blowing ships out of the water,” he said.
“When the sirens went for a raid they would put a mattress over me before they left for safety.
“They got a direct hit, and I never got bloody touched.
“They [the Japanese] never let up.”
After the bombing was over, he remembers nothing more than craving a good meal.
“I wanted to get out and get some tucker, but you couldn’t get a drink because they [the Japanese] got a hit on the hotel,” he said with a laugh.
“It was rough, but I survived.”
Driving Ford V-8 trucks from Alice Springs to Darwin, he was in the Northern Territory capital on and off for six months during the war.
“We had an air raid in Darwin one day where the Japanese had captured American planes in the Philippines, and bombed us with them,” he said.
A warrant officer, his job was to make sure 30 vehicles full of supplies travelled every three days along a road that was at that time just a dusty track.
“There would be tyres blowing out everywhere,” he said.
“Twenty tyres would blow out every trip.”
Among the horrors of war, there were humorous moments, including the moment an emu swallowed two nuts needed to repair a broken down truck.
“All I heard was the sound of it swallowing them, and I saw the nuts were gone,” he said.
After the war, Mr Perrin went back to civilian life and his job with a petrol company in Corowa, before moving to the Bega Valley after being offered a job by Horace Hayes.
“I used to look after the depot in Corowa and deliver petrol around the farms,” he said.
He was behind the refurbishment of the Tathra cenotaph, alongside Cecil Noack, and ran the town’s Anzac Day services until it was taken over by the Lions Club of Tathra.
His quiet home next to Tathra Beach seems a world away from the death and destruction he once witnessed.
