Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Alfred Robert Dow was born in Childers, Queensland, on 20th February 1906, he was the  son of Robert Dow (a Custom Chief of North Ambrym in Vanuatu New Hebrides), and Susie Rooney (Aboriginal Elder of the Butchulla people, Frasier Island (K'Gari), Queensland.

Alfred’s father Robert was the eldest son of a custom chief from the island of Ambrym in Vanuatu. He was kidnapped by “blackbirders” as a young boy and brought to Australia to work as an indentured labourer on sugar plantations in northern Queensland.

Robert was considered too young to work in the cane fields, therefore he became a house-boy, he was given the Christian name Robert, and the surname Dow. So began his exposure to Christianity. Robert was baptised by the Churches of Christ Kanaka Mission at Bundaberg and working alongside the white missionary John Thompson at Childers. Robert couldn’t read or write, but preached the Gospel faithfully, always with a Bible in his hands. Alfred, left the family home at Pialba in the late 1920s and with his younger brother Daniel to commenced missionery studies at Glen Iris Bible College in Melbourne. After which he was appointed as a missionary to the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) by the Church of Christ Overseas Mission Board in 1936.

At the start of World War Two, Alfred was preaching and working as a labourer. He enlisted in May 1940 in Sydney at the age of 34. He went on to serve with the 2/1st Pioneer Battalion in North Africa and the Middle East, and later served as a cook after being shot in the leg and hit by shrapnel.

Alfred was one of more than 2,000 Indigenous Australians who served during the Second World War. He is one of more than 50 “Black Rats of Tobruk” identified by researchers at the Australian War Memorial.

From April to August 1941, approximately 14,000 Australian Military personnel were besieged in Tobruk, which was a port city considered vital to the Allies' defence of Egypt and the Suez Canal. The German–Italian army was laying seige to Tobruk was commanded by General Erwin Rommel. The beseiged troops were subjected to  repeated ground assaults and almost constant shelling and bombing, these defenders were derided by Nazi propagandist Lord Haw Haw as “rats”, a term ironically embraced by the Australians.

Alfred married Frances Mary Martin in October 1945.  in Melbourne, this union producing five children – Carolyn, Susanne, Robert (Bob), David and Philip.