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Victor Paul Odgers enlisted in the AIF in August 1914 and was initially assigned the role of a driver with A Squadron in the 3rd Light Horse Regiment. He served at Gallipoli where he was wounded even although he would humbly say he had never been required to “jump the bags” as the real heroes had.

Vic survived the war although not without some lasting health issues which plagued his last years. He died on 12 February 1932 at the age of 51, killed when run over by the wheel of a laden dray in an accident on his Chaffee soldier settlement property. He left behind a widow but no children. This is his largely now forgotten story.

Renmark days

Victor was born in 1880 in Kent Town in Adelaide. He grew up in Hackney, attending the Parkside Sunday school as a child. Around 1900 he determined to make his future in Renmark. He was probably encouraged to do so by Harry Showell, a former chair of the Renmark Irrigation Trust who had moved to Adelaide and, in 1899, was a lodger at the Odgers’ family home, Moreton House on North Terrace at Hackney.

In Renmark Vic was described as its "youngest settler” by the local paper. He was a capable rider and good shot. Also a good singer, the young Vic Odgers was a popular figure. On 12 June 1901 he was elected to the Settler's Club. That year he celebrated his 21st birthday with a picnic by the river beneath Cathedral Cliffs, near Renmark. Initially he worked as a labourer for Mr H. Norman Rossell. Eventually he would purchase a fruit block.

Having cast in his lot with the fruit growers Vic became caught in their 1911 struggle with the United Labour Union which was demanding improved pay and conditions for its members. As the dispute threatened to turn violent, the Renmark Fruit-Growing Union Ltd. feared that their wharf-side packing shed might be subject to attack. Vic was one of the 'special constables' who volunteered to guard it. 

Around 2 am on May 31 1911 he interrupted an arsonist equipped with kerosene and straw.  Both men carried pistols. Shots were exchanged. Vic could not say if he had hit the offender who was never identified.  But he himself was shot twice. One bullet fired at his chest was stopped by a notebook in his breast pocket.

A second slug lodged in Vic’s thigh. Doctors could not remove it. When his wound became infected Vic was forced to make another extended stay in the Kapunda Hospital. Before 1914 Renmark had no hospital of its own.

In 1906 Vic had spent an extended time as a patient in Kapunda. A measure of his popularity, during his absence a “working bee of 26 settlers” had “thoroughly pruned 15 acres of trees and vines” on his block. A measure of his public spirited character, upon his return to Renmark Vic arranged a series of benefit concerts for the Kapunda Hospital.

Answering his country’s call

Australia followed in lockstep when Britain declared war on Germany on August 4, 1914. A patriotic local “Renmark War Office” was quickly established to assemble, prepare and drill members of the Renmark Rifle Club in anticipation of a call to arms from their country. A supporting motor service of “capable drivers” was formed to drive volunteers to Adelaide at a moment’s notice.

Some two dozen Renmark Rifle Club members would soon join the Australian Imperial Forces by this route. Vic Odgers was one. In a convoy of cars carrying a dozen or so others intending to enlist, to the sounds of the Salvation Army band, he set out for Adelaide around midnight on August 26 following a farewell dinner held at the Renmark Club.

In Renmark Vic had persuaded Dr Guinand (who had examined all the Rifle Club volunteers) that he was medically fit. But he had less success with the AIF’s doctors when he was assessed at Morphettville. He was after all carrying a bullet in his left thigh and was, at thirty four years old, rather old for active service. He was rejected when he first presented.

Fortune intervened. As Vic queued to re-take his medical he met an officer under whom he had previously served. In 1895 Vic had joined a volunteer cavalry unit then known as the “Adelaide Mounted Rifles”. He then spent twelve months as bugler with "D Company Adelaide Infantry”. As Vic later told the story, his former commander “got me before another doctor and I was immediately accepted”.

Vic may have hoped his younger brother Stan (who the army had rejected) would work his fruit block while he was away. But when Stan found work in Adelaide later in 1914 that responsibility seems to have fallen on his ageing father, Alfred. As it turned out Vic would not return to fruit growing at the war’s end.

Vic’s War

On August 29 1914 Vic was assigned to the 3rd Light Horse Regiment being assembled in Adelaide. Almost eight weeks later, on October 20, he embarked with A Squadron on the HMAT Port Lincoln heading, as it turned out, for Egypt. There the Regiment underwent further training and joined the campaign to defend the Suez Canal before being redeployed to Gallipoli in May 1915—this time without their horses.

A little older than other recruits, Vic was promoted to Corporal in May 1915 and then made a sergeant in August. In Egypt he had been assigned clerical duties. At Gallipoli he spent time in the frontline. Lionel Symons from Renmark described how he had encountered Vic and and others from home in the trenches near Snake Gully shortly after arriving at Gallipoli in August.

Earlier in 1915 (on May 14) Vic had been shot during fighting in Monash Valley. As “Buntie” Wyllie wrote home, Vic was shot through “the fleshy part of his arm. However he had that dressed and went on with his work.” Then, for the second time in his life, he dodged a bullet. As Wyllie reported “Later on, a bullet passed through his camera and pocket: so his luck was in!” But Vic’s luck did not last.

This was a war in which casualties fell as commonly to bacteria as to bullets. In mid-October Vic was laid low by cholangitis, an infection of the bile duct. He was admitted to hospital, initially on Lemnos, and later in Malta where he was also treated for jaundice. Upon recovering he was placed on the supernumerary list of NCOs in January 1916. But he was soon back in care. In February 1916 he was admitted to the No.3 Auxillary Hospital in Heliopolis near Cairo, now with malaria. Vic was now no longer a young man. As he himself well knew, he had not “been the same old hardy Vic Odgers since undergoing those bally surgical operations” in 1911.

