Gallipoli Sniper: The Remarkable Life of Billy Sing

By John Hamilton

'This is a well-researched, detailed and compelling story.'
Defender Magazine

Billy Sing was a small, dark man – and a deadly killer. When, as a member of the Australian Imperial Force 5th Light Horse, he was thrust onto the narrow strip of land held by the Australians on Gallipoli, he witnessed the terrible effects of the Turkish snipers and decided to fight fire with fire. Using a simple Lee Enfield .303 rifle, Sing began to pick off unwary Turks who exposed themselves. Assisted by a 'spotter' who would single out targets for him, Sing acquired an unrivalled reputation as he killed increasing numbers of enemy soldiers.

He became known as the 'Anzac Angel of Death' and the 'Assassin of Gallipoli' and was considered to be the most successful sniper and most feared man in Gallipoli.
The Turks, aware of his reputation decided to target the Sing with their own marksman. In a deadly duel, Sing fired first and killed 'Abdul the Terrible'.

This a vivid account of the merciless nature of the fighting in the Gallipoli Campaign from an award-winning journalist and best-selling author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: Apr 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781473847613

John Hamilton

JOHN HAMILTON was born in England and migrated to Western Australia with his family. After serving in the Royal Australian Navy he worked as an award-winning reporter and foreign correspondent for more than forty years. His interest in Gallipoli began in 2000 when he was assigned to cover the 85th anniversary of the landings at Anzac Cove.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Yellow Canary

It was the year that Arsenal won the Melbourne Cup. The year that England beat Australia in the test series and that a ladies cricket match between teams called the Siroccos and the Fernlees was played on the Sydney Cricket Ground. It was such a peaceful year. The first Australian impressionists had established a beachside painting camp near Mentone in Victoria. The explorer John Forrest had set out on an expedition into the Kimberleys. Two Californian brothers called Chaffey had agreed to set up an irrigation scheme at Mildura.

Her Majesty Queen Victoria was on the eve of celebrating 50 years on the British throne. As 1886 dawned, the handful of sparsely inhabited colonies that together formed a continent called Australia were part of the British Empire, part of the family, part of that powerful force that coloured most of the maps of the world a familiar, comfortable and secure red.

In Hobart, the Federal Council of Australasia, a parliament without an electorate or an executive, held its first meeting in a step towards Federation. But delegates from each of the colonies were looking uneasily outwards. France might annexe the New Hebrides – what would having another imperial power so close to its shores mean to Australia? Paranoia about some form of foreign invasion was never far from the surface in the Australia of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

There were stirrings in the bush. They had begun in Victoria, where shearers were vowing that they would work on union terms only, claiming they were not getting a fair go from the increasingly powerful pastoralists of the Western District, who were expanding their land holdings elsewhere. This industrial movement would soon grow across the country, profoundly affecting the Colony of Queensland far to the north. And there, near the centre, these stirrings would envelop the small, dusty and hard-drinking outback mining and pastoral town of Clermont, 760 kilometres north of Brisbane.

It was there, on 6 April 1886, that Mr George Richards Glenny dipped his pen into the inkwell in the court house, so very far from Mother England, and in a neat, round hand began filing an entry – Number 2881 – in his ledger for ‘Births in the District of Clermont in the Colony of Queensland’. The ledger had various headings: Child. Parents. Informant and Witnesses. Mr Glenny scratched away.

On 2 March 1886, a child called William Edward had been born at Clermont.

Father – John Sing. Occupation: Drover. Age: 44 years. Birthplace: Shanghai, China.

Mother – Mary Ann formerly Pugh. Age: 30 years. Birthplace: Kingsford, Stafford, England. Informant – Certified in writing by Mary Ann Sing.

Mother. Clermont. Witnesses – Mrs Munster. Nurse.

Then Mr Glenny signed his name, Geo. R. Glenny, with a spattering of ink and two lines underlined with a flourish.

Billy Sing had officially entered into the world.

