Survival on the Death Railway and Nagasaki

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ANGRY, argumentative, a living skeleton – that was the Jim Bodero I met 27 years after the war had ended. I’d just taken over as editor of the newspaper where he was a compositor/reader, the scourge of any journalist who mutilated the English language.

I understood his irascibility when I learned of the terrifying ordeals he’d been through as a prisoner of the Japanese, ordeals that for 27 years had left him in constant agony from a multiplicity of injuries.

He was a bitter man, not towards the Japanese who had caused his injuries, but towards Australian officialdom. Never out of pain from his damaged back and limbs, eyesight partially lost from a scarred cornea, Jim Bodero had his post-war claims for a Repatriation pension rejected.

Twenty years after the war ended, he aggravated the injuries to his back while working, but was refused workers’ compensation by the insurance doctors, who said the injury was pre-existing. Of course it was pre-existing, the Japanese guards had seen to that.

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