‘I love the boy’:The gift our PM received from a bamboo prison

As Australia’s new Prime Minister Anthony Albanese flew to Tokyo this week,Tom Uren may as well have been flying along with him.

“He has been in my thoughts all week,” Albanese said.

With an oath to “well and truly serve the Commonwealth of Australia”,and the flick of a signature,Anthony Albanese has officially become Australia’s 31st prime minister.

To understand the new prime minister,you need to know a bit about Uren,for this is how Albanese describes the relationship:“I grew up without a dad,but not without a father. Tom Uren was my father figure.”

Uren dreamed of Albanese becoming a prime minister. It seems cruel he didn’t live to see it.

“I love the boy,” he told me in our last conversation before he died in 2015,aged 93.

Books have been written about Uren,a minister in the Whitlam and Hawke governments,hard man of the hard Left,pioneer of Australia’s heritage and conservation movements;a man who as a prisoner of war saw the Japanese sky turn violet when the atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki.

That moment ended World War II and freed him. Yet he turned against nuclear power and forgave the Japanese people for the treatment he suffered,judging they were as much victims of militarism and fascism as anyone else.

He was tough as ironbark,his nose broken early by a heavyweight boxing opponent or a club-wielding Japanese guard in the jungle,or maybe both,and his eyes,deceptively gentle,were knowing.

When he used the word love,which was often,you knew it came from somewhere true.

“So many people are crook on their fellows,but I just look for the love in people,” he said in his waning years.

We had become friends by then,partly,I think,because he’d learned my mother had been born in May 1921 - the same month and year as him. Every May he’d call,asking me to pass on best wishes “to your lovely mother”,though he never met her. There was a courtliness to him.

Among the thousands of stories about Uren,one from Brisbane’s Boggo Road Prison tells much.

In the heady 1960s and ’70s,when protest meant taking to the streets,Uren could be found regularly at the head of marches demonstrating against everything from war to nuclear proliferation to developers who wanted to rip down beautiful old inner-city streetscapes.

Queensland was under the boot those days of Joh Bjelke-Petersen,whose idea of control - apart from allowing corruption to rip - was to turn Queensland into a police state.

Bjelke-Petersen’s decision to ban street marches by outlawing any public gathering of more than three people was akin to waving a red rag at a man like Uren.

Tom Uren sits in the back of a police van after being arrested in Brisbane in January 1979,one of several encounters with the regime of Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

Tom Uren sits in the back of a police van after being arrested in Brisbane in January 1979,one of several encounters with the regime of Joh Bjelke-Petersen.Age archive

In October 1978,he headed north from his home in Sydney to lead a march through Brisbane against the northern regime’s laws. Inevitably the police waded in,truncheons thumping.

Uren was among those arrested and hauled off to Boggo Road,a notoriously brutal place that in the ’70s doubled as a political jail.

Uren didn’t get the treatment Bjelke-Petersen might have hoped for.

One of the guards,Stephen M. Gage,author of the 2009 publication Boggo Road Prison:Riots to Ruin 1976-2008,recalled Uren’s arrival.

“I was one of many officers on duty on the day they bought Tom Uren into the Reception Division for processing;all officers were told not to salute Mr Uren,” Gage wrote.

“As the vehicle pulled up and Tom was ordered to stand in front of the reception window,I and many other officers saluted this man for what he stood for.

“The senior prison officers present could not stop the junior officers from saluting and speaking respectfully to Tom Uren,but the surprise was yet to come.

“The most senior officer present was the Chief Superintendent of Boggo Road Prison,Mr Clyde Lang,who was also a POW on the Burma Railway and a comrade-in-arms with Tom Uren.

“Later on that afternoon both Tom and Clyde left the prison to have dinner and no doubt drinks to their friendship from so many years ago.”

Uren wasn’t any ordinary prisoner,of course. He’d been a Labor politician for 20 years by then,and would remain in federal parliament for another 12 years. He’d been deputy leader of the Labor Party from 1975 to 1977.

But the years that formed him and earned him such respect were those of World War II,after he’d been captured on Timor and made a slave of the Japanese on the Burma-Thailand Railway,aged 21.

Like the other prisoners,he was starved,beaten and worked close to death. Fed barely enough to keep a child alive,he was forced to swing a heavy sledgehammer,a mate holding a drill,to form holes for dynamite and carve the deep mountain cutting known among the slave gangs as “Hammer and Tap” and,more descriptively,as “Hellfire Pass”.

