Frank Waterton wakes early on ANZAC Day, as he always has. At nearly one hundred, the habit is less about routine and more about memory. The light comes slowly through the window at Mercy Place Lynbrook, soft and grey, the kind of morning that makes room for reflection.
He sits for a while before moving, letting the day settle around him. There is no rush. There never is on this day.
“ANZAC Day is a special day,” Frank has said. “A day to remember my uncles who served in WWI and the sacrifices of the men and women who served in WWII and other conflicts.”
The words are simple, but they carry a lifetime behind them.
He was not yet eighteen when he signed up. Six weeks shy, in fact. January 1945. The war was still grinding on, and for boys like Frank, it felt inevitable.
“I signed up six weeks before my 18th birthday, as it was inevitable at that time that the papers would arrive for your service when you turned 18.”
He wanted to fly. Most did. The sky held a certain promise then, something daring and distant. But the Royal Australian Air Force had other ideas. He was young, too young, they thought, and so he stayed on the ground with Royal Australian Air Force, part of the crews who made flight possible.
“When I enlisted, I asked if I could fly the Lancaster bombers but instead because I was still so young, they kept us teenagers as part of the ground crew which involved servicing aircraft, cleaning guns, and readying bombs and rockets for missions flown by others.”
There was no glamour in it. Oil, metal, repetition. The sharp smell of fuel. Hands blackened and busy. But it mattered. Every aircraft that lifted into the sky carried the work of boys like Frank beneath its wings.
He remembers, most of all, the older men. The way they looked out for them.
They were young, those ground crews. Keen, but green. The kind of young that does not yet understand the shape of danger. The senior men did. They kept an eye on them, guided them, steadied them. It stayed with him long after the war itself had moved on.
When the war ended, many went home. Frank did not.
“After the war ended, I decided I wanted to be part of the occupying forces rather than going home, and I was sent to Japan.”
The journey north was anything but straightforward. He can still see it clearly, as if the years between have done nothing to dull the edges.
“I still remember the journey over. It took four weeks to get over there, rather than the two weeks to get back. It wasn’t a straightforward trip.”
There was illness on board. Delays in New Guinea. A storm at Guam that drove the ship back out into the Pacific for three days of rough seas.
“It was rough going.”
By the time they reached Japan, the journey itself had become a kind of test. Endurance, patience, uncertainty. The war might have been over, but its shadows stretched far.
He arrived at Kure, in Hiroshima, headquarters of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force, then travelled south to join 76 Squadron.
“It was a proud unit with a strong history in the Royal Australian Air Force.”
Japan was unlike anything he had known. Snow for the first time. Cold that settled into the bones. Train carriages with patterned wallpaper that stayed fixed in his memory decades later. Small details, vivid and precise, as though they were pressed into him.
He stayed nearly two years.
“The occupation force was made up of troops from Australia, Britain, New Zealand and India, and we were responsible for the southern part of Japan. There was a real sense of camaraderie between us. The ANZAC spirit was strong, even so far from home.”
Even there, especially there, ANZAC Day mattered.
“ANZAC Day was always significant. We held large parades, including one in Tokyo, and also back at base on the parade ground. Those moments meant a great deal to all of us.”
There is a Japanese sword now resting at the Trafalgar–Thorpdale RSL. Frank found it in a bombed dump during his time overseas and later brought it home with permission. Years on, he gave it away.
“I thought this was the best place for it.”
The RSL is where his story gathers with others. Not just his own memories, but those of the men he served with, the ones who returned and the ones who did not.
“For me, ANZAC Day is a time to remember the mates I served with and the lessons they taught us as young blokes, and the RSL is where those memories live on, bringing community together to honour those who didn’t make it home and ensure their legacy is never forgotten.”
He used to march there in Gippsland. Ride in trucks during the parade. Stand among familiar faces, the easy shorthand of shared experience filling the spaces between words.
Now the setting is different. The years have changed that.
“This year, I’ll be home at Mercy Place Lynbrook, and the local Dandenong RSL will put on a lovely service for us. I’ll be wearing my medals and rosemary with pride.”
There are fewer of them now. Frank knows that. He feels it in the quiet, in the way stories are listened to more carefully, as if people understand they will not be told forever.
“ANZAC Day means a great deal to me because it’s a time to stop and remember the people who never came home.”
He names them when he speaks. His uncles, Francis and William, lost in the First World War. The mates from his own time. The countless others across places that blur together in memory but not in meaning.
“And that goes to people in Europe, Singapore that lost their lives, New Guinea, you name it, in the Middle East.”
The scale of it is impossible to hold all at once, so he carries it in parts. In faces. In names. In moments that return unannounced.
“When the Last Post plays and the wreath is laid, it brings it all back.”
He pauses when he says that, as though hearing it again.
When morning shifts towards midday at Mercy Place Lynbrook. There will be a service. There will be quiet voices, the soft murmur of remembrance, the weight of medals pinned carefully in place.
Frank will be there, as he has always been, in one form or another.
He has a line he returns to, one he wrote down because it said what he could not quite shape himself.
“When you go home, tell them of us and say, for your tomorrow we gave our today.”
He does not say it for effect. He says it because, after nearly a century, it still feels true.
ANZAC Day is not, for Frank, about looking back with nostalgia. It is about holding on. About making sure the thread between then and now does not break.
In the quiet of the morning, before the service begins, that is what remains.
