Reminiscences of a Queensland Engineer

By Andrew Patterson

Andrew Patterson looks back at his life growing up in suburban Brisbane and his career as a civil engineer in this memoir.

Born during World War II, he grew up in a rented house in Doomben a short distance from the southern end of Brisbane’s main Eagle Farm Aerodrome—not a particularly safe place to live during wartime. Many family members and friends used their home as a staging post on their way north to war.

His family life was sometimes odd, with his father always urging him to do well in school—or else he would turn him and his brother, Gavin, into “bloody little Bank Johnnies.” He said it in such a disparaging way that it sounded like this would be the worst punishment they could possibly suffer.

He also recalls his array of experiences as a civil engineer working in Queensland and other projects throughout the world.

Join the author as he shares a firsthand account of growing up in Queensland, his passion for sailing and flying, and his fascinating life as an engineer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press AU
• Release date: Nov 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781982291488

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Copyright © 2021 Andrew Patterson.

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The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

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ISBN: 978-1-9822-9149-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-9148-8 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date:   09/02/2021

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1 Starting Off

Chapter 2 Early Childhood Memories of Life in Post-War Brisbane

Chapter 3 School Days

Chapter 4 Sailing and Other Adventures

Chapter 5 University of Queensland

Chapter 6 Cardno and Davies

Chapter 7 London

Chapter 8 Posford Pavry Sinclair and Knight

Chapter 9 Patterson Britton

Chapter 10 1995: My Year of Living Dangerously

Chapter 11 Back at the Office

Chapter 12 Newcastle

Chapter 13 Worley Parsons

Chapter 14 Snowy Mountains Engineering Company

Chapter 15 Royal Haskoning

This book is for my nine beautiful, clever grandchildren: the Misses, Madeline, Coco, Polly, Angie, and Jenny, and their brothers and cousins, the Masters, Max, Timmy, Edward and Tommy Patterson.

Also for their dads, my wonderful, smart, and kindly sons: James Gerald Patterson, Benjamin George Patterson, and Matthew Gavin Patterson. And in memory of my sons’ wonderful mother, Alison Keitha Patterson, née Ferguson. And my beautiful, intelligent, thoughtful, and very caring daughters-in-law and my sons’ wives respectively: Nin, Natalie, and Vanessa.

And especially to my very clever, lovely, caring life-friend and wife, Carol, who I know has on more than one occasion, through clever thinking and her self-attained medical skills, saved my own life.

I love you all.

Also in loving memory of my beautiful mum, Marcia Gordon Patterson, née Wald, who tried very hard to make an honest gentleman of me—and my wonderful, clever father, Gerald Patterson, who taught me about the overriding need for fairness in life and in our society.

INTRODUCTION

My three sons—James, Ben, and Matt Patterson—have asked me to write down some highlights of my life and career history so that all my grandchildren will have some knowledge of what I have done with and during my life. This is principally a simple story of a very ordinary Australian bloke recorded for the information of his nine grandchildren, no more, no less. My publishing adviser, Alan Rogers, has also requested that I try to identify the point of it all. What’s it all about? A really hard question to answer, I have found.

CHAPTER 1

Starting Off

I was born in the Brisbane General Hospital at Kelvin Grove at the height of World War II, on the twenty-fourth of November 1942, a few months after the epic, fierce naval Battle of the Coral Sea. This proved to be the turning point of the war in the Pacific—the battle that is, not my birth. This huge battle was fought between two extremely large naval fleets: the reinforced remains of the US Navy’s Pacific Fleet and the very strong Japanese Imperial Navy (using steel supplied by bloody Bob Menzies, Liberal Prime Minister of Australia, a.k.a. Pig Iron Bob). The battle occurred several months after the surprise attack by the Japanese on the hitherto completely non-combatant United States at Pearl Harbor in December 1941. This dreadful act of aggression by the Japanese brought the Americans into World War II almost overnight.

