Former Labor deputy leader Tom Uren (inset) and the scene immediately after the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki.
Eighty years ago on Saturday, as a prisoner of the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA), Tom Uren saw the discoloured sky that followed the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki.
Uren would become the deputy leader of the federal Labor Party, but at the time he wanted to be a professional boxer. Five years earlier, at the age of 18, he’d fought for the Australian heavyweight title. That year also, he joined the army and, as a committed Christian, knelt beside his bed in the barracks each evening and said his prayers. In 1960, he returned to Japan and declared that the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were crimes against humanity.
Uren was born in working class Balmain and never forgot seeing his mother, to whom he was devoted, humiliated by a committee dispensing charity during the Depression of the 1930s. But his political crucible was the Burma railway, where prisoners of different nations were treated as slaves by the IJA as a result of which over 100,000 perished.
Uren’s commanding officer was Weary Dunlop. In terms of post-war politics, Uren and Weary were on opposite sides, but, in Thailand in 1943 with death and disease all around them, Uren recognised Weary as a true leader. The stories about Weary Dunlop are legend and young Tom Uren saw them happen like miracles before his eyes.
Uren beheld a morality in the prison camp experience which he expressed thus: “The big man takes the heavy end of the log”. Tom was the big man. He was also deeply impressed by the fact that Dunlop taxed his officers and used the money to buy food and medicine for his sick and dying men.
At the Hintok camp, a British unit pulled in alongside the Australians. Uren said the British officers took the best of their tents and equipment, the sergeants next, the privates after. “They died like flies,” he would say. “We used to walk out past the dead bodies each morning going to the line”. Uren talked about it on his maiden speech to the House of Representatives in 1958. “On one side of the river there was a collective spirit, on the other it was law of the jungle”.
In his final year as a prisoner, when he was working underground in Japan as a coal miner, Uren gave some of the Japanese miners boxing lessons. He said some of the Australian prisoners “didn’t like it”, but he saw the Japanese miners as being people like himself. “I realised it wasn’t the Japanese I hated. It was militarism”.
He would finish his long public life as a “non-believer” appealing “to people of goodwill”. He campaigned against the Vietnam war, conscription and nuclear armament. He was briefly jailed in 1971 for protesting against Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s ban on street marches.
Uren’s enemies called him a communist but, as I learned in writing a book with him, the document he cited most often was Pope John XXIII’s 1963 encyclical Pacem In Terris (Peace on Earth). Uren’s enemies belittled him as an old boxer but he had a deep aesthetic sense and one of his biggest inspirations was hearing the mighty voice of black American civil rights champion Paul Robeson sing to the workers on the steps of the Opera House in 1971.
Uren was scared of no-one. He told me the only thing that ever really scared him was the cholera virus in the prison camps. He was a big man in every way, including his ego which could be child-like. He loved his government and parliamentary honours, he loved being recognised on the Sydney public transport system which he gloried in as an example of “collectivism”. He was open in his emotions and told me that if you’re feeling depressed the best way out of it is to help someone else.
When I first met him and introduced myself as a journalist he dismissed me. When he heard my father was with Weary Dunlop it was like I was his son. He could be tedious and talk too much about himself, but he was an innately compassionate man, and a wonderful friend who gave great advice. Another who had this sort of relationship with him was Anthony Albanese. I spoke at Tom’s funeral in Sydney Town Hall. Anthony was MC. Three Prime Ministers, two Labor, one Liberal, sat in the front row.
The irony is that people championing Tom Uren’s causes today are dismissed as “woke”? The idea behind the insult is that to be “woke” is to be shamelessly idealistic in a way that is at odds with reality. Is there anyone stupid enough or crass enough to say that the Burma Railway experience was lacking in reality? It doesn’t get more real than that, which is why Tom Uren’s life is still relevant in these deeply uncertain times.
There is no doubt he would be out on the street marching today on environmental and human rights issues, and in the front row. The book I wrote with him in the final decade of his life was originally titled “Late In The Fight”. Tom never liked the title since it implied there was an end in sight. It was published as “The Fight”. The fight would go on, and so will he.
To quote from the song Paul Robseson sang on the Opera House steps:
“I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
Alive as you and me
Says I “But Joe, you’re ten years dead”
“I never died” says he”.
