2011 - 2014 - CRESWICK-SMEATON RSL Sub-Branch

2011

With memories of past ANZAC days when the march was into cold showers coming down Albert Street form the south, on this day the veterans awoke to attend a dawn service under a crystal clear sky. The service was conducted by Michael Clark and again attracted a good crowd including many of the younger generation. after the service there was a gunfire breakfast, courtesy of Eddy Koene and the Farmers' Arms Hotel.

Although the march this year lacked the colour and style of the Light Horse Troop leading the parade, Creswick's march still upheld the ANZAC tradition, with the older WWII veterans finding the Red Cross cars a blessing. The service again featured the contribution of young people; Susie Koene gave an impeccable rendition of the Last Post, the readers were Joanne Cochrane and Tahlia Crutchfield, and the service as ably directed by Michael Clark.

The ANZAC address was given by Neale Gribble. Neale, his brothers and late father attended the Fromelles service in 2010. Andrew McKinnon of Newlyn was the great-uncle of the gribbles, and although his remains had not been identified among those re interred at that time, the Fromelles service was a memorable and moving event for the Gribble family, and shared by a large crowd in perfect autumn sunshine.

Tea and coffee courtesy of the Red Cross ladies was shared in the RSL hall with the Creswick Brass Band, the St. Johns singers, and those who had contributed to another memorable ANZAC day.

2012

The ANZAC Day march was led by the Creswick RSL members, some in Red Cross vehicles, followed by the Creswick Brass Band, Creswick Light Horse, Creswick CFA, Creswick Football/netball Club and Creswick Primary School. Due to the weather conditions it was decided to hold the ANZAC day Service in the Town Hall to keep our Senior citizens and WWII veterans out of the cold. This was a great idea although we did not realise that there would be so many people who wanted to be part of the service. The hall was filled to capacity with people standing in the doorways to hear the service.

Wreaths were laid by Creswick Community Groups. Mr Jack Sewell AM., Past President of the Creswick RSL gave the ANZAC Day speech. He spoke of his time growing up as WWII commenced, enlisting in the RAAF and serving with the 22nd Squadron in New Guinea and Pacific Islands.

later that day Two Up was played at the new Clubrooms of the Creswick Football/Netball Club, which was a great success.

2013

RSL President Mr. Michael Clark led the mid-morning service after laying a wreath at the Kingston memorial, and expressed his gratitude at the public's response. An address by Cr, Henderson reminded us of the events at Gallipoli and Sacrifices made by young Australians.

Children are being encouraged to take an active part and Creswick is not backward in this. The Requiem was read by Abby Shelton and Jenna Conn, from JAPE, read Pam Colgate's poem, "Memories of the ANZAC's". Many organisations laid wreaths' on the monument, in memory of Creswick's sons and Flanders poppies were place upon the small white crosses in the field by the monument.

At the conclusion a surprise was sprung on veteran Jack Sewell AM. This is the first year that he has not held an office in the local RSL. jack was presented with a framed Certificate of Appreciation from the State-wide body of the RSL to add to all his other awards.

A most despicable theft occurred on the Saturday morning after ANZAC Day. The floodlight that lights the little white crosses was stolen. The RSL members were packing away the crosses and when they returned to collect the flood light, it was gone. Broad daylight - a very audacious thief! The elderly gentlemen of the RSL are deeply grieved by this insult on their fallen mates.

2014

During the morning before the March,our President Alan Morris & Vice President Ken McMillan attended the Creswick Cemetery Soldier’s Section & Kingston Avenue of Honour to lay Wreaths. This was followed by the Wreath laying ceremony at the Flagpoles in front of the RSL Hall.

The March was conducted in brilliant sunshine and led by one of the largest group of Creswick Light Horse Troop the town has ever seen.

With a large RSL Service Group and many Community Groups this ANZAC March was a great success.The Creswick Band played with great gusto during the March.

The Remembrance Service was conducted by our President Alan Morris and was filled to capacity around the Cenotaph.Our Guest Speaker Dr. Rosiland Hearder spoke of the work done by medical personal in POW camps during WWII. (See speech below)

Wreaths were laid by all the Services,Community & Sporting Groups in Creswick. The Service involved all 3 local Primary Schools.The Field of Crosses was of great interest to the children and many put a poppy on the crosses.

At the RSL afterwards, a DVD, which was funded by the Department of Veterans Affairs & our RSL, was released, showing seven Men & four Women from our RSL who served during WWII, tell their stories of Service. It was greatly received by all who saw it. Stories

Two up was played at the Farmers Arms and $150 was raised for Legacy.

Finally Creswick-Smeaton RSL wish to thank the people of Creswick and surrounding areas for their generous support of this year’s ANZAC Appeal & tin rattle.You have helped raise the most money ever for the support of our Veteran’s.

