Vietnam veteran Gware Green does not look forward to Anzac Day.
“It brings back all the bad memories, all of your friends that didn’t come back in one piece,” he says.
Green was one of 11 schoolmates from Gilgandra who served in Vietnam. Only 10 came back.
Green’s close friend Michael Noonan was 21 when he died. He and Green were in the same battalion, but served in different companies. “I was almost alongside of him but didn’t know until two days later.”
Green didn’t return to Gilgandra until 10 years after the war because “it was very hard to front Michael’s mother”.
Green says there was no formal therapy when he returned from service, so he and his fellow returned servicemen started making beer stubbies as their own form of treatment.
While Green was serving in Vietnam, he also became an unwitting foreign correspondent for the local community. He only discovered his “reporting” role when a chopper arrived middle of the jungle to take him to the army commander.
The commander gave him a dressing down because Green’s father had been publishing his son’s letters home in the local paper, to inform the community about what was happening in the war.
On Monday Green stood at the front of the dawn service in Armatree, a western NSW town of 150. He was joined by an Afghanistan veteran as well as those who still farm the land their fathers and grandfathers were given as solider settler blocks.
Barry Malone, who led the service, acknowledged the suffering in Ukraine. He urged the gathering of approximately 150 to “spare a thought to the people in Ukraine losing their freedom and losing absolutely everything”.
Ted Charnley, Garry Fordham, and Malone still farm the land their fathers received on the Bullagreen settlement west of Armatree after serving in second world war.
Fordham and Charnley’s fathers weren’t farmers before the war but Fordham says “they were all used to hard work, doing dirty work, doing any kind of work.” Malone’s father was a farmer.
“Some soldier settlers that came here that had never had anything to do with agriculture … the expression square peg in a round hole. They never lasted. They just didn’t take to it,” Malone says.
After they drew the blocks in 1951, a big fire swept through on 15 November, just as they were all starting to move on to the land.
Fordham’s family survived after his father backed the truck into the dam and covered the family with a tarpaulin while the fire went through.
As a result, the families began with nothing.
“I mean nothing. The fencing was burnt, the water troughs had been burnt,” Fordham says.
He says the soldier settlers had to build their own houses, fence them, and do their farming all with no modern machinery like forklifts and front-end loaders. “Everything done by hand.”
Although the men’s fathers served in different countries, Charnley says their overseas service was a common bond. They formed the local RSL and built a community hall.
Yet Fordham says: “All of us say the same. Our fathers did not talk about the war. My father never brought it up.”
Local historian Robyn Walton says the solider settler population came largely from outside the area and provided “a large injection into the community.” She often thinks about their conditions.
“You see the soldiers come home today and they have so many problems – those soldiers back then they would have had the same problems but nobody understood, and nobody to help them,” she said.
Walton said the second world war soldier settlers in Armatree included men who had been imprisoned and working on the infamous Burma Railway.
Tim Altmann was the most recently returned serviceman at Armatree’s dawn service. He was discharged last year after nine years in the defence force, including eight months service in Afghanistan.
Altmann says the mental health of returned soldiers is “a very big issue” with more help becoming available each year.
“If anything did come up, you’ve always had your mates around you that you served with and your chain of command higher up are pretty on to it.”
However, he says for returned servicemen like himself in regional Australia, there is less access to others who have served or the professional services themselves.
“For rural people out here, you’re that bit further away from the help and you’re very limited to servicemen that are out here. That sort of branch of help and resources is sort of that little bit further away, which is one thing I think they need to invest in more.”
In Australia, support and counselling for veterans and their families is available 24 hours a day from Open Arms on 1800 011 046 or www.openarms.gov.au and Safe Zone Support on 1800 142 072 or www.openarms.gov.au/safe-zone-support
