Going home to Cowra reminded me how completely I had lived inside a bubble.
I grew up at Pack’s Grant, a 572-acre farm beside the Cowra prisoner-of-war camp. I knew the camp was there. I knew about the breakout. I also knew about the holes in the weatherboards at the back of our house and in the shearing shed, which we understood to be bullet holes.
The woolshed at Pack’s Grant – had bullet holes from the Cowra PoW breakout
What I had never fully appreciated was that the history of the Cowra breakout had run directly past our back verandah. That changed when I sat down for lunch with Tom Rowston at the Happy Days cafe.
Tom Rowston had some pieces of gold information for me over lunch at the Happy Days cafe
Tom was 93 and approaching his 94th birthday. His family had been in business in Cowra since 1924, owning car yards and other enterprises around the town. He remained fiercely proud of Cowra, its council, hospital, water supply, businesses and people.
When we met, Tom looked at me and knew exactly where I belonged. “You come from Pack’s Grant. You’re tall and skinny like your father.”
It was an extraordinary welcome home. Tom went to school with Harold Read, whose family owned Pack’s Grant before mine. They were mates, and Tom had stayed at the Read family home when he was a schoolboy.
Then he began talking about the night of the Cowra breakout.
“When the Japanese broke out, they came down and they ran past that house all night.”
The breakout began in the early hours of 5 August 1944, when more than 1,000 Japanese prisoners attempted to escape from the camp. Many headed east, apparently believing the ocean lay beyond the hills. My home Pack’s Grant stood in their path.
“Must have been pretty frightening living there,” I said. “Didn’t worry him at all,” Tom replied. Harold had told him that the men “made a lot of noise and kept us awake”.
That was how Harold Read apparently remembered a night which became one of the most recognised events in Cowra’s history. Men were running past the family home in darkness, yet the detail passed down to Tom was the noise they made and the sleep they interrupted.
Fourteen years after the breakout, Pack’s Grant changed hands. My grandparents purchased the farm for their two sons, my father, John Lindsay, and my uncle, David Lindsay. The plan was for the brothers to farm it together, although the partnership did not last long.
The letter confirming the purchase was addressed to my father. Dated 15 July 1958, it came from Cowra stock and station agents Norman C. Bellamy Pty Limited. It recorded the agreement to buy the 572-acre property from Mr Read for £45 an acre, with a 10 per cent deposit. My father moved our family to Pack’s Grant. David Lindsay built an academic career in agriculture and became Dean of Agriculture at the University of Western Australia. He is now Emeritus Professor David Lindsay.
The sale included the floor coverings, an electric stove, two hot-water systems, electric light fittings, three electric motors, an air compressor, two windmills and the shearing plant. The livestock were negotiated separately. The family bought 717 sheep, including 20 Dorset Horn stud ewes, along with 17 cattle.
Our family photographs from 1958 record what came next. They show the woolshed and yards, sheep, pigs, horses, haymaking and the broad hills surrounding Cowra.
Note the black-and-white Holstein dairy cows. They had travelled with us from the dairy farm in Dapto to become the house cow at Pack’s Grant. Against a landscape of sheep and beef cattle, she looks like a small declaration of where our family had come from.
For me, Pack’s Grant was home. The woolshed was a woolshed. The holes were holes. The former prisoner-of-war camp was nearby, but its history belonged to another time. Returning to Cowra closed the distance between those things.
A conversation over lunch connected me to Harold Read, the boy who grew up in our house and heard the Japanese prisoners passing it during the night. An old letter captured the moment one family handed the farm to another. The photographs recorded the landscape as my family found it in 1958. I went home to Cowra and discovered that the story I had travelled there to find had been waiting at home all along.
The crowd loved the didjeridoo performance by Quinten Dingo-Donovan – a moving tribute that connected the past and present.
Aunty Dr Joyce Donovan is presented with a certificate by Kiama District Historical Society president Sue Eggins, marking her appointment as the Society’s first Aboriginal Elder Patron — a recognition of more than 15 years of collaboration and contribution to keeping Kiama’s shared history alive.