You might be one of Australia's oldest uses of the computer, actually, if not the oldest. What do you use your computer for? Nothing special. Just normally use it for contacting people or looking up bank accounts, all that sort of thing., General purpose. It's a general purpose. Probably 101st. That’s 105th birthday. My name is Colin Lens Wagner. And I was born in Adelaide, December 2nd, 1917. In those years, the parents named their children after a battle of World War One. So I was called Lens. L-E-N-S. . Colin Lens Wagner. My parents were very hard working. They had a shop and they had a machine shop and they had a bicycle shop. His name was William Wagner and he tried everything to make money. He was a hard worker. Well you see, after the First World War, when the soldiers came back, they had brought a broader sensitivity, get things done. I had two sisters. I got on alright with them. They were about ten years old than me. I was a late one starter. But, one was a wild one and she was an icon of the Roaring 20s. She drove my parents up the wall with all those carryings on. I do remember the opening of Canberra in 1927. I have an official invitation to there, to the opening of parliament house. My parents took me there in a car, in a 1925 Studebaker. It was very difficult. We had to go through the Coorong. The Coorong didn't have any roads properly then. Just track. Down to Mount Gambia and across the mountain range to Canberra. There couldn’t have been too many camping in Canberra, in the caravan park, because one water tap did everybody. Did the lot. The tap was frozen over until about 9:00 in the morning, so they must have been cold nights. And all the supplies we had to get were from Queanbeyan. There was nothing open in Canberra They were still building it. They were getting official buildings done. Parliament House, they just got that done in time. My parents, I remember, them saying to me, we’re taking you so you’ll remember to tell it in years to come. And here I am telling it in years to come. I remember the opening. All the guards were there for the opening, in three rows. And one of them feinted and nobody knew anything about it for a while until they got him out of it. So I guess they were World War I soldiers being re-used again. Three planes flew overhead. I heard one of them crashed and the pilot was killed. My father took me to see the wreckage of the plane. It looked, quite simple. Nothing much of it. It was enough to kill somebody. Twin winged planes. I just remember those little bits about it. This radio was built in 1924 for my father. It was his first wireless set and I’ve still got it. And it still works. And it was from this set that I became interested in radios. That's a crystal detector for it. And these are coils so you can get different stations. It's quite a primitive set but there's two valves. You can see the valves in there. They amplify the signals that come in. It’s from there that I made my own radio sets. I reckon about eight or nine years of age. And I got books from, you know, magazines from England. And they had crystal sets. The boys magazines in England. And I made a crystal set and I made a one valve set and a two valve set. All shortwave. And I'd be in my room with earphones on until about one or two o’clock in the morning listening to overseas stations. And I think it cost them 15 pound. It was a hell of a lot of money. Price of a push bike. My father had a shop down on Glen Osmond Rd. It was close to Parkside and it had a big garage door on the front which he opened up and there was a radio in it - a seven valve all wave super heterodyne with a big speaker on it. And a lot of people used to come along with their chairs and listen to the radio until about 2:00 in the morning. That was the cricket in England that they would listen to. Parkside. This was during the Depression. But the interesting part about that radio, it was made by me. And I was about 14 at the time. The day I turned 16, I went into the Register of Motor Vehicles and got a license to ride a car or drive a motor vehicle. And my parents gave me a motorbike. A secondhand one. And I rode it to school and all my school mates were looking at the beautiful chrome tank. They thought how lovely it was. But the headmaster had other ideas. He was from the horse and buggy stage and he told me never to bring it near the school again. That was the end of that. I didn't. During that bit between the Great Depression and the start of World War II, I wanted a sports car, and they were unobtainable. So the only thing to do was for me to make one. Which I did. I made a sports car. With a lot of help from professionals. It would have been cheaper if my parents had gone and bought me one. If they could have. Four us sort of come together because very, very few people had motor cars, particularly young kids. It was very rare to have a sports car. And we sort of found one another and the four of us made friends. And we all joined the Army together. Saw it coming. We reckon, we go to them before they came and got us. That’s about what it amounted to. We joined the Army signals. there was vacancies for signalers. And we just went in part time until 1939. And then when the war started, we went in full time. One was killed in the Middle East with a bomb. The second one died as a P.O.W. in Singapore. And Steve Tillet, he picked up a bullet in New Guinea and he was flown back to Australia more dead than alive but he survived and he got better again. So really two of us survived. Just luck. You’ve either got it or you haven't got it. Yes, I was sent to Woodside Military Camp. And from there I was sent to Loveday. I had a good background of radio. Knew all about it. They wanted to establish a radio link between Darwin and Adelaide. And I did. Then I rigged up another aerial to see if I could get Adelaide, and I did. So we we had a very precarious radio link between Darwin and Adelaide. And they said, “From now on, you’re an instructor”. I said, “I don't know anything about instructing”. They said, “Well you’ve got three stripes, go out and earn them.” So that was the end of that. When you're in the Army, you just walk along a tightrope and you don't fall off. You do exactly what they tell you to do. So that was 8:00 in the morning. And