The godforsaken place looked and felt like hellfire at night as the killing work continued,the cutting lit by blazing infernos.

Tom Uren (third from right) in an internment camp for Japanese prisoners of war who were used as slave labour.

Tom Uren (third from right) in an internment camp for Japanese prisoners of war who were used as slave labour.Age archive

Initially required to drill 80 centimetres a day,Uren and his mate were forced to complete three metres each day during the dreaded “speedo” period of 1943,which meant no rest for up to 18 hours,seven days a week.

Uren had been a heavyweight boxer back in Sydney and despite starvation,his build set him apart.

I have walked part of the old death railway and visited Hellfire Pass several times,and during these excursions I met several former prisoners who told me of Uren placing his big body in front of fellow prisoners to prevent them being beaten to death by furious Japanese and Korean prison guards.

“Tom would take the beating for smaller men,” an old man told me once as we stood in the gloom of Hellfire Pass.

When,years ago,I put this to Uren,he conceded he’d been “knocked around”,as he put it.

“I’ve been hit with open hands,closed fists,pieces of wood,iron bars and bamboo about two inches in diameter,” he said,eyes closed at the memories.

Towards the end of the war,Uren was shoved into the hold of a Japanese hell ship - with little food,water,ventilation or space,POW carriers earned their “hell” titles - and transported to Japan.

There,he slaved in a copper smelter at Saganoseki and at a lead smelting works at Omuta.

On August 9,1945,he saw the sky turn an unearthly colour when the Fat Man atomic bomb was dropped on the distant port of Nagasaki.

Neville Wran and Tom Uren (third from left) at a nuclear disarmament rally in Sydney in March 1986.

Neville Wran and Tom Uren (third from left) at a nuclear disarmament rally in Sydney in March 1986.Peter Solness

“If you’ve ever seen one of those glorious sunsets they get in northern Australia,it was about 20 times as vivid as that,” he said.

The bomb ended the war and freed Tom Uren from his years of torment.

The POW experience destroyed the lives and nerves of many of those who survived,but Uren resolved to frame the lessons he learned into a philosophy by which to live and grow.

Principal among those lessons was the effort of his commander on the death railway,the surgeon Edward “Weary” Dunlop,to harness the means of the entire camp for the good of all.

Dunlop ordered Australian officers - who received a small allowance - to contribute to a fund to buy simple medicines and black market food for sick POWs. No such system existed among the nearby British camps,where officers stayed aloof from the ordinary men,who died at a dreadful rate.

“Collectivism”,decided Uren,was the key to saving society. He distilled the philosophy to a single sentence. “The healthy looked after the sick,the strong looked after the weak,the young looked after the old,” he’d tell anyone who’d listen.

And so,when in the early 1980s he became aware of a young Sydney University firebrand named Anthony Albanese - a leftist member of the Student Representative Council - the young man was to hear his elder’s anthem.

In fact,Uren and the other tough men of the old NSW Labor Left – Arthur Gietzelt,Jack Ferguson and Bruce Childs – identified Albanese,aged 20,as a potential future leader. They knew he was raised without a father,and felt he needed the guidance of a strong male role model.

Uren,then minister for local government,stepped in,gave Albanese his first real job - as a research officer - and never stepped away.

Anthony Albanese with the late Labor politician Tom Uren in the Sydney seat of Mackellar in 2010.

Anthony Albanese with the late Labor politician Tom Uren in the Sydney seat of Mackellar in 2010.Simon Alekna

In 1987,he took Albanese to South-east Asia - the young man’s first trip abroad. In Thailand,Uren took Albanese to Hellfire Pass.

Albanese held the big man’s arm as they walked into the deep cutting,fearful Uren would faint beneath the storm of his memories.

All these years later Albanese,opening the election campaign that led to the prime ministership,declared:“We will look after the young,we will look after the sick,we will look after our older Australians. No one held back. No one left behind.”

It was a rewriting of Weary Dunlop’s wisdom that Tom Uren had made his own when not much more than a boy,struggling to survive in a pitiless bamboo jungle.

Of course Uren’s spirit flew with Albanese to Japan this week. How could it not?

Tony Wright is the associate editor and special writer for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.

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