The barracks of the army of the Netherlands East Indies were bursting at the seams with prisoners of war. Australian, British, Dutch and Colonial Dutch, from navy, army and air force, we were a mixed bag. Japan was not a signatory to the Geneva Convention concerning POWs and we thought we knew what to expect.

We hungered for food other than the meagre ration of dirty rice, we slept on concrete floors, ‘we developed dysentery, but of I course we knew it would be for only a few months, three or maybe four.

The Japanese made the senior medical officer responsible for the good order of the Bandung I camp, and in our miserable condition we knew they had unwittingly done us good. Lieut-Colonel Dunlop was a giant of a man, physically and in every other way, and the other medical officers were of the same cast of character.

Interminable parades for counting, for checking  out work parties, and often for no purpose except to harass and humiliate us; bashings for trivial offences, or for nothing except the amusement of the Japanese or Korean guards; sickness, disease, weakness of body and spirit, all these were our sorry lot, and always Weary Dunlop stood tall, facing the enemy on our behalf, while conditions worsened.

I was fortunate enough to be in the party that left Bandung for Batavia Jakarta), under Weary Dunlop’s leadership, and went with him by ship to Singapore, and by train to Thailand, crowded as sheep or pigs in a saleyard.

We built a railway from near Bangkok to near Rangoon in Burma, with almost no equipment, through jungles and across rivers, thousands of us POWs and enslaved Asian civilians, all of us starved, scourged, racked with malaria, dysentery, beriberi, pellagra, and the stinking tropical ulcers that ate a leg to the bone in a matter of days, and always Weary Dunlop and his fellow MO’s stood up for us, were beaten, scorned, derided, and beaten again.

In the mud and starvation of those long months we looked back at Bandung as at the Garden of Eden, while men died and were buried in shallow graves in hundreds and in thousands.

Always the guards demanded more and more of the sick and dying to join the work parties on their sacred railway to Burma and always Weary Dunlop, quiet voiced, argued and protested and stood up against the Japanese might, and we came to know that he was permanent, unchanging, devoted to his duty as senior medical officer and our leader.

His physical size was indeed the least of his attributes. Over 190cm, and a heart, a spirit bigger again. We came to know the meaning of the description, “a Christian gentleman”.

A great neurosurgeon, and with him two other great specialists, and no medical supplies. Whatever they had of instruments they and their orderlies had carried on their backs into the horrid jungles, keeping faith with their oath as medical personnel.

We sickened and died, we lost limbs eaten away by tropical ulcers in surgical operations under the most primitive conditions performed by the most skilled and dedicated of surgeons, and every day the cholera dead were burnt, the other dead were buried, and always Weary Dunlop gave us of his strength, and many of us were able to survive.

When despair and death reached for us, he stood fast, his only thought our well-being. Faced with guards who had the power of life or death, ignoble tyrants who hated us, he was a lighthouse of sanity in a universe of madness and suffering.

Thousands of men in Australia and across the world, when they read that Weary Dunlop had been named Australian of the Year in 1977 would have said: “Yes, I knew him in Thailand. He’s the Australian of Many Years. We’d never have got back home if it hadn’t been for the MOs.”

The black Ambonese soldiers of the Dutch army named him in their Malay language, Singa Yang Diam.  I agree. Weary Dunlop, of the great heart and the soft voice, was, is, and will ever be, The Quiet Lion, in the hearts and minds of all who knew him in our three and a half years of suffering in the prison camps of Asia.  When we forget him we shall be dead.

Donald Stuart (2nd/3rd Machine Gun Battalion)