Radio Australia Today Editorial

One More Memory

23 April 2008

We had Bud Tingwell on the Breakfast Club yesterday.

Bud is an acting icon in Australia. He was there when the Australian film industry started back in the 1940s. But he left all that to join the air force in the battle against the Axis powers in World War Two, flying spitfires and mosquitos, the fastest fighter planes of the time.

He was a great looking boy back in those days. Check him out:

He may have been smiling, but he told us that he spent the entire war in a state of fear. His plane was, of course, shot at repeatedly, and many were the times that he thought he would not be coming home.

He also told us that he had never acknowledged this fear, and it was only at a meeting of other World War Two vets that they talked openly about being scared.

Bud is in his eighties. That is a long time to be carrying the feelings.

It makes you wonder how many of the other people you see on the street, how many veterans, are also keeping their chins up and bearing it all alone. I have an uncle who has done the same thing. I have known him my whole life, but it was only a couple of years ago that he told me that he had fought in that war. He had kept the whole thing to himself.

As we remember ANZAC Day this week, we should also think about the wounds that people carry with them. For lifetimes perhaps.

For Bud, he got on with building a life and career. He went on to be a movie and TV star in Brtain and has since become an institution in the acting scene in Australia.

And he hasn’t changed all that much, as this page from the program for his recent stage production The Man From Snowy River proves:

Good on yer Bud, and thanks sharing your stories with us.