Service and sacrifice

When we speak of the legend of the Anzacs, Harry Freame is rarely mentioned even though he was once celebrated as the “Marvel of Gallipoli”.

Story Ryan Butta  Photos courtesy Susan McGregor

Every year, on April 25 Australians gather to make a promise. That at the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them. But memory is a slippery thing and some stories slide through the cracks, lost to time and history. Among them is Harry Freame – a name that barely registers when we speak of the legend of the Anzacs, even though, in his day, he was celebrated in the Australian press as the “Marvel of Gallipoli”.

Harry Freame was born Hidetsugu Kitagawa in Nagasaki in 1880 to an Australian father and a Japanese mother of the samurai class, at a time when Japan was emerging from centuries of self-imposed isolation.

His father died before Freame had turned one. Soon after his mother moved the family to Osaka, where Freame’s mixed heritage and light skin marked him as a visible outsider. Japan was in the throes of rapid modernisation, and the samurai class was losing its status and power in society. At home, the young Freame learned the codes of the samurai alongside Christianity, thanks to his mother’s remarriage to an Anglican priest, Magohiko Koba.

It was a time of upheaval, and Freame never settled. Aged just 16, he left Japan for England, seeking a fresh start. He would later tell noted Australian war correspondent Charles Bean that he went to England to further his education, but “took to wandering”. Freame spent the next decade at sea as a ship’s cook, touching down in places as far-flung as Argentina, India and Jamaica. In 1906, while on shore leave, he married an English girl Edith May Soppitt, but after only a few weeks at home Freame again took to the seas. He made his first trip to Australia in 1911 and returned again, this time to settle in the northern NSW town of Glen Innes, working as a horse breaker.

Like so many young Australian men of the time, Freame’s life took a sharp turn in 1914 with the outbreak of World War I. He was among the first to enlist in Sydney, and entered the ranks, passing himself off as a Canadian, and therefore a British subject, to dodge the racial restrictions of the White Australia policy, which allowed only British subjects to enlist in the first Australian Imperial Force.

When Freame landed at Gallipoli on that infamous April day in 1915, he wasn’t yet the “marvel” he would soon become. He was just another soldier on those bullet- and shrapnel-swept shores. But from day one, his courage and daring set him apart. He landed as a Lance Corporal with D Company of the 1st Battalion. As the company scout, he was tasked with finding and relieving Australians in advanced positions, holding hard-won trenches, navigating enemy lines, identifying the Turkish defensive positions, and rounding up the shirkers and the stragglers and driving them back up to the firing line – all dangerous work, especially in the confusion of those early hours of the landing. Yet Freame seemed to thrive in the chaos. As Charles Bean noted, “No soldier in the first week of the landing was more ubiquitous than Harry Freame”.

Listen to our fascinating interview with Ryan Butta talking about Harry Freame on the R.M.Williams OUTBACK podcast.