Cecil
Hinton was a strapping young man in his twenties when he donned his army
fatigues to fight for Australia
in the Second World War.
Eventually
captured by the Japanese, he spent three and a half years in Singapore’s
notorious prisoner of war camp at Changi. The cruel experience was to afflict
him for the rest of his life.
Repatriated
in poor health to Sydney
at war’s end, 29-year-old Cecil formed part of a small group of diggers whose
sacrifice and suffering as POWs became etched into this country’s history and folklore.
He retained lasting friendships with his wartime comrades, including the
legendary Weary Dunlop with whom he sometimes went on fishing trips to the Gold
Coast.
Prior to
the war, Cecil had enjoyed steady employment and played rugby league for the
Redfern All Blacks. However, the hard labour, beatings and malnutrition
suffered at Changi left him with a permanent heart condition and debilitating
leg injuries from untreated tropical ulcers.
Upon his
return he landed a good job with the NSW Tramways, which involved walking
around the rail network and oiling the numerous tram junctions.
His
workmates were well aware of the walking impairment caused by his wartime leg
injuries, so they often gave him a lift on the trams to the various junctions.
Unfortunately for Cecil, this was against the employer’s rules and his practice
of catching a lift on the trams ultimately led to his dismissal.
Following
this disappointment, he was never able to work again and obtained a disability
pension from the Commonwealth Department of Veterans Affairs.
He claimed
a higher rate of pension for total and permanent incapacity (TPI) as a result
of his war injuries but was refused. He could not understand the knock-back
given that all other ex-Changi POWs seemed to qualify for the TPI rate.
Around this
time, the child welfare authorities also took Cecil and Val’s eldest son off
them and made him a State ward. The child, Ray
Vincent, was deemed “uncontrollable,” which Ray remembers as
a common term applied to Aboriginal children in those days. Cecil and Val tried
in vain for many years to get their son released and sent back home.
As if this
wasn’t enough, Cecil continued to suffer the discrimination that he had encountered
prior to going to war. He was, for example, refused service in hotels because
he was Aboriginal. Ray Vincent, now
62 and a resident of Redfern, remains angry to this day: “My father fought for
his country but came back to a place that just hadn’t changed,” he says. Val Hinton
adds: “He was good enough to risk his life in war but not good enough to drink
in a pub.”
But his old
digger comrades stuck by him. Ray fondly remembers his father as being a proud person
who would never ask for charity despite his struggle to raise a very large
family on a meagre war pension. “Dad just had this uncanny knack of winning the
regular Friday night chook raffles run by his mates at Seven Hills RSL,” Ray
says with a chuckle. “The respect the old diggers showed for my father was
inspiring,” he recalls.
The system
though had one final indignity to mete out to Cecil Hinton. On 4 May 1982 the Commonwealth
Repatriation Board finally upheld Cecil’s claim to a war pension at the TPI
rate following representations from the Federal Member for Chifley on his
behalf. Tragically, Cecil had died just a few months earlier at only 65 years
old.
The cause
of death was a heart attack brought on by the hypertensive cardio vascular
disease that the Veterans Affairs Department had accepted was related to his
war service.
It seems
appropriate that the last word in this sorry story should go to Cecil Hinton
himself. While he was a POW in Changi, his Japanese tormentors used to goad him
by asking why he, as a black man, would fight for a racist country like Australia.
“Because
it’s my country, mate,” he would reply, defiantly and proudly.
Source:
South Sydney Herald June 2007 www.southsydneyherald.com.au/
[Robert Domm is the CEO Redfern Waterloo Authority –
REDWatch]