The diary of a former Broken Hill miner and World War I veteran has been taken back to where it was written – all the way to Gallipoli.
Michael Luders and his wife, Rochelle, were in Gallipoli this Anzac Day, and with them was the personal wartime diary of Mr Luders’s great grandfather, William Joseph Jenkins.
“This is the first opportunity that the family’s had to take the diary back to where he wrote it,” Mr Luders told the Barrier Truth.
“We hadn’t had the opportunity previously to do the Anzac ceremony [in Gallipoli], and our family’s always done dawn services,”
“I’ll have it with me, and we thought it would be good to return it to where it was written. Of course, we’re not going to leave it there because it’s one of the few family heirlooms that has survived in his family.”
Mr Luders became the custodian of the diary following one of Mr Jenkins’s granddaughters, Bonnie Moroney, using a magnifying glass to decipher and transcribing the handwritten entries of his day-to-day life in the war.
Mr Jenkins was given a shovel upon arriving at Gallipoli, being turned into a sapper – due to his mining experience – and given the job of digging underneath the enemy trenches and blowing them up. A lot of trench and underground warfare in the Lone Pine area resulted in him being shot in the back, with the wound classed as severe.
He was repatriated back to Australia and within 350 days of signing up, was honourably discharged.
Mr Jenkins returned to Broken Hill and when he was fit enough, resumed work as a miner before retiring. Mr Jenkins passed away peacefully in 1951.
