Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Tonight is my first speech for the Australian Greens on the portfolio responsibility for veterans' affairs, which I have recently taken over from my party room colleague Penny Wright. I would like to start by thanking her for her hard work and the excellent handover that she recently gave me.

I have taken on responsibility for the portfolio for a number of reasons. The main reasons are that I have done some military service myself, I know many veterans and I also have an ongoing interest in military history and military affairs. My service in the military was only short—three and a half years in the Australian Defence Force Academy from 1986 and graduated in 1988; then I went to Royal Military College in 1989. I joined because I wanted to fly helicopters as a young boy, but I was medically discharged in 1989, and so my career was cut short. However, over the years I have kept in touch with a number of the close friends that I made from the time; some are still serving ADF personnel, but many are now also veterans themselves of both Gulf wars, Afghanistan and important peacekeeping operations such as East Timor. I was also born into, and married into, a family of veterans. My father is a Vietnam veteran, as are my two godfathers.

Ever since I did the daily paper round as a young boy in Western Australia through the veterans' ward at Sunset Hospital, where I met and developed friendships with hundreds of veterans from both of the major wars, I have been interested in military history and military affairs. My interest always vacillates between a strange fascination to learn more, a repulsion and a deep sadness. Recently my brother, father and I toured the battlefields of World War I using my great-grandfather Clarence's secret war diary, and it only occurred to me then just how lucky I was to have met, in my own lifetime, so many veterans from this most terrible conflict. It did not seem such a big deal as a boy, but it sure does now that I know what I know. Stepping into the fields of Passchendaele, Pozieres, Villers-Bretonneux and the Somme, following the footsteps of my ancestors, was a very emotional and gut-wrenching experience. Although it belongs to another time and another place, I felt many eerie and close connections to this land which witnessed mankind's most brutal 'hell of hate and fury'. I have no doubt this is because of the seeds that were planted during my daily, cheery childhood chats with often lonely and sick veterans. I often reflect that the veterans were more interested in the joys of children than they were in the afternoon daily newspaper I had to sell.

The commemoration of the Anzacs and the Great War is an important time—a critical time—in our and in other nations' histories. As a nation and as individuals we need reminders in order to remember and honour the sacrifice of war and peacetime service, but we also need to be honest and forward-looking in how we do this. We need to use this as a time to reflect and reassess exactly what the Anzac legend is, what it means and what it should mean—not just to us, but to our veterans and to our defence personnel into the future. I look forward to engaging with veteran communities and also to speaking more on the meaning and interpretation of this commemoration in the Senate over coming months. There are currently 20,164 Australian veterans service pensioners from the Second World War; 4,383 from the Korean and Malayan forces; nearly 32,000 from Vietnam; 70 from Gulf War and 348 from East Timor. Undoubtedly, more from recent conflicts like Afghanistan will also need our support.

I enjoyed Senator Farrell's various adjournment speeches on his ancestors' military service, and it is now a great honour and privilege to have the chance to record some of my immediate family's military service. Tonight I would like to talk about John Henry Browning, but similarly to Senator Farrell, I also intend to outline the wartime experience and sacrifice of other family members at another point in time. I started with 'Johnny', as he was called, because of a recent meeting I had with Shinzo Abe, the Japanese Prime Minister, when he was here in Australia. I attended the official dinner for Mr Abe here at Parliament House and was hoping to personally give him a letter from Paul Watson, asking that Mr Abe read a plea from the founder of the Sea Shepherd to cease the cruel slaughter of whales in the Southern Ocean. I was lucky enough to find an opportunity that evening to respectfully look Mr Abe in the eye and hand over this letter from Paul Watson, but I also took the opportunity when introducing myself to inform Mr Abe that my family had relatives—my kids' great-grandfather, Johnny—buried at Sandakan, and I thanked him for his acknowledgment of Sandakan during his parliamentary speech to the Australian people earlier that day. Shinzo Abe said:

Our fathers and grandfathers lived in a time that saw Kokoda and Sandakan. How many young Australians, with bright futures to come, lost their lives? For those who made it through the war, how much trauma did they feel years and years later from these painful memories? I can find absolutely no words to say; I can only stay humble against the evils and horrors of history. May I most humbly speak for Japan and on behalf of the Japanese people here in sending my most sincere condolences towards the many souls who lost their lives.

I think all senators were probably there for that speech as well.

Recently my daughter Bronte completed a school assignment on Sandakan which outlines the details of the military service, life and death of my wife Natalie's grandfather and Bronte's great-grandfather, John Henry Browning, who was brutally murdered during the infamous Sandakan death marches. Bronte worked on this assignment with her grandfather Rob, and I will now refer to some content from this work.

