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BORN
1969, Perth, Western Australia

Timothy Britten

Australia faced the reality of terrorism with the bombings of the Sari Club in Bali on the 12th October, 2002, with 88 Australians among the 202 killed.

Almost 200 people were acknowledged for their role in the aftermath of the bombings, with Tim Britten being awarded the Cross of Valour – the civilian equivalent of the Victoria Cross.

The Cross of Valour was presented by Major General Philip Michael Jeffery AC CVO MC, Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia, at Government House, Canberra on 17th October, 2003.

At approximately 11.30pm on the 12th October, 2002, following a terrorist bombing in Bali, Constable Timothy Britten placed his life in danger by repeatedly entering the burning Sari Club to rescue a seriously injured woman and to search for survivors.

Constable Britten, a West Australia police officer on secondment to the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in East Timor, was in Bali on leave. As he walked to his hotel, he heard an explosion that he recognised as a bomb blast. He immediately ran approximately 800 metres towards the Sari Club, through narrow streets blocked by hundreds of panicking people fleeing the site. The Sari Club was reduced to a burning shell and large numbers of burned and seriously injured people were lying on the roadway and footpath. On being told that a woman was trapped in the building, Constable Britten ran into the burning club and made his way through the debris as gas cylinders exploded all around him. He managed to locate the severely injured woman, but was forced back by thick smoke and intense heat. He returned to the street and sought help from a man, Mr. Richard Joyes, who was there searching for his friends.

Constable Britten, wearing only a light singlet top, shorts and thongs, ran back into the building with Mr. Joyes to try to rescue the woman, but, having no protective clothing, was forced back by the intensity of the flames. Outside the club they were doused with bottled water and together ran back into the building to rescue the woman. On this attempt, Constable Britten and Mr. Joyes managed to reach the woman, who was still conscious but pinned down by rubble and a piece of iron. Throughout this time, and later in searching the building for other survivors, Constable Britten was aware that he was in danger of being severely injured at least, and possibly, of losing his life, as he believed that another major explosion had been planned to disrupt rescue efforts and kill emergency workers. Despite this constant fear and burns to his arms, Constable Britten persisted in the rescue until the woman was pried free and could be pulled from the wreckage. Constable Britten and Mr. Joyes carried her out of the club and placed her on a truck to be taken to hospital.

Over the next hour, Constable Britten and Mr. Joyes carried the badly wounded from the street outside the club to waiting trucks. At one stage, Constable Britten and Mr. Joyes were stopped at gunpoint by an Indonesian police officer. It was only when Constable Britten produced his police identification that he and Mr. Joyes were allowed to continue their rescue efforts. On the night, Constable Britten selflessly placed himself in constant danger, sustaining burns to his arms, deep cuts and abrasions to his feet from explosion debris, potential injury from gas cylinder explosions, and exposure to deadly infection from blood-borne diseases.

By his actions, Constable Britten displayed most conspicuous courage.

BORN
12 July 1907, Major Plains, Victoria

DIED
2 July 1993, Melbourne, Victoria

Sir Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop AC, CMG, OBE

“The men would do anything for him and are proud to be with him. I am sure it is his presence which holds this body of men from moral decay in bitter circumstances which they can only meet with emotion rather than reason. … This selflessness, this smile, command more from the men than an army of officers each waving a Manual of Military Law.”

Born in Wangaratta, Victoria, in 1907 Dunlop studied pharmacy and medicine at the University of Melbourne and played rugby union for Australia in 1932. His nickname, ‘Weary’, was a play on the well-known brand of Dunlop Tyres which, according to their makers, ‘never wear out’.

Although only one of 106 Australian doctors captured by the Japanese and of 44 on the railway, Dunlop came to represent the self-sacrifice, courage and compassion which doctors and Australians more generally are remembered as displaying in captivity.

In November 1939, Dunlop enlisted in the Australian Army Medical Corps and served with the 2nd Australian Imperial Force in Greece, Crete and North Africa. When Australian troops landed in Java in February 1942 in a futile effort to stop the Japanese advance Dunlop took command of No.1 Allied General Hospital at Bandung. When Java fell to the Japanese, he became a prisoner.