In 1886 Billy Sing was a half-Chinese baby born into an Australian outback world increasingly hostile to the Chinese race. A little boy of mixed race and class, with a Chinese coolie father and an educated English mother, he would have stood out among the other children in the town.

Queensland had been proclaimed a self-governing colony of Great Britain on 10 December 1859. Until then it had been part of the Colony of New South Wales. Growth in the new colony had been slow at first, but in 1867 gold was discovered at Gympie and people began to pour in, so that by the 1880s more people were settling in Queensland than in any other part of the country. By the time Billy Sing was born, the colony had a population of approximately 400,000, of whom about a quarter lived in the capital, Brisbane.

At that time there were about 8,500 Chinese living in Queensland, and of these roughly 1,200 lived in the pastoral country in the centre of the state.

John Sing – also known as Richard Sing – was born circa 1842 in Shanghai, China. His 1921 death certificate notes his father’s name as See Sing, probably an Anglicised version of Xing, pronounced Shing. It was a common name, with many Xings, Shings and Sings arriving in Australia in the 1800s looking for gold.

Chinese traders had visited the north coast of Australia from the 1750s onwards – and maybe much earlier. After the British settlement of Australia in 1788, small numbers of Chinese men arrived as indentured labourers, along with some convicts and free settlers.

The number of Chinese immigrants to Australia did not really become significant until the Victorian and New South Wales gold rushes of the 1850s and 1860s, but then the newcomers soon spread further afield – to other goldfields, to found their own businesses, and to obtain work on the huge pastoral holdings across the country. Most Chinese came from poor areas in rural southern China, particularly the provinces around Canton.

John Sing may well have decided to try his luck in Australia in the aftermath of the Taiping Rebellion, which caused economic and political difficulties in China. Refugees had poured into Shanghai, pushing up land prices and forcing many Chinese to look elsewhere. From the first Victorian gold rush onwards, the number of Chinese in Australia quickly grew, stabilising at about 50,000. This population was sustained until Federation, in 1901, and the passage of the Bill known as the White Australia Policy soon afterwards.

It is not known where or when John Sing arrived in Australia, or when he settled in central Queensland. However, it is on record that, on 4 July 1883, John Sing, bachelor, born in Shanghai, China (he gave his occupation as ‘fruiterer’ on this occasion), aged 41 years, was married to Mary Ann Pugh, spinster, born in Staffordshire, England, aged 26 years.

The Reverend John Peart conducted the ceremony ‘according to the Rites of the Primitive Methodist Church’ at the residence of Mary Ann Pugh before two witnesses, Jane Charlotte King and Elizabeth Heaton. The bridegroom was illiterate. He signed their wedding certificate with an X – John Sing, His Mark.

A baby slept in a crib nearby. For, on 28 May 1883, less than two months before this wedding, Mary Ann Elizabeth Pugh had been born. No father’s name was entered on the birth certificate.

The baby’s young mother, Mary Ann Pugh, came from the village of Kingswinford, also known as Swynford Regis, in Staffordshire. The village was about 16 miles from Birmingham, in the West Midlands. The county had been famous for its potteries, producing fine china in the north, before its rich iron and coal resources led to rapid industrialisation. Eventually the south became known as the ‘Black Country’ due to the level of pollution.

Mary’s father, John Pugh, was a clerk, and he and his wife, the former Mary Ann Pearson, had three children. While the rest of the family lived and died in Staffordshire, their second daughter, Mary Ann Pugh, set out away from the smog of the Black Country for the fresh air and sunlight of Australia. She had trained as a nurse and so she sailed with a free passage from Plymouth on 5 May 1881 aboard an immigrant ship, Famenoth, under the command of Captain W.C. Auld. Famenoth, 1,035 tons and 205 feet long, was quite modern. Built in Glasgow in 1876, it was a three-masted barque with an iron hull. The 303 passengers aboard would have been reasonably comfortable in the two decks available to them on the long journey out. They finally sailed into the port of Rockhampton, Queensland, over two months later, on 30 July 1881.

