Full name is Barbara Woodward. I was born at Port Pirie in South Australia, up towards Port Augusta, in 1921. My mother's name is Marjorie Moffat Wardell. And my father was Oliver Holmes Woodward. "My father actually met her when she was about 14," "and he said he never could explain his feelings for her." "Father was a tunneler in the First World War" and being the Victorian gentleman, he wrote to her father to say, did he mind if he corresponded with Marjorie, just as writing to a soldier, not telling her that he cared about her. That's my mother's "engagement photograph, wearing the miniature" medals of her fiancé. In 1934, father had written up his experiences as a tunneler "for the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy" "and then later on, he thought he wanted to record" his own experiences for himself and the family. He wrote my story of the Great War. In those days they were almost... "I don't know whether they were officially told" "but they were not expected to talk about it." Which was wrong. Both from their point of view and from from ours really. And a man "ran across a copy of this book and read it and said, " “What the devil were miners doing in the war?” What were tunnelers? And when he'd read the book, he was determined to make "some sort of a film to honour them, really." And this is the film. Woodward? I understand you’re a demolition man? Yes, sir. "It was father that actually threw the switch." That blew the trenches up. But because he was underground, he didn't see the result. I have two brothers younger than myself. "One, three and the other six years younger." "My father after his services in the First World War, was working" with the smeltery at Port Pirie, which smelts the ore from Broken Hill. My childhood memories don't really begin until I was about six, when he was manager of the smeltery. Father was strict but very fair. And because he knew that we would always behave ourselves with him and do as we were told, he used to take us to the places that he worked at. So I grew up with memories of roaring furnaces, smeltery and casting lead and Port Pirie was a strange sort of a place. When you were a child "you're interested in, but you don't question" the place that you lived in. And it really was quite an extraordinary harbour. Piles of wheat "that were waiting to be shipped by the clipper ships." "So that you had clipper ships at one end of it and steamers" at the other end loading lead. I went to school at Port Pirie West because father believed that you should go to the government school. "And I began French because there was a woman." who had come to Port Pirie who was German "and why she was teaching French and not German, I don't know," she taught us the international symbols for pronunciation for learning a language after dancing class on Saturday mornings. My father made an overseas trip on behalf of the company in 1934 and he was away for eight months by ship and train and... Whereas now you’d fly over and back in you know, ten days sort of thing. "He was offered this job to manage the north mine in Broken Hill." "And he and my mother, I never questioned them on this," but I should have, had to decide wit h him in London and she here, whether he took this job. This new job. When you had to book a telephone conversation "and sit and wait for your call to come through," or send cables, and what a decision they had to make. Anyway, father became "the manager of North Broken Hill, and I lived in Broken Hill" "about four years as a secondary high school student." "Broken Hill High School at the time was a sort of" high school TAFE mixture. I was in the academic stream, but it also had a stream which enabled girls to manage a house, or boys to do metalwork or woodwork. And then back to Adelaide. Woodlands Girls at Glenelg. When I was going to university, everybody had to do something for the War. All the boys dug up the university lawns to make trenches that we would leap into if the bombing came to us. "But we were sent to the children's hospital" because the nurses who were overworked and underpaid, got a break while we looked after their, mostly polio patients. And also I side track, had a certificate of proficiency in netting for camouflage of trucks and things like that. The Adelaide University was one of the acceptable universities for the Sorbonne. And I had majored in French anyway so I was going to spend a year in France at the Sorbonne. "I did morphology, which was a form of words." "The hostel that we were living in, which was on the Boulevard San Michel," "just opposite the Luxembourg Gardens, was entirely female," and a very famous American lady, Miss Watson, and Miss Watson "she was able to help a number of people escape." during the war at this student hostel. Because the hostel was founded by America, "we got into a lot of places that we otherwise" might not have been able to see. "museums and special churches and every weekend" there was some sort of organization for the American girls, and the two mug Australian girls who were living there were able to join in. "We did see a number of things that we wouldn't have" "otherwise had the opportunity ever to see probably." "Went overseas in 1950 and came back to Australia almost four years later." Mother and father were in Hobart. So I finished up holidaying there until I got a job through father's interests, because he was still a director of North Broken Hill, and said, you know, if you ever hear of a job that might suit Barbara, because in Hobart in those days, you were probably just behind a counter or in typing pool or something like that. So I get the job running the office for Sir Henry Somerset. Associated Pulp and Paper Mills Limited which made paper in Burnie. His mother is my second godmother. So, you know, it's all been like this. Perhaps that I didn’t marry. No, I just sort of pottered along. I wasn’t particularly happy or particularly unhappy. Maybe that’s how I’ve lived as long as I have.