There are always sequels to the stories of our soldiers killed at Gallipoli, as there are for the many who died on the Western Front. And so there are postscripts to my story of Tasmanian Sergeant Horace Francis Donald, a Gallipoli victim on August 7, 1915.
His Launceston mother, Annie Donald, had his letters returned to her in 1916 and if they brought some solace at the loss of her son something else in his personal effects didn’t. Enclosed was a photo which had no name on it but which the military authorities thought was of Sergeant Donald. But it wasn’t. The mother sent it back, saying that she hoped it might get to the right family. It is not recorded if it did.
I don’t know if other Australian returnees from the failed Paraguay ‘New Australia’ colony served in the war, but some Australians who stayed behind in Paraguay did, and it was the experience of one recounted in Anne Whitehead’s Paradise Mislaid that makes an interesting postscript. Three brothers, Bill, Alex and Norman Wood, served with the British Army in the war even though Paraguay did not enter the conflict.
Bill Wood joined the Royal Engineers, 10th Irish Division, was trained as a signaller and in August, 1915, went to Gallipoli as part of the British divisions that landed at Suvla Bay. He gave a vivid account of his experiences under fire, including being sent to reinforce the Australian Infantry Force. His role was to maintain and repair lines of communication between headquarters and the trenches: “It did not matter if there was an attack in progress and people were getting their heads blown off, if the line got cut you had to follow it along till you found the break and repaired it.”
He remembered being under fire every day he was there. Anne Whitehead wrote that Bill Wood considered it a miracle he wasn’t wounded and the extent of the slaughter came home to him when he saw a stack of rifles: “There must have been a couple of thousand, nearly two metres high and about seven metres long.” They had belonged to soldiers killed in action.
There is another footnote to the ‘New Australia’ story, about the Australian-built ship, the Royal Tar, that had transported the colonists. It was later sold and used to freight kauri timber from New Zealand to Melbourne. But on November 26, 1901, en route from Auckland to Kaipara, it was wrecked in the Hauraki Gulf after hitting a rock – which was named Shearer Rock (an interesting coincidence considering the establishment of the ‘New Australia’ colony had arisen, in part, from the 1891 Queensland shearers’ strike). The ship’s mate was lost.
The Royal Tar’s end was in waters associated with Tiritiri Matangi Island, which happens to be the home of New Zealand’s living stone age fossil, the tuatara lizard. In summary: ‘New Australia’ failed, her men died in the war, their ship was lost, but the lizard lived on.
