Penang 1961 to 1963

The Flotto Lauro liner, The Sydney, berthed at the Penang docks, bringing me and my family to an exciting new world. I was just 13 at the time. My father had been posted to RAAF Butterworth for a three-year tour. This was the start of an adventure I will never forget. It shaped my life.

As we left the ship, we were herded into a large shed, where the customs officials awaited us. After processing, we boarded a bus to drive to the RAAF Club where we were to stay for a week or so while we waited for a house. As we drove through town we saw old-style Chinese shophouses, drove past the famous P&O Hotel, and on to the suburbs. The sights and smells were all very exciting and we kids jumped up and down with delight. The excitement stopped as we drove past a Chinese market garden, though. It smelt like we were in a toilet, and that’s just what it was. The farmers were using human night soil to fertilize their crops.

The hostel was on the seafront, out at Tanjong Tokong. It’s all changed now, but back then most of the buildings fronting the ocean were large 2-storey colonial style villas with wooden shutters. Set back off the road, nestled under tropical trees, they looked so enticing.

The hostel wasn’t much, just a long building about 4 stories high, much like a cheap hotel. But it was the social center for the RAAF families living on the island at that time. This is where they would come for meetings, dances, Bingo, to put on amateur theatricals, hold concerts, and for various clubs like boxing, tennis, and so on. I joined the boxing club.

Breakfast at the hostel was always a wonderful affair. There was so much to choose from the menu. I remember we were sitting there on our first morning and this very forbidding looking Chinese man came up to us and barked, “Teecopy, teecopy?”

We looked at each other puzzled as he kept on asking, obviously growing more frustrated each time. Finally, my mother worked it out when he waved two large silver pots under our noses. He was asking if we wanted tea or coffee. Welcome to Penanglish!

It was fun at the hostel, but we soon had a house assigned to us out at Tanjong Bungah. Our little village was called Seaview; a bit of a misnomer as all we could see were the houses across the road.

Ours was a one-storey bungalow on a corner. Outside the fence were these 2 or 3 foot deep drains with a trickle of water in them. We were soon to find out that they did a very efficient job of draining the heavy monsoon rains away. Even though we were at the bottom of a hill we never suffered any flooding.

And did it rain! Regular as clockwork during the monsoon season the rain would come marching over the mountains behind Tanjong Bungah. We could hear it approaching as it drummed on the house roofs.

Some houses had these vines with beautiful bell-shaped blue flowers that attracted big, black, ungainly bees that seemed to feed only on them. We kids used to wait for a bee to walk inside a flower and then grab the flower closed and listen to the bee buzzing in frustration. Surprisingly, no one got stung.

Across the road there was a long swathe of jungle leading to the beach. It wasn’t very dense, so this became our playground. Down the road, a Malay family processed raw rubber into smokey brown sheets.

We had a couple of maids while we lived there. One was a cute Malay girl who had an eye for the boys, even one as young as me. I only realized that when my mother warned me. After that? Well, I was a young, horny boy. What do you think happened? Our eyes met, and the rest is history. Sometimes, parents would be better off not saying anything about their fears.

Later on, we had another Malay maid, about 35 years old, I guess. She was wonderful. But one day she came back from a day off visiting her family in tears. She kept saying something about ghosty, ghosty so we thought she must have seen a ghost. When we asked her what sort of ghost she said no, no, no ghost. My husband ghosty. Oh, oh. That sounded even worse. Had her husband died?

No, no, NO, she cried in frustration. She picked up a broom and mimed playing golf. Then she mimed hitting someone with the stick. The penny dropped. Her husband had beaten her with a golf stick!

Penang back then was a quiet backwater. Many of the buildings were left over from the Second World War. We used to go and play in the old military bunkers up in the hills behind us. I had forgotten about this until one of my old school mates emailed me a couple of years ago and reminded me of a war we organized up there once. It’s a wonder no one was hurt. Imagine about 30 teenaged boys forming two teams and then throwing rocks, sticks, and old rubber tapper’s bowls at each other from behind cover. If the Japanese had still been around I reckon they would have been begging for mercy.

Walking up into those hills was always a lot of fun. The hillsides were covered in jungle with rubber trees interspersed among them. Often, a troop of monkeys would swing through the branches above us. And once we gained the top of the hill, we could see out to sea and around the coast of the island for miles.

