There was a large turnout for the Remembrance Day commemoration at the Cenotaph on Monday, November 11 and the Last Post was sounded by bugler Maya Heath at 11am – the date and time that the armistice was signed to mark the end of World War I.

It seems fitting in today’s history page to recall those who served in ‘the war to end all wars’ and a young recruit who was the last of the Wallabies to sign up in Gunnedah full of patriotic zeal to fight for the empire.

Extract taken from In The Line of Fire written by the late Rob McLean to mark 100 years since the start of the conflict in 1914.

Lance Tudgey had only just turned 17 when the Wallabies came to Gunnedah. To the chant of “What do we want? More Men,” the Wallabies marched down Conadilly Street behind the Town Band. And when they marched out of town the next day, after a night of rallying speeches, Lance was one of them.

Gunnedah residents turned out in force in December 1915 to give a rousing welcome to the Wallabies, a band of young men marching from the Northwest to Newcastle to enlist for service in World War I.

To the beat of a kettle drum and the cheers of the crowds lining the streets in towns and villages, the Wallabies put their patriotism to the test and their lives on the line by signing up for the far-off battlefields.

The Wallaby March from Narrabri to Newcastle in December 1915 was an exciting event and became one of the most successful recruitment efforts of World War I, providing around 800 troops for Australia’s war effort in Belgium and France and in Egypt and Palestine.

The Wallabies eventually formed the nucleus of the 34th Battalion of the AIF, which endured unimaginable conditions on the Western Front, sustaining terrible casualties.

Among those who signed up at Gunnedah were Tom Torrens, Billy Richmond, Jack Dodd, Herb Pryor, Jack Bloomfield, Joe Stevens, Lance Tudgey, Pat Kelly, Fred and Jack Shaw, Dick Harwood, Jim Panwick, Gerry Lonsdale, Fred Church, Vincent Wortley, Les Turner and William Dwyer. Sadly, many of them never returned.

The Wallabies sang as they marched, unaware of the horrors that awaited them on the other side of the world. So many of the Gunnedah district’s fine young men didn’t come back to their families and sweethearts.

Lance was one of the lucky ones – he survived, though twice wounded.

In a newspaper interview in 1985, the then 87-year-old recalled the excitement of the Wallabies’ entry to Gunnedah almost 70 years earlier.

“I joined up without a moment’s notice,” he recalled. “Quite a few of my mates did too – it was going to be a great adventure for us.”

Accounts vary but it is generally agreed that around 40 Gunnedah and district men and boys joined the enlistment march.

Lance recalled the great spirit of the marchers as they headed down the Hunter Valley to Rutherford.

He remembered the Methodist minister from Narrabri, John Wilkinson, who each day massaged the sore and blistered feet of the marchers and cheered up the homesick lads, as well as piper Lloyd Glen, of Inverell, who played the bagpipes along country roads.

After five months of training at the military camp, the Wallabies sailed out of Sydney on May 2, 1916, bound for the battlefields of France at a critical phase of the war.

Lance remembered the noise, tension, shellfire, mud and body lice, fear mixed with fleeting light-hearted moments and the comradeship of men who relied on each other to somehow survive the horrors of warfare.

“We would be up in the line for six or seven days at a time and then we would be pulled back for a few days to rest,” he recalled.

“You couldn’t imagine what it was like. There wasn’t a man who wasn’t frightened when he went into battle.

“You never knew when your number would come up, it could have been any second.”

There were also times of boredom, huddling in the trenches, often in rain, fog or mist, waiting for something to happen.

A Lewis gunner, Lance was wounded in the hand on Passchendaele Ridge on October 12, 1917. He was only out of the fray for a short time, however, and was back in the front line as Germany fought desperately in the last year of the war.

On September 30, 1918, seven weeks before the German surrender, he was badly injured when a shell exploded close to him. That was the end of the conflict for Lance – he spent the next 17 months in hospital, returning to Australia on the hospital ship Dunluce Castle in May 1919, three years after he had left for overseas.

His enduring memory of life in the lines was the strong bond among the men.

“It was terrifying most of the time but we all had a job to do – and we had to make the best of it.”

Lance was the last of the local Wallabies when he died in Gunnedah Hospital in March 1987 at the age of 89.

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