Movie to celebrate the bigger story behind Teddy Sheean’s VC: ‘up there with Gallipoli, Rats of Tobruk’
The fight for Teddy Sheean’s Victoria Cross fascinated the nation, but Australians may soon be gripped by a movie revealing a far bigger story.
The fight for Teddy Sheean’s Victoria Cross fascinated the nation, but Australians may soon be gripped by a movie revealing a far bigger story, of which Sheean was just one part.
After a decades-long campaign, Ordinary Seaman Sheean in August finally received a posthumous VC for sacrificing his life to save comrades from a sinking HMAS Armidale, in the Timor Sea in 1942.
The 18-year-old labourer’s son from rural Tasmania, the youngest man aboard and not long at sea, shunned a lifeboat, instead strapping himself to a gun and firing on Japanese aircraft even as he sank below the waves.
His actions saved the lives of countless comrades in the water being mercilessly strafed by Zero fighters.
However, filmmaker Craig Monahan believes Sheean’s remarkable valour is but an extraordinary component of one of the greatest and least known stories of Australians at war.
His movie, Armidale, scripted and he says halfway to securing its budget of $25m, focuses on what happened before and after, as well as during, Sheean’s heroics.
“There are so many great moments of bravery, of desperation and of courage in the story of the Armidale,” Monahan says.
“Everyone knows about Anzacs, Gallipoli, the Burma Railway, Rats of Tobruk, Albert Jacka, Weary Dunlop, Breaker Morant. Armidale should sit up there in the ranks of these classic Australian war stories.”
The film, which Monahan has co-written and would direct, would be shot in Queensland and on the Armidale’s surviving sister ship, Castlemaine, in dock at Williamstown, Melbourne.
About half the 149 men on board Armidale died in the initial battle; the remainder were left fighting for their lives in the water. They made it into small craft, including a damaged, unreliable motorboat, a sinking whaler and a cobbled-together raft.
The following day, December 2, the ship’s captain, Lieutenant Commander David Richards, on the motorboat with a group of survivors, sailed off to find help, despite a faltering motor. After three days, they were spotted by reconnaissance aircraft.
Back on the whaler, 29 men clung to existence by bailing the sinking craft, while drifting on rafts were 28 crew and 21 Dutch troops. Supplies, including water, were few. Sharks circled.
HMAS Kalgoorlie, steaming to the rescue from Darwin, came under sustained attack by Japanese aircraft. Surviving 16 bombs, the Kalgoorlie then rescued 20 survivors from the motorboat; two having died.
On December 7, the whaler and a raft were spotted by air and survivors on the whaler were rescued by the Kalgoorlie.
The following day, a week after the Armidale was lost, a Catalina flying boat again found the raft, but rough seas prevented a rescue.
The Catalina took a photograph: a haunting image of men clinging to an impossibly tiny raft. It was the last anyone saw of them.
Monahan argues the Armidale would not have been lost had naval command in Darwin acceded to an earlier request from Richards to head home. There had been previous Japanese aerial attacks, before the fatal one, and Richards rightly concluded their mission was blown.
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