FEATURE - Remembering Thomas John Wark
Neil Wark shares memories of his great-uncle, sheep shearer Tom, and his tragic death when the Rakuyo Maru was torpedoed by a US submarine.
By Louise Tasker
In 1944, in rural New South Wales, the Wark Family and the Ross Family each received a telegram just three weeks apart from the Australian War Office telling them their sons had been killed in action.
These two families had joined together when Niel Wark’s grandfather Joe and his grandmother Queenie had married.
Allan Ross, the 21-year-old RAF pilot shot down over Romania with four even younger crew men, was Queenie Wark’s (nee Ross) younger brother. For the rest of her life, his photo sat proudly, though lonely, upon the mantlepiece in the best room in their humble worker’s cottage.
Thomas John Wark was a 30-year-old sheep shearer when he signed up with the Australian Infantry Force in 1941.
He died just short of his 34th birthday, drowned at sea when a US submarine torpedoed the Rakuyo Maru, a Japanese ship carrying surviving labourers of the infamous Burma-Thai Railway to Japan.
Niel says, “I have always been interested in knowing what it was like to be Tom, doing what he was doing, living his life of sheep shearing in rural New South Wales and then being thrust into a long and hard war in parts of the world he’d only ever heard about.
“Tom worked alongside his brother, my grandfather, Joe. They lived on a very humble property called Nardoo in Coonabarabran, country NSW. It was a tough life.”
I ask what Tom was like as a person.
Niel says, “I think he was considered to be softer or more gentle than my grandfather. He was just a knockabout bloke. They built a tennis court on their parents’ property to host a group of sisters who lived next door. One of these girls, Queenie, became my grandmother.
“Tennis was a huge part of their social lives. They would all go around the district on Sundays playing tennis. The family story goes that he was attracted to my grandmother but somehow his brother won the day.”
Niel thinks the idea of adventure is the reason he joined up. “When Tom went to Singapore, he sent his mother photos of what he was seeing there. My father put great stead in these.
“When he joined the AIF he was posted to the 2/19th infantry battalion. After training in NSW, they were deployed to Singapore. From here they were sent to Malaya and when the Japanese invaded, they fought a very hard campaign of retreat all the way down the peninsula back into Singapore.
“The Australians felt the full brunt of the Japanese land force invasion before Singapore fell and Tom was captured along with so many others.
“There’s a studio photo of Tom with three other men. At least two of them, Kym Stewart and Keith Gough, were killed during that fighting. So, by the time he is captured, he has suffered huge personal loss and hardship.
“Tom then became a POW forced to work on the Burma-Thailand Railway. He was put on to the A Force working party, led by Lieutenant Colonel Anderson, which started building the railway from the northern end in Burma.”
Niel made contact with an ex-soldier in the 2/19th named Bob Farrands. He remembered Tom very well.
“He described Tom as being ‘a very good soldier’ and that he was ‘what you would call a loner, a shy bush bloke, sandish-reddish hair with very fair skin. The tropical sun was not kind to him and he suffered a lot with prickly heat when we first arrived in Malaya’.”
Niel also had contact with Don Wall, who wrote a book about the sinking of the Rakuyo Maru, and he wrote back that he knew Tom well.
“Don and Tom jumped into the water together, when the Rayuyo Maru was torpedoed, but he did not see him again after that.
“The irony of having been through so much and then being on a ship that was sunk by a US submarine. There were no signs on the ship to say it carried POWs. This knowledge has always moved me.
“Both families got caught up in the bureaucracy of the Army. There was some compensation paid to ex POWs or their families. It was all cold advice. No chaplain came to the door. You would just receive these letters.”
I ask Niel if he could talk to him today, what would he ask him.
“I guess I’m intrigued as to what kept them going in the depths of the Burma Thai Railway. Hundreds of thousands of local people, Burmese and Thai, also died during the building phases. There was such inhumanity, such coldness, terror, fear that all these people experienced for weeks and years.”
Niel says, “He lived a life for 33 years and then he left the country to fight on unknown lands – he left behind no wife, no children. So, when he died that was it – there was nothing to go forward with. It all ended in that ocean. But I’d like people to know something about him. He wasn’t just a man who drowned at sea on a particular day.
“I wanted to try to tell the human story of someone who fought hard, lost mates alongside him in heavy fighting in Malaya. The whole story of the capture of Singapore is heartbreaking. And then having survived the railway torture, they were packed into trains and sent to a ship that got torpedoed! To drown at the end of it. It’s mind bogglingly sad, isn’t it?”
Niel says, “One of the highlights of my career was being the Navy contingent guard commander for the funeral of the Unknown Soldier that took place at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra in 1993.”
Now, the Last Post Ceremony is held at 4.30pm every day to commemorate a person whose name is on the Roll of Honour - soldier, airman, sailor, nurse by reading out their biography. In doing this we remember someone who died on that day. In this way, their stories are told because they can no longer tell them themselves. In that sense, they are all unknown soldiers.
We have lost so many of their stories, but the stories we can recover are all we have to ensure their sacrifice is not forgotten.
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