While cleaning out mum’s house when she went into care earlier on this year, we found all of Dad’s official army papers; I never knew that mum had kept them. Dad was considerably older than mum, they married in 1948 and he was already 38 years old; mum was only 19. Dad grew up on the land in the Hunter Valley as I have detailed before and was 28 when the war broke out. People involved in primary production could be exempt from military service as they were part of an essential service so dad didn’t volunteer until 1941 and, even then, he doubted that he would pass the physical exam. You see, dad was blind in his left eye, the legacy of a teenage accident when a spike from a Scotch Thistle that he was hitting with a stick punctured his eye.
As luck would have it, Australia was so desperate for recruits that dad was inducted into the army though his chances of active service were stymied by his partial blindness. So dad served here, as a wardsman and orderly at the 12th Australian Camp Hospital located on Sydney Showground. Here he helped care for returned, inured soldiers, repatriated from the various war zones in which Australian servicemen were serving.
Dad never talked about it much, though, from time to time, he let slip some of the details about the things that he saw; none of them were pleasant. He did tell the story of how he heard that the two greatest ocean liners in the world at the time, the “Queen Mary” and the “Queen Elizabeth” were in Sydney Harbour at the same time and so he hopped on his pushbike, rode across to South Head and was in time to see the two huge ships, painted in battleship grey, pass each other in the Heads, one entering the harbour, one leaving. When we asked him why he hadn’t taken a photograph we were told that if he had even LOOKED like doing so he would have been arrested and questioned about his activities 🙂
At the time there were questions asked about the risk of having these two ships being used as troop transports in a time of war. Each could carry thousands of soldiers and the potential loss of life were one to be attacked was massive. However, since there were no ships, either naval or merchant, that could match the two great liners for outright speed, it was felt that they could probably come and go as they pleased which was exactly what they did.
Dad stayed in the army until he was discharged in 1946, nearly a year after hostilities ended. There were no medals, no service ribbons, no glory and no stories of great courage and derring-do, but I have always felt that, in such times as that, every contribution is a valuable one and dad’s service in the hospital at home, unheralded and unacknowledged enabled at least one able-bodied man to go to the front and help in the war effort. As the song says, “All gave some and some gave all.”
On this ANZAC Day I pause to remember my dad. He has been gone for so long now but I am still proud of what he did, no matter how small his contribution was.
Lest we forget.