Richard Harry Graves, known to his mates as Dick, was an Australian bushcraft and survival expert before his time. Gallipoli veteran of the First World War, scout leader, bushwalker, whitewater canoeist, jungle survival training instructor and rescue officer in New Guinea in the Second World War, writer, publisher, founder and head of the Bushcraft Association, conservationist, marketer and visionary... Richard Graves was able to fit a lot into his 73 years on Planet Earth.

Today, Richard Harry Graves is relatively well known as the author of The 10 Bushcraft Books, but until now, little has been publicly known of his life apart from the publishing company’s author blurb on the dustcover of his books. I hope this article offers a little more insight into the man and his life and times.

EARLY LIFE

Richard Graves was born in County Waterford in Ireland in 1897. He was nephew to author, poet and literary critic Robert Graves. Richard’s mother, Jane Graves (‘nee Hawkesworth) died from illness in 1907, and in 1909 his father, Christen Graves emigrated to Brisbane, leaving Richard and his older sister Phyllis in the care of relatives for almost three years. An unaccompanied minor, 14 year old Richard Graves disembarked from the SS Runic at Brisbane on the 30th of October 1911. 16 year old Phyllis remained in Ireland.

Richard was reunited with his father at his home in Manly near Brisbane. As a partner in the successful Graves and Butterworth Timber Merchants Company in Wynnum, Richard’s father Christen could afford to send Richard to the Queensland Agricultural College at Gatton where he would learn the ways of Queensland farming.

It was here, working outdoors under the bright Queensland sun that the young Richard Graves kindled his love of the Australian bush. By 1914 Richard was working in various agriculture-related jobs and it seemed he would follow this path as a career.

Then war was declared in August of 1914 and it changed everything.

THE GREAT WAR

Soon after the outbreak of war Richard enlisted in the militia, the army reserve of its day. As a lad of 17 he joined the Kennedy Regiment company at Bowen in northern Queensland where he had been working as a farm labourer.

Some members of the unit were deployed to guard a radio facility on Thursday Island. A further group were sent north and invaded what was then German New Guinea. Richard and the bulk of the company stayed put on a part time basis, tasked with undertaking various defence roles in the Bowen military area. Richard found that the military life agreed with him.

By August of 1915, with his father’s permission, 18 year old Richard enlisted in the regular army, the Australian Imperial Force. As a fully-trained militiaman he was able to skip much of his army recruit training and was shipped off overseas on the 16th of August 1915, just two weeks after taking the Oath and signing his name on the dotted line.

After a two week voyage and four weeks of advanced training in Egypt he landed on Gallipoli as a reinforcement for the 25th Battalion almost 100 years to the day before the original publication of this article.

A month later he was severely wounded in the left foot by Turkish shrapnel in Reserve Gully while the men of the Battalion were doing their best to improve the trenches prior to the worst of the coming winter snow which had just begun to fall.

Richard Graves was medevac’d by ship to Malta just days before the ANZAC forces began their evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula.

Taking longer than usual to recover due to the severity of his wounds and a secondary infection, Richard was in hospital for three months before rejoining his Battalion in Egypt. As a unit, the 25th Battalion embarked by ship from Alexandria, Egypt headed for the Western Front. They arrived in Marseilles, France 5 days later. As the first Australian Imperial Force Battalion to arrive on the Western Front they were thrown straight into action in the trenches.

Graves was slightly wounded in June, 1916, just a couple of weeks before his Battalion was sent into the wasteful meat grinder that was the Battle of Pozieres. Here the 25th Battalion would suffer 785 casualties, losing almost three quarters of its strength.

By September 1916, the filthy conditions in the trenches saw Richard suffer from debilitating skin infections which put him out of action and into hospital for three weeks. Although not completely recovered, he was transferred to the 7th Light Trench Mortar Battery, an artillery unit. Suffering greatly from nearly untreatable skin infections and their resulting septic sores, he was hospitalised for a few more weeks before being sent back to the trenches.

