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Among those in the boats was Private Austin Bede Pratt, a cab driver from Casino, NSW who had enlisted 8 months earlier. The 9th were one of the first units ashore. Fryer Library holds a number of letters by Pratt, one of which to his sister Claris describes the history-making events in which he played a role:
‘We landed just at day light under fire from the Turks and we had to fix baynots [sic] and charge them out of there [sic] trenches as soon as we landed out of the boats’.
With a certain bravado he reassures his sister that ..
‘I do not want you to think I was frightened’
... but later admits:
‘I tell you when I did feel queer when we were being rowed ashore, when the bullets were whistling over our heads and the shell landing in the water around us, but once I got ashore and fired the first shot I was right. The worst time is just before you go into action’. |
Under heavy fire the 9th, which had been landed 2 miles north of the intended position, dug in on the beach and proceeded to fight off Turkish counter attacks. Pratt’s first stay on Gallipoli was relatively short.
His mother was advised by telegram in May that he had been wounded. He was actually evacuated to England with malaria and wrote this letter to his sister from Ashlawn Red Cross Hospital in Warwickshire.
His tone was chirpy:
‘When this letter reaches you I will be back on the peninsula trying to murder some of those Turks’.
After a furlough and some sight-seeing in Britain the details of which he gives his mother in a subsequent letter, Private Pratt rejoined his unit on Gallipoli in August and fought through the rest of that campaign and on to France in April 1916. |
Pratt’s war was cut short, not by German shell or rifle fire but by rheumatism in his feet. He was in and out of military hospitals throughout the rest of 1916 and was discharged and returned to Australia in June 1917.
He died at Casino on 6 April 1924.
In The Broken Years historian Bill Gammage studies in detail letters and diaries of Australian service men in World War I. He notes that the soldiers wrote for a variety of purposes.
Some ... ‘deliberately recording the climax of their lives... many just described what they saw and felt, because the tumult of the hour denied them an alternative, because they wanted an exact account for themselves if they lived or for their relatives if they died’ (xii).
Documents like Austin Pratt’s letters give valuable insights into the lives of such ordinary men who found themselves in such extraordinary circumstances.
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