By RUSSELL BENNETT
WHEN Thomas Walker enlisted to fight for King and Country, he was a country boy with a head full of dreams. Within months he was yet another corpse in an unmarked grave near Gallipoli.
On 8 May, 1915 – at the age of 20 and with his whole life in front of him – he was killed in a hail of machine-gun bullets at the second battle of Krithia; a little-known sideshow to Gallipoli’s main act.
Almost 100 years later, Thomas will be remembered as one of the Emerald area’s 32 fallen First World War Diggers as Governor-General Peter Cosgrove today (Wednesday) officially opens the town’s Anzac Walk project.
Emerald RSL president Peter Maloney said the event would be one of the biggest and most important the town had ever seen.
“Today is all about the 32,” he added.
“After the Great War broke out in 1914, 100 young men from this township went off to serve their country; 32 never returned.
“Our vision has been to replace our Heroes Avenue, which was originally built in 1921 to honour the lives of those young men.
“Their names are etched forever on the plaques you can visit on Anzac Walk (and) this has been 18 months in the planning, with military precision it could be said.”
A Macclesfield resident, Thomas Walker enlisted on 17 August, 1914 – standing up to serve King and country as part of the 6th Battalion AIF. But Private Walker was killed in action at Cape Helles less than a year later.
In early May 1915, the Victorians of the 2nd Brigade (the 5th to 8th Battalions) and the New Zealand Infantry Brigade were brought from Anzac Cove to Helles to form part of an attempted British advance towards Krithia and the neighbouring hill of Achi Baba. For both Australia and New Zealand, the action – officially known as the Second Battle of Krithia – produced a catastrophic loss of life.
“The heavily loaded brigade,” wrote former Australian journalist and historian Charles Bean, “hurried straight on, heads down, as if into fierce rain, some men holding their shovels before their faces like umbrellas in a thunderstorm”. More than 1000 Australians were killed or wounded in the attack.
Thomas was left without a father at just 10 years of age; while Thomas’s mother, Katie, was struck and killed by a Bourke Street tram in September 1915, just four months after he died at war.
Thomas’s sister Agnes O’Neill mourned his loss until she died in 1974, aged 94. But Thomas’s story and photos have been preserved by the family since, including Agnes’s great, great grandson David Nickell – the president of the Gembrook Township Committee.
David’s parents recently visited the unmarked mass grave of Thomas and so many other soldiers of his battalion, and David will take his own sons there too when they’re old enough.
“It’s been really good over the past several years that we’ve found out about his story and what happened to him,” David said.
“We’ve had a couple of trips up to Canberra where we’ve had the opportunity with our boys to put a poppy on the wall in the National War Memorial.
“He was just a young man and he came from where we live – just a quiet little country town – and got caught up in that first wave of volunteers who signed up ‘for King and Country’ and never came back; never got to grow up; and never got to have a family.
“It’s an important story about the cost of war, and also an important lesson of what the consequences can be when getting caught up in something so much bigger than yourself.
“The second battle of Krithia was just a complete waste of Allied life … It was just a several kilometre walk in broad daylight into machine-guns. They just got up and did it and they paid for it with their lives
“Often we go out past Macclesfield and think ‘he was growing up here, just a country kid dreaming big dreams like everyone else’. The first chance he got to be part of something bigger than himself, he was in.
“But they were caught up in something that was just futile and 100 years later almost irrelevant. It wasn’t a battle against evil. It wasn’t a battle for self-preservation. It was just big empires squaring off against each other and a bloke who grew up in Macclesfield was just a very little piece of that. He was expendable, along with all his mates.”
