Julian Leeser (Berowra, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yesterday marked the 75th anniversary of the fall of Singapore in 1942. The fall of Singapore was one of the worst military defeats in the history of the British Empire. Singapore was meant to be an impregnable fortress: surrounded by forests and the jungle to the north, with British Royal Navy patrolled oceans to the south and defended by Australian, Indian and British troops. Despite the fortification, Singapore was captured by Japanese forces only a week after the initial assault began, with 80,000 troops taken as prisoners of war, including 15,000 Australians.

My grandfather, Sam Goldman, served in the 2/26th Battalion of that ill-fated 8th Division that was there at the fall of Singapore. After the fall he was taken prisoner in Changi and kept in brutal conditions, forced to survive on a cup of rice a day. He talked of being starved and trying to work while watching his mates die all around him. He survived the horrors of the Burma railway, where the Japanese guards would beat prisoners to death, leaving them to die. If their mates tried to help them, they too would be beaten. Disease was rife, malaria was bad and cholera was worse.

My grandfather told his children the story of holding a mate who had developed gangrene while the doctor sawed off his leg, and the image of that occasion never left him. My grandfather was badly burnt by a guard who threw a pot of boiling water over his legs. He spent days lying on a hard stone floor in the makeshift hospital, and when he could get up he virtually had to teach himself to walk again. The burns were so bad on his legs that he was scarred for life, and the hair on them never grew back.

The Japanese were absolutely brutal, and they were just as brutal to the local Singaporean Chinese population as they were to the Allies. The Chinese were a completely different story. They would often smuggle food and other supplies to the prisoners. But the Japanese always took revenge on them. Once my grandfather was marched into a village and saw that Chinese men had been executed, with their heads placed on spikes to demonstrate to the local population not to fight the Japanese.

In the years following World War II the Germans have done a very good job educating the next generations about the atrocities committed by Germany during the war. It is of grave concern to me that I do not think that Japanese children know enough about the atrocities that were committed by the Japanese during the war, and I believe this should be a matter that should be taken up as part of our general foreign relations.

The men that survived did so because they could dream of a life beyond captivity. For my grandfather it was the prospect of opening a hardware store—a store which he planned out so well over the years of captivity. He successfully did that, opening what was at one point the largest hardware store in the southern hemisphere at Merrylands. He employed many of his fellow former POWs too.

Yesterday, in mentioning the fall of Singapore, the Prime Minister noted that the late Sir Alexander Downer and the late Tom Uren were there at the fall of Singapore. I would like very briefly just to mention one other former parliamentarian, Sir John Carrick, who is still very much with us. He was not there at the fall of Singapore but was in Changi and on the Burma railway. Lest we forget the sacrifice of the men and women who were taken prisoner.