Guest Speaker - Dr. Rosiland Hearder.

Anzac Day Ceremony Address – Creswick, 25 April 2014

By Dr Rosalind Hearder, Department of Veterans’ Affairs

Distinguished guests, ladies and gentleman. It is wonderful to be here today in your beautiful town, and thank you to the Creswick-Smeaton RSL for their invitation.

It is 2014, and for the next four years we will be reflecting on the centenary anniversaries of the First World War. While the tradition of Anzac Day came from that war, today it is equally important to remember the other anniversaries that this day asks us to reflect upon. For a small country, Australians have served in disproportionate numbers in both war and peacekeeping roles. For example, it has been exactly 70 years since Australians played key roles in the early 1944 fierce Second World War Pacific campaigns against the Command over Berlin, suffering the highest losses of any Australian units. The same year their comrades ran ashore in the D-Day Normandy landings.

2014 also marks 50 years since early members of the Australian armed forces in Vietnam experienced their first combat roles. July 1964 saw the death of Warrant Officer Kevin Conway of the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam (AATTV) – the first Australian killed in action in the Vietnam conflict. Fifty years ago this November was the introduction of selective conscription, from which thousands of Australians were drafted for duty in Vietnam.

It is now 20 years since Australian peacekeepers were involved in their second mission in a difficult and dangerous civil conflict in Somalia. It is also two decades years since Australian peacekeepers and military medical personnel in Rwanda witnessed the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide – a mission that forever changed perceptions of peacekeeping in this country, and showed that the physical and psychological legacies of peacekeeping service could be just as punishing as combat operations.

There are countless other events and anniversaries to remember – all important to those who served, to those they helped, and to their families and friends who watched from afar.

Every Anzac Day words are repeated like ‘ingenuity’, ‘bravery’, ‘sacrifice’ and ‘mateship’. But what do these words really mean? Today I would like to put some names to these words by focusing on a group of Australians that had an extraordinary war experience: Australian medical officers in Japanese captivity during the Second World War.

After the Fall of Singapore in February 1942, 106 Australian medical officers were taken prisoner by the Japanese, along with 22,000 Australian service personnel, and many thousand more British, Dutch and American troops. While these doctors felt that in joining up that they were prepared for war, none were prepared for captivity. No doctor envisaged a war where men died from a combination of starvation, disease, physical abuse and hard labour, or where doctors themselves could frequently be beaten by their captors.

One in three, or almost 8,000 Australians died while in captivity. Let me put this number in perspective: more than one-qurater of all Australians who died in the Second World War died as prisoners of the Japanese. This was a catastrophic part of Australia’s war story. However while 8,000 died, 14,000 survived – in great part due to the work of their medical officers and staff. This small group displayed time and again all the qualities that are supposed to represent the ‘Anzac spirit’, even though they were not soldiers and they were not in a typical combat environment.

Over nearly four years, these 106 doctors found themselves working in many environments. Some remained for most of their time as prisoners in Changi – a huge, well-organised, and comparatively independent camp. Others were sent with small work parties to the jungles of Thailand or Borneo, where prisoners had to build their own camps from scratch, staying in them only a few weeks before moving on. Others could be in the Japanese islands, on the isolated Ambon Island or in Japanese-occupied Manchuria in China.

A doctor could be in a camp with several other medical officers and thousands of prisoners, or be not only the sole doctor, but the sole officer in a camp, caring for hundreds of men. This happened to Roy Mills, the youngest Australian doctor in captivity at 25. Despite his youth and inexperience, he turned out to be one of the most skilled and loved of all the doctors in captivity because he knew he had to do his best and rose to the challenge, saving hundreds of men.

Doctors battled a range of conditions: malaria, dysentery, pellagra, beriberi, dengue fever, tropical ulcers, physical abuse and starvation. In cold climates such as in Manchuria and Japan, pneumonia, frostbite, diphtheria and tuberculosis added to this list.

Ingenuity is often a word associated with Anzac, and could easily be seen in POW medical personnel. Captivity forced doctors to be surgeons, dentists, anaesthetists and psychiatrists, whether they had those skills or not. With little or no medication or basic supplies, Doctors found solutions in the prisoners around them, finding former engineers to build alcohol stills to make disinfectant, carpenters to make artificial limbs, and chemists to experiment with the medicinal qualities of the plants around them. In one example, Dr Cotter Harvey built a machine from lawn mower parts to churn out a watery soup made from grass for a source of the vitamin riboflavin. Harvey wrote after the war, ‘As I mow my lawn these days, I think sadly how much riboflavin is going to waste.’