Johnny served in the Royal Australian Army in the ill-fated 2/4th Machine Gun Battalion during the Second World War. His journey began in Northam, Western Australia, and ended at Ranau, Borneo, as a result of the Sandakan death marches. Johnny was to become one of over 22,000 Australians taken as prisoners of war by Japanese forces. At the end of the war, only 13,872 of the prisoners were found alive. One-third of the prisoners died. Sadly for our family, Johnny was one soldier who never made it home.

Johnny first left his hometown of Northam in Western Australia with the 2/4th Machine Gun Battalion for training during July 1941 in Adelaide and then went on to Darwin. After completing their training, the battalion left Darwin on 30 December and, while sailing past Port Moresby, were subject to a Japanese attack near Rabaul, New Britain. The convoy was turned around and sent back to Fremantle before continuing on towards Malaya and then Singapore.

Having received a frantic phone call from Johnny for a secret meeting, Great Nanna Thelma, who had not seen her husband in months and had since given birth to their son, Robert, travelled with their baby from Northam in rural Western Australia to the Ocean Beach Hotel in Cottesloe to visit Johnny. Johnny had temporarily gone absent without leave—or what is called 'AWOL'—whilst his ship was in docked in Fremantle to meet with Thelma. It was a long and difficult trip by train in those days and, by the time Great Nanna Thelma arrived with baby Robert, she discovered Johnny had been caught by the military police drinking in the public bar while he was waiting and had been forced back to his ship. She and Johnny missed each other by so little and never saw each other again. He also never got to meet his son, Robert, who never knew the man he would later call his dad.

After sailing out of Fremantle, the 2/4th battalion and others, who were now separated into brigades, arrived in Malaya. It was not long before they saw action, with the Japanese invading force pushing down through Malaya en route to ultimately capture Singapore. The 2/4th, along with other allied battalions, fought a fighting withdrawal along the Malay Peninsula all the way back to Singapore. Johnny was badly wounded by a bullet in the leg during the short but final battle of Singapore but he later recovered, only to be shipped off to Borneo and the horrors of Sandakan.

The full story and the complete recollections of the final years of his life at Sandakan will forever go unknown. Although we do have the original letters from Sandakan, it is believed they were written by the Japanese to mislead. However, we can use other sources of information to find out about the atrocities that occurred to Johnny and others who were prisoners of war of the Japanese during the death marches. From these other sources, we can presume what he experienced. Yet there is nothing we can imagine from our own lives that will ever compare to the horrors and trauma he and his mates felt and went through.

Letters to relatives from Johnny's surviving mates after the war suggest that he always faced the world with his customary courage and cheerfulness. Judging from what we know about the Sandakan death marches, it is likely that Johnny was part of and survived the second march. Although we cannot rule out the slight chance he was one of the only six who survived the first march, it is more likely that he was one of the 183 prisoners who managed to reach the mountains of Ranau, Borneo, on 24 June 1945. This is reinforced by a letter from the Australian government stating he died on 16 July 1945, only weeks before the war ended. This means he survived not only the infamous death marches but also the horrific conditions at Ranau for almost a month following the trek. It should be kept in mind he had also been badly wounded years before with a leg injury. The official cause of death was listed as malaria but eyewitness accounts later called such information into question. Reports of beheading and shooting during the final weeks of the war in an attempt to remove all traces of Japanese brutality prior to liberation suggest otherwise.

This is the sad story that will be carried down through my family for years to come, and it is one that is shared by many others. My daughter found investigating Sandakan highly emotional, especially when she thought of the mental and physical state Johnny must have been in for the last years of his life. The most painful part came from reading his earlier love letters and his regret at not getting to meet his new son. These were sent to Great Nanna Thelma leading up to the fall of Singapore. We can only imagine how shattering it would be to find out about the death of someone close to you through a letter from someone you do not even know and, as in Robert's case, what it must have been like growing up and never meeting or knowing what happened to your father. The moral of this story is that war is sad and brutal. That is why it must be remembered but never glorified. Johnny's story is just one example of why, which we will be reliving with the Anzac spirit going into the commemoration.

I will finish with a brief poem written by the 2/4th which appeared in the Western Australian News the week they set sail:

We came from the West, where the beer is best, Parley Vous,

Our camp was better than all the rest, Parley Vous,

We came over here, we don't know why,

Unless they brought us here to die,

Inky Pinky Parley Vous.

Senate adjourned at 10:36