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Leonard’s young brother, Adrian ‘Keith’ Ramah (123459), was born in Brisbane in 1924. Adrian Keith Ramah was the youngest of six children. In his formative years, he attended Mt Gravatt Primary School and then moved to Tennant Creek with his mother and sister, Eunice, where he stayed for seven years. There, at the age of ten, he worked in a crushing plant and also was responsible for setting up explosives and hand shovelling tonnes of rock so gold could be extracted. He loved to read Australian poetry. Then at the age of 18 he joined the RAAF and trained to be a flight mechanic in Sydney.

He enlisted in 1943 in Brisbane, and served as a Leading Aircraftman in the RAAF. At the end of his RAAF training, he was sent to a staging camp in Port Moresby, via Townsville and was posted to the 78th Squadron as an aircraft mechanic on the Kittyhawk fighter planes. He was responsible for keeping the planes in good mechanical order. Adrian’s squadron were on the move all the time as air transport was an important part in such a mountainous country.

Before Borneo, the squadron moved through nearby islands around New Guinea. Once they landed in New Guinea, Australians suffered from malaria, dengue fever and trench feet rot. The appalling jungle conditions, constant deaths and casualties caused much stress and loss of hope. Under their tents, soldiers found venomous insects whose bites sometimes caused intense pains like they were ‘shot by a gun’. Lyndal Maloney said that her father Adrian recalled being bitten by ‘a huge centipede in his tent at his camp, not a pleasant experience at the time’. From Port Moresby’s camp, servicemen were transported by American C47s to New Britain where the 78th Squadron was based at the time. The 78th Squadron consisted of 24 Kittyhawk fighter bombers. The squadron was divided into 2 flights – A and B flights, each having twelve planes. Adrian was in B flight, the squadron markings were HU, and he was the flight mechanic for the plane HUR.

At the time, Adrian recalled a near miss from a bombing raid near his camp. From New Britain, an island in the Bismarck Archipelago, part of the Islands’ Region of Papua New Guinea, the 78th squadron was moved to Noemfoor Island, a Papua province, in north-eastern Indonesia. From there, the squadron was shifted to Hollandia. There, Leading Aircraftman Adrian remembered ‘almost all the RAAF ground crew being sick with dysentery and malaria’, said his daughter. At one stage he looked after all 12 planes as everyone else was laid up. After other postings, eventually they landed at Tarakan in Borneo. This was a prelude to the forthcoming operation. In the wake of the operation, there was uncertainty, never to know if you were going to die the next day. Adrian thought a lot of his relatives and friends, and also wrote a letter to his mother, telling the sounds of the war and his challenged situation:

[…] in any case, should anything happen to me, don’t take it too hard as it must have been the wish of God. Don’t worry, Mum, as you are not the only mother who has lost a son. Some sacrifices have to be made to make the world a fit place to live in. God bless you all. Amen.

Leading Aircraftman, Adrian Ramah, and his squadron played an important part in a military operation that destroyed enemy forces and recaptured Tarakan Island, which was a significant oil supply base for the Japanese fleet. It was a bloody battle during which 240 Australians and some 1500 Japanese died. The heavy Allied air raids destroyed the island’s oil production and storage facilities, and freed Tarakan’s inhabitants who suffered terribly under the Japanese occupiers and their rigid policies. At that time the operation was seen as an unavoidable and was ‘appreciated as a courageous and tenacious campaign by the Australian armed forces’. Adrian survived the ordeal, then he and the other ground crew came in by landing barge on the 4th May 1945, and he saw out the remainder of the war there. After being discharged at Richmond in New South Wales, he finished up in Rosemount Hospital in Brisbane, suffering from maggot-infested feet and malaria as a result of his time spent in Borneo. Adrian returned to Brisbane in 1945, two weeks after the war ended. Carrying out military operations was one of his biggest accomplishments in life.

Adrian Keith Ramah was issued: the 1939-45 Star, the Pacific Star, the War Medal 1939-45, the Australian Service Medal 1939-45 and the Returned from Active Service Badge. His country and his war-time contribution made Adrian ‘Keith’ Ramah a ‘very proud and patriotic Australian and he gave that as his reason for joining the Airforce’. He found that the RAAF gave him a real sense of achievement. ‘He often discussed his war service with pride and spoke of the mateship and comraderies during the post-war years’, said his daughter. His relative, Janeth Deen, a well-respected Australian Muslim woman (Adrian’s father, Abdul Ramah, was Janeth Deen’s maternal grandfather) also remarked, Adrian was a devoted Australian ‘so much so that he always had an Australian flag on his property’. When he sold his house, he moved to a block of units but had troubles with the body corporate to keep the Australian flag on the roof, but ‘after lots of expense in this matter he succeeded to fly the flag again’. Janeth also evoked Adrian’s spirit of mateship which was very important to him. He supported the RSL with his own personal funds. Adrian made friends – he made them for life, because while in the war, they were all in the ‘same shoes’.

Further remarks by his daughter also highlighted: Living in Brisbane, Adrian built one of the first freehold shops, a convenience store on the corner of Logan and Nursery Roads in Holland Park. He was very determined in nature. He was married, had children and lived a very full and rich life. He was always a self-made and inventive man, with strong principles and values that he developed from a young age, which shaped the way that he lived and became successful in businesses he owned. He had a great love of gardening, travel and literature, and reciting Australian poetry, since his time reading poetry as a young lad in Tennant Creek. His rose garden at his Chermside home was famous in Brisbane, and even some 15 years after he moved from that home, people still recall its magnificence. A fall in 2016 at home at the age of 92 meant he needed care, so he moved to a nursing home where he lived happily until his passing in November 2018. His funeral at the Pinnaroo Lawn Cemetery and Crematorium was an Australian funeral (not religious) with all the war mementoes. In his honour it was written the following RAAF Tribute:

The Epitaph
On the casket bright and shiny
Let no bitter tear be shed
He is marching with his comrades
Somewhere on the road ahead,
He has joined the unseen legions
Sound for him no solemn knell,
He has joined the great reveille
It is morning, all is well!

The Muslim community in Brisbane in the Crescent Community News expressed a great appreciation for the Abdul Kaus family, the Mohamed Howsan family and the Abdul Ramah family. They can be proud of the sons who went to war to represent their Muslim fathers and fight for their country. ‘Let us make du’a for them, lest we forget’.


From the book:

Dzavid Haveric, 'A History of Muslims in the Australian Military from 1885 to 1945: Loyalty, Patriotism, Contribution’, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, London, 2024