CHANGI travails . . . Chris Wilson with a letter he wrote to his mother while in the prison camp.

RUTH MATHEWSON

Name: Philip (Chris) Christian Wilson

Occupation: Retired small cropper and postmaster

Service: RAAF, Signals 8 Division; Australian Army and British Commonwealth Occupation Force

Service number:  RAAF 34796, Army NX51945

Born: Temora, NSW, January 30, 1922

Enlisted: RAAF: Sydney, November 6, 1940.
Army: Sydney November 10, 1941

Family: Married Joyce on February 5, 1949. They have four children, 14 grandchildren and one great-grandchild

SIRENS wailed and air raids rocked the steamy, tropical island of Singapore as 19-year-old Chris Wilson took his first steps on foreign soil in January 1942.

He had travelled on the liner Aquitania from Australia, hopped aboard a small Dutch boat in the Singapore Straits and made it ashore with mates from the 8th Division he had just joined. As the young men struggled with their gear, the humid air stank of smoke, explosions deafened them and they had to shout to be heard above the din.

The bucolic hills of country New South Wales suddenly seemed far away.

"Our baptism to war was kind of sudden," Wilson said. "I suppose, at some stages, I wished I'd gone home and stayed with mum."

It takes a strong character to admit that fear, particularly for a fellow who had pleaded and bargained with his parents for the "note from home" allowing him to sign up.

Had the teenager known what lay ahead, he might have been less determined to enlist with the Australian Army. He was about to be plunged into the hottest, most cruel fires of war. He would emerge stronger, but forever altered.

DETERMINED to join . . . teenaged Chris Wilson finally joined the army after receiving a note from his parents.

The son of a railway linesman, the Riverina district kid was so keen to sign up that when a headmaster convinced his parents not to write the permission note he needed to join the army, he turned to the RAAF.

"The airforce didn't need (a note)," he said. "It was a spirit of adventure or something. I don't know."

Wilson stayed nine months, training in wireless operations before giving the army another go. The problem was he was still just 18.

"As soon as I walked through the door, the fellow said to me 'You got a note from your parents?' I said 'No.' He said, 'Well, get one and come back'." This time, his parents granted his wish.

Wilson did more wireless training and managed to get himself into a draft of 8th Division reinforcements bound for Singapore. He arrived under heavy air attack a week before his 20th birthday. Two weeks later, on February 15, 1942, Singapore fell.

"We had to march all the way from Singapore out to Changi jail, which was quite a long way, carrying all the gear with you," he said. "It was made into a concentration camp. It used to be the English or the Scottish barracks there before the war."

The Australian prisoners were soon working in gangs to build roads, rail lines and memorials to the Japanese army, and loading and unloading ships.

"Food was scarce," Wilson said. "Nothing but rice for the first few weeks. Gardens were started straight away. Wherever there's an Australian and he's got some seeds, he'll grow something.

"There was corn. We learnt to eat hibiscus hedges. You'd pick the young leaves and cook them up and eat them. We learnt to eat all those things we'd never heard of before. We ate snails and snakes, anything edible.

"You took it along to a doctor and said 'Do you think this would be edible?' and they said 'Yep, if you boil it up enough. Go ahead'."

After 12 months at Changi, in April 1943, 7000 of the fittest Australian prisoners were crammed into railway boxcars and sent north to start work on the Burma Railway. If a man had to go to the toilet during the five-day, five-night journey, his mates hung him off the side of the moving train.

"It was searing heat in the daytime and freezing cold of a night," Wilson said.

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"There were some drastic things... People being beaten to death with pick handles, people being stoned by guards standing up the top of a cutting."

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When they arrived at the Thai town of Bampong, the men tumbled out into a camp for the night and, the next day, marched about 300km into the jungle.

"We had to carve our own camp out of the jungle," Wilson said. "Within a couple of days, we were building bridges and putting culverts in, all by hand, with a pick and shovel. They sent other lots from Changi, Java and Sumatra straight to Burma and they started on the Burma side of it."

The Japanese overseers chose 700 of the fittest prisoners to form a trouble-shooting work gang. "I must have been still looking fit, because I was picked in the 700," Wilson said. "We went up and down where the rail was going to go, to wherever work was lagging behind. I think we marched up and down the railway 13 times in the time we were up there."

Memories of the sadism, violence and abject cruelty of the Burma Railway flood back all too readily.

"There were some drastic things," Wilson said. "People being beaten to death with pick handles, people being stoned by guards standing up the top of a cutting. If anybody looked like they were lagging a little bit, they used to throw rocks at them and kill them."

After nine months, the railway was finished and more than half the men in Wilson's gang of 700 were dead. The fittest prisoners were shipped to Japan. The remainder were herded into boxcars and back to Changi.

"Luckily, I must not have looked so fit this time and I was sent back to Singapore," Wilson said. "When we were unloaded out of the trucks, the fellow that was in charge of the Australians, Lt-Col ("Black Jack") Galleghan, said to the Sergeant-Major 'Where are the rest of my men?' The Sergeant-Major said 'This is the lot'. "

The ghosts of mates long gone and fine young men extinguished in their prime still weigh heavily on Wilson's heart, causing his eyes to water and his voice to crack. "Out of the 7000 British and Australian men, nearly half of them were dead," he said.

After more than three years as a prisoner of war, Wilson was finally sent home in September 1945. His weight had dropped from 60kg to just 38kg.

On his return, he stayed in the army, spending six months closeted in a Sydney records office. "A doctor told me that I'd gone downhill so far in getting on with people that he told me to stay in the army for a while," he said.

In early 1946, volunteers were needed to join the British Commonwealth Occupation Force in Japan. Wilson put up his hand. "I thought I'd like to go and have a look at how the other half lived. It was very difficult to put it all together, to find that people who could be so cultured on one side could be so cruel and inhuman to one another."

After 12 months with BCOF Signals in Kure, Wilson returned and left the army.

He had several jobs, as a storeman and packer, a Qantas communications officer and working in his brother-in-law's corner shop in Toowoomba. During this time, he met and married Joyce. They were looking to buy a farm, when a newspaper ad caught Wilson's eye.

"It said: 'Farm for sale on Russell Island. All the noise you'll have to put up with is the splash of a silvery fish.' I brought my new wife down to have a look and we said 'This is for us'. "

The couple built a house in the middle of their three hectares, and there they raised their four children. They farmed tomatoes, cucumbers, pawpaws, bananas, nuts and lychees.

Meanwhile, Wilson took on the role of volunteer firefighter on Russell Island from the 1950s and '60s. He became the community's first fire warden in 1975 and held the role until 1990.

He also was the island's postmaster, and his family recall the many times he was the community's first port of call in accidents or emergencies. When the island's new emergency centre opened in April this year, it was named The Chris Wilson Centre in his honour.

He served as Russell Island RSL treasurer for 15 years, is surrounded by proud children and grandchildren at Anzac Day ceremonies and was nominated for an Australia Day Citizen's Award for Redland district in 2005.