The US State Department had apparently been trying to bring the country into the war for several months prior to this event, to support and assist the English and their allies against Hitler and Mussolini. Yet the Republican government, goaded on by people like famous aviator Charles Lindbergh, had repeatedly declared that the nation should remain neutral and not get involved in the mostly European war. My dad wrote in his History of England that President Franklin Roosevelt, unlike Winston Churchill (who, indeed, had openly supported Hitler and Mussolini right up to just before the war started), saw that both these dictators were a severe and dire threat to the future of the whole of modern Western civilisation. Dad also wrote that the US State Department was a bastion of the British Foreign Office within Washington. President Roosevelt did not have satisfactory access to accurate intelligence about what was truly occurring in Europe and had to develop his own private external intelligence network to obtain a proper understanding.

Living Near the Wartime Airfield

My mum and dad’s small rented house in Doomben was a short distance away from the southern end of Brisbane’s main Eagle Farm Aerodrome. This was not a particularly safe place to be living during wartime, the airfield being a prime bombing target for any nearby aircraft carrier–borne Japanese fighter-bombers. The aerodrome was set up as the primary wartime air base on the Australian Pacific coast for both the United States Air Force (USAF) and our own Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF).

The high risk of aerial bombing attacks is why our landlord had provided our household with a large, very heavily reinforced concrete in-ground air-raid shelter in our backyard, under a large mature mango tree. For most of the time I knew this structure, it was half-full of water, which seeped in from the outside groundwater table through large cracks in the concrete walls.

Aunt Audrey and the War Secrets

My aunt Audrey, Mum’s sister, lived with us during this time, and she had some time earlier joined the WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, part of the RAAF). During the Battle of the Coral Sea, she was on assignment to US General Douglas MacArthur’s Supreme Headquarters for the Pacific War, located in Brisbane in the old AMP Insurance building in Queen Street. MacArthur, after leaving the Philippines, was in charge of the whole Allied Force’s response to the Japanese aggression after Pearl Harbor. My auntie Audrey would come home on the tram each night from her signals directorate job, which comprised largely of reading, decoding, typing in, and transmitting Morse code radio messages to and from the many US fleet vessels in the Coral Sea battle. The messages were mostly regarding the various shipping activities, including reports of recently sunk Japanese and US ships and their likely casualties. The Battle of the Coral Sea was the result of the US carrier fleet sailing to intercept the large Japanese armada that was to launch an assault on Australia, with the beachhead assumed to be somewhere in North Queensland.

Poor Audrey would arrive home each evening with her head full of this horrific and terrifying news. She was also privy to the then secret knowledge that MacArthur’s strategy was to allow the Japanese to land more or less unchallenged and capture the whole of north Queensland. He then planned to harden up resistance to the invading Jap forces near Brisbane, at what was referred to as the Brisbane Line, so the principle resistance to the Japanese advance would be as a land battle in and around Brisbane and at the Queensland border with NSW—a fairly terrifying prospect for the 1 million citizens of Brisbane.

Of course, Audrey was completely unable to whisper a word about any of this stuff to my parents or to anyone else—not until the time several weeks later when the US Pacific Fleet’s aircraft carriers prevailed and effectively destroyed most of the capital ships of the invading Japanese fleet. After the Battle of the Coral Sea was won, the news was released to the press, and then my parents at last found out what it was that had been so deeply troubling and distracting young Audrey.

A Full House

The time around my birth was a period of very great stress in my parents’ household. In addition to the permanent residents, including Audrey as well as Dad’s sister, Aunt Margaret, there were lots of family members and friends of friends using our home as a staging post on their way north to war. A consequence of this was there was much alcohol-fuelled partying going on to try to relieve the enormous stress. Neither of my parents had drunk alcohol prior to this time, so they no doubt thought they had a lot of catching up to do.

My mum and dad also hosted servicemen bivouacked for days at a time on their way through to North Queensland and Papua New Guinea, to walk along the Kokoda Trail. These young men slept on army-style cots on our front and side verandas. When my parents visited Alison and me and baby James decades later, I took my parents to the Port Moresby Bomana War Cemetery. They were very quiet, walking around this very sombre reminder of their early days in Brisbane and the Coral Sea armada. Me too.

Included in the group who stayed at Doomben were men like Reggie Church, my cousin Kate McGregor’s dad. Reggie had been a neighbour of my mother and Aunt Audrey while they were teenagers living in Rockhampton, where their father had been regional manager of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. Reggie had married my dad’s sister Margaret. Margaret and my mum had been good friends as teenagers at Rockhampton Girls Grammar School, and both were very keen pianists. My mum achieved the highest possible qualification in piano in Australia, the A.Mus.E. Both Mum and Margaret became senior piano teachers as young women at a large girl’s boarding school, St. Catherine’s, in the southern Queensland city of Warwick for several years in the late 1930s.

