Morawa Scene: Article 02—Tanks on the Main Street
This is my second article for publishing in the Morawa Scene. This article was published in issue 268 on the 30th of October 2023.
As a general rule I publish these article here about two weeks after they appear in the Morawa Scene.
For those that want to see the article in the layout that it was published then you can click on the image provided. Otherwise the content below the ruling is exactly the same as that in the layout image.
The previous such article “The ‘right’ side of town” can be found here.
It’s a tad tricky when you think you might cobble together a series of notes about Morawa’s past featuring, on occasion, your parent’s general store. Do you try and get the stories in chronological order or just punch them up as they pop into your mind? I’m going with the second approach.
So, how about armoured tanks on the main street of Morawa during WWII.
At one point during WWII there was a significant deployment of Australia’s military forces in and around Morawa. My dad told me you could not go for a short drive in any direction out of Morawa without encountering a military camp. There were also large military camps in the town. To the west of the line up past the hospital. Also, east of Valentine Street on the ‘right’ side of town—being the east side.
Records suggest that as many as 50,000 military personnel were based in and around Morawa at one point in time. Further, as I understand it, this number still stands as the largest concentration of our armed forces gathered at one location within Australia on a war footing.
My father told me, albeit likely after a few beers while sitting in his lounge chair in the living room after a hard day’s work at the shop, that special trains brought tanks, trucks, personnel carriers, troops, jeeps, and field artillery into Morawa for months on end. At times the roads in and around Morawa were an impassable muddy mess from all the military traffic.
There were so many locos moving around in Morawa that a special spur and turn-around line was put in by the military. This spur railway line went up alongside what is now Broad Avenue; as shown in the map (bottom left) of the southwest part of the Morawa Townsite circa 1961.
Part of this spur line was still there when I was a young kid in Morawa back before the new bulk wheat bin was built.
When the troops began arriving in Morawa there was not enough food in the town to feed them. Many stores had to put up signs saying they could not provide food or stores to the armed forces due to the lack of supplies. This situation was quickly addressed as local stores increased stocks and the armed forces also brought in tons of rations.
It is a little hard to make out, but the second store on the right in the picture at left of the tank transports is the ‘famous’ Strand Café in Morawa.
It had been filled in by the time I was a kid, but apparently we had a decent air raid shelter in our backyard at 42 Valentine Street. Just in case the Japanese decided Morawa was a good target to bomb because of the large military deployment there.
The third article in this series “Why Morawa”? can be found here.
