An old digger’s black experience

Cecil Hinton was a strapping young man in his twenties when he donned his army fatigues to fight for Australia in the Second World War.

Eventually captured by the Japanese, he spent three and a half years in Singapore’s notorious prisoner of war camp at Changi. The cruel experience was to afflict him for the rest of his life.

Repatriated in poor health to Sydney at war’s end, 29-year-old Cecil formed part of a small group of diggers whose sacrifice and suffering as POWs became etched into this country’s history and folklore. He retained lasting friendships with his wartime comrades, including the legendary Weary Dunlop with whom he sometimes went on fishing trips to the Gold Coast.

Prior to the war, Cecil had enjoyed steady employment and played rugby league for the Redfern All Blacks. However, the hard labour, beatings and malnutrition suffered at Changi left him with a permanent heart condition and debilitating leg injuries from untreated tropical ulcers.

Upon his return he landed a good job with the NSW Tramways, which involved walking around the rail network and oiling the numerous tram junctions.

His workmates were well aware of the walking impairment caused by his wartime leg injuries, so they often gave him a lift on the trams to the various junctions. Unfortunately for Cecil, this was against the employer’s rules and his practice of catching a lift on the trams ultimately led to his dismissal.

Following this disappointment, he was never able to work again and obtained a disability pension from the Commonwealth Department of Veterans Affairs.

He claimed a higher rate of pension for total and permanent incapacity (TPI) as a result of his war injuries but was refused. He could not understand the knock-back given that all other ex-Changi POWs seemed to qualify for the TPI rate.

Around this time, the child welfare authorities also took Cecil and Val’s eldest son off them and made him a State ward. The child, Ray Vincent, was deemed “uncontrollable,” which Ray remembers as a common term applied to Aboriginal children in those days. Cecil and Val tried in vain for many years to get their son released and sent back home.

As if this wasn’t enough, Cecil continued to suffer the discrimination that he had encountered prior to going to war. He was, for example, refused service in hotels because he was Aboriginal. Ray Vincent, now 62 and a resident of Redfern, remains angry to this day: “My father fought for his country but came back to a place that just hadn’t changed,” he says. Val Hinton adds: “He was good enough to risk his life in war but not good enough to drink in a pub.”

But his old digger comrades stuck by him. Ray fondly remembers his father as being a proud person who would never ask for charity despite his struggle to raise a very large family on a meagre war pension. “Dad just had this uncanny knack of winning the regular Friday night chook raffles run by his mates at Seven Hills RSL,” Ray says with a chuckle. “The respect the old diggers showed for my father was inspiring,” he recalls.

The system though had one final indignity to mete out to Cecil Hinton. On 4 May 1982 the Commonwealth Repatriation Board finally upheld Cecil’s claim to a war pension at the TPI rate following representations from the Federal Member for Chifley on his behalf. Tragically, Cecil had died just a few months earlier at only 65 years old.

The cause of death was a heart attack brought on by the hypertensive cardio vascular disease that the Veterans Affairs Department had accepted was related to his war service.

It seems appropriate that the last word in this sorry story should go to Cecil Hinton himself. While he was a POW in Changi, his Japanese tormentors used to goad him by asking why he, as a black man, would fight for a racist country like Australia.

“Because it’s my country, mate,” he would reply, defiantly and proudly.

Source: South Sydney Herald June 2007 www.southsydneyherald.com.au/

[Robert Domm is the CEO Redfern Waterloo Authority – REDWatch]