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from the crater was powerful enough to
dislodge a Squirrel helicopter
from its landing pad.
But police were responsible for ensuring no further casualties, and the GNS Science seismometer on Whakaari was laying down a continuous recording of the volcano’s quivering energy. The volcano had erupted out of nowhere, and might do so again. In the hours after the eruption, the island was relatively quiet – and, in retrospect, this was the window for recovering the bodies.
Indications of unrest became more pronounced on Tuesday 10 December when the tremors began again, and on Wednesday and early Thursday the tremors peaked at levels well above the eruption itself. On Thursday evening, the tremors fell away sharply, and continued to fall on Friday, when the NZ Defence Force landed on the island at first light.
It was a team of eight, including six bomb disposal specialists, kitted out in three protective layers, with breathing apparatus and four hours’ worth of air. The work they did was exhausting. Around the active crater area, they waded through dense, hot, acidic mud, but they collected the bodies, and prepared them for final retrieval by helicopter to HMNZS Wellington, which was waiting offshore.
They recovered six bodies, but two had gone.
Marshall-Inman and Winona Langford had been 800m away from the eruption, and 300m from the shoreline, but a violent rainstorm had swollen the stream near where they lay, and washed them into the sea. Police would later say that, while patrolling in Te Awapuia Bay, they’d seen a body believed to be Marshall-Inman near the landing, but couldn’t get close enough to recover it, and called in a Navy inflatable. In rebounding waves, the Navy personnel were unable to take the body aboard, and the rough sea allowed no second chance.
Resigned to the lack of any formal goodbye, the Inman family organised a celebration of life at the Whakatane Baptist Church on 20 December. Maangi’s photo was on display, too, and hundreds attended. The mourners heard from the helicopterpilot rescuers that both Marshall-Inman and Maangi had tried to help members of their tour groups before they’d finally succumbed. Monday 9 December had been Marshall-Inman’s 1111th venture onto the island, and each one of them, except the last, had been recorded in his diary.
A few weeks later, Marshall-Inman’s brother Mark Inman and friends rode jet skis out to Whakaari, and sat on their craft in Te Awapuia Bay. After the long haul out to the island, the eight riders opened cans of beer and performed their own karakia – Maori incantations and prayers, used to invoke spiritual guidance and protection – to their friend and brother, and to all those who’d lost their lives.
EGG MAN
OF CHANGI
It was an unusual first meeting; I arrived a stranger, yet an hour later we parted as friends. My presence somehow helped a dying old man tap a reserve of strength, and, as if there was some magic elixir circulating in that oxygen cylinder, he became animated and energised.
There would be no further contact – we had no time to lose. In those precious moments Guy determinedly ventured back in his mind to his young adult years in the 1940s when, like so many Australians of his generation, he saw more of life and death than he may have cared for. Therein lay our bond, a connection born of Guy’s wartime encounter with my long-dead father, Ian McGregor. We talked of that, and much more.
HAVING ALREADY SERVED in the citizen militia, 19-year-old Guy Templeton Baker joined the all-volunteer Second Australian Imperial Force (2nd AIF) in July 1940 and was posted to its 27th Infantry Brigade, one of three brigades of the Australian Army’s 8th Division. The 20,000-strong division had been raised for war in North Africa, but, with the rapidly escalating threat from Japan in Asia and the Pacific, the 8th was broken into four units and deployed much closer to home.
The 27th Brigade joined with the 22nd in reinforcing the British garrison in Malaya, while other elements of the division headed for Rabaul, Ambon and Timor. From August 1941 onwards, the 22nd and ▶
Guy Baker, pictured here
as a 19-year-old private,
enlisted in the 2nd AIF
in July 1940.
The island of Singapore was Britain’s great strategic hub in the Far East, but this supposedly unconquerable fortress would soon be rendered as defendable as a house of cards.
Through the following December and January, a relentless enemy, whose air superiority proved to be devastatingly effective, pushed ever southward. Despite pockets of stiff resistance, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) quickly overran the Malayan peninsula. Singapore fell after a further two weeks of fighting, and a campaign that had lasted a mere 70 days came to an abrupt end.
On 15 February 1942 the Malaya Command capitulated, and, along with 15,000 of his fellow Australians, Private Guy Baker found himself a prisoner of war (POW). Units of the 8th Division fighting elsewhere in Asia fared no better and were also condemned to captivity.
