Winston

❤️🇦🇺❤️🇦🇺❤️🇦🇺❤️🇦🇺❤️🇦🇺💯💯💯💯💯 Remembering Hard Hat Harry: Harry Roland Brutnall, 1920–2017 Harry was born in Leicester in 1920 and grew up in Ravenshoe, milking cows. At fourteen he was a blacksmith's nipper on the Tully Falls Road, saving every penny for his first motorbike. He couldn't read or write, so the local Catholic priest sat him down and taught him enough to pass the navy entry exam. Not bad for a lad who'd rather be tin mining. He signed up in August 1938 with his mate Billy Gladwell. When a stern Scottish officer asked why he wanted to join, Harry said "for the adventure", and he was promptly told the correct answer was "to serve king and country". He got the adventure anyway. He sailed to England, watched HMS Amphion become HMAS Perth, and was in the Caribbean when war was declared. A cheer went up across the deck. The family remembers that the youngest and lightest got the fun jobs, so it was young Harry shinning up a knotted grappling-hook rope onto suspect merchant ships. His only weapon was a cutlass, and he kept it razor sharp. On one boarding, a crusty old chief engineer was up on deck hacking at the grappling-hook rope with an axe while Harry was still climbing. Harry didn't slash at him. He gave him a whack with the flat of the blade instead. The cutlass was so sharp that even the flat of it nicked the skin, which stopped the old bloke dead, and shocked the pair of them about equally. Once Harry was over the rail, he dropped a ladder for the rest of the boarding party. As a hard hat diver he did the hard yards. Kuttabul was his home, an old ferry the navy used as a floating barracks in Sydney Harbour. On the night of 31 May 1942, a Japanese midget submarine fired a torpedo at the American cruiser USS Chicago. It missed, ran under the cruiser, and blew up beneath Kuttabul, killing 21 sailors. Harry was only alive because he'd wangled a night pass to go courting his girlfriend in town. Romance saved his life. When he got back, he went down into the wreck and brought his own mates out of the ship he'd lived in. Then he spent 23 straight hours underwater in Darwin clearing wire from a propeller, and fished Japanese Zeroes out of murky water. Stationed at Fremantle, one of his jobs was diving on the test range during torpedo trials to recover the practice torpedoes. After the war, he was put in charge of clearing the pillars that had held up the anti-submarine nets across Sydney Harbour. He developed and directed the underwater charges that brought those pillars down cleanly and accurately. He was one of the last hard hat clearance divers the Australian Navy ever trained. He also had the knack of missing the wrong ship. He was lucky enough to be off both HMAS Sydney and HMAS Perth before their last voyages. After the navy came whaling, salvage, copra and coastal ships out of Rabaul. In his later years in Ravenshoe he cooked curries and New Guinea feasts for his old PNG mates, the navy clearance divers, the motorbike crowd, and anyone else who wandered in. At 94 he was still leading the Anzac Day parade. He called his memoir "Brutnall's Follies", which says plenty about his sense of humour. A good man, a good mate, and proud to serve Australia. Lest we forget.