Reggie was a qualified dentist and had immediately enlisted in the army at the outset of the war. Because of his professional qualifications, he was commissioned as an officer cadet in the officer cadet training unit (OCTU). This status gave him access to beer and spirits, which were useful for the Doomben party crowd.

Ipswich Patterson Network

Another friend of my parents was Dr. Wylie Gibbs, whom they got to know through my dad’s uncle, Dr. Mervyn Patterson, a general practitioner based in central Ipswich. Wylie had been engaged to Dad’s youngest sister, the reputedly quite attractive Kathy Patterson. Wylie had graduated medicine at the University of Queensland, and by the start of the war was medical registrar at the Brisbane Regional Base Hospital at Kelvin Grove. He became a regular guest at the Doomben nightly parties, where he met and then eventually married Audrey Wald. Kathy, by this stage, had established a new, strong romantic attachment to a clever Queensland University Arts faculty lecturer in phonetics, Bob Cochrane.

I am not at all clear on the timing of the intricate pairing up and decoupling of these varied and overlapping personal relationships, and given the alcoholic consumption that was reportedly going on at those times, I doubt if anyone else would have been either. Wylie, being a surgical registrar, had access to various forms of medicinal alcohol, which is a strong surgical antiseptic. It also happens to contain ethanol, the main active component of all strong commercial alcoholic beverages, such as gin and vodka. During the war, alcoholic drinks were not easily obtained because the government had regulated that they must be strictly reserved and distributed only to people in uniform. The house parties lubricated and supplied by Reggie’s OCTU bottled-beer supply and Wylie’s hospital-sourced ethyl alcohol ran extremely well, apparently, and produced some interesting social gymnastics along with the intended stress relief.

My lovely aunt Margaret married my mum’s neighbour, Reggie Church. their daughter Catherine, was born just a week after my brother Gavin. But their marriage didn’t last much after this, and she met at these parties and then eventually married a brilliant young Ipswich-born scientist who then was a Queensland University lecturer in chemistry, Dr. James Green. He was destined to have a stratospheric rise through the ranks of the newly blossoming nuclear-science academia, working in the radio chemistry and nuclear physics sector within Australian universities and the CSIRO (the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, a very prestigious federal government-funded research group.

Much later in his career, Jim spent some time as the dean of the Connecticut-based New England Medical Research Centre, which was undertaking research involving closely examining the relationships between different forms of radiation and cancer, both as a potential causation and for its therapeutic potential as a treatment. Jim became the youngest head of any Australian university faculty when, in his very early thirties, he became dean of the School of Chemistry at the recently founded University of New South Wales, at the Kensington, Sydney campus in the early 1960s.

The New Hazards of Radiation

My Uncle Jim—in the time when I knew him well, while I was in my early twenties and an undergraduate engineer in Queensland—was extremely passionate about health hazards of radiation, and he was very proactive in leading public and political protest campaigns in the tabloid press to create much stronger controls on all forms of electromagnetic radiation because of its known and demonstrated adverse health impacts. Aunt Margaret had a several-inches-thick scrapbook of all Jim’s press releases and press statements about this subject and his vocal efforts to stop radiating the masses.

For example, Jim campaigned publicly and loudly against the Liberal Federal Government and the Prime Ministership of Pig Iron Bob Menzies, the Liberal Party’s Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies, to stop the ridiculous British nuclear bomb testing on the aboriginal tribal lands of Maralinga in South Australia in the 1950s, which protesting and press campaign unfortunately failed to make any significant difference. He also tried very hard to moderate (substantially reduce) the widespread and quite excessive use of medical and dental X-rays, and, in particular, stopping the ridiculous practice of having continuous X-ray machines for people buying shoes for young children in shoe shops. the salesman and the customer would view on a cathode-ray oscilloscope (Like an old TV set) the young customer’s feet inside the leather shoe in real time. This required a continuous X-ray lasting several minutes instead of a normal modern millisecond snapshot. The machine has long since been outlawed.