Richard soldiered on for another 9 months until July 1917 before collapsing at his post. Running a dangerously high temperature, he was sent to an Australian casualty clearing station and then to the British 1st General Hospital at Étretat in the Normandy region of France where he was diagnosed with Pyrexia of Unknown Origin which is a fever of 38.3 degrees or higher which lasts for more than three weeks, for which there is no known cause.

After convalescing, he rejoined his unit three weeks later and served in the trenches for another two months as a gunner and ammunition runner during the various offensives in the Villers-Bretonneaux Sector. During a large-scale German bombardment of his unit’s position, Richard Graves was wounded in action for the third time, copping a shrapnel wound to the right leg which put him out of action for just over three weeks. He rejoined his unit in early November 1917. It was in late 1917 that 19 year old Richard Graves first began to find himself in trouble with his superiors, when he was charged with “Insolence to a superior officer” and had 7 days’ pay forfeited.

Over the next ten months Richard took part in the massive Allied offensives which, with the last-minute injection of manpower from the newly-arrived US expeditionary forces, would ultimately fight the Germans to a standstill and force them to the peace table.

The First World War officially ended at 11am on the 11th of November, 1918 but it would be months before the men of the Australian Imperial Force were brought home.

Across the Australian Imperial Force there was discontent which in some cases led to outright mutiny by whole war-weary units who had been sent into battle again and again with no let-up and then, after the Armistice, forced to wait for months in France or England for transport back to Australia. It is no surprise that in late December 1918, after war’s end, Richard Graves found himself undertaking Field Punishment No. 2 for 7 days and forfeited another 7 days’ pay for “Disobeying his superior officer”.

Field Punishment No. 2 meant that the offender was shackled or tied up for a good portion of the day and when not in shackles and leg irons, was forced to undertake hard labour under the watchful eye of the provost or military police. Among some of the Diggers of the first AIF in France and Belgium at this time “collecting” field punishments was seen as a bit of a game. Richard was lucky that he wasn’t sentenced to Field Punishment No. 1, which was identical to Field Punishment No. 2 but also involved shackling the offender to a fixed object for hours on end.

As a 1915 enlistee, Richard was high on the list of AIF Diggers to be repatriated back to Australia, but it would still be a couple of months before he would return to Australian shores. During this time he went AWL (Absent Without Leave) with a few mates for three days, living it up with the mademoiselles in the drinking establishments and cafes of Hazebrouck, southeast of Calais near the English Channel.

Adding to his small “collection” of disciplinary offences, Richard was sentenced to another 7 days of Field Punishment No. 2 but this time he forfeited 10 days’ pay. With an AIF Private in France receiving 5 shillings per day, that 50 shillings (A$210 in 2015), was quite a financial hit.

Finally, on the 7th of April 1919, Richard Graves embarked on the troop transport Trasos Montes in Weymouth Harbour bound for Australia.

FRIENDSHIP WITH PADDY PALLIN

By the mid-1920s, Richard Graves had worked hard to put his war experiences behind him and had abandoned his plans to become a farmer. Relocating to Sydney, he worked in marketing and advertising sales and soon found solace in the bush by taking up the popular hobbies of bushwalking and whitewater canoeing.

With a move to Lindfield in northern Sydney, Richard found himself living just 400 yards from the home of Englishman and WWI Royal Air Force veteran Frank “Paddy” Pallin who had emigrated to Australia in 1926. Paddy was what we today might call a “gear freak”. Unable to find good outdoor equipment such as rucksacks and tents in Sydney, Paddy resolved to make his own and then sell them to a hungry community of bushwalkers and campers in Sydney and beyond. He set up shop in a spare room in his Bent St Lindfield home and began churning out equipment.

Richard Graves shared Paddy Pallin’s love for the Australian bush as well as Paddy’s desire for decent bush gear and the two became fast friends. They soon recognised that each could help the other. Paddy would provide good gear to Richard at mate’s rates while Richard would use his marketing nous to help kick-start Paddy’s burgeoning gear-making enterprise, ”Paddymade”.

