President of the Lismore City Sub-Branch Ken Arnett was a former Army Engineer and spent 25 years in uniform, and 19 years in the defence industry. He was born and raised in Lismore, and after spending decades away, he has settled back down in his hometown. Lilly Harmon sat down with him and talked about his life. 

I was born in 1948, on the second of August, at Lismore Base Hospital.

I was the youngest of four boys. My brothers Peter, Ian and Graeme will be remembered by many. My father John (Jack) was a well-respected businessman in town, and my mum Beryl deserves a medal. I am not being facetious with that comment, for managing a family of testosterone fuelled boys so successfully. There was a time in about 1955 when she had three of us in medical plaster all at once. 

We were a regular church-going family and very civic-minded. Mum and Dad were involved with many organisations including Rotary, East Lismore Bowling and Tennis clubs, Progress Associations (which don’t seem to exist anymore), and sporting organisations.

My family home was in Oakley Avenue, East Lismore, opposite the Bowlo (it was not there when we first arrived).

I started school at what was called Pound Street Primary School, later to be Lismore Public. 

I did kindergarten there, and then they opened Wyrallah Road School in 1954. So, I was in the first ever year one class at that school. 

I was a very active youth. I played Soccer on weekends for a club called Eastwood United, who were taken over by the Workers Club 35 years ago. I played cricket and rugby league, and we had the weekly trip to Woodlawn and Marist Brothers to get flogged.

I started high school in 1961 doing all the right subjects. I did the very last of the leaving certificates in 1965, the Wyndham scheme came into place for the year after me.

I didn't know what I wanted to do after school. So I didn't work hard enough and didn't study well in school. I won a job in the engineering department at the main roads department in Grafton as an engineering draughtsman.

All my time in high school, I was very keen on being in school cadets, and Lismore High had its own Cadet unit. I went through to be a Cadet Under Officer Army Cadets and commanded a mortar platoon. 

I developed an interest, and my mother, of course, wasn't keen on the idea because the Vietnam War started in 1965 with Australia joining in 1962. She didn’t want to send her son off to war. 

By the time I was 19, I decided to join the military. I was too old to go to college, so I applied for the Officer Cadet School at Portsea, Victoria. While the training centre did allow direct entry, it was primarily for experienced soldiers who had been to Vietnam and were selected from the ranks for their leadership qualities to undertake officer training. So I went in as a callow youth against men who were up to the age of 27. At that age 19 to 27 is a big difference.

I went to Portsea in July 1968. Vietnam was raging at the time. It was at the tail end of the famous Tet Offensive in Vietnam, where large numbers of casualties were happening.

Officer Training is a very demanding activity. OCS was intimidating and very exhausting. They try to find any character flaw that you might have and if they find them, they try to correct them. Essentially, they want people with leadership potential who can lead soldiers.

In those days, only men and very few women were involved, none at the OCS.

I graduated as a second lieutenant in June 1969. Now I look back at my graduation photo that I've had hanging on the wall and I know now why that didn't send me to Vietnam. I look about 15 years old, even though I was 20. So, they sent me off to study engineering instead. I did three years of a four-year degree and for reasons I won’t go into here, I did not complete it. I always intended to go back, but people including me rarely do.

The Army must have accepted the sufficiency of my reasons and kept me on. I think I repaid their good faith several times over.

I don't know that the younger generations understand the severity of the Vietnam War.

One of my best friends at OCS, Second Lieutenant Brian Jones was killed in action in Vietnam in 1971 and several of my Portsea class were wounded. We had the Vietnam Veterans commemoration last week 3 August 23: I knew two of those boys on the Lismore Cenotaph personally.

There was Glen Bartholomew, Glen was a couple of years ahead at Lismore High. His brother Arnold was School Captain of my year. Desmond Tully used to live near the Lismore golf course, next door to the young lady I eventually married. I played cricket both with and against Des. Both those young men were killed in action in Vietnam. Then being regular army, I knew another three army officers who were killed.

At the time, I thought, as a soldier I'm missing out on my war but I look back and think, I was so lucky. I was ready to go in 1972 and then the Australian Force was withdrawn.

