The Australian War Memorial Collection. Test site
Port Moresby, New Guinea "All dressed up in his pansy clothes, Just a Blue Orchid - one of those! But back in the days of Forty-two - Well, you should have been up There for the DO! Them was the days! We dips our lids! We wouldn't have missed the DO for quids. When the "DOOVER" went and The Ack-Ack spat. Out on our old SLIT TRENCH we sat, And sang all the choruses from "G and S" Fingered noses to Tojo, more or less! We're glad that we saw that business through.... You see, we were BOTH of us there for the DO!!" A portrait of a member of the RAAF, possibly Padre P. Sands, the first RAAF chaplain in war-time New Guinea, who obtained and furnished a Rec[reation] hut. Once the hut was finished, Padre Sands and Billy Challoner formed a concert group called the Moresby Microbes. This group performed 50 weekly concerts between 8 May 1942 and 28 April 1943, including a "Jubilee Concert" which was the last. Padre Sands wrote the verse which accompanies each photograph in an album given to LAC Frank Lansdowne, a member of the Moresby Microbes, now held in the Private Records collection at the Australian War Memorial. (Donor J. Treseder)
Port Moresby, New Guinea. "Look through the window and what do you see? A most enormous BANANA tree! A foot and a half when we brought it home... Now look how big the dam' thing's grown!" The view out
Port Moresby, New Guinea. "For billiards and reading And writing, we come - Be blowed to the Black-out! The Rec Hut's our Home." Two members of the RAAF reading and writing in the Rec[reation] Hut tha
Port Moresby, New Guinea. "For billiards and reading And writing, we come - Be blowed to the Black-out! The Rec Hut's our Home." Two members of the RAAF playing billiards in the Rec[reation] Hut that
Port Moresby, New Guinea. Members of the concert party called the "Moresby Microbes" performing on stage in the Rec[reation] Hut that they performed in weekly. Note the Union Jack flag hanging above t
Port Moresby, New Guinea. "Meet the Padre, the bloke in the HUT! The doors of which are never shut. Recital or concert or cinema show - He pressed the button, the blokes made 'em go!" Portrait of Padr
Port Moresby, New Guinea. "This is the Padre, a scrounger renowned, But we furnished the REC HUT by the loot that we found! At Moresby he lost all his middle-aged spread And most of the fluff from the
