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Your Award Winning Seniors’ Newspaper - Written for Seniors by Seniors Vol 12 - Issue No. 3
APRIL 2015
1300 880 265
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100 horses, 100 riders mark Anzac Day Centenary Parade By JIM BOWDEN COORPAROO will be among the 251 listed RSL clubs in Queensland preparing their biggest Anzac Day commemorative services and parades on Saturday, April 25, which marks 100 years since the landing on Gallipoli peninsula in 1915. “This is the big one with some real surprises in store for Brisbane citizens this year,” said Coorparoo RSL president and Vietnam veteran Neville Veal. He said he believed 100 horses and riders would get the inner-city Anzac Day centenary parade under way. • Mr Veal (second from left) is pictured with Lisa Prior, a member of the club’s Anzac Day committee, and Joan Polson and Tony Stokes, both Word War 2 veterans. They are holding a framed photo of soldiers of the 11th Battalion posing on the Great Pyramid of Giza on January 10, 1915, prior to landing at Gallipoli. Joan, a spry 93-year-old, and Tony, 89, both from Carina, will lay a wreath in a special Anzac Day service at the club. Neville Veal said Coorparoo RSL’s own Anzac Day parade this year would feature a riderless horse with boots reversed in the stirrups and led by a soldier to reflect the loss of the many lives of men and women at Gallipoli. Raised on an orchard at Gayndah, Joan Polson was a nursing orderly with the Royal Australian Airforce. She joined up in 1939 and spent most of the war serving in North Queensland. Tony Stokes, a life member of the Queensland Southeastern District RSL and president from 1988 to 1993, was on Biak Island off the western coast of New Guinea in 1944, stationed with the 111 Mobile Fighter Patrol Unit, a RAAF radar surveillance and air defence division. The island was held by 11,000 Japanese troops. Tony also served with the radar unit in Morotai, one of Indonesia’s northernmost islands, which was eventually taken by the Allies as a much-needed base to support the liberation of the Philippines. Continued on Page 2