Richard soon came up with a plan which would not only see Paddymade become a successful business, but would see Paddy himself become an acknowledged expert, not only in the field of equipment manufacture, but also in bushwalking and canoeing. He’d continue to make his tough and reliable Paddymade gear, but he’d cement his position as an expert in two different ways - by participating in the outdoor community at large as a valued member, and by writing a book on how to do the same thing.

Paddy ran with the plan and created relationships with every outdoor recreation club in Sydney from Myles Dunphy’s Mountain Trails Club to the River Canoe Club along with being a founding member of the Sydney Bushwalkers and establishing the Search and Rescue arm of the NSW Confederation of Bushwalking Clubs. The first edition of Paddy Pallin’s book Bushwalking and Camping: a Manual of Australian Bushcraft was eventually published in 1933 and is still in print today in its 14th edition. Paddy Pallin OAM passed away in 1991 at the age of 90 years. While the Paddymade brand of locally-made equipment may have died out in the late 1980s, outdoor gear retailer Paddy Pallin Pty Ltd is still going strong and is now under the leadership of Managing Director Tim Pallin, Paddy’s own grandson. Like his grandfather, Tim Pallin is an acknowledged expert in the field of outdoor recreation in Australia.

It’s all because Paddy started to make bushwalking gear on a treadle sewing machine in the back room of his Lindfield home, and because his mate Dick Graves suggested he write a book about bushwalking back in the 1930s.

SCOUTS

Richard, in 1928 married the love of his life, Jessie and together they had a total of five children. Richard’s association with the bushwalking fraternity in general and with Paddy Pallin in particular led him to the Boy Scout Association. It was at this time, training to be a scout leader, that Richard Graves first began to learn about bushcraft and bush survival. His own teachers were old bush-bred scoutmasters who had grown up in the bush in the late 1800s and were consummate bushmen. Richard was taught about bush foods and how to find water where it seemed there was none. This kick-started a burning passion for bushcraft and he began to research and learn as much as he could.

Richard Graves’ scout leader’s name was Wontolla, a title he used as a pen name in the 1940s with the release of his first book Bushcraft: How to Live in Jungle and Bush.

Richard’s association with the Boy Scouts would lead to some interesting opportunities later in his career, particularly when it came to securing a chunk of the National Park near Waterfall in NSW as a postwar basecamp for his Bushcraft Association.

WORLD WAR TWO

World War Two began on the first of September 1939 when Britain (and therefore Australia) declared war on Nazi Germany when that country invaded neighbouring Poland. It wasn’t unexpected, since international tensions had been building for a couple of years.

Once again, Richard Graves took the Oath, and putting his age down by two years, 42 year old Richard Graves signed on the dotted line, enlisting in the 11th Anti-Tank Regiment of the Royal Australian Artillery, a militia (army reserve) unit based at Paddington in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs, just one month after the declaration of war on Germany.

Despite the declaration of war, life in Australia continued relatively unaffected by the catastrophic events in Europe and Africa such as the Occupation of France, the Battle of Britain and the Siege of Malta. The war was a world away.

Richard was still working as an advertising manager in Sydney and parading part time with his militia unit, when the first Australian troops of the Second Australian Imperial Force began to deploy overseas to the Middle East.

He applied for a commission, citing his WWI military experience and his management roles post war, and was appointed a probationary Lieutenant in the 3rd Anti-Tank Regiment.

With the start of the Pacific War in December 1941, the situation on the ground in Australian towns and cities became more anxious. The Japanese were seemingly unstoppable in their “bamboo blitzkrieg“ all across the Pacific Islands and Southeast Asia, and this meant that Australia was directly under threat for the first time in her short European history. Japanese air raids had been hitting Darwin and Broome since early 1942, but it was the infamous Japanese mini-sub raid on Sydney Harbour at the end of May 1942 that really hit home that the Great Southern Land was vulnerable.

In July 1942, Richard Graves volunteered for full-time service in the regular army, the Second Australian Imperial Force, and was allotted the Regimental Number NX114001. In September 1942, Lt Graves was transferred to regimental headquarters and appointed Intelligence Officer. He remained in this role for around 10 months before transferring to a camouflage unit where he met and worked with Professor William Dakin, head of the Ministry of Home Security’s Camouflage Section and author of the 1941 military training pamphlet, The Art of Camouflage. This meeting would prove to be invaluable to Richard’s future career.