After a stint with the 1st Light Horse at Gallipoli Vic was posted in 1916 to the 5th Australian Ammunition Sub-Park and then to the 1st Australian Ammunition Sub Park. Both were AIF mechanical transport units responsible for shifting ammunition from the railhead to forward ammunition dumps. spent much of the war transporting ammunition to the front.

From 1916 onward his time on active duty was punctuated with time in hospital. In September 1917 he was admitted to hospital as “sick”. While recuperating on leave from France, in October he succumbed to “trench fever”, spending time in Fort Pitt Hospital and the 3rd Australian Auxiliary Hospital, both in Kent. He would recover and return to France where in January 1918 he was again wounded. Again he was again sent to England for hospital care. In July 1918 he fell ill with influenza and was admitted to the Sutton Veny Military Hospital in Wiltshire. He spent over five weeks in hospital care.

Vic’s war ended with Armistice in 1918. When it did the AIF faced a massive challenge in shipping troops back to Australia. Vic sailed from England on the “happy ship”, the Port Hacking; arrived in Melbourne on January 27 1919; and, after a short period of quarantine, he travelled by rail to Adelaide. On this last leg of his journey he contracted a further bout of illness (food poisoning first feared to have been meningitis.) This further delayed his discharge. He was eventually de-mobbed on March 8. A “1914 man”, Vic had spent 4 years and 266 days in the AIF, all but 68 days of which had been spent outside Australia. He had had the good fortune to survive the Great War without crippling injury. But the real scars he carried were unseen. Vic would never again be robustly healthy.

Seacliff

Renmark welcomed Vic and two other Anzacs home on 20 February 1919 with what was “the largest gathering for a long time in the Renmark Institute”. There were speeches including an awkward one from Vic himself who said he was grateful for the welcome but not sure that he was deserving. Later in the evening he joined in the playing of several musical items. The Town Band played. Supper was served and there was dancing.

Despite this warm reception Vic decided not to remain in Renmark. He was for a time “roping to get a planted property”. But when his parents decided to move to Glenelg he opted to follow. Perhaps in the end Vic didn’t feel sufficiently robust to return to fruit growing? What ever his reasons, by July he was working as a seaside realtor. In September he acquired the Seacliff Land and House Agency and opened a Brighton Road office selling housing blocks and poultry farms in what was then a seaside village ten miles from Adelaide.

Vic enthusiastically threw himself into his new life. He joined in in the local community, often sang and played at—and sometimes organised—concerts for groups such as the Seacliff Cheer-Up Society. Professionally he soon did well enough to purchase “Ivanhoe”, a large eight room house on Brighton Road with commanding sea views. In 1922 he entered into a partnership with another ex-soldier and land broker named Charles Tuffin.

Vic said in 1924 that he had “returned from the war and came to Seacliff in very poor health” but that “the beautiful bracing air of that picturesque town” had restored his strength. His spirits that year were buoyed in January when Violet Kerr agreed to marry him. Violet was from a prominent Kew family. She had corresponded with Vic during the war and greeted him when the Port Hacking arrived in Melbourne.

No letters have survived showing how a long distance romance unfolded between Vic in Seacliff and Violet in Kew. In September 1924 they married in what was a society wedding in the Independent Church in Collins Street, Melbourne. The reception which followed was held in the manicured gardens of Violet’s grand family home, Trennant. After their honeymoon in Lorne Victor and Violet made their way to Renmark.

His health restored Vic had decided to try his hand again at fruit growing. He had applied to the Land Board sitting in Renmark for a soldier settler’s land grant in August and his allocation of a 15.5 acre irrigation block as a discharged soldier was gazetted in November 1924. He must have known that his application would be successful for in August he also transferred Odgers & Tuffin to his partner and was given a farewell by the Seacliff Mutual Improvement Society whose chairman described Vic has having been a good citizen who had "helped in all movements for the welfare of the town".

Block E

In late 1924 and newly married, Vic returned to Renmark to develop a fruit property and build a family home on the block allocated him in Block E, at the edge of the settlement near Chaffey. He put Ivanhoe up for auction in 1925, a clear sign that his future would be on the land. As he always had Vic threw himself into community life.

Clearing and planting new vineyards and orchards was demanding work. Not all the land he had been given proved arable and he was forced to surrender 5 acres of impossible land “after five years of manful wrestling to farm it”. Although Vic’s farming generated little cash income, he and Violet “faced life bravely and cheerfully”, finding other rewards in life on the land.

Initially Vic’s health held. However his last years were marred by illness. In July 1930 the local paper noted that Victor had “had a hard spin since he returned to these parts as a Chaffey soldier settler, war disabilities debarring him from heavy work, and intermittently from any work” at all. However his service and standing in the community saw him supported by his neighbours: the Returned Soldiers Association organised a number of working bees to assist him prune and harvest when he fell upon poor health.

Victor was working on his property when died in an accident on 12 February 1932 near Renmark at the age of 51. He was working alone when he was run over by the wheel of a heavily laden horse-drawn dray. He died, investigators found, instantly.

Victor was “accorded the honors of a military funeral” in recognition of his Anzac service and flags were flown at half mast in Renmark. He was buried in the Renmark cemetery on Sunday 14 February 1932, with “large numbers of his comrades surrounding the grave”. Some days later his neighbours and friends gathered to pick his sultana crop. After the funeral his wife left with her parents for Melbourne, never to return to Renmark.