By Christine de Kock
LOCAL Returned Services League (RSL) clubs will celebrate the 60th anniversary of Victory in the Pacific (VP) Day next week on August 15.
RSLs from Yarraville, Footscray, SpotswoodKingsville and Newport and the Footscray Naval Association will celebrate the day with funds from the Saluting Their Service 2005 grants program.
The organisations will use their $5162 to host a “by invitation only” event where commemorative plaques will be presented to local RSL branches.
There will also be a light meal and entertainment provided by the Footscray Yarraville band.
Yarrville RSL secretary Glenn Hollibone said they also expected to feature a collage of photographs dating back to the 1940s at the function.
“The photographs will be of anywhere in the western suburbs, of how it looked here prior to 1939, then 1945 and post 1945,” he said.
Mr Hollibone, 43, expects to source the photographs from fellow RSL members and the Footscray Historical Society.
Although neither he nor his father served in the war, his grandfather Stanley Albert Hollibone served in WWI and each of the three generations of Hollibones grew up in Footscray.
Mr Hollibone hopes to include pictures of the Footscray munitions factory which was located in Gordon Street.
“The women worked bloody hard in the munitions factories,” he said. “And I’ll tell you, those cordite fumes caused severe migraines.
“My aunt worked there, she’s 79 now, and my grandmother worked there. They had tremendous headaches and I asked my aunt: ‘Why’d you go back?’
And she said: ‘Because it had to be done’.”
“Most people accepted their lot and say: ‘There’s no good whining about it you have to get on with it.”
Other photographs to be included will be pictures of school children.
“I know there are pictures of my dad and you look at those kids and you see that a lot of them had just come through a depression and now they’re in a war.
“There were patches on their pants but they were clean and tidy. With their clothes pressed and neat.
“People back then might not have had a lot but they were still proud.
“You look at mine (school photographs) from the 60s and we’re all a bunch of scruffies.
He said the pictures showed that the people who lived through the war did so with pride. “You can take a lot of things away from people but you can not take away their pride.”
ENDS
“It would be good to see how people dressed, Mum, Dad and kids, the fashions changed a lot in those six to seven years.
“There’ll be photos of people taken when the news came through that the war was over. There were people dancing in the streets in Footscray and Yarraville. It was a chaotic time.”
