Teens recall young men eager for adventure
As night fell over the commemorative camp at Greenmount Primary School, the thoughts of the teenage army cadets turned to the young soldiers who had slept out on the spot exactly 100 years earlier.
On that night in 1914, when it was the Blackboy Hill training camp, those young men went to bed impatient to be off. It had been more than 10 weeks since they flooded in from around WA to volunteer for WWI and they had grown tired of drills.
It was after a parade at 4am on October 31 that the young men of the 11th Infantry Battalion, the first to be raised in WA, got the news they had been waiting for. The troopships Medic and Ascanius were in port in Fremantle, waiting to take them to join the Australian convoy coming up from Albany.
For many, it would be their last day on home soil, as they set out for a war from which they would never return.
Their sacrifice was remembered yesterday by more than 60 army cadets, who spent last night in tents on the grounds and will rise early today to re-enact that fateful journey from Blackboy Hill to Fremantle.
For cadet sergeants Will Burt and Cameron Criddle, both 16, retracing the steps of the soldiers was a sobering reminder of the parallels between them.
"To walk in the footsteps of the boys who went to Gallipoli, it really brings home that they weren't any older than us and many of them were younger," Cameron said. "It makes you think about what they would have felt."
Veterans Minister Joe Francis told the more than 300 people gathered on the school oval under a grey sky that they were "standing in the shadows of those 32,000 great men" who trained at Blackboy Hill.
"They came from every single part of WA: from the gold mines of Kalgoorlie, the farming lands of the South West and the city streets of Perth and Fremantle," he said. "They were a variety of backgrounds and ages. Some were too young and lied about their age. Others were too old but didn't want to miss out."
Members of the 11th Battalion Living History Unit, with period uniforms and rifles, set up pale tents representing those that once dotted the whole area: in August 1914, the training camp was "a huge canvas town" built in just two days by the first of the recruits to arrive.
The unit also brought real and replica objects, such as jam tin bombs, bayonets and rum jars, to help educate the cadets and the crowd about life in the camp and on the front line.
President Tim Rust said their goal was to personalise the sacrifice of the soldiers, especially the often overshadowed 11th Battalion.
"One of the big things that we are very conscious of is the perception that we, as re-enactors, are glorifying war but that is the complete opposite of what we are trying to do," he said.
"What we want is to humanise it. Nearly everyone can point to someone in their family who died in WWI. It touched everyone's lives. It is just sad that it is slowly being forgotten."
This morning, the cadets will attend a commemorative service at the Blackboy Hill site before re-enacting the march to Bellevue, where the steam train was waiting 100 years ago today to take the troops to Fremantle.
They will then take a special heritage train from Midland to Fremantle, where they will be greeted by a parade before a commemorative service and wreath-laying ceremony.
