25 April p 2016
A Star News Group Publication
Covering Endeavour Hills,, Doveton & Hallam
Property liftout
We remember - ANZAC DAY 2016 PAGES 11-14 & 39
IN SI DE -O UT SI DE LIF ES TY LE
Monday, 25 April 2016
PAGE 2
INSIDE
■ Old soldier says army career was a blast...
Bob shakes it up By CAM LUCADOU-WELLS DON’T call Bob Walker a tin-rattler. As the 80-year-old DandenongCranbourne RSL member said, he doesn’t need to shake a can to sell badges and poppies for the Anzac Appeal. Ask him about his story as he sits in his regular spot outside Doveton’s Autumn Place shops. It doesn’t take long to realise this Hallam knockabout has been a witness to notable history. Maralinga 1957. Mr Walker was a fresh-faced army recruit, who had just watched the Melbourne Olympics on a CBD cafe’s black-and-white TV screen. The crackling display was about the size of a modern day mobile phone, he adds with a laugh. Maralinga was the scene of British atomic-bomb testing at the time. Mr Walker saw four bombs go off from outside the eight-mile exclusion zone. “You can’t look at it because the flash will blind you. “After the initial blast, you turn around and just see this massive black cloud grow. “The mushroom cloud ... It goes up and up and up. You are amazed at it.” There was only one time when Mr Walker felt shockwaves from these tremendous explosions. He believes the jolt that rippled through his body had bounced off clouds. The resulting Royal Commission into testing heard a lot of stories that were “bulldust” he said. The claim that intellectually disabled people used as test dummies just didn’t happen he said. The safety systems in place were “unbelievable”, though Mr Walker wasn’t sure if the radiation-gauge badges actually worked. In 1957, Mr Walker was flown out to the Malayan Emergency – a 12-year guerrilla war in Malaysia.
A worldly Bob Walker has many tales to tell. 152844 He arrived in time to be part of a ceremonial guard during the declaration of Malaysia’s independence from the Brits. It was the longest military conflict Australia had been involved with before Afghanistan. Yet no one here knew about it because it was never declared a war, Mr Walker said. Lords in London instead described the conflict as an emergency, to ensure insurers still paid out on rubber plantations and tin mines targeted by
Picture: GARY SISSONS
terrorists, he believes. His time at Puckapunyal army base from 1960 seemed to be more mundane. Memories of being “young and single and all the rest of it” as well as painting a lot of stones on hard ground with white paint. “We had a saying: if it stays still, paint it.” More than 50 years on, Mr Walker sits patiently in the elements to collect for the RSL appeal. Most of his contemporaries prefer
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to work inside the shopping centres. “I can’t do a lot of physical work but at least I can help out by selling a few badges.” It’s a charity that helps young and old veterans out in hard times - 100 per cent of donations go to those who need them, Mr Walker points out. Most passers-by who stop are supportive. The odd person might rebuke Mr Walker, like a woman who told him she didn’t believe in supporting war. “I said to her who doesn’t! It’s not to
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