WITH Anzac Day looming this week, thoughts turn to the gallant service personnel who gave their lives in action during World War I.
I can vividly recall two memorials on the corner of my parents’ property ‘Ryecroft’, at Lyndhurst, honouring Charles Payne and Lieutenant Malcolm Kirkham.
Both were killed on the bloody battlefields of France.
Mr Kirkham, 33, fondly known as Mac to his friends, died in Peronne Wood on the Somme on 2 September 1918.
Before joining the 37th infantry battalion, Mac Kirkham was a champion rifle shot of world fame, while his brother Don was a champion cyclist, who held many world records.
Don won every road race of note in Australia and rode in the 1914 Tour de France.
The Argus of Thursday 12 September 1918 carried Mac’s poignant death announcement:
KIRKHAM. – Killed in action, on 2nd September, 1918, Lieutenant Malcom (Mac), loved eldest son of Mrs Margaret Kirkham, Lyndhurst. “He died that we might live.”
– (Inserted by his sorrowing brother and sister-in-law, Don and May, Carrum.)
Charles Payne was a driver with the 28th Company of the Australian Army Service Corps. He died from wounds inflicted on 26 April 1918 and is buried in Vignacourt British Cemetery, Vignacourt, Somme, France.
Two trees were planted near a corner of my parents’ property commemmorating Mac and Charles. The nameplates were made by Herbert McKibbon, an old school friend.
Mr and Mrs McKibbon senior were pioneering farmers in the area, and they both died in 1918.
Jack, the youngest of the McKibbon family married Irene Cox. The McKibbons’ other son, Adam, enlisted in the AIF in 1914 and returned home from France in 1919.
As a youngster growing up I would visit the memorials often to water the trees.
On Anzac Day my thoughts always turn to these two men, whose lives were too short.
The memorial was a stone’s throw to an avenue of oak trees, which to our own family was also a memorial site.
In between the birth of my late brother, who was 11 years older than me, my mother lost two daughters, both stillborn at Nurse Ahearn’s private hospital near St James Anglican Church in Dandenong.
In those days you were permitted to farewell your own dead and I can recall how she told me my sisters were placed in handmade boxes lined with felt which my father used as an ornotholigist to send bird eggs overseas. The girls were reverentially buried in the oak tree avenue.
Like the trees on the corner, the oak trees were regarded as a sacred setting.
Dandenong RSL will mark Anzac Day with a Dawn Service and march. The Dawn Service starts at 5.45am at the Pillars of Freedom on Clow Street. The march starts at the RSL, 44 Clow Street, Dandenong, at 10.30am and concludes with a service at the Pillars of Freedom.
AUSSIE PRIDE
I was pleased to learn that local schoolchildren will be able to celebrate the special centenary of the Anzac legend under an Australian-made, Aussie flag, thanks to Le Pine Funerals.
April 25 next year marks the 100-year commemoration of the Anzac spirit and Australians will pause to salute the Australian flag among other special ceremonies.
Mr John Fowler, National Senior Vice-President of the Australian Funeral Directors Association and general manager of Le Pine Funerals, said the company wanted to mark the milestone by ensuring schools were equipped with new, Australian-made national flags.
“We hope the flags will assist the schools to mark their own remembrance events in a very special way,” he said.
Schools can request flags from the manger of Le Pine Funeral Services Dandenong, Ian Maxwell, by emailing imaxwell@lepinefunerals.com.au from this Anzac Day 25 April to the end of May 2014.
