The Last Post Ceremony commemorating the service of (NX30204) Lance Corporal Lindsay Richmond Walker, 2/18th Battalion, Second AIF, Second World War.

The Last Post Ceremony is presented in the Commemorative area of the Australian War Memorial each day. The ceremony commemorates more than 102,000 Australians who have given their lives in war and other operations and whose names are recorded on the Roll of Honour. At each ceremony the story behind one of the names on the Roll of Honour is told. Hosted by Richard Cruise, the story for this day was on (NX30204) Lance Corporal Lindsay Richmond Walker, 2/18th Battalion, Second AIF, Second World War.

NX30204 Lance Corporal Lindsay Richmond Walker, 2/18th Battalion, Second AIF
DOD 27 June 1943
No photograph in collection

Story delivered 2 September 2015

Today we remember and pay tribute to Lance Corporal Lindsay Richmond Walker, who was killed on active service with the Second Australian Imperial Force in 1943.

Born in Lismore on 3 June 1919, Lindsay Richmond Walker was the son of William Arthur and May Eleanor Walker. Prior to enlisting the Second Australian Imperial Force on 11 June 1940, he worked in Lismore as a dairy farmer.

Walker was posted to the 2/18th Battalion of the 22nd Brigade as part of the Australian 8th Division. In February 1941 the 22nd Brigade embarked in Sydney for overseas service aboard the famous ocean liner Queen Mary, which had been converted to a troopship. Some weeks later it arrived in Singapore, where the 22nd Brigade joined the garrison forces in Malaya.

Walker had contracted pneumonia during the voyage, and he was struck down again with pneumonia shortly after his arrival in Malaya. Once fit, he re-joined his battalion at Port Dickson in the south, and spent the rest of 1941 training and forming part of the assembled British and Commonwealth garrison forces.

Following Japan’s entry into the war in December 1941, the 8th Division fought in the defence of the Malay Peninsula. On 15 February 1942, after weeks of fierce fighting, Singapore fell to the Japanese and Walker became one of the 45,000 Australian and British troops captured in the surrender.

Walker spent the first period of his imprisonment at Selarang Barracks in the large prisoner-of-war camp at Changi. Later he was drafted into a large workforce of slave labourers bound for Thailand, where the prisoners were employed by the Japanese to construct the Burma– Thailand Railway.

Many of the men working on the railway were malnourished, and disease was rife. It was while a prisoner in Thailand that Walker died of disease on 27 June 1943. He was 23 years old.

Lindsay Walker’s body is buried in the British and Commonwealth War Cemetery at Kanchanaburi, Thailand.

His name is listed here on the Roll of Honour on my left, among the names of some 40,000 other Australians who died in the Second World War.

This is but one of the many stories of service and sacrifice told here at the Australian War Memorial. We now remember Lance Corporal Lindsay Richmond Walker, and all of those Australians who gave their lives for their nation.

Dr Lachlan Grant
Historian, Military History Section