Few words say so much more

By Kath Gannaway
“WHAT you’ve seen in the pictures… all that’s how it was.”
Ninety-year-old Roy Bartlett doesn’t have a lot to say about his experiences as a Changi prisoner of war, or his time on the Burma Railway, but he remembers.
Mr Bartlett was one of about 30 people who gathered at the Cenotaph at Yarra Junction on Friday to observe Remembrance Day.
Vice president of Upper Yarra RSL sub-branch Barry Treloar spoke of the sacrifice made by Australian service men and women in many theatres of war, a wreath was laid by a fellow RSL member, and red poppies were placed by members of the public.
Mr Bartlett moved with his family to Warburton as an 18-year-old in 1933.
He joined the 2nd/10 Company, Royal Australian Engineers in July 1940 and after training left Australia on the Queen Mary. He was 25 years old. His brother, Cedric, was two years younger.
“We went to Singapore and then into Malaya,” Mr Bartlett recalls in a quiet, studied voice.
“At the capitulation, on the 15th of February, that was it. We were POWs.”
Cedric died as a POW.
“He would be 88 now, if he had lived,” he said.
More than 50 years on, Mr Bartlett can’t bring to mind exactly how many men were in his unit, about 240, he thinks. As for how many returned, a heartbreaking too few.
“On the first Anzac Day after the war there were about 30 of us,” he recalls.
Roy Bartlett has never forgotten, but on Remembrance Day, there is an added sense of the sacrifice asked for, and made, by so many.
“It’s about remembering my mates,” he says to a question which really didn’t need to be asked.