Message that really brought home the war to Australia
EIGHTY years after she learnt morse code to help defend her country,
Highton’s Jan Morgan still knows all the dots and dashes.
“Morse code is like music. I still rattle things off in morse code,” she says.
Mrs Morgan, 98, was a music-obsessed teenager destined for a university education when World War II broke out.
Well educated and fluent in English, French and Latin, she was known in those days as Joan and by her maiden name, Stephens.
She left her comfortable family home in Sydney’s inner-east and moved to Melbourne, where she worked for the Royal Australian Air Force, showing an aptitude for morse code.
“I got to 30 words per minute pretty quickly,” she recalls.
“All I had wanted to do was music, so morse I picked up like nobody’s business.”
The Women's Auxiliary Australian Air Force was formed in 1941, and young Joan was among the first to join.
She was still a teenager working at Air Board — the RAAF’s Melbourne headquarters — on February 19, 1942, when she took the urgent signal that Darwin had been bombed by the Japanese.
The arrival of war on home shores changed Australia’s approach to the war.
It also fast-tracked the arrival of US forces in Australia, marking a time of great cultural upheaval.
“You have never seen anything like it,” Jan recalls with a smile.
“The whole of St Kilda Road was full of Americans, and I had never before seen so many women with so much make-up on.
“I was quite green and naive myself, and had never worn make-up, but everywhere you looked women were dressed up, with all this make-up and they all had beauty spots marked on their faces.
“I’ll never forget those Americans.”
Shortly after receiving the Darwin message, Joan was transferred to Sydney where she worked long shifts, especially when US General Douglas McArthur arrived to oversee Allied operations.
Joan was impressed by the General’s efficiency.
“McArthur’s messages going out were all about how brilliant everything was, but all the messages I was taking were the opposite,” she says.
“Nobody seems to realise these days how bad things really were, and how totally unprepared Australia was.
“The entire country’s population was the equivalent of about the population today of Melbourne and Geelong, and that was all we had to defend Australia.”
After returning to Victoria for further training, Jan was sent to Queensland’s sugar cane country.
She managed a “DF (direction-finding) station” at Maryborough, and occasionally crossed paths with fresh-faced would-be soldiers on training missions.
“Towards the end of the war many of the trainees were very young, no more than children,” she says.
But an older and more worldly spitfire pilot did catch her eye.
She met Flight Lieutenant Owen Morgan in
Queensland and, on a trip to Sydney to meet her family, he asked her father for her hand.
They started their family shortly after tying the knot, moved to Adelaide so that he could train to be a doctor, then to Melbourne, where they raised three children.