There is an intriguing gap in Mary Ann Pugh’s life at this point. Between July 1881 and May 1883, no documentation regarding her exists, and many questions remain unanswered. Did Mary Pugh go nursing on the coast first at Rockhampton? Did she act as a midwife? At what stage did she decide to head for the frontier town called Clermont in the Peak Downs district of central Queensland, perhaps to work in the hospital there? And how did she meet an older Chinese man called John or Richard Sing? Was he the father of her first baby girl – or was theirs a marriage of convenience? It was, after all, a marriage that swam against a growing tide of anti-Chinese sentiment in Australia.

Jen Tsen Kwok, a modern-day PhD student at the University of Queensland, wrote of the period: ‘There had been a shift in the representation of the Chinese from the plodding, frugal John Chinaman to the dangerous and repulsive Ah Sin.’

Vicious cartoons were appearing in national magazines of the time such as the Bulletin and state papers like the Queensland Figaro. A cartoon in the Bulletin depicted a Chinese octopus with a tentacle marked ‘Immorality’ wrapped around the waist of a European girl; another showed a Chinese man tempting two girls with an opium pipe outside a den. The Queensland Figaro published an image of a Chinese locust plague advancing on a farmer and his family under the heading ‘The Chinese Plague’ and with the caption ‘White Man: It’s those pesky locusts that are eating me out of house and home. I must exterminate them somehow.’

Another cartoon in the same newspaper showed a top-hatted European astride a map of Queensland with Chinese on one side of him and rabbits on the other. A rabbit says: ‘What will he do with them?’

Mary Ann Pugh had set out from the coast literally for the Wild West, and an area called Peak Downs that lay beyond the Great Dividing Range. Only 20 years before, the Brisbane Courier had given travelling directions as ‘Peak Downs … about 320 miles n-w of Rockhampton … new country … no roads … blacks bad’.

In 1861 gold had been found there, near the present town of Clermont, by a shepherd called Sweeney – some said he was one of four men mustering the first sheep out to a property called the Langton Run. They were cutting timber in a gully when they found gold a mile north of the town. Their sale of 50 ounces of gold in Rockhampton started the first rush. Soon there were 10,000 diggers swarming through the gullies in the countryside around Clermont after the ‘yeller stuff’.

The long hot road to the place then called Digger’s Lagoon was soon marked by pubs along the way, serving as landmarks for the diggers walking and riding past Yaamba, Woodville, Princhester, Marlborough, Woodstock Creek, Maisford, Columbia, Roper’s Creek, Kynebil, Lilyvale, Capella Creek and Retro Creek.

By 1865 there were signs of more permanent settlement at Digger’s Lagoon, and the town of Clermont was well established, with three pubs, several boarding houses, a bank, a hospital, a court house and its own newspaper, the Peak Downs Telegram and Queensland Mining Record.

An early visitor to the town described it thus:

For nearly a mile, we should judge, the place is covered with tents and shafts, and butchers’ and bakers’ shops. On your left, just as you enter the township, you are actually invited to an oyster saloon; on the other side of the road or street, or track – whatever you choose to call it – ‘Jack’ Moore will serve you with a Klondyke or a lemon squash, a splendid liquor for this blazing hot season; then you haven’t to travel many yards before you get to the ‘London Bakery’, where you can have loaves of bread as well as hop beer and cider, as long as you pay for them; and then you can go to a butcher’s shop and get as good a beef steak as the best of appetites could desire for three-halfpence or twopence per lb. Still on the same side of the road you can see on the northern side, a big billiard room, and slightly to the left of it, but nearer the McDonald’s Flat road, there is a big tent where ‘washing and ironing and clothes are cleaned’.

Clermont’s population in the early years tended to ebb and flow with word of new strikes. When Charles Hardie Buzacott founded the Telegram in 1864, its future was put into immediate doubt when some 2,000 miners left town, leaving him with a potential audience of only 500, most of whom were non-English speaking Chinese, including, possibly, John Sing.

