Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

My grandfather, Captain Walter Fisher Colman was born on January 4, 1891 on his parent’s sheep property at Narrandera, New South Wales. His father, George Galbraith Colman, was an Irishman who joined the 2nd Australian Remount Division in 1916, when he was seventy years of age. He stated on his army papers that he was 49 years of age. George was an Irishman from Kilcarrig in County Carlow and he went to Egypt as a trooper. George was a shearer, drover, tinker and horseman and he taught his son these skills. The Vigors-Coleman family, to which he belonged were horsemen, but in the 1830s Grandad’s grandfather Thomas Vigors-Coleman and his wife Mary Galbraith had been fisher-people in Newfoundland. Grandad’s father was a small blue-eyed man, but his mother was six feet tall and dark eyed and dark complexioned like her son Walter. Captain Colman’s mother’s father’s family came from Richmond, Yorkshire and were land owners and hotel owners there. Grandad’s maternal grandfather was an ostler, hammerman and silversmith who arrived in Australia in 1835. He amassed a number of dairy farms in the Ulladulla-Milton area. Grandad left home in his childhood and went to live at Ulladulla with his mother’s family. Grandad’s grandmother’s mother was an Aboriginal woman who was born at Cow pastures in Western Sydney in 1806. She was a Darug woman. No body in our family ever spoke about this Aboriginality because until recently one would have been removed by the police. Grandad learned bush skills and how to find bush tucker and how to live off the land from his uncles and old initiated Wandandian Australian Aboriginal Elders and this stood him in good stead when he became commanding officer of supply sections in the Middle East in Kantar, Syria, Palestine and Romani from 1916 to 1919. Because he had to find water and food for his men and finding water meant digging into soaks, he needed bush skills. His uncles taught him horse, cattle and oxen team skills and he loved horses all his life. We had two Clydesdale heavy horses as well as stock horses and he named every dog, horse and my father after his Waler (horse) that he rode in WW1. His horse’s name was Peter. Tragically, Peter was shot at the end of the war as were all the Walers except for Bill and Penny who were sold for a tiny price to some villagers in the Middle East. Grandad entered the war as a driver, which meant taking supplies back and forth under fire on mule transport. He was promoted to sergeant in May 1915 for meritorious service under fire at Gallipoli. Of the 60,000 Australians that fought at Gallipoli, there were 26,000 casualties and 7,594 were killed. According to the official history, 70 Australians were captured on Gallipoli. Grandad obviously had the luck of the Irish and he was not wounded. But he went to hospital three times in 1915 to Lemnos, in June, July and November for gastro-enteritis, pyrexia and influenza. In September 1916 he was made 2nd Lieutenant and be this time he was in the Middle East as a requisitioning officer, which used his clerical skills and the language skills he began to use as a child with the old Australian Aboriginal man. By the time he left the Middle East in early 1919 he could speak ten Middle Eastern languages which he no doubt used to barter with Syrian and Palestinian local villagers for food and liquids to drink, even water to wash in and drink as the baggage trains he was in charge of had to have washer women, vets and medical officers. He taught me how to count in Arabic as a child and I am ashamed to admit I cannot remember one Arabic word. Grandad was made Captain on his birthday: the 4th of January, 1818, when he was 26 years old and he was made Commanding Officer of the Supply Section. He was enormously lucky as was his brother Uncle les, who although he fought at the Somme was never gassed. Only his cousin Moreton Cambage was killed and none of his other first cousins who fought in WWI were hurt. In January 1919 the commanding officer of the entire Australian Mounted Division in the Middle East recommended that grandad become a professional officer in the regular British army because of his leadership skills, his ability to maintain discipline, his rapport with the “men”, his excellent manner and his ability to speak any Middle Eastern language. Granddad was trained for three months at Leeds in wool classing in Yorkshire where he lived with some of his Cambage cousins. The army paid. He arrived back in Australia in late 1920. He and his brother Leslie and Stanley, later Sir Stanley Colman, general manager of Australian Estates and their friends Edmund Burke and Joe Trude bought five pastoral companies in Australia and the Atcherly Hotel in Brisbane. Grandad took over Essex sheep station, which was one million acres, and he befriended WWI her Colonel “Mad” Harry Murray on Glenlyon, the next-door property. He married Margaret Bain, an English teacher, who was nanny to his brother Stanley’s children in 1927 and my father was born in 1928. He bought Hanworth Pastoral Company in 1947 with one of his friends Blair Robinson and I was born there in 1955, the eldest of his grandchildren. He died, when I was in only nine, in 1964 from using herbicides and poisons like strychnine to cure sheep’s hides and dieldrin which killed prickly acacia. But up to then he lived a good life and as Dad’s cousin Sir Henry “Jo” Gullet would say Grandad “had a good war.” He had a huge influence on me and I learned so much from him in our quiet times on the back of our Clydesdales.
I wish you well~ Dr Hilary Bond nee Colman.