ANZAC day will have passed by the time you read this, and we will have commemorated at the Dawn Services in Yarloop and Harvey and also the later service at Harvey, but before this I was involved with other moving acts of commemoration. These took place on Saturday the 15th of October last year [2022] and on Saturday the 7th of April this year [2023] at the Old Harvey Cemetery on SW Highway.
For the past 104 years, returned soldiers from the bloody ‘Great War’ have died and been buried with little recognition. They may have had the National Flag draped over their coffin and the recitation of the Ode by their RSL mates at the time of their burial, but there was nothing to indicate that under this mound of earth or this grave was a person who suffered all manner of cruelties in that first mechanised war. After all this time this neglect has been recognised and the Department of Veteran Affairs, to their credit, is undertaking the replacement of the mounds with plain but significant graves. On these, and the graves of those that already had headstones, large bronze plaques recognizing their war service have been placed.
At the re-dedication of the graves of these men and women I read that one of these was a timber worker, probably at Mornington Mill, and two were farmers from there as well. From a family I know, the latter often had to supplement the farm income by also working in the mill. The prominence of the War Memorial in Yarloop and the other timber towns in which I have worked, reflects the large number of timber workers who enlisted. Some of the larger timber mills had to support the war effort by remaining open, so their workers were classified as being in a ’reserved occupation’ or an ‘essential service’ but many wanted to go and serve their country in the military.
This also reminded me of the part that the timber industry played in time of war. Trench timbers, jarrah fire- bomb shovels (apparently phosphorus fire-bombs burnt through steel but smouldered for up to half an hour on the high ignition-point jarrah shovel blades) or even the replica Asian fishing boats built jointly by Millars’ and Bunnings for Z force are some of the contributions. There are stories that Yarloop Workshops’ large 22-foot lathe was used to make gun barrels for ships and that the casings for shells were also produced there. The latter has, according to one of my sources, more credibility but, never-the-less, every resource is utilised in time of war and the Workshops could produce many things.
We’ll come back to this in my next article on the machines that could do such things, but I trust that on the 25th of April we particularly remembered those who served. Lest we forget.[1]
George Arthur Snudden was a timber worker when he enlisted in 1915 and is buried in the Old Harvey Cemetery.
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[1] From ‘The Phoenix Rises Very Slowly’ Part 21, by Allan Ward.