However, things began to stabilise at Clermont after the discovery of a huge outcrop of almost pure copper at nearby Copperfield in 1861 and a new gold rush to the Drummond Diggings, 22 miles west of Clermont. The town became the region’s supply and administrative centre. Soon, a clear symbol of stability, the Clermont Municipal Council, was incorporated, with the Chinese well represented among the ratepayers.

On the surface Clermont appeared a multicultural mix, with the Chinese immigrants engaged in business alongside citizens with European names. Soon the town had grown to seven pubs, with one run by Ah Sam, three butchers, including the premises occupied by Ah Sue, and five stores, among them one owned by Yat Loy. There were now blacksmiths and bookmakers, and cordial and soap factories. Mr Benno Behr became a prominent businessman and mayor of the town after taking over a watch-making business from its founder, Mr H. Tootal.

However, the rush at Copperfield, only 4 kilometres away, had also exposed the first real anti-Chinese feeling in the area. The Acting Gold Commissioner reported to Brisbane that there were some 60 to 70 Chinese miners on this field and that some were failing to obey government regulations in obtaining a Miner’s Right.

‘Their plea on being asked to do so being poverty or no savee,’ he said, and noted that he intended to make an example of ‘one or two of the headmen’ by bringing them before the Bench and fining them. Far from being an isolated incident, though, the Sinophobia just kept on growing. In 1887 the Clermont Anti-Chinese League struck its own ‘medalette’ for members to wear as a sign of solidarity and, a year later, after further unrest and rioting, the Chinese were ‘removed’ from the gold and copper fields. The feeling against the Chinese also spread into the surrounding pastoral industry.

Copperfield had by now gained a reputation as a wild town, vying for that dubious honour with its bigger sister Clermont, up the road. In one incident, Copperfield postmaster, Thomas Jeminson, was brought before Clermont’s Police Magistrate, T.J. Griffin. Jeminson was charged with assaulting Mr William Glasson, whose wife was ‘notoriously a woman of ill-fame’; he was also said to have been in the habit of ‘allowing women of the lowest character to live in the Post Office where there were frequently monies and documents of value left’. He received one month’s gaol with hard labour in Rockhampton.

Meanwhile, in Clermont, the magistrate who sentenced Jemison was himself later charged with and hanged for murder. Thomas Griffin scandalised the whole region with his actions after he moved to Rockhampton as gold commissioner. Owing £252 to some Chinese miners and finding himself unable to pay, he drew £8,151 of government money from the bank to pay for gold that had arrived under armed escort from Clermont. After paying off the Chinese, Griffin gave the rest of the money to the two mounted troopers, who set out on the return journey to the coast. But the magistrate-turned-gold-commissioner insisted on accompanying the troopers and, at the Mackenzie River, shot them both and stole the money. As gold commissioner he then took part in the subsequent investigation into the murders, but finally came undone when stolen banknotes were traced to him.

Against this background of anti-Chinese feeling and general lawlessness it is not hard to imagine why the newlywed John and Mary Ann Sing and baby Mary Ann Elizabeth settled on a property some kilometres outside Clermont, near the settlement called Bathampton on Sandy Creek.

With water from the nearby creek, the hard-working couple established a market garden at their property, The Western, and grew lucerne, which fed a small herd of dairy cows. Each morning they rose early to do the milking and then John Sing set out with a pony cart to deliver milk and fresh fruit and vegetables to Clermont and some of the nearby diggings.

Mary Ann was an educated Englishwoman and she chose sensible middle-class English names for her next two children – William Edward (Billy) Sing, born on 2 March 1886, and his sister Beatrice Sing, born on 12 July 1893.

Her first daughter, Mary Ann Elizabeth, grew up to join the Salvation Army but died in childbirth in 1915.

Beatrice Sing married a local stockman called George Smith in 1917 and went on to have four sons. After her first husband died, Beatrice remarried to a widower, George Fry, who was a teamster drover and general station hand.

