R.I.P.Gordon Jamieson obituary
Australian prisoner of war who was one of the last survivors of the Death Railway in Burma and campaigned for reparations
In January 1942 the 2/26th crossed into Singapore, which on February 15 fell to the Japanese. “It was quite eerie when the din of gunfire and high explosives ceased, to be followed by the cheering of the enemy soldiers at close proximity,” he said. “We became slaves and thus began, unexpectedly, a 42-month phase of my life, a period of tragic events the memories of which will remain for all time.”
Jamieson was among thousands of prisoners held at Changi jail and used as forced labour. In April 1943, he was herded into a metal rice van and driven hundreds of miles north to Songkurai in Thailand, near the Burmese border, and put to work on the Siam-Burma railway. He described 18-hour shifts on what was known as the Death Railway in scorching sun, building embankments and bridges and digging cuttings with picks and shovels. “On the completion of a strenuous day at work our boys would commence the walk back to camp, several kilometres in pouring rain with little or no footwear,” he said. “Then someone would start to sing a tune . . . and others would follow, and the heads would be lifted proudly.”
Food was minimal, usually a bowl of rice a day. Jamieson ate maggots for protein, but avoided flies because they carried disease. Despite the conditions, he remembered his comrades’ kindness and generosity of spirit — as well as their dark humour. If a soldier lost his mate, another would “adopt you”, he said, adding that their numbers were reduced by “illness and death, mostly caused from diseases and tropical ulcers resulting in limb amputations”.
The worst cruelty was from Japanese officers. The regular soldiers would “sit with you and have a smoke,” he said. “Then, if an officer came, they’d jump up and start yelling at you. When we had refused to do something, you’d soon get a few claps around the ear.”
After the war Jamieson returned to Australia, later recalling the crowds surging to greet his troopship as it docked in Brisbane. “We saw them all come through and then they knocked another fence down further down from the main entrance and in the lead was my dad,” he said. “They had cars ready with my parents, with my mother in it . . . She was in the front seat and I was in the back seat with another two blokes, holding on to my hand all the way. It was really a memory that you don’t lose, that day with Mum.”
He also campaigned for reparations, taking his case to the Japanese and Australian governments. In 1990 he brought a A$250 million claim to the UN on behalf of the Queensland Ex-Prisoners of War Association, offering to drop it if Japan would fund a tropical health and medical research centre on land donated by James Cook University at Townsville. “This would be a living tribute to our 22,000 PoWs, civilian internees and slave labourers,” he told The Age newspaper in Melbourne. Politics intervened and it was not to be.
In 2013, Jamieson visited the set during filming of The Railway Man, starring Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth. “He was watching his step as he got out of the car, and when he looked up he saw one of the cast members — a really skinny guy in shorts, he was playing a PoW,” his daughter Paula recalled. “Dad just grabbed his hand and said, ‘Are you OK, mate?’. In his mind, he was back there for a moment, and that’s how they were. Mates until the end, looking out for each other.”
Gordon Jamieson, Australian soldier, was born on June 14, 1921. He died on September 23, 2023, aged 102
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