Fourteen-year-old Helen Raw was sitting a high school history exam when the headmaster told her class Japan had surrendered in World War II.
She remembered the headmaster walked into the classroom and told everyone to put down their pens.
"We thought 'what is going on?'" she said. "He said 'you're all dismissed' ... we hadn't finished our paper.
"He said 'peace has been declared' and we were just so excited."
Mrs Raw, 90, said she and her classmates went outside and then headed to Liebig Street, Warrnambool, on the Great Ocean Road, Victoria.
"A few friends decided there was nothing really happening at the school so we went down to Liebig Street and church bells were ringing," she said. "It was a bit exciting."
It is 75 years since the declaration of Victory in the Pacific, in August, 1945.
The day commemorates Japan's acceptance of the allied demand for unconditional surrender.
Mrs Raw's four brothers - Max, Wally, Ted and Peter Hammond - all served in the war.
And her two older sisters, Margaret (Peggy) and Billie were both married to men in the air force.
"With all my brothers at the war I always felt I was virtually an only child with my parents, coming from a family of seven," she said.
Mrs Raw said she sympathised with her parents who had the unenviable task of farewelling four sons to an uncertain future.
"I always felt for my parents because my father had a brother killed in World War I and my mother had two brothers killed in World War I, so it must have been very traumatic."
She said thankfully they all came back safely.
During the war Mrs Raw said she and other students sewed and knitted different bits and pieces for soldiers.
"We knitted balaclavas and scarves and mittens and things like that," she said.
"We always stitched on a paper tag giving our name and address.
"As a result I did receive an airgram letter from a man in Egypt but it was in a foreign language and no one in Warrnambool at the time could read it."
She said school students also had to play their part by raising money for the war effort.
"I used to bake and cook sausage rolls, my parents provided the ingredients and I made the sausage rolls and sold them to our neighbours," she said.
"I think it was a penny per sausage roll and then I sold them back to my parents, my mother would buy them back from me.
"I used to contribute quite a bit to the war effort with the money I raised.
"Our form teacher might have been a bit suspicious about where all this money was coming from and he said 'how do you make your money?'
"I told him and from then on he called me Cookie."
Mrs Raw said she could find similarities between the difficulties the community faced during the war and the restrictions put in place due to COVID-19.
"I can make comparisons to those days," she said. "There was always something you were deprived of.
"Food was rationed, everything was and certain items just weren't available. That was the way it was so you accepted it."
When Avis Quarrell was 19 she signed up for the war.
In 2017 she told the local paper, The Warrnambool Standard that she came from a car-mad pedigree with her father a mechanic.
Mrs Quarrell finished school at 15 and by then was already a competent driver and could pull an engine apart and reassemble it.
During the war she worked as a searchlight operator and a driver.
After training Mrs Quarrell operated giant searchlights on the coast of Sydney, before she was transferred to the East Sale Air Base, a training centre for Hudson and Beaufort bombers.
Her mechanical skills were useful for maintaining and repairing the engines that powered the lights, but she hankered for a job on four wheels and was accepted for a transfer to the motor division where she began life as a driver.
She was assigned a 1941 Chevrolet to ferry senior officers to their appointments.
Mrs Quarrell, 97, was car proud and because her vehicle was always kept in tip-top condition, she was soon promoted to driving senior officers.
General Robertson, General Burston, Matron Sage and Lady Mountbatten are among the distinguished passengers she drove around.
"I absolutely loved it," she said.
When VP Day was declared, Warrnambool's Marg Morton was recovering in an army hospital.
But she said the news was so welcomed that she and others on the ward were ready to jump out of bed and celebrate.
"I had pneumonia in the army hospital in Heidelberg," she said. "We knew there was rumbles all around the ward.
"It was wonderful, we were just about ready to hop out of beds ourselves and go running around."
Mrs Morton, 93, served in the Navy and was stationed at Cerberus on the Mornington Peninsula where she worked as an officer's stewardess.
"It was good work when you're a young girl," she said. "The discipline was good.
"I worked with a lot of ladies. It was a good time, it's just unfortunate that there was a war."
Mrs Morton said for many of the men who returned from the war there was a lot of pain which was impossible to heal.
She said her husband, Richard Morton, was in Japan when the surrender was announced.
"All the boys that were over in Japan didn't get much of a go," she said. "They just couldn't cope with what was going on, it was awful actually.
"You couldn't do anything for them though even though the doctor was giving them tablets and whatever, it made them worse."
Mrs Morton followed in the footsteps of her brother and sisters who served in the navy and army.
"It was just one of those things, we were the right age, or the wrong age at the right time," she said. "We just thought it was the best thing to do."
