Indigenous WA Anzacs honoured at Gallipoli

CHARLES Burns was a Wyndham orphan raised since age six by explorer Frederick Slade Drake-Brockman and wife Grace. He was the first Aboriginal student to attend Guildford Grammar School.
The family moved to Bridgetown in 1913, Charles working as a blacksmith and playing footy for the local team. In January 1915, aged 19, he received a certificate of exemption to the Aborigines Act of 1905 and a recommendation by the town constable that he be able to serve overseas.
On November 22, 1915, Charles sailed from Fremantle on SS Mongolia for Port Said, Egypt, with the 12th Reinforcements of the 10th Light Horse Regiment. In January 1916, he transferred to the 12th Australian Army Service Corps Company at Salhia, then joined the Signal Squadron Anzac Mounted Division at Romani, the young trooper taking part in the Mesopotamia Campaign and Dunsterforce and Kurdistan offensives.
In 1919, Charles returned to Australia and received the 1914-1915 Star, British War Medal and Victory Medal.
In 1940, he returned to the front.
Placed with the 3rd Railway Construction Company, the ‘slaughter man’ served in the Middle East until he returned to WA in January 1943 and discharged in April 1945. Charles, who never married, passed away in 1990, aged 94.
The Dickerson brothers of Gin Gin were not so lucky. Born in 1883, James was a horse breaker who joined the 10th LHR in October 1914, listing his complexion as ‘black’. A comrade described James as. ‘a hard case and the life of the troop, liked by officers and men’. A talented sportsman, James was the son of George Dickerson and Mary Brazely, who was the daughter of an Irish man and a Yued Nyoongar woman.
During an assault on Hill 60, the WA trooper was wounded and removed to the hospital ship Devanha, where he died the following day on August 30, 1915. James was buried at sea, the only Aboriginal Western Australian serviceman to die in the Gallipoli campaign.
Born in 1894, his younger brother Harry enlisted the same month his brother died, listing his occupation as a woodcutter when he joined the 12th reinforcements to the 10th LHR. He arrived in Egypt in February 1916, a couple of months after Australian forces evacuated Gallipoli. He joined the 3rd Light Horse Machine Gun Squadron and served throughout the Palestine campaign.
James returned to Australia without his older brother and was discharged in September 1919.

‘Black Diggers’

Charles and brothers James and Harry are among the WA Aboriginal soldiers who fought and died at Gallipoli, including Lawrence and Lewis Farmer, 28th Battalion, Katanning; Charles Hutchins, 28th Bn, Busselton; William John Jackson, 28th Bn, Bunbury; Frank Lawrence, 12th Field Artillery Brigade, York; Fred Lockyer, Ordinance Corps, Perth; Randall Mason, 28th Bn, Tenterden, William Mason, 28th Bn, Tenterden; Arthur McCallum, 16th Bn, Albany; James Melbourne, 5th Bn, Perth; Gordon Charles Naley, 16th Bn, Eucla; Frederick Leslie Sayers, 6th LHR, Busselton; Claude Shaw, 51st Bn, Gin Gin; and Albert Victor Thompson, 51st Bn, Perth.
In 1989, historians estimated 3000 Aboriginal people and 850 Torres Strait Islanders enlisted in WW2. As with WW1, many were rejected despite the significant role they played defending Australia’s northern borders.
The Australian War Memorial has since identified about 5000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander servicemen and women who served in WW2. Indigenous people also served in the Korean War from 1950 to 1953 and the Vietnam War from 1962 to 1975.
As one historian says, “Sharing stories and learning about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories is at the heart of the reconciliation process”, describing service in the armed forces as a shared history between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.
StreetWise will bring readers some of these stories while ‘isolated’ in WA’s North West at www.streetwisemedia.com.au.
Tomorrow, a tribute to Pilbara Diggers.