Some 50,000 Allied soldiers – most of them British and Australian – were marched to Singapore’s Changi peninsula where the Japanese cordoned off a large area for a sprawling series of crowded camps centred on the British Army’s Selarang Barracks. In the first weeks of captivity, the POWs were more or less left to their own devices, with little interference from their captors. Minimal food and medical supplies were provided, and as much as possible life returned to pre-captivity military routine.
But by April 1942, Japanese attitudes were hardening. Imperial Japan’s bushido militarist ethos held that POWs were utterly dishonoured. They had failed the ultimate test of death in battle, and as a consequence their lives were rendered worthless. Because Japan had not ratified the 1929 Geneva Convention on the rights of POWs, its military commanders felt under no compulsion to act humanely.
Prisoners were to be put to hard labour, repairing damaged buildings, roads and the like, building airfields, and loading ships taking the spoils of war back to Japan. Further afield they were to be used as slave labourers on the construction of a railway linking occupied Burma with Thailand.
IN MID-APRIL 1943, Guy Baker was one of 3662 Australians transported to Thailand to labour on the railway. They joined 3400 British POWs to form F Force. Conditions in the infamous construction camps were appalling. Diseases such as cholera, typhoid and dysentery took a disastrous toll, while Japanese and Korean guards exacted punishments with sadistic brutality.
It’s a familiar and painful episode in Australia’s history, seared into the consciousness of Guy Baker’s generation and many who followed. By the time F Force survivors returned to Changi in October, Baker had been reduced to little more than a pitiful sack of bones. Out in the Thai jungle, 1060 of his Australian comrades lay dead, almost a third of those who had headed north six months earlier.
Like Baker, Ian McGregor had served in the citizen militia, but his service extended back to the mid-1920s. He was born in 1907 in Broken Hill, the second-eldest of four boys.
His father, Alexander McGregor, worked as a livestock agent and auctioneer. However, business soured in union-dominated Broken Hil l after Alexander
OPPOSITE PAGE, FROM TOP: THE AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL; MCGREGOR COLLECTION
Alexander’s financial troubles forced Ian from school around the age of 15. He found work as a teller with the Commonwealth Bank, serving in branches in NSW, New Guinea and Queensland. Somewhere in his youth, perhaps in Broken Hill or on visits to Brogo, Ian learnt to ride.
He became a skilled horseman, and, drawn to the deeds of Australia’s mounted troops in the recent war, joined a succession of cavalry and mounted infantry regiments, rising from the ranks to become a junior officer in Queensland’s 11th Light Horse (Darling Downs) Regiment.
In April 1940, aged 32, Ian Alexander McGregor joined the 2nd AIF, enlisting while working in the Queensland outback town of Roma. He was posted to the 2/26th Battalion and later that year promoted to captain with Headquarters (HQ), 27th Brigade.
McGregor was one of three officers responsible for embarking the brigade from Sydney, Melbourne and Fremantle, in Western Australia. Following weeks of toil, and almost on the eve of departure for Singapore, he hurried to Toowoomba in July 1941 to join my mother, Charmian, at the birth their first child, Graeme (Tim). Ian would not see them again until September 1945.
Snatched tender moments and hasty farewells were followed after February 1942 by an agonising silence lasting months. Ian was posted as missing in April. Charmian waited until 8 January 1943 to learn that he was still alive. It was wonderful news, but came with a bleak caveat in the final 13 words of an urgent official telegram: “PRISONER OF WAR MALAYAN CAMPS STOP MINISTER FOR THE ARMY EXTENDS SINCERE SYMPATHY.”
In the early days of captivity, rumours circulated among the POWs that liberation was imminent. With the USA drawn into the war following Japan’s Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941, assuredly the Americans would come to the POWs’ aid? McGregor thought otherwise. With a dour realist bent – some said linked to his Scottish ancestry – he predicted a captivity of years, an unpopular, but of course accurate, prediction.
After a month of incarceration, a meeting of AIF HQ heard that the IJA could provide only a further two months supply of food. The POWs needed to become as selfsuficient as possible, and fast. A 40ha vegetable garden ▶
Pigs were proposed, but how would hungry men find enough extra food for a piggery? Separate poultry farms run by each brigade were suggested and rejected, although some soldiers began keeping one or two chickens or ducks for their own consumption, or to profit from the sale of their eggs.
Consistent with his gloomy prediction of years in captivity, McGregor hatched grander and more determined plans that none could dispute.
WITH THE PERMISSION of his superiors, McGregor became Officer in Charge (OIC) Poultry, and, between May 1942 and the liberation of Changi in September 1945, managed a farm that grew to be more like an industrial enterprise than a backyard chook run. Yet despite his family’s farming background, there was little in his early years to prepare him for his role as OIC Poultry.
