ANZAC Day holds great meaning for Juniper resident Graham Nielsen, who served 15 years with the Royal Australian Air Force as a radio technician. For Graham, now living at Juniper Hayloft alongside his wife of 60 years, the day is about more than those who served, it is about the sacrifice of the people who waited at home.
“We observe the sacrifice that men and women have made over the years in serving the defence interests of their country,” he says. “But it’s also recognising those left behind.”
Graham was 17 years old when he first saw an advertisement calling for Air Force radio apprentices in 1957, sitting the selection process alongside around 200 other applicants from across the state.
“I was fortunate to be one of the six chosen that year,” he says. “It was a bit of a reach because I hadn’t been out of the state prior to that.”
The six recruits joined 30 others and travelled by train to Melbourne to train at the Royal Melbourne Technical College, before completing their radio training in Ballarat, a posting that carried unexpected personal significance for Graham.
“It was quite a revelation for me,” he says. “Both of my father’s parents were born in Castlemaine, which is in the goldfields, so I had the chance to visit where they came from, and I visited the house they had been living in before they came to Western Australia.”
From there, Graham was posted to Richmond in New South Wales, then Darwin.
“One of the best postings I got was Darwin,” he says. “We only had one aircraft on a permanent basis which was an old DC3, a Dakota as we would call it, which was used for search and rescue and communications.”
“I don’t know how on earth the aircrew suffered those aircraft. There was no soundproofing, no pressurisation. I flew in them a few times and that was an experience.”
A posting back to RAAF Base Pearce, north of Perth, brought Graham closer to home, and to someone who would change his life entirely. Through the Methodist Youth Choir, he found himself on a country tour performing Pirates of Penzance.
“I was a pirate,” he says, with a laugh. “I was a flag bearer and I had a sword.”
Also in the choir was a young teacher named Margaret. Graham drove her to the next couple of regional venues on tour.
“We just clicked,” he says. “We’ve been together 60 years now.”
They had been engaged just two weeks when Graham received a posting to Malaysia, where Australian forces were defending the country against Indonesian territorial claims over Borneo.
“We decided then to go across to Brisbane and get married, which is where she was from,” he says. “It was sort of a whirlwind romance if you like.”
The newlyweds sailed to Malaysia, ten days at sea, and somehow were accidentally booked in first class.
“The officer in charge was a commissioned officer and didn’t like the fact that he had these ordinary airmen sitting in the same dining sitting as he was,” Graham recalls. “He sent a signal back to headquarters and the reply came back: have them removed at once. This was quite a joke among us.”
The officer took the signal to the Italian captain of the ship.
“The captain came back and said, ‘No no no, they stay,'” Graham says. “For the rest of the voyage he wouldn’t speak to us,” he laughed
After three years in Malaysia, two weeks before Christmas, Graham was sent to Vietnam.
“It was a bit of a rupture to our blissful married life,” he says. “Because you didn’t have your partner with you, it was a lonely place to be.”
He was stationed at a Royal Thai Air Force base largely occupied by Americans bombing North Vietnam, where the noise of aircraft and explosions was persistent. Graham became a member of the Civic Action Committee and rose to the rank of Sergeant before his 15 years of service concluded in 1972.
He could have extended, but another opportunity had caught his attention. Graham applied to work with NASA on the Apollo Program and was posted to the tracking station in Carnarvon, where he tracked the final Apollo missions and the Skylab laboratory as it orbited Earth.
“It didn’t involve any combat, which was nice,” he says.
After Carnarvon, Graham pursued theological training and became deeply involved in the Uniting Church, which he has been a part of since its formation in 1977. He later served as President of the Council of Churches in Western Australia.
This ANZAC Day, Graham will wear his medals, accumulated, he says, somewhat mysteriously over more than 30 years of service.
“I seem to have been getting medals sporadically for over 30 years,” he says. “I have a chest full and it’s hard to explain why I got them all, but there you go.”
Sacrifice, for Graham, has always had more than one face. His father served with the Royal Australian Navy during the Second World War, leaving his mother to raise her children alone.
“My mother was having to fend for herself, raising children,” he says. “That is a sacrifice too.”
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