By KATH GANNAWAY
IT’S hard to imagine what it is like for a parent to wave a son, or a daughter, off to war.
Mary Starr who lived at Comley Bank, a guesthouse on Myers Creek Road in Healesville during the WWI years, did it four times.
She was listed as next of kin by her sons John Robert, Patrick James, Michael Francis and Phillip Henry.
Having been to Comley Bank, you can’t but help imagine what her thoughts would have been each day as she looked out towards Mount St Leonard.
She was Roman Catholic, as were her boys, so almost certainly there would have been prayers for their safe return.
And, prayers, and tears with the news that two would not be coming back.
John, 31 and single, was first to enlist on 22 November, 1914. He survived Gallipoli.
Patrick, the baby of the family at 20 was a clerk. He enlisted on 2 August, 1915 and was killed at Passchendaele in Belgium on 4 October, 1917.
Michael was 26 when he enlisted a day later and died on the same day on the same killing fields. He was also a clerk.
Phillip, a farmer, joined his brothers in 1916, enlisting on 18 September and serving on the Western Front.
Patrick and Michael were among more than 2800 sets of Australian brothers who died between 1915 and 1918 at Gallipoli, Palestine and on the Western Front.
Leonard Joseph Lawlor and his brother Robert Byron who grew up in Yering and Buxton were both 21 when they died – Leonard on ‘Anzac Day’ 25 April, 1915, at Gallipoli, and Robert in Belgium in 1917.
The Buller Brothers from Upper Yarra – Charles, John and Arthur, never returned. Neither did their cousin Archibald.
In rural communities families were close and connected. Honour boards across the Yarra Valley reflect the make-up of those communities with names such as Furmston, Surman, Leith, Brown and Bell, Alsop, Harrison and Christie, Ozanne and Potts, Sargeant and Smith, Hubbard, Partington, Platt, Syme, Sloss and Cliff … among many more listed in alphabetical order.
Brothers, fathers, cousins … all with mothers, sisters and wives at home, like Mrs Starr.