Writing in March 1944, McGregor recalled that “people laughed at me rather at the start – however, I persevered”. His activities faced risks and setbacks, but as each arose it was tackled with a stubborn refusal to brook failure.
Of an initial stock of 204 chickens obtained from local Chinese traders, 183 were wiped out by avian cholera. Second and third flocks suffered similarly, but fortunately choosing hardier ducks put the farm on a more sustainable footing.
Because the IJA sternly discouraged fraternisation between POWs and the Chinese, even obtaining new birds could be hazardous. In More Lives Than a Cat, a selfpublished memoir of his POW years, Guy Baker recounted how “one night [McGregor] sneaked outside the barbed wire where he purchased chickens...[and] proudly...bore them back in a bag”. While the farm was mostly tolerated by the IJA, harassment and arbitrary threats to have it moved meant that McGregor’s activities were never settled.
Yet in a June 1945 report for AIF HQ, he was able to summarise in precise detail – literally to the last egg – his farm’s remarkable output for the preceding three years. A total of 12,112 chicken and 27,366 duck eggs had been produced, with an average of 1012 eggs collected each month.
Based on his typical weight for an egg (chicken 1.69 ounces and duck 2.34 ounces), McGregor even calculated a total tonnage. Perhaps more impressive than the number of eggs laid was the tally of 5281 pounds (2.4 tonnes). When the farm closed after liberation in early September, it was producing eggs at a rate of 3000 a month. Almost 47,000 eggs had been distributed and consumed, or diverted for breeding, during its entire operation.
Apart from the farm’s size, it was the destination of the produce that set McGregor’s enterprise apart. Keenly aware of the likelihood of protracted malnourishment, he also knew that the sick and those still recovering from wounds sustained in battle would suffer most.
McGregor’s diary is dotted with references to the sorry state of the sick and how the farm’s produce was to supplement their paltry rations. “Some will never be well again,” he wrote in March 1944. “They have an intolerable burden to bear – few comforts and little food”.
The four hospitals treating Australians received eggs, as did the “sick in the lines upon medical request”. And the Red Cross took eggs to “all nationalities”. The farm’s produce went nowhere else, and despite their own gnawing hunger, McGregor and his off siders never indulged.
As the years dragged on, and as each work party staggered back to Changi, McGregor’s diary descriptions sank deeper into the squalid tragedy of the many hollowed out husks of manhood he encountered. On 29 February 1944 he wrote:
“The hospital is a very depressing place these days: malaria & dysentery in all their types; ulcers (tropical) & duodenal; beriberi, diphtheria, TB; skin diseases in all forms; typhus, cholera & many examples of sheer starvation. Men who at one time were examples of a fine soldierly masculine bearing now have infantile yet bovine [sluggish] faces & where there is a little flesh to cover their emaciated frames have quite feminine limbs.”
And out of the hellish darkness of the punishment cells of Outram Road Gaol in Singapore emerged men more dead than alive. McGregor mentioned several “batches” returning to Changi in a “pitiful state”, their bodies:
“…covered in scabies and sores, so sick with beriberi, unable to walk or stand, emaciated to the extreme – beaten & thrashed & starved & yet retaining a mental balance after months in solitary confinement.”
These were men who through sheer mental strength had regained the light and relative sanctuary of Changi. McGregor was able “to give 30 eggs immediately”. He was also confident about putting them “on their feet with products from the big farm” – more eggs, vegetables, and perhaps a nourishing broth made from a bird whose laying days were done. Such were McGregor’s ways as he helped those in desperate straits.
McGregor continued to visit from time to time with an egg in hand, or would send them with others. When Baker was fit enough to leave hospital the captain called again. But this time he came empty-handed. Instead, he arrived with an order for the lowly private. Baker was to become McGregor’s batman.
“The worst job in the army!” Baker cringed at the prospect of being an officer’s servant, but an order was an order. “What a surprise I got when I reported for duty,” he recalled in More Lives Than a Cat:
“I felt somewhat ashamed…I did not wash a thing for Captain McGregor, nor clean his boots or do any cooking… He looked after me like a baby for the three weeks. I acted as his batman and then he sacked me and took on another lame duck.”
Cosseted back to functioning health by McGregor, this ex-batman, and several that followed, were given jobs on the farm. Ravenous ducks needed plenty of food. Minced grass, kitchen slops and the smallest scrap or grain of rice that fell to earth – it all went to the farm. But what sent a duck into a frenzy was a meaty snail. McGregor made Private Arthur Rollings his “master snail catcher”, and when not detailed elsewhere, Guy Baker became one of his helpers.
