Relevance of Anzac Day hits home again

ONE hundred and eight years on from the first Anzac Day and with the very last of our World War 2 diggers into their late 90s, you might wonder at the relevance of Anzac Day, and all the ceremony and solemnity that goes with it.

But the impact of war was brought home, right home to us again last Saturday when the Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced that the Prisoner of War transport ship, Japan’s Montevideo Maru, had been found in 4000 metres of water off the coast of the Philippines, having been mistakenly torpedoed by the American submarine USS Sturgeon, on July 1, 1942.

The ship hadn’t identified itself, as it was required to do, as a POW vessel.

With the loss of 1060 prisoners from 16 countries, including 850 Australian service members captured in Rabaul, it is considered Australia’s worst maritime disaster.

Just imagine the impact, back in 1942, when family and friends in a town the size of Leongatha, and the even smaller town of Yarram, were advised that six each of their number had been killed in such harrowing circumstances.

Leongatha historian Lyn Skillern notes in her records that Katie Ketels of Leongatha waited her whole life for son Fred to return, unconvinced he was alive or dead.

This week, grandson of Tom Sangster (senior), Frank Welsford, said his mother Thelma and uncle Kevin, who died only a few years ago, would have liked to know the exact location of their father’s resting place.

Others like the extended Howard family of Leongatha, remember uncle Jack, the former captain/coach of Leongatha’s 1940 premiership team, who also died in those tragic circumstances.

And these men weren’t serving on some far-flung foreign shores. They were fighting to defend the former Australian territory of New Guinea, being captured just days before the Japanese launched ‘Australia’s Pearl Harbour’ on February 19, 1942, the first ‘Bombing of Darwin’.

It was a terrible tragedy then, and still resonates today when you think about the loss suffered by wives, sons, daughters and friends.

It’s why we still say, at the going down of the sun and in the morning… we will remember them!