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ANZAC II: Walers and a ‘Chloe’ sequel OPUS LXXVI
I had an ANZAC Day experience this year in my efforts to get a photograph of Chloe used in the previous issue of Surgical News. I even asked one of the servicemen to walk by the portrait so discretion would obtain. The ANZAC spirit still pervaded the first-floor bar and I was even offered a beer by a stranger (did I look like one of the old brigades?).
Incidentally, John Hanrahan, a former president of the College in the 90s, when hearing of this article would enlighten me that it was an ANZAC dentist who was the first man to set foot in Damascus. Thanks to this tip I discovered an article in the Sydney Morning Herald that the person was lieutenant-colonel Olden, who hailed from Ballarat.
How does the word Waler come into this title? My habit of asking every patient in this medico-legal phase of my career their occupation—‘I am a Waler’ surfaced once and my mind went straight to the 1850s novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville, about the albino whale and Captain Ahab who went hunting for the big white brute, the size of his sailing ship.
Most of the Walers had to be left behind as the cost of transport and quarantine precluded their return to Australia. Some ended up with the British forces in Egypt and India.
Walers were the brumby horses from western New South Wales, the breed favoured by the Australian Light Horse Regiment in WWI. They would have been part of that contingent of 120,000 horses sent to the Arabian Peninsula. These Walers had stamina, endurance and could work all day, ‘even without a drop to drink’. Their characteristic resilience in the desert was the hallmark of their success.
Some of the soldiers in WWI could not handle the thought of losing their best friend in a foreign land and had to resort to euthanasia—one of the saddest days in their lives they said. Being killed in a war is incidental because that is where the story stops. Major Bridges had a horse, Sandy, and was the only Waler to return to Australia. A sculpture of the horse’s head, acknowledging the Walers, is on display at the Australian War Memorial.
The Shrine of Remembrance – Melbourne
Actual Beersheba image
In the Battle of Beersheba, these characteristics were their saving grace—carrying heavy weapons, guns and ammunition, and military supplies, weaving their way in and out of the Turkish trenches, eventually capturing the regiment, then arriving at Damascus on the way to Jerusalem. Later that day Lawrence of Arabia in his Rolls Royce (illustrated) claimed it as a British victory.
Here is another ANZAC recollection piece from the Shrine of Remembrance in St Kilda Road. The building was designed by architects Philip Hudson and James Wardrop in the classical style of the mausoleum tomb of Halicarnassus and the Parthenon. Etched in marble there are the words ‘Greater Love Hath no Man’ (John 15:13). Every year on 11 November at 11am (Remembrance Day), a ray of sunlight is designed to shine through an aperture in the roof to highlight the word Love.
The sanctuary in the Shrine of Rememberance
Lodge Bros, the construction engineers and their foreman of works—a returned veteran—was my patient at The Western Hospital, suffering from multiple skin cancers. After umpteen admissions he was grateful for the work done by the plastic and reconstructive team, so much so that one day on the ward round he offered me a little token of gratitude. “Felix, I have a present for you,” he said. “You can have my marquette of the Shrine.” A marquette is a miniature replica of a major construction. Not to seem too intrusive in accepting such a gift and being a little tardy in following up this gesture, the family overruled the patient’s wishes and I lost out. I had intended to give it to the College as a memento for the likes of Weary Dunlop and Bertie Coates for their wartime contribution. Even Bertie Coates later said, “memories of times past are our most treasured possessions,” as I keep trying to recall. Now let us dive back to T.E. Lawrence and his Welsh background. Historically, a life story emerged recently on one of those David Portillo train excursions into Wales on SBS Great British Rail Journeys. Lawrence was the unplanned son of Sir Thomas Chapman, an Anglo-Irish baronet, and his housemaid—born at Snowden Lodge in Wales.