After much pleading with the IJA, the snail catchers were given permission to scour the bush outside the camp perimeter. Their prey was not like a typical garden snail, but a creature “as large as a small man’s clenched hand”.
The snails congregated in clusters, and each collector could “very quickly fill a bucket”. Men heading out in labouring parties were also given buckets to fill with snails. With the hard snail shells cleaved by a bush knife (known as a parang) and the flesh exposed, the ducks greedily gobbled every last skerrick.
The full impact of Ian McGregor’s activities shines from the few surviving thankyou notes written by recipients of the farm’s produce. Lieutenant Colonel Cotter Harvey, a doctor with the 2/10th Australian General Hospital, sent such a note from the Kranji Camp on the other side of the island, addressed to “Capt. McGregor, Eggologist, Changi”: “[What?] a grand fellow you are”, the colonel’s note began:
“The birds arrived in perfect condition & were roasted (beautifully). For dinner that night, having given Chas O. a drumstick, I ate the remainder of one entire bird, thereby consuming more chicken at one sitting than I have done in my entire life.”
APART FROM THE forgotten joy of a full stomach, the health blessings were palpable. “Already my ulcer has taken a turn for the better,” Cotter Harvey enthused, “and healing promises to be rapid henceforth!” What he didn’t reveal was that he had nearly died from septicaemia. The birds and eggs sent to Kranji had helped him survive.
In September 1942, just a few months after the farm was set up, Brigadier Duncan Maxwell (commander of the 27th Brigade during the Malaya campaign) wrote to McGregor before being shipped off to Taiwan with other senior officers. He conveyed the thanks of all in his hospital ward “who have lost legs and had serious wounds and have been here since the capitulation”.
One in particular said that “since the start, back in the black days when he was so sick, he had in all 28 eggs from your farmyard and they had saved his life!”
McGregor’s own health suffered as a POW. Even before the fall of Singapore, he had been forced into hospital. While the fighting raged in Malaya, he was incapacitated and frustrated in equal measure noting that “the war coming closer and closer down the mainland and me in
In contrast to his meticulous farm production records, McGregor’s diary provides little detail of the personal trials of illness and hunger, and any ailments are only noted in passing. And yet through three and a half years spent in captivity it seems that he suffered from a range of afflictions, including: scabies, tropical ulcers and unspecified fevers; a kidney complaint and chronic back pain; and an excruciatingly swollen testicle, the “size of an emu egg”.
He twice required surgery for the removal of painful cysts. But whatever ailed McGregor, he always knew that he was one of the lucky ones. In August 1944 he reflected on:
“…how fortunate I was to miss the rigors [sic] & privations of the trip to the north...I would have gone gladly had I been asked but in no way pressed the point.”
He was simply glad not to work for the enemy, but in truth he would not have survived.
McGregor brooded on “years of anxiety and loneliness... and such an intolerable waste of time”. They were, in quoting the Bible, the “years the locusts have eaten”. He suffered bouts of depression, but his great weapon in fighting despair was a sense of purpose – a deeply felt compulsion to do all he could for men who were in a far more wretched state than himself. As much as these were wasted years, they were also years tempered by “faith and hope and charity”.
McGregor’s efforts undoubtedly helped save many lives; but unlike his egg tally, such a number would always have defied calculation. The Eggologist of Changi was unassuming throughout, writing as late as December 1944 that:
“It has been said that men’s lives have been saved in some instances by these [eggs]. Perhaps an exaggeration, but if the effort has assisted in the saving of one life it has been worth it.”
As I went to take my leave from that Wollongong hospital room, Guy Baker’s eyes became moist. No words were needed to mark our parting. His eyes said it all. They spoke to me with ineffable gratitude, telling me that, yes, Ian McGregor had saved at least one life, and the selflessness of one among many had all been worth it.
In the 2007 Queen’s Birthday Honours, just before he died, Guy Baker was awarded the Order of Australia Medal (OAM) for his service to the welfare of veterans and their families.
_____________________________
Quotes relating directly to Ian McGregor are from diaries and papers held by the McGregor family. I thank my brothers Tim and Andrew for their help with that material and with this story. I also thank Guy Baker’s daughter Roslyn for her assistance.
Beauty on the brink
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Our new conservation superpower
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Lifeblood of the nation
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When a city rises
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Grantham’s road to recovery
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