Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 467
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[Page 467]
(18)
brilliant Duntroon graduate, and later a judge in he Supreme Court of New South Wales, gave me a list of sixty roads to be mined. The physical work was to be done by the Department of Main Roads with their men and plant, under my supervision. So early in January I set off for the North Coast by car, accompaied by three members of the Main Roads staff and a senior R.A.E. officer of the Division defending that area, to select suitable locations for the road mines. Usually the best position from a tactical point of view, was where the road was cut into the side of a steep hill, with a precipitous gorge, a stream, or a lake, below. Our Army Intelligence Service reported that Japanese first-line mobile bridging equipment could span a gap of only about seventy feet. To "blow" a gap eighty feet wide would (I calculated by a combination of text-book formulae) require two tons of gelignite placed twenty feet below the surface, this charge to be placed in the end of a tunnel driven horizontally into the road bank at the correct level.
I had the sole responsibility, and a free hand, for this work and I was constantly being reminded of its extreme urgency by Headquarters. Actually, the task was completed in two months; just before the Battle of the Coral Sea rendered it unnecessary. But I have never worked so hard, and for such long hours, day and night, including all Sundays, in the whole of my life.
In addition to selecting the mine sites, which entailed much travelling and often a lot of strenuous walking in the rough coastal mountain ranges, I had a lot of office-work at the Barracks (with three telephones on my desk) working out how the necessary explosives could be sent to each remote site by the most convenient railway and road transport, to be received just at the right time, and placing orders with the suppliers accordingly. Dalgettys were the sole agents for the Nobel Company and I took all the gelignite they had in stock and in transit from overseas. An equivalent quantity was ordered for urgent shipment from abroad.
Also, I had to make frequent visits to the Head and District