In January 1943 Dunlop and nearly nine hundred prisoners were transferred from Java to Changi. Two weeks later they left for Thailand. ‘Dunlop Force’ reached Konyu River Camp on 25 January 1943. Dunlop himself moved to Hintok Mountain camp in March. He stayed here until October, when he was sent to Tha Sao Hospital further down the Kwae Noi. In 1944 he moved to the hospital camp at Chungkai and later to Nakhon Pathom where he remained until the end of the war.

Dunlop was renowned for his untiring efforts to care for the sick. Many times he put his own health at risk, earning himself physical punishment when he protested to the Japanese. At other times his sheer physical presence—he was nearly two metres tall—seemed to intimidate his captors. When a Japanese soldier hit a man with bad feet and malaria and then laughed at him, Dunlop was so enraged that, according to his diary which he kept throughout his ordeal:

“I lost nearly all control and advanced on them, calling them every ‘cuss’ word I ever heard. No doubt the meaning was caught, if not the actual words, and they backed away.” (17 June 1943)

Dunlop was also a strong administrator and leader. He kept meticulous notes on the men under his command and his leadership and courage earned him the lasting loyalty of the men who served under him.

After the war Dunlop gained increasingly public prominence as an advocate for former prisoners of the Japanese. He supported individuals making pension claims, lobbied governments on their behalf and took leadership roles in ex-POW associations. He was knighted in 1969 and received many other honours in his later life.

After his death in 1993, Dunlop was given a state funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral, Melbourne. Dunlop has also been commemorated on a 50 cent coin and in statues including at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, Melbourne, and Benalla, his home town.

BORN
9 May 1857 Athelstone, near Adelaide, South Australia

DIED
2 September 1935 Millswood, South Australia, Australia

Sir Sidney Kidman

Sir Sidney Kidman (1857-1935), pastoralist, was born near Athelstone, Adelaide.

Sidney’s father George Kidman died about six months after Sidney’s birth. His son was educated at private schools in suburban Norwood but left home with five shillings in his pocket and riding a one-eyed horse which he had bought with laboriously acquired savings.

The boy shared a dug-out in the bank of a dry creek with an Aboriginal known among whites as Billy. Treating him seriously as a friend and equal, Sidney learned from him tracking and other bush skills and so became a better bushman than most white adults.

Kidman contracted to cart supplies in the country between the isolated settlements at Mount Gipps, Wilcannia, Swan Hill (Victoria), Menindee, Bourke, Tibooburra, Louth and Cobar. He also drove mobs of horses and cattle, sometimes to market in Adelaide. Following the discovery of copper at Cobar in the early 1870s he set up a butcher’s shop and like James Tyson at the Bendigo gold rush twenty years earlier, made enough money to establish himself as a large squatter. In 1878 he inherited £400 from his grandfather and traded with it successfully. He increased his capital by setting up coaching businesses in western New South Wales and in Western Australia. He supplied them with horses and began providing the British army in India with remounts. He grew richer still by continually buying cattle and selling them to his brother Sackville, who conducted a large butchering business at Broken Hill.

These activities were a means to an end. In 1886 Kidman bought his first station, Owen Springs on the Hugh River, south-west of Alice Springs. Long before his thirtieth birthday he had conceived the idea of buying a chain, later two chains, of stations stretching in nearly continuous lines from the well-watered tropical country round the Gulf of Carpentaria, south through western Queensland to Broken Hill and across the border into South Australia within easy droving distance of Adelaide. Many stations on this ‘main chain’ were watered by Cooper’s Creek and the Georgina and Diamantina rivers which sometimes brought northern tropical rain-waters to the centre even during droughts.

