The Boer War (1899–1902) — a conflict we chose to forget

At 11am this Sunday, May 28, at our city’s largely unknown Boer War Memorial in Robertson Park we commemorate a conflict that we have mostly chosen to forget, writes former Orange Mayor Reg Kidd.

Yet the Orange district provided a number of vitally-important Australian figures in the conflict.

This included local doctor — Captain (later Major General Sir Neville Howse) — who won a Victoria Cross for conspicuous bravery under fire and later revolutionised battlefield medical procedures. Another central figure in Australia’s experience in the conflict was a maverick field commander — Lieutenant Harry “Breaker” Morant — who was subsequently executed by the British for war crimes. Central Tableland’s local and Australia’s great Bush Poet, Banjo Patterson, also served as a war correspondent during the conflict.

The Boer War (also known as the Anglo-Boer War and South African War) represented a link between two ages — that of the small, localised conflicts typical of the British Empire during the Victorian era and that of the mass industrial-level carnage of the 20th century.

It was also the first conflict in which Australian forces were involved as a nation. Despite its relative lack of acknowledgement, it was a conflict that had an inordinate impact on a new nation.

Approximately 23,000 Australian men and women served in the War out of a population of about four million with nearly 1000 men — more than our losses in Korea and Vietnam combined — paying the ultimate price for their service.

Like Vietnam, it was a conflict in which our participation was also fiercely debated with uncomfortable echoes and haunting parallels between the two on whether we were on the side of right or might — the British Empire versus the hard-bitten and outnumbered Boer farmers courageously fighting for their homeland and, in Vietnam, the Vietcong and third-world North Vietnamese against the military might of the United States and its Allies.

In another sad aside, more than 40,000 Australian horses went overseas with only one allowed to return due to Australia’s strict quarantine laws.

The Boer War was the first conflict in which Australian forces were involved as a nation with the new “Federal Government” sending Commonwealth contingents to the War after 1901.

Before that, most Australians fought in the war from 1899 with British forces or as “free” soldiers. Following early Boer victories, the British utilised their overwhelming numerical strength to defeat the main Boer forces. The Boers later adopted small, mobile units of horse-mounted irregulars in a hit-and-run guerrilla campaign. 

The British, unable to pin down these units who blended in with the local farmer population, adopted a scorched earth strategy. This involved forcing thousands of civilian men, women, and children into giant outdoor prisons — thereby inventing the modern “concentration camp” — where inadequate shelter, poor diet, bad hygiene, and overcrowding led to malnutrition and endemic contagious diseases such as measles, typhoid and dysentery killed thousands.

On May 31, 1902, the Treaty of Vereeniging was signed in the State of Pretoria which ended the war.

Local identity Captain Sir Neville Howse enlisted as a doctor and was awarded the highest order of medal in the British Empire, the Victoria Cross, for rescuing an injured man while under fire after having his horse shot from under him.

Again, enlisting with the First AIF in World War I, he went on to revolutionise rapid-response battlefield medical practice during the carnage of that conflict and later served two terms as Mayor before becoming a Federal politician.

Australia’s most popular bush poet, Banjo Paterson also served as a war correspondent penning an ode — the poem “The Last Parade” that commemorates the courage of Australian horses in the war and their eventual sad fate. Only one horse as a symbol of the group was ever allowed to return to Australian shores.

With the war starting at the end of the greatest recorded drought in Australian history and the subsequent rural depression, young men with a firearm and their own horse were eager to enlist in this great overseas adventure.

It is believed that somewhere between 24–32 volunteers were from this district with four casualties, soldiers Coneybeane, Beasley, Bastick and Smith (who was the son of an Orange Mayor).

Notably, two others from our region played a central role in one of the most controversial and darkest chapters of the conflict. Lieutenant Peter Handcock from Peel near Bathurst and Lieutenant Harry “Breaker” Morant had worked on properties in our district for years.

Lieutenants Morant and Handcock were found guilty of murdering nine incapacitated Boer hospital patients and were also accused of killing a Dutch clergyman who threatened to expose their atrocities. They were executed by a British firing squad from the Cameron Highlanders on 27 February 1902.

Orange’s Boer War Memorial — originally designed as a gas-powered street light — is now located at the northern end of Robertson Park. It was dedicated on March 29, 1905 with all-local funding and construction.

The Memorial though was originally sited at the intersection of Summer and Anson Streets but was moved In 1929 to the south-western side of Robertson Park on Summer Street because it had become a traffic impediment with fears of it being damaged by motor vehicles.

During the 1930s remodelling of the Park, it was again moved to its present site near the CWA Hall with a three-faceted modern monument to Sir Neville Howse (“Soldier”, “Doctor”, “Statesman”) located adjacent to the Boer War Memorial.

Orange finally restarted commemorating this “forgotten war” after many years of neglect on the 31st of May, 2010. This followed a call from The Australian War Memorial in Canberra for towns to rediscover this long-forgotten conflict with Orange taking up the challenge.

As Boer War veteran Winston Churchill said in a 1948 speech to the House of Commons, “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”