By KATH GANNAWAY
SISTERS Val Christie and Judith Thomas will be at services on either side of the Yarra Valley on Anzac Day, but their thoughts will be on one person, their dad, John Valentine McDonald.
It’s an emotional time each year for the two remaining children of John McDonald’s five post-war children, Val from Healesville and Judith from Seville.
Their memories, of course, are of a returned soldier who settled on 401 acres in Badger Creek after the war, built the family home and was the first caretaker at Coranderrk Weir, now Badger Weir.
But they have photos, post-cards and stories retold to the McDonald children, Jack, Kathleen, Frank, and the two girls, as they were growing up.
Much of his war experience, documented in an essay written some years ago as a school project by Frank’s daughter Kelly McDonald, is based on those conversations.
It’s a reminder of the sacrifice made by so many.
“Dad was injured three times,” Val said.
“Every Anzac Day, I read it and I can’t help but cry. It reminds me of what he went through, and even after all this time, you still miss him.”
The photos show a young, single man from Launching Place, well known and liked as the son of Valentine McDonald and his wife Annie Catherine, a pioneering family of the district.
His sweet-heart and later wife, Alice Martin, was the daughter of another well-known family, John and Alice Susan Martin from Yarra Junction.
Post-cards between the two, often just one or two lines, declare their love, but there is nothing of the brutality, pain and horror of John’s war experience.
He was 25 when he joined up on 15 June 1915, a strapping man of 6-foot 2-inches. His enlistment form shows he had been a member of the Launching Place Rifle Club for four years.
He was put into the 24th Battalion A.I.F, number 1929.
“His experiences at war were ordinary for the time and yet extraordinary for any man to have to endure,” Kelly wrote.
They include the story of Arab hairdresser Acki-Bjelke who was put before the firing squad in Egypt and of ‘Darky Sneezby’ who was everyone’s envy after receiving a ‘blighty’ (minor wound) which sent him from Lone Pine back to recover in Britain. His death from blood poisoning from the ‘blighty’ was a shattering experience and another example of the horrors of war.
He survived the role of a grenadier – a bomber who hurled grenades at the enemy – at Poziers, and the day-to-day exposure to death in the trenches and on the front line.
But he didn’t escape injury.
His first injury was at Gallipoli on 21 December 1915 and he was wounded again at Poziers on 17 October, 1916.
A shot to the head at the Second Battle of Bullecourt on 16 June 1917, put an end to his active service.
It was an horrific wound, shot behind the right ear with the bullet exiting through his mouth, leading the stretcher bearer to list him as ‘Killed in Action’. It was early dawn, and it was only later in the day he was seen to move and taken for medical attention.
Returning to Launching Place, John joined the 24th Battalion Association and looked forward to Anzac Day each year when he met up with friends, including from surrounding towns including Marysville, Narbethong, Alexandra and Healesville.
John was 69 when he died in 1959.
Judith and Val say he was one of the lucky ones. Returning to marry his sweet-heart and make a good life, not entirely without the legacy of war, but loving, productive and unlike thousands of his generation, long.