As a small boy, Billy Sing played happily with his sisters on the little farm, and when he was still very young, the Bathampton Provisional School – ‘a good, substantially built wooden structure’ – opened for business. It was a typical small one-teacher bush school measuring 24 by 16 feet and had been built to accommodate 38 pupils. In 1892 Billy received a scrolled certificate headed ‘Christmas 1892’, bearing the names of the school committee and Mrs T. Sullivan, teacher. It was presented to W.E. Sing ‘for General Proficiency in 2nd Class’.

The District Inspector of Schools, Mr D.I. Harrap, reported back to Brisbane: ‘The children of Mrs Sing, a Chinaman’s wife, invariably win school prizes for academic proficiency.’ The inspector said the Sing children were ‘bright, intelligent and well behaved and thoroughly deserving of the honours achieved’. But he also reported that a disgruntled parent, whose children’s ‘attendance was irregular and progress minimal’, had written to Mrs Sullivan declaring that school prizes were ‘for white children and not for Canaries or Yellow Noses’. Mrs Sullivan, to her credit, took no notice and kept teaching Billy until she was forced to resign due to illness in 1898.

But racism continued to raise its head at Bathampton. In 1901 the school parents nominated Joseph Ah Sam to fill a vacancy on the school committee. An anxious public servant in Brisbane wrote to the education minister:

Judging by his name Joseph Ah Sam is either a Chinaman or is of Chinese extraction … so far as I remember this is the first time a Chinaman has been nominated for a position on a school committee. Is he a naturalised British subject? If not, is he eligible?

The enquiry was passed to the Department of Justice for urgent advice. The Crown solicitor ruled that Mr Ah Sam was legally entitled to be appointed to a school committee and naturalisation was not required. There were still some reservations within the education department. The Crown solicitor’s ‘interesting opinion’, it was decided, should be entered into a Precedent Book for future reference.

As Billy Sing played in the schoolyard at Bathampton, events were brewing elsewhere that would envelop Sandy Creek and Clermont as flashpoints in what was to become known as the Shearers’ War of 1891.

Australia was, until then, a country that rode on the sheep’s back. Early explorers covered enormous distances when finding new land to settle, new country to graze. In 1844 a Prussian naturalist called Friedrich Wilhelm Leichhardt had embarked on a poorly equipped marathon exploration expedition, during which he walked all the way from Moreton Bay in Queensland to Port Essington in Arnhem Land. On his way he passed through central Queensland and an area straddling the Tropic of Cancer where the towns of Springsure, Emerald and Clermont are now located. The district became known as Leichhardt in honour of the explorer, who disappeared without trace seven years later after setting out to walk across Australia from east to west. Leichhardt had found an area in central Queensland with wide-open plains and rich black soil, dusty in the hot summers but boggy when the rains came. It grew good pasture.

Pastoralists and their sheep soon arrived to populate the plains, overcoming initially fierce opposition from the local Aboriginals. By 1891 it was a rich pastoral district with over a million sheep, 60 per cent of which grazed on just five giant properties.

A Frenchman, Oscar de Satgé, who had arrived in Melbourne during the gold rushes but then went droving and moved north, took over one of the properties in an area that came to be known as Peak Downs. He called his station ‘Wolfang Downs’ after the only really prominent natural feature in the area – a jagged piece of rock, the core of an ancient volcano, that indeed looks like a giant dog’s tooth from a distance. It was de Satgé who named the settlement on Hood’s Lagoon ‘Clermont’ as a nostalgic tribute to his French beginnings in the area of Clermont-Ferrand. The town of Clermont was just one small, populated island in a vast sea of sheep stations. Pastoralists, miners, shearers and stockmen ruled the land.

When industrial unrest grew into what became known as the Shearers’ War, the Queensland Colonial Secretary, Horace Tozer, spoke of a ‘front’, which extended from the southern border of the colony to the Gulf country north of Cloncurry and from Roma across to the western border. This area, enveloping Clermont, included 316 stations.

