Courage carved in stone

By Peter Johnson

COURAGE, determination and the Australian spirit have been enshrined in the Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial in the Victorian city of Ballarat.

The 130m-long polished black granite memorial wall bears 35,000 names, every one of them a story of bravery in the face of captivity by the enemy.

The memorial, in the Ballarat Botanical Gardens, was dedicated on February 6 in the presence of 10,000 people, including an estimated 900 former POWs.

Both the Governor General, Major General Michael Jeffery, and the Chief of the Defence Force, General Peter Cosgrove, spoke of how Australian prisoners maintained their mateship and humour in adversity.

MAJGEN Jeffery described the Australian spirit as irrepressible. GEN Cosgrove said, “The ones who returned didn’t allow their captivity to go unnoticed, they refused to let the dead be forgotten.”

The memorial is the fi rst time a comprehensive list of Australian POWs from the Boer War, both World Wars, and Korea has been compiled.

National President of the Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Association Fred Hodel, a Burma-Thailand railway POW, thanked everyone associated with establishing the memorial.

The Ex-PoW Memorial Committee worked for more than six years to bring the memorial into being. Of the 35,000 Australians who became POWs in con- flicts last century, more than 8000 died, most of them at the hands of the Japanese during WWII.

Standing at the centre of the memorial are six large basalt obelisks etched with the names of all countries where Australians have been held prisoner of war.

PC-9 aircraft from Central Flying School provided a “missing man” flypast during the dedication.

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