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147 men were asked to enlist as volunteers; most came from TA-type associations. 'They lined
up in the drill-hall grounds, some in uniform, most of them in civilian clothes... Off they marched
through the main streets, preceded by the Kalgoorlie brass band, the Kalgoorlie pipers' band,
and the Cadet Buglers band, to be taken by special train to Blackboy Hill camp.'
John Honeycombe, who had never lived in a country at war (he left England four years before
the Crimean War began), must have watched them go with very mixed emotions. But no one
who watched or marched that day knew what war was like - what hell - unless they had fought
in the Boer War. To most it was'The Great Adventure'. They chorused: 'For Britain! Good old
Britain! Where our fathers first drew breath. We'll fight like true Australians, facing danger,
wounds or death!'
The 147 returned in September on embarkation leave before joining the 11th Battalion, as Bert
Facey had done, and sailing for Egypt, for much more death than glory with the Australian
Imperial Force. They were paid six shillings a day. The troopships gathered in King George
Sound off Albany before setting off on the first great convoy.
A nursing sister, Alice Kitchen, wrote in her diary on the Benalla on 1 November, All Saints'
Day: 'At 8am we began to move out in single file to the sea; it was a fine sight to see the long
line of ships, going out one by one and forming into 3 long lines, the Cruisers leading...'
Altogether 38 troopships (ten from New Zealand) and eight warships sailed that day.
Hundreds of volunteers from Western Australia followed in other convoys. In all, over 32,000
men and women enlisted, the most per percentage of population of the six Australian states.
Those who were left in Kalgoorlie and Boulder made war on the elements in the community that
were not of British stock. A German club was raided and sacked, as were some hotels and
businesses run by Italians. People born in Austria or Germany were interned, although East
Europeans working in the mines, like Serbs, Croatians and others, were allowed to go on
working.
At Gallipoli, Bert Facey was experiencing the horrors of war at first-hand. He was there from
April to August 1915.
Years later he wrote: 'They were the worst four months of my whole life. I had seen many men
die horribly, and had killed many myself, and lived in fear most of the time. And it is terrible to
think that it was all for nothing... It is a
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terrible thing, a bayonet charge. I was in several in the first few days, and about eleven
altogether... The awful look on the man's face after he has been bayoneted will, I am sure, haunt
me for the rest of my life; I will never forget that dreadful look. I killed men too with rifle-fire -1
was on a machine gun at one time and must have killed hundreds... You never knew when a
bullet or worse was going to whack into you. A bullet is red hot when it hits you and burns like
mad.' His brother Roy was blown apart by a Turkish shell. Bert helped to bury him and 15 of
his mates all killed on the same day. 'We put them in a grave side by side... Roy was in pieces
when they found him. We put him together as best we could -1 can remember carrying a leg.'
His eldest brother, Joseph, was also killed - 'I was told he had been bayoneted while on guard
duty at an outpost'. Bert Facey himself was badly injured by shrapnel, bomb and bullet. By
November 1915 he was in a military hospital in Fremantle.
An accountant's daughter from Perth, quoted in Nothing to Spare by Jan Carter, had this to say
of the girls and women who were left behind. A teacher in a country school, she was 27 when
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