In the meantime, I'd married that young lady from Parade Street who had I gone to school with.

We met again as adults on my first posting in Brisbane after Portsea, when I was living in barracks at Bulimba and she was a nurse at Princess Alexandria Hospital. She followed me around the world in our 22 years of married life in the Army.

We had 17 houses, typical for Army officers in those days. We started our family young as you did then. We had two children: son Andrew and daughter Anne-Louise.

Andrew is a mining engineer turned lawyer in Brisbane and Annie after studying Science at ANU and Business at UTS and then working in the US is the CEO of a major medical research company in Sydney.

They had five primary schools and two high schools but still managed to achieve outstanding results. A very disrupted schooling seemed to stimulate rather than inhibit their education, I think with a great deal of help from their mother. 

Being a soldier, I was generally absent on duty most of the time. They were great kids and are even better adults and delivered me three beautiful grandchildren.

My Army career was typical for a peacetime soldier but after studying for those several years, the army realised that I hadn’t commanded soldiers. They said we had better send you off to the recruit training battalion to get some rapid regimental experience actually leading soldiers. So, I went to 1st Recruit Training Battalion in Kapooka as a Company 2IC of about 500 recruits.

That's where you see raw humanity come into the army by the bus load and we had to convert these youths into strong young men, soldiers. Then followed several more junior regimental appointments in Adelaide and to Holsworthy, Sydney, where I was I commanded the Technical Support Squadron at the 2nd Cavalry Regiment. I was then promoted to Major, working in the Victoria Barracks in the middle of the city.

I was identified for what the Army calls Technical Staff Officer training and the course to qualify was conducted by the British Army at a place called the Royal Military College of Science at Shrivenham, Oxfordshire in England.

It was a 12-month-long course in military technology now recognised as a master's level qualification. I was awarded the CGIA (City and Guilds of London Institute Award) for excellence in military technology. It was a year of very intense study going into every aspect of military technology. Guns big and small, missiles, bombs, rotary and fixed wing aircraft, watercraft, trucks, tanks, radios and computers. 

The project I did with fellow Australian and Portsea classmate Major Bruce Cameron MC was to construct and demonstrate the first working model of an electromagnetic rail gun, certainly in England and probably Europe, given the amount of interest it generated.

This was the era of the President Reagan Star Wars and this was at the cutting edge. It is only now that the Chinese have deployed such a weapon that the Americans in particular are racing to catch up. I guess our report may have been dusted off.

Bruce had been awarded his Military Cross in Vietnam doing some pretty scary stuff and it was an honour and privilege to be asked to join him in this.  

They posted me straight back to Canberra as a Technical Staff Officer into the Army’s guided weapons job. I led a small team for four years, working on all the army's guided weapons, including both anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles.

In 1983 I did the source selection for the very low-level air defence system weapon. I selected the RBS 70 from Sweden, which remains in service today. I then oversaw small arms and special projects. This involved the management of all weapons other than the standard rifle and machine gun. These included weapons such as grenade launchers, pistols, sniper rifles but also all highly innovative and so highly classified counter terrorism requirements for the Special Forces.

In 1986, I was selected for a promotion to Lieutenant Colonel. It was a short stint in Canberra in logistics and then becoming Commanding Officer of the 4th Base Workshop Battalion just outside Albury Wodonga.

We looked after the base maintenance for the tank at the time, the Leopard, as well as the M113 personnel carrier, the RBS 70 missile system (the one that is still in service), night vision equipment (goggles, sights, binoculars etc) and Nuclear Biological and Chemical (NBC) defence equipment.

I was there for two and a half years. Finally posted back to Canberra for my last posting. I went into a job called Staff Officer Grade One General Engineering. I had four Majors and several civilian Technical Officers working for me and they covered a large range of stuff. One was the NBC officer for the army. That was the nuclear, biological and chemical warfare officer. All that stuff that we don't have, but we have to know about it and have defenses for it. One of the other Majors built a deployable field hospital, which was reputed to be the most advanced surgical capability in northern Australia when deployed. Very high-tech stuff. They also covered aerial delivery equipment i.e. parachutes and slings for small vehicles, artillery pieces and the like.

