Gold Coast’s last living World War I widow Rita Chisholm’s touching Anzac Day tribute
MEET Rita Chisholm, the Gold Coast’s last World War I widow. Her husband left Australia for the front lines with his Light Horse Regiment 103 years ago. This is their story.
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LIGHT horseman John Mackellar Chisholm is frozen in time proudly wearing his slouch hat which barely covers his greying hair.
He’s just 26 years old and the young Captain is just weeks away from leaving Australia with his beloved horses bound for Egypt and the Gallipoli campaign.
It’s October 1914 and the boy from western Queensland has the barest hint of a smile under his moustache as he prepares to serve in World War I.
It’s this smile and his good humour which his wife Rita Chisholm remembers most when she looks at the black and white image of her love
Rita, now 83, is the Gold Coast’s last remaining World War I widow and believed to be one of less than 100 remaining in Australia.
“John never talked about it, most men didn’t at all back then,” she said, speaking from her Ashmore home.
“The one thing he told me was that when it came time for him to return to Australia he had to get one of his friends to shoot his horses.
“He knew the people there would be cruel to them and he didn’t want them left behind to that so the only thing he could do was make sure they didn’t suffer.
“It must have been so hard on him. He loved his horses.”
Captain Chisholm, born in 1888, was a grazier from a property near Winton and made the journey to Sydney to join the army in October 1914, just months after the war began and was commissioned as a Lieutenant.
Taking four horses from his property, he embarked as a member of the 6th Light Horse Regiment bound for Egypt where he was station, caring for the horses as many of his colleagues advanced to land at Anzac Cove on April 25, 1915.
He soon followed them and served at Gallipoli where he fell ill and returned to Cairo and was hospitalised.
Consistently unwell, he was found to have chronic dyspepsia and was sent home to Australia soon after getting married to a woman he met while in the hospital.
Discharged for health reasons, he would return to his property and work the land until moving to Beechmont on the Gold Coast in the 1940s.
Mrs Chisholm, who married the Captain in 1962, said a now-lost photo album of images captured but her husband showed the lighter side of his time in the war.
“He took his camera with him to Gallipoli and took pictures of the men in the afternoons having fun, swimming in the water, their horses and the games they played in the afternoon,” she said.
“These were the things he wanted to remember.”
Captain Chisholm died in 1967 after a battle with pneumonia in 1967 and rarely spoke of the war with family, instead flying to Sydney annually to spend Anzac Day with his light horse comrades.
In 2015, Mrs Chisholm made an emotional pilgrimage to Gallipoli in what was her first and only overseas trip to attend commemorations marking a century since the landings at Anzac Cove.
There, she met Prince Harry and toured the battle sites.
“It was the experience of a lifetime and something I felt I had to do,” she said.
“It was so hard to imagine it. Especially when you see the cove. You can’t imagine how they survived it. There is just the water, a pebble beach and the mountain which goes straight up.”
Mrs Chisholm was just 15 when she first met her future husband when he offered her a job managing his cafe and doing office work but soon moved to Mackay where she met her first husband.
She returned to her family farm at Beechmont some years later when she met the Captain again and they fell in love, marrying on April 5, 1962.
Captain Chisholm adopted his wife’s infant daughter from her previous marriage.
The couple lived and worked on their property for five years together.
Mrs Chisholm misses living on her farm but remembers her husband and his life fondly from her unit at Amity Gardens in Ashmore.
“I remember how emotional it was being at Gallipoli. It was something special standing where he had been many years earlier.
“Now 100 years on from the war’s end hopefully we have learned from it.
“People will get together on that special day this week and they remember the past and hopefully the future will hold a lot more promise than what happened to us.”
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