I said, “Can I have four hours leave?” And they said, “Yes, you have leave till 12:00”. And I raced around and got my future-to-be wife. She was from Menindie, up on the Darling River. Yeah, well I met her because I was one of the very, very few young kids who had a motor car. We were fair game. I said, “Shall we get married, we’ve got four hours to do it?” [Before] I get back to camp. So in those four hours we went and got married and I got back to camp. And then I went off to Bonegilla to establish the Number One Signal Training. I did it if for about 12 or 18 months. because of my qualifications being an instructor, I was sent to the signal office in Townsville. And it was run by girls, about 15. AWAS they were. Australian Women’s Army Service. They were all good. I had ten days leave I came home in that ten days. I bought a house at St Georges and that provided Peggy with a roof over her head. Yes, I joined a unit then. An operational unit. The 2/3rd Anti-aircraft Regiment. And we were attached to the 9th Division. We were classed as a defensive unit, not an offensive unit. An offensive unit is infantry. You go out looking for trouble. A defensive unit is us. Let trouble come to us. We were supplying all the communications. We headed [off] on a troop ship. There was about 2,000 on it. We played chess all the way to Morotai. It was very hot. We were just with no shirts on. I took some photos of being on board the ship along the way to Borneo. And then another chap took our photo, just myself and the four drivers. Now that’s a photo of us on the LST. Just before we did the the landing. That's me. That's our four drivers. He said, “I want to take your photo.” So we found out after. He said, “I took your photo just it case you didn’t make it on the landing.” But we did. There wasn't any harbour there. To get off the boat, they threw rope ladders over the side of the boat. We saw some LSTs or ‘Landing Ship Tanks’ coming in. Ready to come in one at a time and we knew they’d be for us. Rope ladders over the side, we got on the boats. But the LSTs, all went in. We unloaded and there’s a photograph of me coming off. It must’ve been pretty late because we couldn't get off the beach and we just held the landing that night. We expected air raids or something but it never happened. I had a cheap camera with me. If I’d had an expensive one it would have got pinched. I had a cheap one and another chap in the unit also had a cheap one. Similar cameras and he knew more than I did about developing films. And he said, well, if you go to the up to the RAAF, their reconnaissance unit, that's the ones that take photographs from the air. Air photographs. He said they've got some material. Here's what to get. And he said it'll take at least 30 cigarettes to get them. I received a cigarette ration and that gave me cigarettes, which were very handy to me. Ten cigarettes I used to buy an egg with, but the rest I used to get photography with. So it went over with a handful of cigarettes and put them down on the table. I got it and we came back and we developed the films at night time. It had to be completely dark and we made a torch with a red rag over it to see what we were doing. If anybody had turned a light on at the wrong time, we would have lost everything. But they didn’t. And we developed films. You know, a 'jungle developing company’ sort of thing. And got away with it. We did it. And it was at that point there I thought the war would never end. I’d been in it for six years and the war was just going on and on. And then the atom bomb dropped and war suddenly came to an end. I found out on the grape vine. Yeah I was just pleased that I’d made it. But then, of course, came the big thing, the surrender. We'd found out that there was a death march 2000 Australians were murdered, and we wanted to round up the people who did it. And we did. Sandakan was not far away from where we were at Labuan. And that was where the death marches started from. Most of the garrison from Sandakan had gone inland to Ranau. They murdered them along the way. Someone had to go and pick up the remnants, what was left of the garrison, at Sandakan. We sent an LST, a Landing Ship Tank, over. And one of our group, a corporal - he was a very good corporal - I gave him my gun. It was a machine gun. I said, “If you use it, clean it”. They pulled into the harbour at Sandakan. The Japanese, they were all on the wharf waiting. There was half a dozen wooden boxes. They were quite heavy. About the size you could lift one up and put on your shoulder and carry along. They had Yokohama Specie Bank written on them. We knew they were full of money. So the corporal went in and saw this Japanese chap in the tent. He was sitting at a table, the boxes along side of him, and he was waiting to be greeted by the corporal. The corporal walked in the tent, pointed a gun at him and said, “Get out and join the others!” And they were all put on the boat. On the way back, they were put in [the] charge of a private and the private had other ideas. He told them to put their packs on and they put their packs on and he formed them into a ring and he made them run at the double around and around the ring in the heat. I don't know how long it went on for, but an officer came down, saw it and stopped it. So that was as close as they got to a death march. It wasn't very much at all. They arrived at the back of Labuan and I was there with my camera. I took a photograph on the deck of the ship. Another couple of photographs of them walking along. They were very obedient. They didn't play up at all. We opened the boxes. It was Japanese invasion money and as the Japanese had lost, the money was worthless. The boys made a big pile of them. I must have had an honest face because I was given the job of burning it. I had to get a long stick and it was like burning phonebooks. And the next morning it was just a pile of red ashes. A few years ago, I looked on the computer, and I saw the 9th Division had given their version of the surrender. And it was whitewashed. It was never correct. So I was speaking at a meeting and I gave the real version. The Canberra War Memorial checked on me. They said yours was different from ours. Can you prove it? I said, “Yes I can.” So I had photos to prove it. So here is