SAVE THIS FLAG

Many mornings when I am doing a fitness walk through and around the Botanic Gardens here in Melbourne I pass the awesome and imposing tribute to our Diggers. The Shrine.

And often I pass that stunning and eloquent bronze statue to a great Australian -- Weary Dunlop. A hero from the days when thousands of Australians and British soldiers were prisoners of sadistic and cruel Japanese guards in Changi after the fall of Singapore. And thousand of them died… there and when used as sick and forced labor on the Thai-Burma Railway. Built with Aussie blood in 1942 and 1943.

In front of me on my desk daily is a slice of that railway line that caused so much pain.

I mention it today because of another piece of this country’s history which is likely to be auctioned and could end up going overseas. And this must not be. Must not happen.

It is the flag that was flown in Singapore to celebrate the defeat of the Japanese and the release and freedom of the surviving Australians. Sure, it is the Union Jack but it is a symbol, an historic symbol, of survival in those dreadful fatal days of war.

Bill Flowers was an Aussie POW who finally lived a dream when he saw that very flag flutter over the jail in Singapore to show that the Japanese had been defeated. The place had been retaken. No more Diggers would die.

Aussie soldiers had snaffled the flag from the Palace of the Sultan of Johore when Singapore collapsed, British troops withdrew, and the Aussies were ordered to surrender their guns and themselves to the Japanese. Years of suffering and horror were to follow in Changi.

Apparently the Australians managed to keep the flag hidden at Changi and used it at burial services.

There are now more than seventy signatures on it including those of Lord Louis Mountbatten and Lady Mountbatten who signed it when Singapore was liberated.

Now it is to go to auction at Leonard Joel’s. The estimate is it could be sold for $50,000. And it could go overseas. It can’t. It deserves to be enshrined at The Shrine. The Shrine of Remembrance is the place where it must live in perpetuity.

I don’t know how we do it. I would hope a millionaire businessman with an historical conscience or with a family link to Changi might bid for it. If I had to money I would buy it myself and donate it. Personally, I am deeply involved in trying to do something for the living rather than the dead by raising funds to build a homer for kids with Cerebral Palsy.

But it would be a tragic scandal if this piece of Diggers’ history is lost to this country. Can anybody help me?

Friday, September 24, 2004

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2004