Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

The following information has been provided by Jim Burrowes and submitted on his behalf by his son.

My name is Jim Burrowes, VX136343. I served as a Coastwatcher in the South Pacific during World War II. I am now nearly 99 years old.

As one of the Coastwatchers, I was also a signaller, and proud to play a key role in their operations. This was because the singular mandate of coastwatching was not to confront the enemy but to report their movements. Hence, without a radio operator, there would not have been any coastwatching parties.

Apart from earlier service, I spent ten months in enemy-occupied territory in New Britain, overlooking Rabaul. From there, I sent warning messages by Morse Code to Australian and United States forces stationed in the South Pacific advising details of Japanese shipping and aircraft movements.

In recognition of coastwatching efforts, the official acknowledgement by five-star US Admiral of the Fleet, William F. Halsey, was brief and poignant:

'The Coastwatchers saved Guadalcanal, and Guadalcanal saved the South Pacific.'

Post-war, I am the only signaller coastwatcher to tell the full history of the coastwatchers. You can read my stories on my website:

The Last Coastwatcher (thelastcoastwatcher.wordpress.com)

Tribute

I would like to close this brief biography by writing a short tribute to my Mum: Alice, a true heroine.

Mum was born in 1891, and after growing up in the social life of South Perth, at age 20 she met and married my Dad, a farmer. She then took up years of 'farm-house duties' and, after later moving to a Soldier Settlement farm at Balingup, she looked after my father, uncle and other workers while also undertaking hard labour in driving horse and dray to fetch water from afar, and raising 3 children (Pat, Helen and Bob).

Following the family’s move to Melbourne in 1922, she added twins (my brother Tom and me) in 1923 to the family, and steered the family through the 1920s and 1930s decades of 'dirt-poor' and Depression existence, with my father constantly unemployed.

My Mum was indeed one of those women immortalized in the lines of the famous poem by George Essex Evans Women of the West, given that following her early married life in the west, she later received notices in the mail that her two sons Bob and Tom had been Killed in Action in World War II:

And we have hearts to do and dare, and yet o'er all the rest
The hearts that made the Nation were the Women of the West.
Well have we held our fathers' creed. No call has passed us by.
We faced and fought the wilderness, we sent our sons to die.