Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

William ‘Billy ‘Bonsop (QX26806) was born in 1917 in Mackay, Queensland, of Singaporean Malay Muslim heritage. Before enlisting in the army. He was a horse trainer and a rider. Billy Bonsop entered a boxing tournament too, but riding horses was his great passion. Billy moved afterwards from the Mackay district to Ingham. It was in this Northern centre, where he first competed in rodeos and met with much success. Then he competed at the big rodeo races achieving outstanding success including winning the North Queensland buckjumping championship. He was described as the ‘likeable young horseman whose pleasing personality has made him so many friends’.

When the war began, Billy Bonsop was anxious to get to the East to fight the Japanese. He enlisted himself in 1942 in Brisbane on the day of his birthday. This rodeo rider, in khaki in the New South Wales camp met other AIF rodeo riders who as soldiers were going to war, while some of them already were overseas. While serving in the Australian Army Private Billy Bonsop was killed at the age of 26 in action in New Guinea on 10 July 1943. Billy optimistic and young, sought combat and adventure, was filled with pride and dignity and could not even know that the day when he had enlisted would also be his last birthday. When his friend heard that Billy was killed in action, his death brought immediate reaction from him. He wrote the following reflection:

Over in New Guinea another well-known and popular young rodeo rider has fallen in action, and never again will we cheer Billy Bonsop’s efforts to master a buckjumper. From the time Billy stepped into khaki, he corresponded with me. Then, came a time when I did not hear from him again. He had gone to New Guinea, and there he died, facing the enemy.

Billy is remembered with humility and gratitude for his selfless act of valour for Australia. His friend also remembered that Billy liked so much to get on the back of a bucking horse. In his last letter, Billy said to him how ‘keenly he was looking forward to post-war days when he hoped to again compete in the big rodeos that were yearly events in the larger centres’. He was certainly the most admired among young ‘coloured’ riders, said Billy’s friend, and many will be sorry at his passing, for Billy, to use a popular expression, ‘was white right through’. And, the last words of his friend were, ‘So long, Billy – it was good to have known, you, and I have lost a sincere friend! William ‘Billy ‘Bonsop ‘s name is on the Roll of Honour in Walkerston, Qld. His grave is at Lae War Cemetery, Papua New Guinea.


From the book:
Dzavid Haveric, ‘A History of the Muslims in the Australian Military from 1885 to 1945