Extracts from
Laurie Cheeseman's Memoirs

Page 7

Laurie's company commander was Major William Dudley Duncan Refshauge (1913-2009), a medical practitioner, career soldier and (later) public health administrator, who was born at Ballarat and educated at Scotch College and the University of Melbourne. He was mentioned in despatches four times and was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1944. As mentioned in Laurie's memoir, while in Syria Refshauge took charge of a hospital where he treated the local sex workers for sexually transmitted diseases as a measure to control the incidence of disease amongst the soldiers stationed there. He and his spouse, Helen Allwright, had five children, one of whom, Andrew Refshauge, served as deputy premier of NSW from 1995 to 2005. Another son, Richard Refshauge, is a judge of the ACT Supreme Court. Their only daughter, Kathryn Refshauge, is Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences and Professor of Physiotherapy at the University of Sydney. As Laurie also alludes to, the division had arrived in Syria on the onset of a bitterly cold winter which saw heavy snow falls, the first that many troops, including Laurie, had seen.

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Baalbeck north of Damascus in Syria. On the back Laurie has written: '17th Infantry Brigade took up positions in these hills as 2nd line
of defence against possible invasion of the Middle East after Crete'. A snow fight in Baalbeck during the winter of 1941-42.

The feared German attack through Lebanon never eventuated but much was happening elsewhere most of it of growing concern to Laurie and his colleagues in Baalbeck. Pearl Harbour was attacked by Japanese aircraft on 7 November 1941. As the troops of the 17th Brigade were coping with the snows of Syria, their compatriots in the Malayan jungles were attempting to stem the southward advance of the Japanese Imperial Army. They were let down by their generals who surrendered at Singapore on 15 February 1942 and committed the British and allied forces there to the purgatory of Japan's prisoner of war camps at Changi and elsewhere. In January 1942 it was decided the 6th Division should be brought back to Australia to help defend the country against the prospect of a Japanese invasion. The 19th Brigade went first first (and subsequently arrived at Fremantle on 10 March) followed by the 16th and 17th Brigades.

The troops disembarked at Columbo on the 24th of March and 'were taken around the south coast to camp at a palce called Bassa, morale was pretty low as we got news of the Japanese overrunning everything with ease, and here we were stuck halfway home and the Japanese heading towards Australia'. As the monsoon season began B Company was directed to establish an advanced dressing station in the jungle near the town of Galle. Laurie and his colleagues spent the next few months 'clearing jungle, digging pits, etc while the nursing orderlies looked after about twenty patients . . . the jungle was crawling with centipedes and the like and occasionally we would see a cobra, and all the time the rain came down in bucketfuls . . . we considered we were wasting time on the island now and were all pretty unhappy . . . [on leave] in Columbo we met quite a few civilians who had been evacuated from Singapore and seemed to be of the opinion that there had been too many cocktail parties and not enough awareness of the dangers ahead by the "army brass" which led to the Japs having such a resounding victory'.

As the Australian forces finally began leaving the island in June 1942, 'word got around there was a tea shortage at home so out of the kit bags came everything that was not essential and we loaded up with Ceylon tea, then we travelled by troop train from Galle to Columbo where we boarded the S. S. Union Castle. Although it was very crowded it was great to be on our way. Four thousand six hundred troops in a convoy of eleven ships excluding escort, the whole 17th Brigade on the way home at last'. The sea voyage, which took some twenty-one days, took the troops deep into the southern ocean in order to avoid submarines and, after a brief halt off the coast of Western Australia, across the Great Australian Bite. By this stage the troops on the Union Castle 'had bought up all the ship's canteen, were on hard rations and were cold and hungry and anxious to get home'.

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