Coleambally resident John ‘Wilko’ Wilkinson made his annual pilgrimage to Sydney for the city’s annual Anzac Day march.

The New Guinea veteran is now 101 years old and the last one left of his unit, Australia’s PNG Battalions during World War 2.

“Wilko” as he likes to be called, was 20 when he joined the army in 1941. After training at Puckapunyal he was persuaded to join the artillery.

He was in Darwin in February of 1942 when the war first came to Australia in the form of Japanese bombers.

“We were digging a gun pit alongside the airfield,” he recalled.

“We’d noticed the Yanks had been sending a lot of planes over to Timor and we saw this very large formation of planes coming in from the south. It was a very impressive sight. Then we heard the bombs coming down, so we dug in very quickly!”

Despite the shock of the Darwin bombings, Wilko grew bored in the artillery and jumped at the chance to join one of the newly formed ‘native units’ as a sergeant major.

It was a fighting unit and all New Guinea boys apart from officers and senior NCOs.

Local knowledge benefitted the New Guinea battalions when supplementing their rations.

“A lot of the time in action it would only be bully beef and biscuits, but because we would be in country that some of the boys belong to, we could get fresh vegetables and live a lot better than the Australian troops,” Wilko said.

As the years passed, the number of surviving veterans dwindled.

After the war, he kept in touch with his batman (orderly). He was younger than Wilko and years ago he received a telegram written by his daughter to say that he had died.

There were 567 Australians spread over the three battalions and Wilko is the last survivor.

While the 101-year-old was the only New Guinea battalion veteran marching, he was not alone.

After the war, a lot of Australian teachers went up to teach the new recruits in the New Guinea army, to teach them English and so on. They marched alongside Wilko.

This article appeared in the Narrandera Argus, 28 April 2022.