Luke Gosling (Solomon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I second the motion. I thank the member for Herbert for that fantastic speech. She has the great honour, as she has just articulated, of being in Townsville, where the 1st and 3rd battalions are both homed. It would have been fantastic to be part of those 50th anniversary commemorations. The battles of fire support bases Coral and Balmoral during the Vietnam War were a very big deal, and it's fitting that this year, being their 50th anniversary, we look back to when those two battalions of the Royal Australian Regiment and attachments were deployed forward as the 1st Australian Task Force to just north of Bien Hoa city. In May and June 1968 there were a series of incredibly fierce and costly battles that claimed the lives of 26 Anzacs, with up to 100 wounded, and an estimated 300 North Vietnamese combatants killed during that period of fighting. There's a long list of the attachments to the battalions as part of the task force, and I acknowledge everyone who was there as part of those battles.

On 13 May 2018, the Minister for Veterans' Affairs announced that the Governor-General, himself a former commanding officer of the 1st Battalion, was awarding the unit citation for gallantry to the 1st Australian Task Force forward group and everyone associated in that battle. That announcement has been long awaited and much anticipated. In fact, on 13 May, the 50th anniversary of the commencement of fighting, which was also Mother's Day here, that the commanding officer of the 3rd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment during the battle, Brigadier Jeffery James 'JJ' Shelton DSO, MC, passed away while watching the ceremony from his hospital bed. Jim Shelton had been unwell for some time, but he closed his eyes and passed away peacefully, knowing that his old battalion had been recognised for its gallantry in that battle. It is extraordinary.

Brigadier Shelton was the commanding officer, but battles are fought by soldiers, and one of Jim's soldiers was Brian Cleaver, a nasho who had been reinforced to the 3rd Battalion. On 26 May, 20-year-old Brian Cleaver, just living his life in Australia, got caught up in the ballot, as my father did, and headed over to Vietnam to serve his country. At the Battle of Coral-Balmoral, this young 20-year-old Australian was in the thick of it. He described the battle as numbing. It was either kill or be killed. The fighting was so intense that the machine-gun barrels ran red-hot through the night and the Aussie diggers were forced to urinate on the machine guns to cool them down because they were under such fierce attack. When the smoke cleared in the dawn light, in front of Brian Cleaver's pit and with him and around him four of his mates lay dead, and 42 North Vietnamese soldiers lay dead in front of their pits. These young Vietnamese men were bulldozed into a mass grave in a large bomb crater. Brian Cleaver, all this time later, suffering from post-traumatic stress from his experience as a young man in Vietnam, went back to try and find those men buried in that mass grave, because he knew that the strong tradition of the Vietnamese is to find the remains and bring them home to be buried properly. So I just want to acknowledge Brian and his work, which has been captured by the award-winning Australian filmmaker David Bradbury. I want to acknowledge all those who serve our country, and I hope that we as a parliament can recommit to always making sure that we support our veterans.

Debate adjourned.

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