Archibald “Arch” Driscoll so personified the Diggers’ youth,endurance,courage,ingenuity,good humour and mateship that his face was used on the poster for Charles Chauvel’s 1944 filmThe Fighting Rats of Tobruk.
Few,if any,at the time realised that Driscoll was,in fact,one of the “Black Rats”,a term proudly coined by the Indigenous veterans themselves and now a badge of honour within the wider Rats of Tobruk Association. But as theHerald’s,despite their service,the Black Rats returned to a deeply segregated Australia. They were not entitled to vote,let alone walk into a pub with their white brothers in arms and share a beer.
April 10 marks the 83rd anniversary of the siege of Tobruk,a lonely Libyan port town which,in 1941,Australian troops defended from a much larger German–Italian army commanded by “Desert Fox”,General Erwin Rommel. Tobruk was cut off by land,but the garrison was supplied by sea,and our troops held out for 231 days. Nearly 800 Australian soldiers died and 1996 were wounded during the siege. The Nazi propagandist Lord Haw Haw (William Joyce) derided the tenacious defenders as “rats”,but the Diggers embraced the moniker as an ironic compliment.
Holding out against repeated ground assaults under almost constant shelling and bombing,the heroic Rats are credited with thwarting Rommel’s plan to seize Cairo. Like the Battles of Britain and Dunkirk,Tobruk became a bright shining moment for Britain and her Commonwealth allies after a string of defeats across Western Europe by the German Wehrmacht.
The 1944 propaganda film that starred Chips Rafferty was primarily shot on Cronulla’s dunes and was aimed at American and British markets. Driscoll had taken part in battle re-enactments while serving in El Alamein as part of an official campaign to record the events of Tobruk. His image,holding a .303 rifle with a fixed bayonet,was later selected for the film’s posters. The caption read:“A type of the soldiers of the 9th Australian division who have fought so magnificently in the new battle in the Western Desert. They look tough,they act tough,and the enemy finds out they really are tough.”
Australian War Memorial Indigenous liaison officer Michael Bell has devoted nearly a decade to discovering First Nations war stories such as Driscoll’s,researching their history through a combination of yarns,photos,artefacts and archival records. He said Driscoll,an Aboriginal man of the Munanjali peoples from around the Beaudesert and Mt Tambourine area of south-east Queensland,was one of at least 59 Black Rats of Tobruk,a figure expected to grow as research continues and more publicly acknowledge their personal histories. Five years ago,there were only 18 confirmed Black Rats.
“There is no longer the sort of stigma that stopped a people declaring their Aboriginality in previous generations,” Bell said.
The army would not accept Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders until Germany and Japan threatened. When the war ended,enlistment restrictions were reintroduced only to be dropped when recruits were needed to fight in Korea. The discrimination in civvy street against Korean and Vietnam First Nations war veterans continued until the 1967 referendum that effectively recognised them as Australian citizens.
If we pause today to remember Tobruk,the days when Archibald Driscoll’s poster represented Australia’s finest are a reminder that things change and equality conquers discrimination.
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