Uncle Stuart

Australian Stuart Harold White was a 20-year-old dairyman from Armadale, Victoria, when he volunteered on 14th June 1940, landing at Singapore 6 months before its catastrophic fall.

Held initially at Changi, now a huge unsanitary POW camp, Stuart was repeatedly hospitalised with ‘effort syndrome’ or ‘soldier’s heart’, a form of shellshock.

But a force of 1500 Australians was soon demanded, to be sent to an unknown destination to build an airstrip for the Japanese.

Surely this had to be better than Changi.

So, on 8th July 1942, Stuart embarked on a hell-ship, bound for Borneo and to the camp at Sandakan.

In April 1943, Stuart’s sisters and their Mum & Dad back home in Toorak, would receive a telegram to the effect that their Missing boy was alive, but POW on Borneo.

No one knew it, but this was already a death sentence. Only six of the 2500 men held at Sandakan would survive the War, all escapees.

Stuart, like all the Sandakan POWs, like my own cousins Alec and Bert, waited and hoped and endured, kept each other going, through all the setbacks, all the arbitrary beatings, all the petty humiliations, every reduction in rice rations until, by the turn of 1944-45 there was no food at all.

Red Cross parcels were plundered and stockpiled by their captors; nothing ever reached the POWs.

Somehow surviving another day became their only form of resistance.

I am sure thoughts of Australia, and his beloved sisters, gave him strength.

When the Japanese finally surrendered in August 1945, the White family must have been wild with joy at the thought that they would see Stuart again.

But on Halloween 1945, they received the telegram which put an end to all their hopes.

He had died at Sandakan on 6th February.

Buried now as one of the Unknowns at Labuan, this is where five members of his family - his sisters’ girls - came to find him on a pilgrimage for Anzac Day a couple of years ago, bringing with them 80 years of love and grief to lay at the lost brother’s feet.

So this week, ready for Anzac Day on Saturday, this is for you, Uncle Stuart; though all else was lost, the immense love of your family keeps the home fires burning, always.