the real story of the surrender. Baba. General Baba. B-A-B-A. He was a war criminal and we wanted him dealt with. I was standing there and I saw the plane come over the top. I was very pleased to see it and it landed. I was there with my camera. But there was an official camera standing by. I just thought what a bugger he was. I couldn't... you know, there's not much you could do [as an] individual. You just. You just look at them as... You just don't like them. General Baba was told to come on a plane and sign a surrender document. And they had to put white crosses over the red rondelles so we’d know what plane it was. But to me that was not the case, the white crosses were to humiliate him. That was first sign of humiliation. And it was one of our jeeps that took the general to the surrender point. I was told he was told to get in the jeep. Standing alongside him was a big chap, with 'MP’ on the side... He was a private. The general being a general [would] naturally sat in the front seat of the car. The private told him to go get in the back. This is the unofficial version that I'm giving. And you can see the private sat in the front seat. And you can see it's real because the general is sitting in the back seat. I spoke to the driver afterwards. I never used that particular driver. He said he took him as fast as he could over every bump he could. The next two photos of the general going into the hut to sign the surrender document. What our side, I did, was to put a mortar gun right alongside of the hut. Hard up against it. And he wasn’t to know about it. So they marched him in there and the next photo is taken officially. You see him signing a surrender document, and as he signed it, about to put the pen down, a signal was given at the door and the gun went off and the hut shook very badly. And I think it didn't do him any good at all. A couple of hours later I saw him again. He was in a hut. Ordinary tent. Usual furniture - a long table and two long chairs. He was sitting on a form with his back to me and there were two lieutenants standing each side of him. Each of them had a foot up on the form alongside of him and one was pointing his finger at him and he was saying to him, “Who told you to lock up civilians?” And I saw the general just... He was still in a state of shell shock. He didn't know... After that, they put him into a compound. The compound the Japanese made. I saw two or three of them. They were just four posts in the ground. Probably about three meters by three meters. Wire netting up the side, and they put our troops in them overnight. What he was finding out first hand, what it was like, he was put in one. It was all unofficial. If it rained, he got wet. All the mosquitoes bothered him all night. He wanted to commit suicide, but we wouldn't let him. We put a guard there on a hut. Guard him all over night. We put two lights on the thing to watch him to make sure he didn't commit suicide. I had to be very careful because there were a couple of shots I would have liked to have got, but I wasn't game to take. That would have been the the general sitting in in the pen. I'd love to have taken the photograph but I just wasn’t game. I thought I might... I’d better not. He survived to be tried and he was hung, but that that was not my story. That's someone else’s. It was the plane that General Baba came in. It was sitting there doing, you know, surplus sort of thing and a few of the RAAF boys, air pilots, were basically waiting for us to get back to Australia on leave. So they filled a plane up with pilots and they flew it back to Australia. That's how they got home. It's all unofficial. And they left it on an airstrip and forgot about it. A few years ago, the Australian War Memorial in Canberra found the plane, and somehow or other they got it back to Canberra. Probably by road of course. And they’re restoring it. It's going to be an exhibit. We had to wait [for] a ship to bring us in. We waited and waited and waited. We were very frustrated. And we waited right down to December the 10th, 1945. At that stage I'd walked over to the airstrip with a handful of cigarettes to get some more material to do some more photos. I heard the engine of a plane start up, then rev up. I heard it go down the runway and I heard the engines suddenly stop and there was an enormous bang. The plane had crashed. Of course we all raced out and the plane had gone into a ditch. Everybody on board was killed instantly. But they seemed to be lying around just on the side of the plane. It was that intense. In about 20 minutes they were all ashes. You couldn't tell who they were. But I photographed it. At that moment, one of our chaps from the main unit came in. He said, “Come back straight away. Two ships are coming to take us home!” It was at that point of my war career, that I had a tragedy on one side and I had good news on the other. I felt for the people who were going to receive some bad news in Australia, and I just received good news. I went down, two Victory ships had come in, to take us home. I thought it might be a change of ration, but it was worse. There was no... they were just cargo ships. 1,500 of us got onto each ship, and we... There was nowhere to eat, nowhere to sleep. We couldn't care less. We were going home. And it was wonderful to go down the Brisbane River. We thought after two months, 2 or 3 months after the war, Australia would have forgotten about us, but they hadn’t. It was the 9th division coming home. The last one. As we went past the ships in the river, they fired their fire hoses into the air welcoming us home. There was a troop train standing by to take us home, but the people of Brisbane had other ideas for us. They loaded us into trucks and they drove us slowly down the main street of Brisbane to a ticker tape welcome home. I felt little bits of paper falling on me. We were wet from a shower of rain. We were dirty. We were hungry. But we didn't care. We were going home. And my next thing is I got the best Christmas present I ever got in my life. It was half past ten Christmas morning, 1945, when a train pulled into Adelaide Railway Station and I was on it. My father picked me up and brought me home. It was a wonderful feeling to walk up to my front door knowing I would never have to go away again.