By then I was 44, beginning to age in Army terms, and the army was letting go of people nearing compulsory retirement age. I did my sums and I decided to come home to Lismore and back into the family business.

People kept contacting me to come and do stuff for the army on contract. So I did that from here in Lismore until my wife and I sadly split up in the year 2000. She was able to stay in Lismore where she had started and was then running the Department of Veterans Affairs office downtown.  

Following our break-up, I went back to Canberra for eight years with military projects. I joined a company called Ball Aerospace Technology, which is the American company that built and modified the Hubble telescope. It was mainly helicopter projects.

I was getting close to retirement age, and there was a contract at the RAAF base in Williamtown, “would you like to do that?” they asked me. I worked on the Airborne Early Warning and Control (AEWC) Project, which is the Boeing 737 with the radar that looks like a surfboard on top. I worked on that for a couple of years. And then, the air force kept finding more work for me at Williamtown on security projects and eventually on the fighter jets programmes.

I was then turning 65. I wanted to reduce my workload and decided to retire. The senior Air Force officer I was telling this to said “Are you prepared to work a couple of days per week and are you still in the reserves?” I said yes. He said, “Would you be prepared to go back into uniform?” Hang on, I was 65. Will the Army do that? Let me worry about that, he said. Next day “get yourself up to the Army Base at Singleton for a reissue of modern uniforms, you’re back in the Army”.

So I was back in uniform at 65 working three or four day weeks at the RAAF Base in Williamtown for another three years.

Then I did a job swap with a friend in Brisbane and I went back to working on helicopters. It was three days a week, commuting from Lismore to Brisbane at the Army Aviation System Program Office in the City helping look after the fleets of helicopters I had worked on previously. I finally retired in 2017.  

I had bought the old family home after my mother died in anticipation of a return to Lismore, and so I settled back home full-time in 2017.

In the last 5 years, I’ve been playing a lot of golf and became heavily involved with the Lismore High School Centenary Committee. 

I had also to supplement my military pension and had earlier invested in the Star Court Arcade where the family had been in business since 1947. Of course, when the flood hit, it hit the ceilings, and it has been a long 18 months since, but so they say ‘it is an ill wind that does not blow some good’. As a result and as part of the remediation of the Arcade we have been able to restore some of the shop frontages to their original 1926 condition. Some of the leadlight and much of the original atmosphere in the atrium areas has been recovered.

Meanwhile, Michel and Lisa Lamarre from the La Trouvaille at the front of the Arcade have brilliantly supervised the refurbishment of the Arcade common areas into something Lismore can be proud of. 

I have one little shop down there, which is an incubator shop having been a toe in the water entry point for many new small businesses around town. Recently, we had a very successful florist, The Hanging Gardens who had to move to bigger premises and then followed by Amarina who now has the Aboriginal art shop at the front of the arcade. She was planning on moving to a bigger area just before the flood hit and luckily had moved all of her stuff out on the Friday before the flood. She was very lucky.

When I was down there after the flood, squeegeeing and shovelling the mud out, she came down and cleaned her shop. Not too many people would do that having vacated a rental premises, it just shows the character of the lady. The incubator is now ready to go again. 

When I was here in Lismore, from 1994 to 2000, I helped set up the Rotary Club of Summerland Sunrise which I have now rejoined having served Rotary at the breakfast club in Canberra and the Nelson Bay Club while I was away. I am now also: the President of the City of Lismore Sub Branch of the RSL having been a Trustee; and a member of the Royal United Services Institute of Queensland; Officer Cadet School Portsea Alumni; the RAEME Association of Queensland; the Australian Defence Force Retirees Association; Richmond River Historical Society, the Evans Head RAAF Museum; the Northern Rivers Military Museum Casino; St Andrews Anglican Church Lismore; and of course the Lismore Workers Golf Club (including the Lismore Veterans Golf Club).

I have a continuing interest in military technology, military history (particularly World War 1), and I like to keep up to date on current affairs. All of which keeps me busy while just trying to give a little bit back for a rewarding life, so far.