Coral was Orange’s own Pacific War codebreaker

Coral Hinds is Orange’s least-known war hero — she couldn’t even tell her parents what she did!

 The Colour City “born and bred” local worked as one of the famous “Garage Girls” operating cipher machines on the cracked Japanese military code in the latter part of World War II.

 This eventually led her to deciphering some of the most momentous messages from the Pacific War out of a shed behind Nyrambla manor in the leafy Brisbane suburb of Ascot — wartime headquarters of Central Bureau — the joint US-Australian signal intelligence organisation.

 Yet this vital role seemed a lifetime away from growing-up and working in Orange before the war.

“I was born on the first of October 1924 at a little midwifery place on the Cargo Road; I was only a toddler and then my mum and dad moved to Allenby Road and built a house there.”

 “I went to East Orange School and then to the ‘Rural School’ opposite the Presbyterian Church on the corner of Kite and Sale St,” she said.

 Coral left school at 14 after her father realised her antipathy for study and instead did the hard-work trying to get his girl a job during the tough years of the Great Depression.

 “My father rode his bike all around town to find me work and I got a job at a homemade cake shop known as ‘The Brown Lantern’,” Coral recalls.

 “It was a little tea-shop with morning teas and things and we used to deliver cakes to the wealthy homes in town, I remember a Mrs Ratten was a popular customer.”

 Rationing during the early years of the war, however, put paid to the tea-house which had to close due to ingredient shortages with Coral then working for a John Farrell grocer at “the Five Ways” before she and her younger sister Ruth made a momentous decision that changed their lives.

 “We didn’t have a brother old enough to sign-up, and there were lots of boys here who were going overseas and getting killed, so my sister and I decided we’d join-up!” Coral said.

 Coral enlisted in the Australian Women's Army (AWA) soon after turning 18 and trained at Ingleburn Army Base near Liverpool where her proficiency and accuracy saw her assigned to the signals section before being transferred to the Central Bureau in Brisbane.

 “I did my signals training at the old Observatory in Melbourne Gardens. It was probably that I’d been working with numbers and they thought that I could type them accurately and quickly,” Coral said.

 It was here that she was introduced to the Typex rotor cypher (code) machines that played such a central role in decoding life-and-death messages from the front-line of the Pacific War. 

 Along with her mostly female colleagues, she helped receive, decode and translate Japanese radio transmissions. “There were some very important messages, but we didn't always know how important they were,” she explains. “It was just a fun place to work.”

 “I was one of the ‘garage girls’; we were the Typex operators of the cypher machines, we didn’t do the code, we deciphered it. The messages all came in five-letter groups and then we delivered them on a paper ribbon… it was all very hush-hush,” Coral said.

 “We didn’t always know how important it was… we were young, and it was an adventure,” Coral said.

 It was here that Coral also met her future husband, Sandy, also in Signals who had been at Darwin and was in the process of being transferred to the frontline in Hollandia (the Dutch East Indies) where code-breaking played a decisive role in the eventual Allied victory.

 “I met my sweet-heart here, he and his friend had been in Darwin, and he was waiting for his unit to be assembled and we got talking and only went-out together twice,” Coral said.

 The primitive conditions under which his unit worked in tropical New Guinea though played havoc on Sandy’s health. “He was very sick, he had to go into hospital at Heidelberg he was yellow with hookworm, dysentery, he was never well-enough to back to full-duty,” she said.

 “He came back though, and we got married on June 2, 1945, at the Congregational Church at the Five Ways — yesterday would have been our 76th wedding anniversary,” Coral said.

 “I got out of the army, and we bought a house at Blackburn (Melbourne) near Box Hill.”

 The couple were married for 62 years until Sandy died in 2007 aged 85. “I had four lovely children and a big family, at the time we had our 60th wedding anniversary, we sent a photo to the local paper in Orange, and they published it,” Coral said.

 In 2009, the ‘Garage Girls’ received the Bletchley Park commemorative badge from the British Government for their vital work.

 Despite the passing years, Coral still has vivid memories of her time in the Central Tablelands, easily-recalling local names, streets, and businesses, from her youth.

 “My grandparents lived at Millthorpe, and I’ve still got a lot of relatives around Orange,” Coral said from her home near Melbourne.

 “It all comes back to you. When you get older, you’ve got nothing else to do but remember,” Orange’s very-own code-breaking Coral concludes.