There he was, stuck out in the middle of the ocean on a life raft with a suspect crew and a boozy skipper who had run their chartered boat into a reef before it had rapidly begun to sink.
There was no fresh water and no supplies, and a then 25-year-old Tom Fisher was delirious in the sun’s brutalising heat, 15 miles off the coast of the Solomon Islands.
After surviving the travails and horrors of the Second World War, it would have been all but impossible not to think, “finally, this must be the end”; to wonder what it had all been for.
None of them knew how long they had been out there; they had no working time piece.
Eventually their salvation arrived by means of a native fishing boat which saw them, picked them up and took them back to port.
It wasn’t the first time the now-91-year-old Tom Fisher had beaten death and, as his newly released autobiography Tom’s Story reveals, it wouldn’t be the last.
In spite of hearing of some of his exploits, I had not anticipated the highs and lows, experiences, challenges, occasional tragedies and myriad achievements contained in the book when Tom Fisher handed me a copy across his kitchen table in Osborne Park, in late September.
One period of his life in particular has come in for most attention over the years.
Since the end of the war, he has been sought out by naval historians and journalists as one of the few surviving men who served on the ill-fated HMAS Sydney and as someone who lived through the Battles of the Java Sea, the Coral Sea and the Allied landing at Okinawa.
It was on the Sydney that he got his first real taste of far flung adventure, as well as the hard realities of war.
In a particularly powerful moment in the book, he laments the sight of seeing Italian enemy seamen die after the Sydney sunk the Italian destroyer Espero on June 28, 1940.
Remembering the sight of survivors slipping unconscious, down into the dark made him think of the Italian boys and girls he had grown up with in Osborne Park (he remembers helping out at Italian market gardens when he was an adolescent; exchanging his labour for all the vegetables he could carry back home to his mother).
“We didn’t have counsellors, or ‘do gooders’ rushing up to hold our hands in those days and I just had to absorb it. I was more fortunate than some as I was a practising Catholic. I could confide in my confessor for help and guidance,” he wrote.
Tom was transferred to a different ship to make way for new recruits in need of training, two months before the Sydney was sunk on November 19, 1941 off the Western Australian coast.
“I packed my bag and hammock and said all my goodbyes to my mess mates and other friends in the ship. Little did I know that in four weeks’ time they would all be dead: the ship missing with all 645 hands, never to be seen again.”
There is also a vivid account of the night when he might have been blown to bits during his subsequent posting on the HMAS Hobart, a ship with the dubious honour of having been the most bombed Australian naval vessel of WWII.
The ship was heading towards Espiritu Santo, the largest island of Vanuatu, and he and his mates had just finished their evening meal.
Tom had gone to the bathroom to clean his teeth after slinging his hammock up for the rare opportunity of getting some sleep.
Suddenly there was an almighty bang, and then darkness.
The emergency lighting came on, too dim to see by.
He knew they had been torpedoed.
“I made my way back to my hammock berth to see Kingy, the man who slept next to me, lying on the deck. He was cut in half. I was violently ill and made my way to the upper deck.
[quote align=”center” color=”#999999″]“We waited for the next torpedo to hit, but this time it didn’t come. There was an eerie silence as the hum of the machinery came to a stop.”[/quote]
Auxiliary pumps kept the internal water level constant throughout the crew’s sleepless night until three US tug boats arrived in the morning.
The following evening they buried their 13 deceased comrades at sea.
The next month, Tom received his first home leave in more than two-and-a-half years.
The fear of being torpedoed again never left him for the remainder of the war.
To dwell on the harrowing moments in the book, however, would paint a wildly unbalanced picture.
The book reads like a lark, interspersed with poignant and dramatic moments.
During his World War II service, he got to see many of the far-off lands which a working Australian at the time could only dream about.
He read extensively as a young man, mostly travel and adventure stories, and has always been known to friends and colleagues as someone who knows a little something about most everything.
“I suppose that I was different from a lot of sailors in those early days, in that I wanted to go sightseeing, instead of diving for the nearest bar to drink grog,” he wrote.
An exhaustive list of all the places he visited is not possible here, but the mention of Sri Lanka, Libya, Greece, Egypt, Papua New Guinea, India, Somalia and Malta, gives an indication of just how far-flung his journeys were.
When the war ended, the happy future which would ensue was not immediately apparent.
Single men weren’t demobilised until long after the fighting had finished.
When he returned to Western Australia, he found significant domestic problems at home and that life in general was nothing like what he had anticipated.
“The few pre-war mates I had were now either married, settled down in other states or had been killed in the war. All the girls had either married locally, or to men from other states or to Americans.
“Now that the war was finished people just wanted to get on with their lives and not be bothered with visiting homecomers … I have that complex that now the war was over we were not welcome.”
He agonised over what he would do in the future, culminating in his unfortunate experience with chartered shipping.
Tom’s retelling of his life during the war and its immediate aftermath makes up a good bulk of Tom’s Story but it doesn’t begin to approximate his varied life.
The final words he wrote in the book make up that immortal Catholic phrase, “the family that prays together stays together”: “it worked for us”, he wrote.
He met his wife Shirley at a parish dance in 1947.
“He was giving it the power of cheek,” Shirley told me, laughing as she remembered throwing a teatowel at him that night. “I was bitten.”
The couple had three boys and two girls. Tom eventually joined the RAC, spending 15 months as a motor patrol man helping to get broken-down motorists back on the road.
He described those months, before being promoted to site-based and clerical work, as the happiest of his working life (he would later go on to further study and senior management positions).
Tom has also spent 50 years serving the poor as a member of the St Vincent de Paul Society, acting at various times as its secretary, regional president, archivist and, from 1985-1990, its State President.
The Osborne Park conference, which he heads, still meets around his kitchen table.
There is always a danger of the Society becoming too commercialised, he said, and that the importance of social visitation be neglected.
“We were always taught, which I still preach, the greatest poverty in western affluent nations is loneliness,” he said, quoting Bl Mother Teresa of Kolkata.
For the past 11 years, he has also volunteered as a typist for the Archdiocesan Archives Office, typing up historical documents while Shirley watches her evening television shows.
He reckons he has typed some 860,000 words to date, or thereabouts.
“Keeps him off the street,” his wife Shirley says.
“That’s right, stops me chasing girls around,” Tom fires back, smiling.
Sitting on his kitchen table is an exercise book with correspondence from the legendary Archbishop Daniel Mannix (his original correspondence was copied and then the originals destroyed back in the 1960s, much to the horror of subsequent archivists).
When he gets to one million words, he told the Archdiocese’s chief archivist, Sr Frances Stibi PBVM, he is going to retire.
“’You’re going to retire?’ she said, adding ‘over my dead body’.”
Whether or not Tom makes good on his promise, chances are he will be putting his talents and verve for life to some other good use. If Tom’s Story is any guide, he always has.
Tom’s Story is available for pick-up purchase only, from the man himself, at 9444 3063 for $22.50 or via mail from Hesperion Press at 9362 5955 for $30 plus postage and handling.