I would pass this mystery radio facility half way along daily trek to school, cutting across open marshland, in 1961. It was at about mid point of Youngs Rd which was gravel road at the time. On south side of street was a brick building slightly elevated above Tea Tree wetland, the area is drier today (climate change?) Across the street was a massive array of poles and wires with insulators! Adding to the mystery, the facility seemed to be mothballed..?

Shocked to recently discover on the web that it was a price-no-object turnkey installation to allow Gen MacArthur to chit chat with the Pentagon any time he wanted!

The tech specs for this place were kind of interesting for the time, early 1940s.

What suburb of Brisbane? Would be interesting to have a look now in Street View.

MacArthur had an underground bunker built for him in Bankstown (Sydney).. After MacArthur left, it was sealed up and only discovered many years later by someone digging in their backyard! Or so it was reported at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankstown_Bunker

The address is 180 Youngs Rd, Hemmant QLD. Today it's just a homestead.

https://www.ozatwar.com/locations/hemmantts.htm

Yeah, you would wonder how only 1kw (Western Electric) SSB transmitter would be reliable across the Pacific?

That Western Electric transmitter, amazing quality, but not cheap (their movie sound equipment so expensive it could only be rented to theatres!)

It's wartime, you can bet Bell Telephone/Western-Electric stuck Uncle Sam retail for this (they also held the patents on Rhombic antennas) and the voice-scramblers, a breathtaking $14m*each, were also theirs. Add in the associated full-time rented cross country US carrier voice circuits and Bell is achieving near Vertical-Integration!

But Uncle Sam would strike back after the war, disallowing many of Bell's non phone enterprises!

*in today's dollars

...so after all this spending, the US showed a Debt/GDP of 125% by 1946 - a figure not matched until today, after the $2T "war on terror"!

After pinching much of Great Britain's gold reserves to fund the Lend Lease agreement one would have thought the US would have come out of WWII with a black balance sheet but I guess it is a case that the only ones that make money from war are the suppliers of the hardware.

Mention of Uncle Sam reminded me of this bit of satire in a 70s TV commercial

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_6mG2N2fE4

Catch the voice of Bullwinkle at the end!

Being partly deaf I can't hear what Bullwinkle was saying. What I remember the most about Bullwinkle was him saying, "Hey Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!". The rabbit was always some kind of monster.

I can't hear what Bullwinkle was saying.

"No swtheat".

I remember when that ad came out thinking Vance Packard would have had a field day with it.

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/a/vance-packard-4/the-hidden-persuaders/

It's a pity this gear didn't become available. The Western Electric transmitter was configurable for Broadcast service and featured high-fidelity audio chain for just such an application.

Photo 19 of the ozatwar shows some techs relaxing by the waterfront: This was just 3mi east of the radio facility. At that spot on the Esplanade was the Imperial Theatre that, according to the brass sign in the lobby, featured a (surviving pre-war) Western Electric Mirrophonic sound system. In the early sixties, the locals would (successfully) keep petitioning the management to bring back 'Blue Hawaii', a film that incidentally used the Western Electric recording process. What they were really hooked on was the euphonious, addictive Western Electric sound.

In the early eighties, I was tipped off by the film distribution/theatre service Co. in West End, Bris. that the Imperial was closing. I purchased its gear. The meter in my avatar is from its sound rack! It's still on one of my racks today to monitor AC