Anzac Day: Digger Keith Fowler’s right for last hurrah as time marches on

He’s no spring chicken, but 102-year-old Keith ‘Chook’ Fowler will march this Anzac Day for the mates he lost.

Veteran Keith ‘Chook’ Fowler, 102, is determined to march in Adelaide with the help of Andrew Thomas, 66, the son of his great mate Jack Thomas. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Morgan Sette

It’s a special privilege, Andrew Thomas says, to be at the old boy’s side on this bittersweet Anzac Day in Adelaide.

Keith Fowler, 102, was the great mate of Mr Thomas’s father when they marched together under the banner of the 2/3rd Machine Gun Battalion until it was just them.

All the others had gone.

On Tuesday it will be down to “Chook”, as they inevitably called him. Mr Thomas, 66, will be there to offer a steadying hand or to help him into the wheelchair if need be, proud to do his bit.

Sad too. You see, this could well be Mr Fowler’s farewell Anzac Day – he has seen out the time the doctors gave him, and then some.

But at his age there is no winning with stage 4 metastatic cancer and he will savour the heartfelt reception he’s sure to receive from the crowd.

Private Keith Fowler.

And make no mistake: Mr Fowler is adamant he will march, one way or another.

“I will try to walk the distance,” he told The Australian on Monday, readying himself to give it his all. “This might be my last time and I want to do it right. I hope I can make it but if I can’t, Andy and my son will be standing next to me.”

Jack Thomas, left, and Mr Fowler together in 2015. Picture Mike Burton

He will be thinking about his friend Jack Thomas, who died in December 2021, aged 101, and the old comrades who have slipped away through the years.

Couldn’t be otherwise, Mr Fowler said: “It’s the chance to say thank you to a lot of people who lost their lives to make the world a better place.”

The irony is that while they served together in the 2/3rd and were both prisoners of war on the infamous Thai-Burma Railway after being captured by the Japanese in Java in 1942, he and Mr Thomas never crossed paths during the war.

“They were in different companies in the battalion and in different work groups on the railway,” Mr Fowler said. “Chook was on the railway for the duration, while Dad was taken to Japan in 1944 and ended up working in a coalmine in terrible conditions.” Their friendship developed at veterans’ get-togethers and over lunch years later, a case of opposites attract.

Mr Thomas said his father was quiet and thoughtful, a “conservative gentleman”, while gregarious Chook would be the life of any party. “It was a yin and yang sort of thing but they really hit it off,” Mr Thomas said. “I think Chook brought out the inner larrikin in Dad. It was a pleasure to see.”

At services and marches around the country, the fadeout of the World War II generation will be all too evident. For the first time this year, there will be no Australian Rats of Tobruk in attendance – the lone survivor, Tommy Pritchard, 101, will watch on in his care home in Melbourne, recovering from a broken hip.

Of the million-odd Australians who joined up between 1939 and 1945, fewer than 4600 remain, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. By the end of the year their ranks are projected to thin to 3100, falling to 2000 next year and barely 1300 in 2025. Their average age is now 98.

Mr Fowler is believed to be the oldest surviving former PoW in South Australia. Upbeat as ever, he said he still enjoyed a long lunch and a song or two afterwards. A bout of what’s now known as post-traumatic stress disorder from the prison camps didn’t get him down after the war – and neither would the cancer.

“I have had a ball,” he said. “I have not been unhappy, I have loved every moment of my life.

“I was lucky to know those boys who have passed away … they gave everything they had for their country.”