It was here that Richard set into motion his own plan for the future. For the past few months he had been working on his first book, encouraged by Paddy Pallin’s success and now that of Professor Dakin’s as authors. Taking a leaf out of the plan he had helped developed for Paddy Pallin, Richard now sought to become a recognised expert in the field of bushcraft and jungle survival. He had a plan in mind.

In 1942 and 1943 there had been a series of articles written up in the Army’s Education Service magazine SALT which dealt with the topic of bushcraft and bush survival. These articles were written by experts such as legendary bushman and author Ion L Idriess as well as the head of the Army’s survival training effort, Australian Army Education Service Instructor Warrant Officer HA Lindsay.

WO Lindsay’s training was restricted to the Atherton Tableland and it seemed there was no one teaching bushcraft and survival in the Northern Territory, or where it counted most, in New Guinea or the Islands. At the time, US and Australian aircrews were taking a hammering from Japanese fighters and flak and many crew who were able to parachute safely from their burning aircraft into the dense jungle were never seen again. They lacked the skills and training to survive and make their way back to safety so they perished.

As his most valuable contribution to the War Effort, Richard Graves planned a training program for aircrew in the islands, but before anyone would listen, he had to become a recognised expert in the field. To do that, he needed to publish his book.

Prior to publication of Bushcraft; How to Live in Jungle and Bush, Richard Graves was able to have the book endorsed by not only the Boy Scouts Association of NSW, but also by Professor Dakin, who wrote in the foreword;

Coming from a respected scholar such as Professor Dakin, this foreword would no doubt grab the attention of army decision makers.

Leaving nothing to chance, Richard had the book published under the pseudonym Wontolla, his scouting name, rather than his own name. At the time he was still officially a military intelligence officer and there was an operational need to conceal his identity from critics and from the general public in case any negative publicity impacted on the Army. Richard had the book professionally edited, typeset and illustrated by the very capable staff at the FH Johnson Publishing Company, a small, but professional imprint who specialised in publishing military and natural history books in Sydney at the time.

The book was released in 1944, but a few months prior, Richard had already submitted his plans for a Junglecraft school in the Islands. Using some of Professor Dakin’s high level political and military contacts, the plan had hinged on having some unnamed officer high up in US General Douglas Macathur’s General Headquarters request from the Australian army the services of Lt Graves and a number of Other Ranks for the establishment of a jungle training unit for US Army Air Force and other Allied personnel in New Guinea.

On the 22nd of February 1944, and much to the surprise of the Australian Army, General Macarthur’s office requested from Australian Land Headquarters the services of Lt Richard Graves and 6 soldiers to establish a jungle training unit.

By the 30th of March, Richard and his hand-picked assistants were getting off a C47 transport plane at 5 Mile Drome near Port Moresby. Designated the Australian Jungle Training Detachment, the unit was initially put to work training Australian anti-aircraft and searchlight units in the Townsville and Port Moresby areas in jungle survival and bushcraft. This valuable period helped Richard determine the best subjects to teach as well as decide on the optimum class sizes.

By July 1944 the unit was up to speed with an effective training system and syllabus in place. It was at this time that Lt Graves returned to Australia to recruit more personnel. His recruitment effort was supported by the Directorate of Military Training and it saw him travel around military establishments in NSW interviewing and testing personnel suitable to become instructors with the Australian Jungle Training Detachment.

At the end of this effort he had recruited an excellent officer offsider, Captain William M. Gillespie, as well as another 32 Other Ranks, bringing the total size of the Detachment up to 40. After training the new instructors, the whole unit proceeded to the large US airbase at Nadzab in New Guinea where they would be attached to the US 5th Air Force for an initial period of three months.

The training program for US aircrew was a week long and it concentrated mainly on water, fire, shelter, food, jungle travel and navigation. For the bulk of the American trainees, the program was their first introduction to living in the jungle away from their cold PX Coca Cola, comfy cots and mosquito nets. Some of the students took to the training like a duck to water, while others just barely suffered through.

