The one piece of info I couldn't find, was a Unit Diary I was hoping to use to settle a long-standing query from my thesis days, involving a fire at Wilson's Promontory that, due to a family friend, I had narrowed down to occurring in early 1943.

Although I was trying to date the fire for successional ecology reasons, for him the fire was associated with a highly amusing and memorable story which he reckoned would have been mentioned in official records.

Although it has nothing to do with HMAS Sydney, I thought the story of the Prom fire was the sort of thing Mudcatters might appreciate and here's as good a place as any to post it.

Background
A wildfire in 1951 swept from the north, over the peaks at Wilson's Promontory and down into Lilly Pilly Gully, wreaking havoc in the southernmost stand of Subtropical Rainforest anywhere. It was known to be the second severe wildfire to do so in the 20th century and, because of the elimination of eucalypts from where the burn patterns of both fires overlapped, it was calculated that the previous fire had occurred in the 15 years (the time for eucalypt seed stored in the soil, from the species there, to germinate and grow enough to mature and set seed themselves) prior to 1951.

The 1939 fires that started on 13 January (Black Friday) were the obvious candidates so I searched local and other newspapers from December 1938 to December 1939 and found that, although South Gippsland was burned, no fires had occurrred on Wilson's Promontory, then a National Park. I was musing over this conundrum in the presence of Reuben, a family friend of my parents' generation and related distantly by marriage. He commented that he had been at the Prom, "with the army" when the fire had occurred.

"You were never a commando?" I queried, knowing from various bits of history plus the recognisable archaeology (years before I studied the field professionally) that the first six (of the ten, ultimately) Australian Commando Companies had trained at the Prom; maps of the area from that time (of which I also had a copy) had been Classified and there was no access south of Darby River.

"No," he said, "I was with the 2nd Medium Artillery Battery. We took over defence of the Prom after the commandos left."
"So, when did it happen?" I asked.
"In 1943, in either January or February," he replied. These are the hottest months of the southeastern Oz summer. I asked him for details.

Reuben's story
"The army's main camp was at the saddle on the western slope of Mt Bishop, where the road crosses down to Tidal River. The Procedure, if smoke was seen in the north, was to take all the weapons (25 pounders), ammunition and removable stores down to the beach at Norman Bay [called "Tidal River beach" by most tourists, these days]. If flames were seen, everything on the beach was to be bulldozed into the water and recovered after the danger had passed.

"Smoke had been seen, so we were taking everything down to the beach. Because it was stinking hot and there were only blokes there, we had stripped off to nothing but boots and hats. The nearest women were at Foster, 40 miles away so we didn't have to worry about being seen. We were each carrying two 25lb artillery shells in our arms, walking in a line down the road from the camp to the beach, about a mile away.

"We had been doing this for a while when we were paid a visit by a staff officer, who'd driven in from the officers' camp at the Darby River Chalet. The officer was Colonel [later, "Brigadier General, Sir" and Governor of Victoria] Ivor McKay. Officers of this rank don't drive; they are driven by "Other Ranks". In this case, the driver was a WAAC [Women's Australian Army Corps].

"So, for the whole of the mile, this WAAC was exposed to the pride of Austrlia's manhood wearing nothing but boots and hats and with their arms full of artillery shells.

"If you want to find the exact date of this, the visit (and probably the fire as well) would have been recorded in the Unit Diary."

Follow-up
I went off to Southern Command at Victoria Barracks in Melbourne to chase down contacts for the location of the Unit Diary but it was right in the middle of the Vietnam conscription era and, as soon as they heard "Melbourne University" I was shown the door and told not to come back. The archives of the AWM, to which all such records are ultimately sent, were my last hope of narrowing the date of the fire to less than two months. And it was in their archives that I found Reuben had subsequently joined the RAN.

But I did note the date in my thesis as a "Pers. Comm." and it has subsequently entered the published record.

Cheers, Rowan