[MUSIC PLAYING]
It is my melancholy duty to inform you Australia is at war.
--that every human being in this country is now asked
their service of the government to work in the defence
of Australia!
[MUSIC PLAYING]
In a 1992 interview, Dick Thompson
recalled being stationed at the Exhibition Buildings
during World War II.
But when I arrived in Melbourne, that was about January 1941.
And then we posted up to the Exhibition Building,
and I thought we were the first of the air force group
that had gone there.
His interview revealed much about the building's forgotten
war time role as a barracks and training facility.
Depending on the type of course we went to,
either in Beechams or 1STT, or AWA--
what we were called in the skill of technical training.
Over the course of the war, the Exhibition Buildings
housed more than 2,000 instrument makers,
radio engineers, and wireless operators.
Dick Thompson was one of them.
The building's balconies became sleeping areas,
and the great hall became a mess that fed hundreds each day.
At the rear of the building with classrooms
and an oval for exercise drills.
Parades were held on the South side of the building,
and it was not uncommon to see marching
at all hours of the day.
Many here in the morning would have lined up,
had breakfast, grabbed our books,
and then would march down to 1STT.
It was all Morse code and telegraphy.
We concentrated eight hours a day learning the Morse code,
sending it and receiving it.
RAAF trainees were initially focused
on supporting the war effort in Europe and in the Middle East.
But as 1941 drew to a close, all that changed.
[AIR RAID ALARM]
On the 9th of September, Dick was
posted to RAAF number 12 squadron in Darwin.
A few months later, the war came to Australia.
Equipped with Australian-built Wirraways,
the number 12 squadron regularly patrol the hostile waters
to Australia's North.
But the 19th of February 1942 caught everyone by surprise.
I remember the clearly Japanese bombers coming in.
They would have been up around 20,000 feet.
You could see the bombs falling out of the aircraft and the sun
flashing on them.
[EXPLOSIONS]
You could hear the bombs dropping--
fortunately missed us.
The Liberator was burned to pieces,
and a lot of the aircraft were flattened.
The first bombing of Darwin killed more than 250 people,
devastated much of the city, and changed the course of the war.
[MORSE CODE BEEPING]
If Australia was going to defend itself,
it needed advanced air warning systems and skilled operators
to man them.
As the CSIRO developed radar systems for the RAAF,
Dick returned to the Number 1 School of Technical Training.
I came back to the Exhibition Buildings
to do a special course in VHF transmitters receivers
down here and then joined the Mobile Fighter Control
Unit, which was a ground operational thing
for monitoring aircraft.
And that took me back to the Admiralty Islands.
From the Admiralty Islands, the unit
assisted bombing raids, intercepted enemy positions,
and fed information to antiaircraft guns
across the Pacific.
[MACHINE GUN FIRE]
And then I was in the invasion of Tarakan,
a little island off Borneo.
[GUNFIRE]
I stayed there until we completed the island system.
He returned to Australia on the 25th of February 1946.
So I came back.
I think it was a 200-tonne army ship.
You never really knew when you were going
to come back or not anyhow.
It was just the luck of the gun then.
Dick Thompson was one of thousands of RAAF
and Women's Auxiliary Air Force personnel whose lives
intersected at the Exhibition Buildings
before active service in World War II.
There used to be a hall where, as you walked in to the left,
they'd have occasional night concerts.
And I heard this tune, "The Last Time I saw Paris,"
and it stuck in my mind ever since.
Every time I hear it, I switch back to Melbourne.
[MUSIC PLAYING]