RON Vickress remembers visiting Tokyo just after the atomic bombing.
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"It was just shattered buildings with no one inside them, very eerie," Mr Vickress said.
August 6 marked 78 years since the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Three days later, the Americans dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki.
On this grim anniversary Mr Vickress, 98, reflected on the famous surrender in Tokyo that officially ended World War II.
A signalman on the corvette HMAS Pirie, Mr Vickress vividly recalled how, in the Tokyo port, the Pirie sailed alongside the HMS Striker, carrying the first cargo of Australian Prisoners of War (PoWs) out of the Pacific.
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"We saw them on deck and they were skin and bone," Mr Vickress said.
"So we spontaneously started singing, Waltzing Matilda and that rallied the PoWs."
To mark the anniversary of the dropping of the world's first atomic bomb, known as Little Boy, the National Film and Sound Archive screened the docudrama, Children of the A Bomb, Hiroshima on Saturday, August 5.
While Mr Vickress was unable to travel to Canberra for the screening, he did stop for a moment to reflect on that world-changing event.
"It was horrific, I actually enlisted in the navy because of the Japanese attack on Darwin in 1942.
"I never dreamed then I would witness [the surrender of Japan] through my binoculars aboard the Pirie."
Born in the Sydney suburb of Eastwood, Mr Vickress was a teenaged air raid warden wearing a steel helmet and carrying a gas mask when, in May, 1942, the Japanese sailed midget submarines into Sydney Harbour.
"People forget how threatening and frightening that was," Mr Vickress said.
It prompted Mr Vickress to enlist and within days he was sailing on the HMAS Pirie, working as a signalman, where he relayed messages using morse code and flags.
The corvette initially sailed to New Guinea before becoming attached to the British Pacific fleet in the Philippines, then sailing on to Tokyo.
World War II was in its final stages and the Pirie arrived at Tokyo shortly after the bombing of Hiroshima.
It took a year for Mr Vickress to be discharged and as a 21-year-old, he returned to his Sydney job of being a junior clerk.
It was in that time Mr Vickress met his wife, Thelma and they went on to have three children.
But a love of theatre and history propelled Mr Vickress to undertake further education, training as a teacher and lecturer.
"I came to Armidale in 1972, as a lecturer at the teachers' college," Mr Vickress said.
He stayed, becoming involved in the theatre community here and writing a number of plays.
Indeed, anyone who has seen the classic Australian film, The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, may recognised Mr Vickress as the judge in a brief scene filmed in the Armidale Courthouse.
"Few people know our courthouse's claim to fame," he said.
Mr Vickress weighed into the debate over the historic courthouse's future, hoping it could be used as a communitry facility.
For now, Mr Vickress is content to remain an active resident, driving around the city, catching up with family and friends and reflecting on that historic time as a signalman who witnessed the effects of the first atomic bomb.
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