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AGE has wearied their bodies more than they might like to admit, but some of Forster Tuncurry’s surviving World War II ex-servicemen are fighting fit in mind and spirit.
Kemble Thompson, Bruce Wright and Max Wright – all aged in their 90s – won’t be marching in Friday’s Anzac Day parade, but each of them will likely raise a solemn glass or two to the memory of departed comrades, and spend some time reflecting on the past.
The wartime experiences of the three men, and others, will feature in an online interactive audio-visual presentation being developed by the Great Lakes Historical Society and Museum at Tuncurry, ahead of next year’s centenary of the Anzac’s World War I landing at Gallipoli.
A war theme is being included in the clickHistory Great Lakes project, which is a joint venture between the Great Lakes Museum and the Great Lakes Library, funded with a grant from the NSW State Library, to create a catalogued, multi-media database of local history.
An enthusiastic team of volunteers is working on the project, spending hours identifying, researching and digitising the museum’s ever-expanding photographic archive.
Great Lakes Historical Society president Alan Wright said it was hoped that at least 1500 of the more than 8000 images in the museum’s photographic archive would be digitised and uploaded onto the clickHistory Great Lakes website before the end of August.
Mr Wright said hundreds of men and women from the Great Lakes area served in both World Wars, the Korean and Vietnam wars, and each conflict had imposed a legacy on local history.
“We think it’s important to record the area’s wartime contribution as part of the clickHistory Great Lakes project,” Mr Wright said.
The museum already had a collection of photographic portraits of military servicemen and women, and was keen to add to the collection, he said.
In addition, the museum is conducting oral history recordings with ex-service personnel who live in the area, and who are willing to talk about their wartime experiences.
Kemble Thompson of Forster spent three-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war at Changi and on the Burma-Thailand railway. Bruce Wright, of Tuncurry, was an RAAF transport driver and was in Darwin during the Japanese bombing, in Moratai when battle raged there, and also in New Guinea and the Philippines. Max Wright, also of Tuncurry, was a medic on the hospital ship Manunda, and arrived in Hiroshima just weeks after the atomic bombing to help bring home allied POWs.
All three men are engaging story-tellers and their compelling tales of the horrors, sorrows and even the humorous side of war range the scale of human emotions.
Excerpts from their digitally-recorded oral histories will be available for members of the public to listen to online as part of the Anzac theme on the clickHistory Great Lakes data base when it is launched later this year.