Summary

Folder containing sheets of paper with people's recollections and memories of the Royal Exhibition Building collected during the Royal Exhibition Building Open Day on 31 July 2005.

Several of the cards include memories of the use of the then-exhibition building to house members of the RAAF and the WAAAF during World War II. Paula Hyndes writes that in 1943 her father Frank Walsh was stationed there prior to serving in the south-west Pacific. She and her mother boarded opposite the Exhibition Building in Royal Terrace, while she was a toddler. She also records that her great-grandmother, Mary Jane Kennedy of East Brunswick, died at the Exhbition Building in 1919 of the Spanish influenza. Ruth Gordon writes that her father, John William Roscoe, was billeted at the Exhibition Building with the RAAF in 1941-1946. M. Dwyer writes that he/she spent two nights in the Exhibition building attending the (RAAF) Technical School. During that time Edward Leonski was being tried for the 'Brownout' serial murders - the Australian Military Police stopped traffic as he was brought to trial. Dwyer dug trenches near the Exhibition Building (depicted in photographs such as SH 960567). John Drain was seven years old in 1945, and remembers going to the Exhibition Building with his mother and grandmother to welcome his uncle home from war. He was a fighter pilot and had been 'loaned to England during the war'. John X was in the RAAF in 1942-43 and spent one year at the Exhibition Building. His bed was in the middle of the main concourse. He writes: 'It was quite breezy and noisy with a few hundred men in building'.

Physical Description

White A4 Folder filled with A6 sheets of paper each with with handwritten recollections.

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