By the 1890s he had begun to acquire his second chain of stations strung along the Overland Telegraph line from the Fitzroy River and Victoria River Downs in the north to Wilpena station in the Flinders Ranges near Adelaide. Thus, by moving stock from drought-stricken areas to others, by selling in markets where the price was highest, by his detailed knowledge of the country and by his energy and bushcraft he withstood the depression of the 1890s and the great drought of 1902. By the time of World War I he controlled station country considerably greater in area than England or Tasmania and nearly as great as Victoria.

By the war’s end he had become a national institution, having given fighter aeroplanes and other munificent gifts to the armed forces. In 1920 he gave to the Salvation Army £1000 and a half share in one of his cattle-stations. In 1921 he gave his country home at Kapunda, the scene of his annual horse-sales, to the South Australian government for a district high school. It may have been mere coincidence that he was knighted next day.

In old age he suffered from increasing deafness and rheumatism, but otherwise retained his faculties unimpaired until his death in Adelaide on 2 September 1935; he was buried in Mitcham general cemetery. Kidman’s estate, amounting to some £300,000, was mostly left to his family, but much went to charities.

BORN
15 January 1842, Fitzroy, Victoria, Australia

DIED
8 August 1909, North Sydney, NSW, Australia

Saint Mary MacKillop

Mary Helen MacKillop (1842-1909), known in life as Mother Mary of the Cross, was born on 15 January 1842 in Fitzroy, Melbourne.

Mary was educated at private schools but chiefly by her father who had studied for the priesthood at Rome. To help her family Mary became in turn a shopgirl, a governess and at Portland a teacher in the Catholic Denominational School and proprietress of a small boarding school for girls.

As she grew to womanhood Mary was probably influenced by an early friend of the family, Father Patrick Geoghegan and began to yearn for a strictly penitential form of religious life. Concluding she would have to go to Europe to execute her plan, she placed herself under the direction of Father Julian Tenison-Woods who, as parish priest of Penola in South Australia sometimes visiting Melbourne and Portland, wanted to found a religious society, ‘The Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart’; they were to live in poverty and dedicate themselves to educating poor children. With Mary its first member and Superior the society was founded at Penola on 19 March 1866 with the approval of Bishop Laurence Sheil.

The Sisterhood spread to Adelaide and other parts of South Australia, and increased rapidly in membership but ran into difficulties. Tenison-Woods had become director of Catholic schools and conflicted with some of the clergy over educational matters. One priest with influence over the bishop declared publicly he would ruin the director through the Sisterhood. The result was that Mary was excommunicated by Bishop Sheil on 22 September 1871 for alleged insubordination; most of the schools were closed and the Sisterhood almost disbanded. The excommunication was removed on 21 February 1872 by order of the bishop nine days before he died.

In 1873 in Rome, Mary obtained papal approval of the Sisterhood but the Rule of Life laid down by Tenison-Woods and sanctioned by the bishop on 17 December 1868 was discarded and another drawn up. Tenison-Woods blamed her for not doing enough to have his Rule accepted and this caused a permanent breach between them. In journeys throughout Australasia she established schools, convents and charitable institutions but came into conflict with those bishops who preferred diocesan control of the Sisterhood rather than central control from Adelaide.

In 1883 Bishop Christopher Reynolds, misunderstanding the extent of his jurisdiction over the Sisterhood, told her to leave his diocese. She then transferred the headquarters of the Sisterhood to Sydney. On 11 May 1901 she suffered a stroke at Rotorua, New Zealand. Although retaining her mental faculties, she was an invalid until she died in Sydney on 8 August 1909.

Mary’s finest feature was her large blue eyes. Affectionate but determined, her virtues were multitudinous with charity towards her neighbour outshining all. Always regarded as holy, she was put forward in 1972 as a candidate for the honour of beatification and canonisation and on 1 February 1973 the Cause was formally introduced. Mary was beatified on 19 January 1995 at Randwick Racecourse, Sydney, in a Mass celebrated by Pope John Paul II. She was canonised as Saint Mary of the Cross at a Mass celebrated by Pope Benedict XVI in St Peter’s Square in the Vatican on 17 October 2010.