Trainees were put into groups of fifteen (roughly the crew size of a US heavy bomber) and were given mainly practical training with very little theory involved.

Thinking ahead, Richard Graves began to re-jig his training syllabus for post-war civilian use and photographed a lot of the techniques. Both the training notes and the photographs would appear in his ten Bushcraft Handbooks and the later compilation volume, The 10 Bushcraft Books.

The training program proved to be extremely popular, with USAAF units lining up to put their aircraft crews through the week-long courses. The unit expanded to 50 ORs and 2 officers and personnel started to filter out to other large US airbases such as those at Hollandia, Morotai and Biak.

It was around this time that members of the unit, including Richard Graves himself, began to take part in search and rescue operations in enemy territory. Records are scarce, but members of the Detachment are known to have participated in several land patrols to extract downed aircrew and were present as “jungle advisors” on USAAF Catalina search and rescue aircraft.

Keeping his promise “I shall return!” Richard Graves’ benefactor, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the South West Pacific Area General Douglas Macarthur strode ashore from a US Navy landing craft in a carefully stage-managed fashion, onto the beachhead at Leyte Island in the Philippines on the 20th of October 1944, the same day it was secured following the US invasion. Unbeknown to Macarthur, let alone to Australian Land Headquarters in Brisbane, members of Richard Graves’ Australian Jungle Training Detachment had been inserted into the same area by boat and PBY amphibious aircraft to rescue downed US airmen behind Japanese lines in the weeks before. They would be the only Australian army troops to participate in the Philippines invasion.

By December 1944, Richard Graves was pulled out of the field suffering from a severe arthritic condition, Spondylitis. He continued to administer the Detachment from New Guinea Force HQ in Port Moresby, but the day to day running of the unit was handed over to Captain Gillespie, an extremely capable officer, instructor, bushcraft and search and rescue expert in his own right.

Wound down in June of 1945, the unit was not finally disbanded until the end of August that year, a few days after the Japanese surrender.

At a final disbandment ceremony and dinner in Brisbane, Richard Graves handed each of the 50 members of his Australian Jungle Training Detachment a copy of a United States Army Air Force commendation which read in part:

The Commanding General takes great satisfaction in expressing his appreciation of the training given to American pilots and crews by personnel of the Australian Jungle Training Detachment.

By war’s end, the Australian Jungle Training Detachment had trained hundreds of US and Australian personnel in jungle survival techniques and had participated in dozens of search and rescue operations behind enemy lines without the loss of a single man.

These experiences would stand Richard Graves in good stead after he returned to civilian life.

THE 10 BUSHCRAFT BOOKS

Richard returned to his work in advertising upon his return to Australia, and this was a role he would continue to work as his “day job” for the rest of his working life. In his free time he concentrated on developing his wartime bushcraft syllabus and on preparing a series of bushcraft handbooks for publication as text books of sorts for the newly-established Bushcraft Association. He also managed to find the time to write two young adult fiction novels Spear and Stockwhip and its sequel Tibinbilla Adventure.

His original bushcraft book, published under his pen name Wontolla had gone out of print after just one edition so he was keen to publish a series of so-called Jungle Gadgets which were a shortened version of his later Bushcraft Handbooks. The Jungle Gadgets were sold by a major Sydney department store and were marketed primarily at children. The fact that the Gadgets contained highly-effective animal trap designs led to an unexpected backlash against Graves, something he would have to find himself getting used to in years to come during his exhausting war of words with various committee members of the Sydney Bushwalkers.

In 1952 the first edition of Graves’ ten Bushcraft Handbooks were published by Dymocks in Sydney, who had also previously published his two novels. The ten Bushcraft Handbooks were; Bush Ropemaking, Bush Hutmaking, Snares and Traps, Impoverished Campcraft, Time and Direction, Travel and Gear, Food and Water in the Bush, Firemaking, Tracks and Lures and Knots and Lashings.

As per the Bushcraft Association’s field and self-paced training philosophy, the ten Bushcraft Handbooks were designed to be slipped into a trouser pocket or rucksack and taken out bush so the student could concentrate on and learn one general bushcraft topic area at a time. They were published in several editions and were finally published under the one cover as The 10 Bushcraft Books.