It had been boom time for wool. From a few thousand sheep introduced in the 1790s, nearly a century later there were almost 90 million grazing across Australia. The wool clip was worth close to £13 million in 1886, while gold brought in £3 million and all other exports just less than £5 million.

By the 1880s there was an estimated shearing workforce of 56,000, of whom 25,000 were shearers. Thousands more workers owed their living to the wool trade – from the shepherds and the station workers, and the men building the rail lines and loading the trains that brought the bales of wool to the city ports, to the wharfies loading the bales aboard the ships and the sailors taking the golden cargo to the mills of Britain.

But all was not well. The boom, the first age of the Golden Fleece, was running out of steam and wool prices began falling. While in 1873 wool fetched fifteen pence per pound in London, by 1894, when the economy had plunged into a depression, the price had fallen to six and a half pence per pound. As the price began to drop from the 1873 peak, the pastoralists’ problems compounded, and the pressure to reduce costs prompted them to cut their shearing rates.

The trouble began brewing early in 1886, the year Billy Sing was born, when a young Victorian shearer named David Temple refused to accept a cut in shearing rates. Pastoralists in New South Wales had declared that rates for the coming season were to be reduced from twenty shillings per 100 sheep to seventeen shillings and sixpence. A shearer penalised for what the pastoralists might decree ‘wilful bad shearing’ would receive only fifteen shillings per 100 for all sheep shorn.

The pastoralists started banding together to determine the employment conditions between themselves and their shearers. It was boss versus worker and the scene was being set for a classic confrontation as the pastoralists formed themselves into associations and the shearers into unions.

David Temple, aged just 24, and other ‘knights of the blade’ banded together to form the Australasian Shearers’ Union – the forerunner of today’s Australian Workers’ Union. They soon amalgamated with other shearers’ unions. Many of the shearers were itinerant, working their way along a route that might take them, according to the shearing season, from Victoria and New South Wales between June and November and then up into Queensland from January to March and August to October, depending on the pastoral district. It was in Queensland that attitudes hardened and lines were finally drawn in red dust and black soil.

For John Sing, sometimes working as a drover or a station hand and also tending his market garden and his cows for the milk run into Clermont, the anti-Chinese feeling generated by the gold rushes was now compounded by the attitudes of the shearers as they moved rapidly towards strikes and confrontation with the pastoralists. The shearers thought the Chinese were an inferior, immoral race who would take their jobs for low rates. Stuart Svensen in his book The Shearers’ War puts the number of Chinese in Queensland in 1891 at 8,574, of whom about 1,200 lived on the ‘front’.

Fewer than a hundred Chinese in the whole colony listed their occupation as pastoral worker. Most Chinese on the front were market gardeners, cooks or shopkeepers. The Chinese market gardeners were either employed for wages on the large stations, or worked small plots privately near the towns. In many areas they provided the only form of defence against Barcoo Rot and scurvy. White Queenslanders were generally unwilling to take the long, arduous labour of market gardening for the low and unreliable financial returns it offered. So why all the fuss about a few Chinese?

Svensen says the answer is a complex one. Many Chinese market gardeners, most likely John Sing among them, arranged their farms so they could work as casual shed hands during the shearing season. The unions claimed the Chinese would work for lower wages than the Europeans. They were accused of opium smoking, of gambling, of spreading diseases like leprosy, and of sexual debauchery.

There were also some Chinese shearers working the sheds, who were treated like lepers and called ‘scabs’, in reference to leprosy – and the Queensland Shearers’ Union banned them from membership. As feeling grew one union leader declared: ‘Our present position is almost a strike against Chinese and coloured aliens.’ The fear and loathing often focused on sex. Svensen writes of the period:

Of the 8,574 Chinese in Queensland, only 47 were female. Consequently, if the Chinese wished to engage in any heterosexual activity it had to be with white or Aboriginal women.