In treating cholera – the most infectious and deadly disease of Japanese captivity – doctors tried to flood the affected men’s bodies with fluid, in an attempt to prevent complete dehydration. Victorian Dr Victor Brand constructed an IV unit, using bamboo tips as needles, the rubber of his stethoscope as tubing, and a saline solution of river water and rock salt, held in a Japanese wine bottle.

Sacrifice – another common Anzac word – can mean different things to different people, but captivity provided many examples. On the Burma-Thai Railway, cholera could sweep through a camp and kill hundreds within days. In one camp, when Dr Bruce Hunt gathered his men and asked for volunteers to nurse cholera patients, knowing they could also be infected, he had more staff than he needed within minutes. Several paid the ultimate price for their care of others. I have also heard countless stories of men giving their meagre food to a sick friend even though they were starving themselves.

In another example, while Australian combatant officers were not forced to work in labour gangs as other ranks were, many voluntarily went out with work parties to give desperately sick men a much-needed rest. I have never heard of this being done by British or Dutch POW officers.

Bravery is often associated with heroic deeds done under enemy fire or another combat situation. But here is another example: Australian medical officer John Akeroyd, who while caring for prisoners in Japan, lost half his body weight, and was ‘repeatedly beaten because of the strong stand he took regarding sick and ailing men, he never weakened, and a great deal of credit goes to him for the few deaths recorded in this particular camp’.

Or Drs Domenic Picone and John Oakeshott, who both worked tirelessly in Borneo to keep prisoners alive and who were both executed by the Japanese, tragically only days after the end of the war.

In captivity, some of the bravest acts were the terrible decisions made by doctors such as who to give medication to when there wasn’t enough. On the Railway, British medical officer Cyril Vardy wrote in his diary about when he had seven dying men – all under 25 – but only enough medication to save one. He eventually put their names in a hat. Dr Stanley Pavillard chose his own method of selecting which of his sick patients would receive medication when there was not enough: married men received first preference, especially those with children.

Mateship is a central concept of Anzac. Despite the horrors of captivity, among most Australians it remained intact – men supported each other through the worst times and laughed through better times. Australian soldiers in all camps held Anzac Day ceremonies in captivity – a chance to reflect on their First World War fathers, and to grieve for friends who had died.

Even in captivity, Australian knew who they were and were loyal first to each other. In one example, British soldiers in Changi performed the play Journey’s End – a story about British officers in the First World War. While the British POW audience quietly appreciated it, the Australians ‘heckled, interrupted and ended up barracking for the German prisoner’!

Through you might think humour in Japanese captivity would be hard to find, it was never far from Australians no matter how hard conditions were. Former POW Jack Higgs recalled a mock Melbourne Cup race where the pretend ‘horses’ all had names of diseases and the commentator’s race call was a string of puns: ‘Tinea has been scratched’; ‘Diarrhoea has done a lot of running lately’; ‘Hernia is well supported’ etc. Jack remembered, ‘Simple entertainments like these were of immense value in allowing us to forget, even if only for an hour or so, uncertainty and fear about what may lie ahead.’

For survivors of captivity, the bonds forged during the war continued in the decades afterwards – a time which could be just as hard. Jack Higgs recalled after reuniting with his parents, ‘What I remember most ... was that we could find so little to talk about; Mum just sat beside me with her hand on my knee, and Dad did his best to conceal his tears.’

Anzac Days and other war ceremonies were important chances for survivors to talk to each other. Only these people understood the persistent physical problems from captivity that lasted decades such as nerve damage from malnutrition, respiratory illness and malaria, and severe back and neck problems from forced labour and beatings.

They understood the psychological legacies of captivity too, the nightmares and the terrible memories. An international study in 1986 compared psychiatric illness in ex-POWs of the Japanese and non-POW veterans of the Pacific campaigns. The researchers noted that although the experiences of both groups were potentially very traumatic, that of ex-POWs was ‘almost incomprehensible’.

These lifelong friendships were forged in captivity and were crucial for the survivors, including medical personnel. Some friendships were even made with their captors. Glyn White, a senior army commander and Australian doctor, became friends in a Japanese POW camp with a Korean camp guard. He taught the guard English and in exchange, the guard smuggled medication to him. In 1969, White happened to pass through South Korea and tracked down the former guard. White wrote that apart from meeting his wife again in 1945, ‘I don’t think I have ever experienced such an emotional reunion’. After a friendship that lasted many more years, White gave the oration at his former captor’s funeral.

Whether in France in the First World War, in a POW camp during the Second World War or in Afghanistan today, remembering and sharing such stories is how the ideas behind Anzac become real and meaningful for us in 2014. It is easy to dismiss the ‘Anzac spirit’ as nationalistic mythology, but scratching the surface of how individual Australians have chosen to respond to adversity gives us a lot to be proud of on days like today.

Thank you

Photos courtesy Wayne Rex Brereton, Terry Hope & Phil Greenbank