Virtual
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Australia

Arthur ‘Sarip’ Saron (QX18679) was of Javanese (Indonesian) Islamic background, born in 1920 in Mackay, Queensland. Like his brother, William, he enlisted in 1941 in Mackay and served in the 2/26 Infantry Battalion of the Australian Army. During the war, Private Arthur ‘Sarip’ Saron was also called ‘Ripper’. The 2/26th Battalion fought well in the Malayan Campaign and retained good spirits during the extremely difficult periods when they were captured. Sarip was captured by the Japanese on 5 August 1942 and held in the notorious Changi Prison, in the east end of Singapore Island, where malaria, dysentery, beri-beri spread and where hunger was the order of the day along with forced labour. While in the prison, Australian POWs, including Sarip had no weapons, but ‘resolution, courage and unbreakable moral’ on their way to win for their country’s glorious victory. In the camp there were many thousands of prisoners crammed into less than a quarter of a square kilometre. Hazel Neah Saron, a third-generation Javanese-Australian, recalled her late husband’s last days as a POW in Changi:

In a Japanese concentration camp Sarip lost weight. They [Australian prisoners] said that the Japanese were about to shoot them all. But, when America dropped that atomic bomb on Japan, they capitulated and gave up. Only by a couple of days Arthur and other Aussie prisoners were saved.

After incredible circumstances of three years in the face of death and the terrible odds in the Changi Prison, Sarip and his comrades were ‘just lucky that the war finished. Lucky they were home on time’. Before he returned to Australia, his mother received a letter from her son sent from the Singapore prison that he was apparently ‘well’. A month later, the ex-prisoner returned home receiving a warm welcome in Mackay. Looking fit despite his ordeal in Changi Prison, Private Saron arrived back in Mackay and was given a rousing welcome by friends and relatives from his home at Baker’s Creek. ‘Real glad to be home,’ was the sum total of his remarks when asked how he felt about it.

When asked how things had been in the prison camps, Private Saron ‘looked momentarily grim and said he preferred not to talk about his experiences’. He said he had been released on September 15, and since then ‘had been very well treated, having an excellent trip from Singapore to Australia’. Representatives of the RSSAILA welcomed Private Saron, and also met three other [of about 20] ex-prisoners of war who were passengers on the train for their trip home. A local Muslim community was also happy to see him and his comrades back at home. Members of the Mackay branch of the Red Cross Society supplied food parcels to these men, who said that their main anxiety was to get on their way home. Hazel Neah Saron further said, ‘My late husband, Arthur (Sarrip) Saron, who served in Malaya, was single when he went to war. Then, two years after the war, we got married’.


From the book:

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