National Sandakan Remembrance Day Welcome Address 2025
Dhawura nguna, dhawura Ngunnawal.
Yanggu ngalawiri, dhunimanyin
Ngunnawalwari dhawurawari.
Nginggada Dindi wangirali jinyiin
I pay my respects to the traditional custodians of the lands on which we meet, and to their Elders, past and present.
And here, at the Australian War Memorial, as we do every evening, and we will tonight, when we honour the life and loss at Sandakan of Private Henry Robert McKnight Gault, I welcome those who have served, those still serving, and the families who love and support them.
The Memorial’s wonderful visitor service officers, some of whom are our wreath orderlies today, tell me there is one gallery visitors seldom enter, and if they do, they don’t loiter.
The Sandakan Gallery.
1,787 enlistment photos.
1,787 lives lost.
1,787 futures denied.
1,787 familes who would never, could never recover.
1,787 service numbers.
No names, except those who enlisted in Queensland.
Sitting there alone with them this morning before we opened that really struck me.
Hair colour. Eye colour.
Many years ago while visiting a First World War cemetery near Fromelles, in France, I read the epitaph inscribed on the grave of Private Michael Noble Smith: 53rd Infantry Battalion, a Boundary Rider from Redfern, who died, age 24. Chosen by his grieving family, it said:
“These deeds which should not pass away. Names that must not wither”.
This particular dedication has stayed with me.
In fact, I write it on the card attached to every wreath I lay.
It is especially true for those who lived and died at Sandakan. That we, who are here today, must say aloud the names of these men.
Not let their names whither.
This is the fifth year I have had the honour of providing a welcome address for the National Sandakan Remembrance Day ceremony.
And each year, I have issued you with the challenge: That we remember these men, not for where and how they died, but for who they were when they lived.
I ask that we bring Sandakan into the collective memory of Australians.
And that we remember the British too, and the locals who aided and traded with them, often at great personal risk.
NX27110 and NX53670
Twins Cecil and Frederick Glover who enlisted as 22 years olds. Cecil was a salesman and Fred was a bank officer. Both men were recorded as single and listed their father as next of kin. Cecil was a Sergeant. Fred was a Gunner.
We have in our national collection seven personal letters written to Fred and Cecil’s family while in Malaya and Singapore during 1941, before their capture at Singapore; list of codes devised and used by Glover brothers, for use in personal letters to frustrate the censors; a Christmas card sent from Malaya for Christmas 1941.
Cecil was killed in an allied air raid on Sandakan. Fred of course, mourned his brother, crying for a week – a fact recorded by one of Sandakan’s 6 survivors. Fred died during the first of the Sandakan death marches.
NX25306 25 year old Norman Horrne. 2/19 Infantry Battalion. A factory hand before enlisting. Within 6 months, Singapore had fallen and he was recorded as missing.
A year later, his thin service record is stamped as Prisoner of War with the handwritten note Malaya.
A year on and he is transferred to the Borneo camp.
And then 30 September 1945, his record is stamped DECEASED WHILE POW CAUSE NOT STATED, with the date of his death listed as 1 April 1945.
NX38351 Sapper William Redman, 2/12 Field Company, Royal Australian Engineers.
Known as Bill. A blacksmith who enlisted at 29 years old at Paddington NSW. He listed his wife Enid as his next of kin. He died of dysentery and left behind 3 young sons.
Tiny snapshots of full lives taken too soon.
Not numbers.
Names.
There was a code of honour among the Australian prisoners of war was that no man would die alone. Men would take turns on “death watch”, sitting in the makeshift hospitals to ensure this.
In the end though, on the marches, this was not possible. To fall, exhausted on a muddy jungle path, look up at the sky or inward to your own thoughts and meet death.
Men lay down and waited for death. Too many died alone, beaten, broken, starved.
Lost to their mates and loved ones in their last moments.
But not here. And not today.
We stand together here today and say never again.
We say their names.
And we will remember them.
After the World Wars, lest we forget was said as a promise.
Over the years, it has become a challenge.
But here, today, we say their names.
And when we do, they are not missing.
They are here.
Because we are here.