Some manifestation of a sense of sexual threat can be detected in almost every piece of anti-Chinese propaganda of the period. Often this was blatant, as in the many cartoons, which contained a Chinese with a lecherous grin on his face, and a white girl with her head hung in shame.

More usually the threat was unconsciously converted into some quasi-scientific argument such as the popular one that children of mixed marriages were biologically inferior.

John and Mary Ann Sing would have been fearful to venture far from their farm, and must have found the whispered gossip about their relationship hard to bear. Family legend has it that Mary Ann was fearless in defending her children and making sure they were brought up as Europeans … as Australians.

Their son, Billy, lively, small and dark, was just under five years old when the soldiers came to Clermont to crush the shearers’ rebellion. Members of a group called the Moreton Mounted Infantry clattered into town, one of many similar bands of volunteer soldiers on horseback, part of the Queensland Defence Force. The volunteers had been called out by the colonial government to help restore law and order as the striking shearers established camps near towns and the pastoralists sent in strike-breakers to work on the stations. Two camps with around 500 men were established near Clermont. John Sing and his little boy, Billy, were kept busy delivering fresh vegetables to both soldiers and strikers with their pony cart.

Relations between the two groups were mainly amiable, so good that at one stage the military officers even challenged the strikers to a game of cricket against the troops at Sandy Creek.

Billy may have watched preparations for the game. He would certainly have noticed the feathers the soldiers wore in their hats. To prove their horsemanship, the men had taken to chasing the emus that abounded around Clermont. They would aim to pluck the darker and smaller chest feathers of the birds while riding alongside at a gallop. Then they would stuff the feathers into the puggaree around their felt hats.

After the strike was over the Queensland government allowed the mounted infantry –forerunners of the Australian Light Horse – to wear the emu plume in recognition of their service. The Queensland decoration was taken up by other states so that by the time of Gallipoli, all Light Horsemen wore the feathers as a badge of honour. The ways of the bush and even of its animals were translating into the ways of the soldier in the field.

***

‘The bush still sets the standard of personal efficiency,’ wrote Charles Bean in The Story of Anzac:

The bushman is the hero of the Australian boy; the arts of the bush are his ambition; his most cherished holidays are those spent with country relatives or in camping out.

He learns something of half the arts of a soldier by the time he is ten years old – to sleep comfortably in any shelter, to cook meat or bake flour, to catch a horse, to find his way across country by day or night, to ride, or at the worst, to ‘stick on’.

The Australian was half a soldier before the war; indeed throughout the war, in the hottest fights on Gallipoli and in the bitterest trials of France or Palestine, the Australian soldier differed very little from the Australian who at home rides the station boundaries every week-day and sits of a Sunday round the stockyard fence.

By the time Billy Sing of Clermont was ten years old, he too was half a soldier. He could sleep out, cook a damper on a campfire’s coals and ride a horse.

From his father he learned how to be patient and how to work from sunup to sunset and endure against the odds. From his mother he discovered adaptability, persistence and discipline. But the bush was his greatest teacher. He learned the ways of the emu and the kangaroo, the wild pig and the bush turkey, and how to track and stalk them. He learned how to move quietly, carefully, through the scrub and then take up a position in which he’d stop and watch and wait. He learned to stay still in the heat, keep motionless, ignore the tickling of bush flies around his eyes, nose and ears, stay focused, and wait.

And he could shoot a rifle.

Chapter 2

Sound the Trumpet, Beat the Drum

Billy Sing got the sack from his first job in 1902. He never forgot the incident. He was dismissed for lending a mate the horse provided for him by a Mr McCann, the manager of Beresford station outside Clermont. He didn’t really need the horse, because his job was a simple one.

Just camp by the waterhole, Mr McCann had told the teenager. When the cattle come down to the mud patch – all that remained of Mistake Creek – pull them out when they become bogged. Just stay there until the next thirst-crazed beasts come along, and try to save them, yanking, pulling, pushing them from the certain sucking death of the