Julian Leeser (Berowra, Liberal Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

Australia's role in the Pacific war is not as well known as it should be. While the education system focuses on World War I and the horrors of the Holocaust in the second war, it was the Pacific that most impacted Australia. During the last decade, more and more World War II veterans have passed, and now there are very few left. Over 200,000 Australian service men and women served in the Pacific. Over 17,000 died, and 22,000 were taken prisoner.

In my own electorate, there are many who served, including 101-year-old John McAuley. John joined the RAAF and was trained as a radar operator at RAAF Base Richmond. During World War II, he served at Merauke in New Guinea. Despite his very great age, John continues to march, on his own two legs, the full length of the Sydney Anzac Day March every year. John returned home and became an economist, rising to become the chief economist of the state bank. Every year, we collect a set of budget papers for him, and I'm the beneficiary of his wisdom and observations into economic policy. John's the head of a very significant family in the electorate, with three children, nine grandchildren and over 30 great-grandchildren, and I had the privilege of speaking at his 100th birthday last year.

The Pacific war brought World War II home, with the bombing of Darwin and the arrival of Japanese midget subs in Sydney Harbour. In the Berowra electorate, the threat of Japanese invasion led to the formation of what is now the Rural Fire Service. The Hawkesbury River became a place of shipbuilding, and there were antisubmarine nets installed on the railway bridge between Brooklyn and Dangar Island and Little Wobby. To make the Hawkesbury more impassable, the naval control board impounded small boats. In Operation Berowra Boat Guard, over 2,000 boats were gathered at Crosslands Reserve. The task of keeping them away from Japanese hands became much easier when there was a major storm and flash flood which caused those boats to be stacked on the river flats.

Although there were no air raids in Sydney, blackouts were practiced and brownout shields were placed on all streetlights. There were regular air raid drills, and all schools were provided with trenches. Hornsby Shire acted as a training ground for Australian troops—the Army used the old Thornleigh Quarry as a shooting range, and the crew of the Krait trained in Cowan Creek before their daring commando raid in Singapore harbour in September 1943.

Singapore's a good segue to speak about my own family's involvement in the Pacific war. Singapore was meant to be an impregnable fortress, yet Singapore fell to the Japanese forces in only a week, with 80,000 troops taken as prisoners of war, including 15,000 Australians. My grandfather Sam Goldman served in the 2nd/26th Battalion of the ill-fated 8th Division and was there at the fall of Singapore. After the fall, he was taken prisoner in Changi and he was kept in brutal conditions, forced to survive on a cup of rice a day. He talked of being starved and trying to work while watching his mates die all around him. He survived the horrors of the Burma railway, where the Japanese guards would beat prisoners to death leaving them to die on the side of the road. If their mates tried to help them, they too would be beaten. Disease was rife. Malaria was bad, and cholera was worse.

My grandfather told to his children the story of holding a mate who had developed gangrene while the doctor sawed off his leg, and the image of that occasion never left him. People who have seen the gruesome dramatisation of The Narrow Road to the Deep North will have a sense of how bad those conditions were. My grandfather was badly burnt by a guard who threw a pot of boiling water over his legs. He spent days lying in the hard stone floor in the makeshift hospital, and, when he could get up, he virtually had to teach himself to walk again. The burns on his legs were so bad that he was scarred for life and the hair never grew back on them.

The Japanese were absolutely brutal, and they were just as brutal to the local Singaporean Chinese population and the Malay Chinese population as they were to the Allies. The Chinese were a completely different story. They often smuggled food and other supplies to the prisoners, but the Japanese always took revenge on them. Once, my grandfather was marched into a village and saw Chinese men had been executed, with their heads placed on spikes to demonstrate to the local population not to fight the Japanese.

The Australians and other prisoners of war survived because they could dream of a life beyond captivity. For my grandfather, it was his love of his family and the prospect of opening a hardware store when he returned. He successfully did that, opening what was at one point the largest hardware store in the Southern Hemisphere, in Merrylands. He employed many of his former POWs there, too.

In the years following World War II, the Germans have done a very good job educating the next generations about the atrocities committed by Germany during the Second World War. Sadly, I don't think the Japanese actually understand enough about the atrocities that were committed by the Imperial Japanese Army during that war. I believe this should be a matter that is raised and taken up as part of our general foreign relations with Japan, who is a very friendly country and whose future is dependent on us as much as our future is dependent on them.

In conclusion, on this very good motion, can I say to all those who served in the Pacific: we salute your service. Lest we forget.

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