National Sandakan Remembrance Day Welcoming Remarks 2024
We are here today to remember.
To remember a place called Sandakan and the more than 2,500 Australian and British men who died there.
We gather today, because with each telling, we honour those who died.
And we gather here at the Sandakan Memorial every year because, with each utterance of the word Sandakan, we mark a deeper groove in the track in the nation’s vocabulary.
And in the nation’s memory.
Today we welcome a number of special guests. But with your indulgence, I must acknowledge the attendance of the Ambassador for Japan, His Excellency Mr Kazuhire Suzuki.
Ambassador, your presence here, although difficult I am sure, is a reminder that the horrors are the past.
We all live with the consequences, but Australia and Japan most surely stand together to face our shared future.
Since the War Memorial opened in 1941, when Lord Gowrie VC dedicated this place, we have committed to remembering and honouring those who served, and to helping people to understand.
We speak of war’s horrors here so that when we leave, as we will today, we can utter “never again”.
War is dark.
In it men, women and all too often the innocent children suffer terribly, and die terribly.
Sandakan though, by sheer scale and brutality make it a darker place within that darkness.
Perhaps that’s why we are loathe to speak its name?
We find light in their darkness by remembering them.
Who they were, and how they sustained their character through such horrors.
The small acts of the kindness between them that in any normal life might go unnoticed.
Not here.
And not today.
The men remembered as larrikins, as scholars, as honourable men.
Men like Sapper William Heydon Wallace Hinchcliff.
A carpenter before he enlisted, he was known as Wally.
Wally loved to dance, and started a jitterbug club in his hometown of Junee.
He was tortured for stealing food and died in the camp as a result of his wounds a few months later.
We remember Wally’s joyful spirit and love of dancing.
Corporal Edward Victor Emmett, a carpet salesman before the war, left Paddington to join the Australian Army Medical Corps. He is remembered by his family as an idealistic young man.
Only a few weeks before the fall of Singapore, his poem “Thoughts of Youth” was published in Australian Women’s Weekly.
We have it in our archives. It opens:
‘Who can tell these thoughts of youth
As he leaves his native land
In his valiant search for the way of truth
There are few who understand’
Emmett joined survivor Owen Campbell in his escape attempt. Having survived a few days, he was fishing in the jungle when a native fishing craft approached.
A Japanese soldier who was concealed in the boat shot and killed him.
We remember Edward as a creative and thoughtful man.
We remember too his family and the pain it must have been not knowing.
His service record places him in Malaya on 1 April 1942. There is a stamp marking him as missing.
Clearly, so regular an occurrence in 1942 that the clerks at NSW Echelon and Records had a stamp made.
On 26 March 1943, another stamp. Prisoner of War – with a handwritten postscript Borneo.
And then, beneath a red pencilled line drawn with the accuracy of a bookkeeper recording the month’s profit and loss:
30 September 1945. Deceased whilst P/W Sandakan 31 March 1945
In his valiant search for the way of truth
There are few who understand
During the forced marches, the men have few choices; walk, die or flee into the jungle.
But even here, there are pinpoints of light.
Tiny acts of courage and humanity that survive through our telling.
Near Paginatan, six men decided to attempt escape. They encountered a young local girl named Domima who was 12 years old. She told her father of finding the men, and he instructed her to feed them.
For six days, three times a day, she left rice and fish in the same place.
On the seventh day, she found in the usual place a can.
And in that can, six gold wedding bands.
With nothing else to give in thanks, these honourable men left what little payment they had.
We don’t know who they were or what became of them.
But we know they were loved.
And today, we tell their story.
Some might ask if it’s possible to die with dignity when your broken body finally gives up and you lie down on the side of a jungle track knowing your fate.
That you will surely die, muddied, bloodied and starved and your body will not be laid to rest by those who love you.
Today, we declare those tortured Australian and British men are our heroes.
There are very few left now who knew these men personally.
So it is our job to know their story and mourn for who they could have been.
We are here today to remember them.
To utter the name Sandakan.
And to say never again.
Lest we forget.