New documentary project ensures legacy will live on

She has lived through the Spanish flu, the Great Depression and two world wars. And now this former military nurse’s stories will be preserved for time immemorial.

HER eyes have shone brightly for over 100 years, through the Spanish flu, the Great Depression, World War II and the loss of a beloved husband after almost six decades of marriage.

Faye Clarke, eagerly awaiting the celebration of her 102nd birthday on July 29, was taught to always look on the bright side of life while she was growing up on a farm outside Ulverstone on Tasmania’s north coast.

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Now inside the Caloundra RSL, just down the road from her neat self-contained home in a retirement village, she is explaining to a documentary maker about the joy of life, of the good man she wrote to from an army tent in far-flung places around the globe, of the three fine children they raised and her many descendants scattered around Australia.

Coronavirus might have killed off the public Anzac Day commemorations this year, but as Clarke sits before a camera crew, her recollections of World War II and the friends she lost live large. She is dressed in a neat yellow suit with a row of shining medals on her chest but in the blink of her mind’s eye she is back in her army nurse’s uniform in 1941 hanging onto a swaying rope ladder for dear life as she tries to shimmy up the enormous hull of the 310m-long ocean liner, the Queen Mary, anchored in Sydney Harbour.

Faye Clarke, World War II nurse at the Caloundra RSL club is one of the stars of a new documentary telling the stories of our veterans. Picture: Mark Cranitch

The great vessel has been stripped of its luxury fittings and turned into a British Navy troop ship, her red, white and black livery painted over by grey camouflage.

Clothes awry, every muscle aching and her eyes wide with fear, Clarke is with the Voluntary Aid Detachment bound for nursing duty with the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) in Palestine. As she dangles from the side of the enormous ocean liner, though, she fears she will never make it. “Just getting on board was petrifying,” she says in a clipped, measured delivery, weighing the veracity of every short sentence before it is delivered.

“This big rope ladder with dozens of us girls on it at once was swaying this way and that. That’s how they loaded troops onto the ships.

“We had been on the train all night from our nursing base in Melbourne. We were tired but then we had to carry a respirator, a steel helmet and a water bottle up the rope ladders on the outside of the ship. I wondered how long before I was down in the water.”

Faye Clarke in her nursing days

Clarke eventually made it to Palestine, to the military hospital just outside the city of Gaza, about 90km southwest of the now Israeli capital Tel Aviv.

“At Gaza Ridge, there was a very big cemetery from the First World War nearby with a lot of gum trees,” she says.

“We girls used to go and collect the gum leaves and smell them to remind us of home.”

But the horrors of the desert war, and her later service in Borneo mending the battered bodies and shattered minds of men who had been prisoners of the Japanese, was in stark contrast to the idyllic childhood in which she was raised on her parents’ farm in Tasmania.

Her father gave her some sound advice before she sailed for war, telling Clarke that if she wanted to be respected as a young lady she should never smoke or drink alcohol.

Despite that, she says she’s partial to a Baileys now, and admits that she did try a cigarette once during the war.

She took a couple of puffs, only for the smoke to make her cough and splutter and her head to spin as though a bomb had gone off inside it. But at least, for a short while, it made Clarke forget the smell of rotting flesh.

Jeff Hughes, a filmmaker from Albany Creek,

north of Brisbane, is recording Clarke’s recollections. The Canadian-born documentarian is patiently filming Clarke as she organises her thoughts, but Hughes is also in a desperate race against time.

Documentary maker Jeff Hughes is helping tell the stories of war veterans. Picture: Mark Cranitch.

Almost all of Clarke’s generation of wartime nurses is gone.

One woman with whom she travelled to Gaza Ridge died of an infectious disease soon after arriving. Some she trained with died on the ill-fated Centaur not far off the Caloundra coast, some were massacred by the Japanese on Indonesia’s Bangka Island. Most succumbed to the inevitable ravages of time and age.

Hughes is busy interviewing as many veterans from World War II as he can, while he can, given that the youngest are now well into their 90s and that some, like Clarke, have already reached their century.

Last year Hughes and a long-time friend, Rachel Dutton, started a not-for-profit movement called This Story to preserve the memories of Queensland men and women who served in World War II. The project is now a registered charity and a copy of each short documentary on the veterans’ lives is being kept by Queensland’s State Library.

Vicki McDonald, the library’s CEO, told Qweekend that “these digital stories help honour the sacrifice of our Second World War veterans”.

“They will be preserved and made available to anyone who wants to learn about their important wartime contribution, through the State Library’s website.”

The idea for This Story was born from a short tribute film Hughes made documenting the memories of a friend’s father, David White, a World War II veteran from the Gold Coast.

“His family wanted to preserve David’s story for his grandkids,” Hughes says.

“I sat with David all day, getting his recollections down on tape. Unfortunately he passed away soon after, in April 2016, but I finished the video in time for his memorial, and his story was preserved for future generations.”

Clarke is the 17th veteran Hughes has interviewed in a series which has been the most rewarding project of a career that began with a double degree in history and film from McMaster University in Canada.