Jim was even concerned about the harmful effects of radiation from the small amounts of iridescent paint on the luminous faces of men’s wristwatches. He always thought we were all being way too glib and quite cavalier about the severe dangers of radiation, and he campaigned very hard to clean up the enormous amount of excessive stray radiation we humans were all being subjected to. This radiation may well be causing the greatly increased numbers of cancer deaths our modern society currently suffers, including particularly the dreadful effects that mobile-phone-transmission radiation has in the present increase in fatal brain cancers, according to the eminent and outspoken Australian neurosurgeon Dr. Charlie Teo.

Did you know that the excruciatingly irresponsible Menzies Liberal Government allowed a foreign country to detonate lots of nuclear bombs in our Australia? Yes it did! When the Aborigines living out in their desert shanty houses on their homelands at Maralinga, South Australia, were told they had to leave their homelands and go live somewhere else because the region was going to be bombed with huge deadly nuclear bombs like those the Americans had dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, they could not believe their ears. What? Our Australian Whitefella Government was allowing a foreign country to bomb our own country with dirty nuclear weapons? How bizarre/crazy/stupid is that?

When you think about it, it really was quite weird and pretty bloody stupid. Our original colonial masters, the Poms, probably used more explosives and dirty nuclear bomb tonnage against us in South Australia in peacetime than all the high-explosive bombs dropped by the Japanese on the north and west of Australia during WWII. The first Jap attack on Darwin had more bomb tonnage than was dropped during the devastating Japanese attack on the US Navy at Pearl Harbour Hawaii, and there were quite a few similar-sized raids against Darwin after that first one, as well as several large bombing raids on the beautiful pearling-industry town and fishing port of Broome in Western Australia.

Broome was itself an outpost for many Japanese pearl divers who were then working for the murderous WA pearl industry bosses. I say murderous because those criminal pearling masters often just left the poor Japanese divers to drown on the sea floor when they needed to sail away from the pearling grounds in a hurry due to approaching bad weather or whatever other cause. No attempt was made to raise and recover the Jap pearl divers—murder, really. The Japanese pearl divers apparently had a very interesting attitude to death, which was: If today is my day to die, then today is my day to die.

When Gavin and I, as young school Air Training Corps cadets, had a two-week school-holiday training camp one August at the RAAF’s base at Amberley, we had day-long information excursions to witness some Avro Lincoln bombers on the ramp at the airbase being washed down with high-pressure hoses by men in hazmat moon-suits. These aircraft, we were told by some young smartly dressed air-force officer chappy, had been ordered to fly through the large mushroom cloud after detonation of some atomic bombs by the British at Maralinga in South Australia as a test-trial to observe and measure the potential adverse impacts of any nuclear radiation on the aircraft and crew.

When the aircraft were washed down, all the wash-water was collected and placed in forty-four gallon steel drums. Such drums (forty-four imperial gallons, probably equivalent to fifty US gallons) were most commonly used for transporting petrol and diesel fuel in the early days of motoring before invention of large bulk ship and road tankers. These old fuel drums filled with radioactive wash-water were then loaded onto another Lincoln bomber. As we watched, this aircraft struggled mightily to lift itself off the runway with its very heavy load on its way out to sea to dump these radioactive drums a few miles off the coast of Moreton and Stradbroke Islands, we were told by this friendly and informative RAAF chap.

So, if you grandkids start catching two-headed sea mullet or three-eyed tailor in the surf at Southport or the Gold Coast, you’ll know it’s because of the dreadful British nuclear testing programme at Maralinga. Our really stupid Liberal party government making Australian servicemen undertake these trials and suffer all the dreadful consequences (cancer etc) from the contamination.

On reflection, I think the dumping of these drums of radioactive water into the sea just off these Queensland Islands would probably have been in direct contravention of our obligations under the 1953 London Dumping Convention, of which Australia is and was a signatory. This treaty was intended originally to prevent radioactive material from entering the sea, particularly around the UK coast, from the many new and developing British nuclear power stations (such as the Dounreay power station in Scotland.)

My Morning-After Party Explorations

One of my memories of my parents’ war-years parties was that when I was a little over two years old (and just able to get myself out of my little bed to roam and explore the early morning, sleeping house),