For those of us that live in Canberra’s Eastern Suburbs, for any rides west, where the meeting point is Nicholls, a day’s ride is automatically one hour longer as it takes us half an hour just to meet up with everyone. So we thought for Remembrance Day we would travel to Batemans Bay for their Commemoration of the 100th Anniversary of the World War One Armistice.
I am related, by blood or marriage to a few names on the Batemans Bay memorial. McMillan, Bettini, Backhouse, and Patrech are all in my family tree. But it was for Alexander McMillan, my great great uncle, that we travelled to the Bay.
Alexander was the 14th of sixteen children born to John McMillan and Ellen Backhouse. He was born at Batemans Bay and the family lived at South Durras.
Alexander enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force in Sydney on 3 September 1914. He was 24 years old, single and employed as a sawyer (presumably in the family business). He joined the 13th Battalion, one of the first battalions to be raised, only six weeks after the declaration of war. The battalion left Melbourne for Albany on HMAT Ulysses 22 December 1914 arriving in Egypt in February 1915. Along with the rest of the 4th Brigade, under the command of then Colonel John Monash, the 13th Battalion took part in the landing at Anzac Cove, arriving late on 25 April 1915.
I don’t know which ship took Alexander to Gallipoli for the landing, but I do know that it is a bullet ridden lifeboat used by the 13th Battalion that greets you at the start of the WW1 gallery at the Australian War Memorial.
Surviving the landing, Alexander was shot in the left leg on 2 May and was eventually evacuated to the 1st Australian General Hospital in Heliopolis. He lingered for a few months as doctors tried at first to save his leg, and then his life. He died 7 August 1915 three days before two of his sisters arrived to check on his well-being. How did two civilian women travel half way around the world in the middle of a war? Was this common? I’m yet to find this out. Alexander was buried in the New Protestant Cemetery, Old Cairo, and to the best of my knowledge no relatives have ever visited his gravesite.
Alexander’s surname is spelt incorrectly on the memorial in Batemans Bay and the dates of the war are incorrect. According to the RSL, the people of Batemans Bay were so traumatised by the loss of so many local men so soon into the war that they wanted some sort of recognition immediately and so the memorial was created in 1917.
Alexander was just one of the 62,000 Australian men and women who lost their lives so we could live as we do today. RIP Great Uncle Alex.
Words by Tracey Winters