During our second year in Penang we moved to a two-storey house up at Hillside Village, not far away. From our balcony I could see the Penang Swimming Club and Pulau Tikus (Rat) Island. My friends and I would swim out there occasionally. It was always a bit dangerous as the sea was infested with sea snakes. One of my Malay friends would sometimes nonchalantly pick up one that swam by and toss it behind him. I kept my fingers and toes tightly clenched, as the snakes have a very small mouth they find it difficult to bite anything large. It must have worked because we never got bitten.

Pulau Tikus was a collection of large rocks. I can’t remember if there were any buildings on it, but I have a hazy recollection of some kind of building there, perhaps a shrine of some sort. I used to sit on our balcony up at Hillside and paint the island. The light was always changing it, depending on the time of day and the clouds scudding overhead.

Of course, we took trips up Penang Hill Railway and to the Snake Temple. But I will always remember the walk out to the lighthouse at Monkey Beach on the far northwestern corner of the island. The only way to get there was a long hike from Telok Bahang fishing village. Along the way we crossed deep chasms on two or three water pipes laid across them. The gaps weren’t very wide, but it was still scary walking over those pipes loaded down with a rucksack on our backs.

Once we got out to Monkey Beach there were a couple of old houses there, and a few huge old trees. One time the trees were infested with cicadas that set up such a racket that we had to retreat into the jungle to sleep for the night.

I first attended the RAAF School out at Residency Road. These were beautiful old colonial buildings the RAAF leased as temporary schools. I was placed in The Residency (built in 1890 for the British Resident and now the home of Penang's Head of State). The houses were large with very spacious grounds. Our classroom was actually in what had been the garage. You can see it here in this picture.



We moved to a new, modern school in 1962. Finally we had real classrooms, and even proper playing fields for various sports. Take a look at the RAAF School website at RAAF School, Penang for a journey back in time.

This is my class picture in 1961. I’m the bloke in the center back row above the blond headed girl.



But it wasn’t all schoolwork. We had plenty of other things to keep us busy then too. I was a Boy Scout, and in 1963 I attained Queen’s Scout.

Soon after that we all traveled to Bangkok to attend an international Boy Scout jamboree. We stayed in tents in Lumpini Park. That was in the days when the floating restaurant was in the pond near Wireless Road.

One night, I stepped out of my tent to take a leak and fell into the lake! Not a pleasant experience. It was just a smelly pond covered in those small green plants you see covering so many stagnant khlongs and ponds. It took me three showers to get the smell off me. No wonder that trip was memorable.

My scout troop loved going trekking in the Penang jungles. Our camping ground was out near the Penang Botanical Gardens. Nearby was an old Chinese Moon gate with a track going up into the mountains. One day we tramped up that track to the mountain next to Penang hill. When we finally reached the top we were amazed to find a beautiful old home sitting in the middle of the jungle. We had fabulous views from there across the water all the way to Butterworth. Exploring the house we found old newspapers and magazines from the war years. It looked like that was the last time anyone had ever lived up there. The house also contained many treasures, including silver cutlery, old-fashioned dinner services, pictures, and so on. We left them there, although one or two of the boys may have taken some small souvenirs.

Georgetown in those days was a low-rise city. I remember streets of 2- or 3-storey Chinese shophouses, old-fashioned hotels like those you still see today in Chulia Street, the memorial to Sir Francis Light, the man who founded Georgetown, and the old Hakka fishing village. One of our maids was from that village and she had a very beautiful daughter I befriended. Ah, sweet youth.

I had all my clothes made by Chandra Tailors in Penang Market. His sons still run the stall there today. The old Tiger Bar nearby was popular. It was in one of those old buildings with wooden shuttered windows where you could sit at a table and enjoy a cooling breeze, or lean over the windowsill and watch the people in the street below. The bus depot was always a scene of bustle and activity. We would get on the bus for the ride out to Tanjong Bungah and watch the beggars going up and down outside the buses. They did very well, I noticed. But how well was only brought home to me one day when I saw a black Mercedes Benz pull up to collect them. Maybe their ‘boss’ owned the car, but obviously they made enough to pay for his big car.

Especially memorable was a Chinese dentist shopfront I saw one day. The name on his window? Fuk Yoo, Dentist. I guess he didn’t get many Western patients.

The Georgetown street vendors sold all the latest electronics and watches. I still have a beautiful gold Seiko self-winding watch I bought back then. It works even today. And I bought one of the earliest transistor radios before I left. It was on that radio I first heard the Beatles singing “She Loves You”. I was entranced. I’d never heard music like that before. All we had to listen to in Penang were Cliff Richard and the Shadows, and other old rockers. So as we sailed into Melbourne Bay in 1963, I was welcomed home to Australia by the biggest music sensation of the times.