THE BUSHCRAFT ASSOCIATION

By 1947, just two years after the end of the Second World War, Richard Graves had run with his passion and established the Bushcraft Association, a training organisation for the purposes of instructing young folks and others in the arts of bushcraft. Boy Scouts troops, Senior Scouts (Venturers) units, Guides, Rovers crews, Rangers, Army, Navy and Air Force Cadet units all benefited from the free training courses conducted by Richard Graves and his group of civilian instructors.

Richard Graves’ contacts in the NSW Boy Scout Association assisted him in negotiations with the Board of Trustees of the National Park Trust which saw the Bushcraft Association acquire free use of a parcel of the National Park (from 1954 known as the Royal National Park) near Waterfall. The site was close to fresh water, and permission was given by the National Park Trust for the Association to harvest limited amounts of green timber as well as use as much dead material as they liked. The site had bulk amounts of dead cabbage tree fronds and tussock grass nearby, which was immediately put to good use by members and students of the Bushcraft Association in making ropes and cords and thatching for the Association’s rough huts and shelters on site.

At the urging of Richard Graves’ mate Paddy, the Bushcraft Association successfully applied for membership of the NSW Federation of Bushwalking Clubs.

The Federation’s description of the Bushcraft Association was as follows;

The Bushcraft Association was developed for those who are interested in a practical knowledge of bush materials and the use of bush lore - for food, shelter and self-preservation. Camps run as training for leadership. Mixed adult membership.

Membership of the Federation put the Bushcraft Association onto an equal footing with old, established organisations such as Myles Dunphy’s Mountain Trails Club and The Sydney Bushwalkers, of whom Paddy Pallin was a founding member in 1926. The Sydney Bushwalkers in particular as an organisation had a strong and proactive conservation focus and they had been trying for decades to secure their own slice of the National Park from the Board of Trustees.

Various committee members of the Sydney Bushwalkers saw the Bushcraft Association as a destructive organisation which ran contrary to the stated aims of the NSW Federation of Bushwalking Clubs. It’s possible there may have been some sour grapes over the Bushcraft Association’s acquisition and use of the camp near Waterfall as well.

Various senior members of the Sydney Bushwalkers set out to have the Bushcraft Association ejected from the Federation by painting them as environmental vandals and as an attempt to destroy the Bushcraft Association’s credibility as a training organisation among the general public, these same noisy folk very publicly poo-poo’d the very idea of this type of bushcraft training and skills, insisting that the training provided by the Bushcraft Association had zero value for “modern bushwalkers”.

Richard Graves, taking the high road, did his best to simply ignore the knockers, but there was constant whingeing from these people without let-up. A look at the Sydney Bushwalker’s newsletters from the period shows the pathological hatred of the Bushcraft Association displayed by one senior Sydney Bushwalkers committee member in particular. It became so boring for the other members of the Sydney Bushwalkers that they began to walk out of general meetings whenever the “evils” of the Bushcraft Association were brought up.

Specifically, the grievances were that the Bushcraft Association had been spotted using green vegetation at their base camp. Additionally, two young members of the Bushcraft Association had been apprehended in a nature reserve elsewhere in Sydney shooting rabbits on a Sunday, apparently in violation of some arcane NSW law prohibiting the use of firearms on the Sabbath. In addition, and with the blessing of the National Park Trust, the Bushcraft Association undertook trapping programs around their bush camp near Waterfall for the purposes of eradicating rabbits, foxes, rats and wild cats. There’s an epic whinge in one of the old Sydney Bushwalkers newsletters.

Fed up with the constant attacks upon himself personally and upon the Bushcraft Association as a whole by various committee members of the Sydney Bushwalkers and others who saw members of the Bushcraft Association as little more than environmental vandals, Richard Graves finally published a gentle rebuke in the Annual journal of the NSW Federation of Bushwalking Clubs, the “Bushwalker”.

SO You're a Bushwalker?

By Richard H. Graves, Bushwalker Annual, 1947