“I think my dad would be proud that the Greek community celebrates and honour the ANZACs," says Raylee Waugh, daughter of late Harry Waugh, an ANZAC soldier who fought in the Battle of Crete.
"I’m very humble and respectful of him and the ANZAC spirit, but it gives me an enormous amount of pride to stand up and represent him", Ms Waugh told SBS Greek at the end of a special ceremony dedicated to her father and organised by Melbourne-based Hellenic RSL Sub Branch.
Stranded in Crete
Ms Waugh told SBS Greek that many of her father's fellow soldiers were killed, captured or stranded during the fierce Battle of Crete in 1941 and he was always haunted by the memory of leaving them there.
"One of his mates was Captain Reginald Walter 'Reg' Saunders, the first Aboriginal Australian to be commissioned as an officer in the Australian army."
The Battle of 42nd Street in Crete was a brutal bayonet charge and one where the New Zealand soldiers - to the amazement of the Aussie soldiers - reputedly performed the Haka, the traditional Maori war dance, before going into battle.
Harry and a few fellow soldiers were able to escape from Crete's fighting in a fishing boat and they eventually made it to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) where they regrouped. Harry then returned to Australia and he got engaged to his sweetheart Dulcie.
ANZAC veteran Harry Waugh, with his wife Dulcie and his daughter, Reylee Source: Supplied
Later, he was deployed to New Guinea where he was badly wounded and carried off the island.
When he was well enough, he returned home on a few weeks' leave and married Dulcie. They went up to the South East Queensland town of Canungra to teach jungle warfare.
Harry and Dulcie were married for 67 years and Raylee grew up in the settlement town of Robinvale, a town itself built by soldiers. Harry died in 2001.
ANZAC veteran Harry Waugh Source: Supplied
War, peace, and medicine
“Once my dad asked me to name something good about the war," says Ms Waugh. "Well, I was stuck."
She told SBS Greek that the first things that came up to her mind were mateship and the chance to travel and explore the world.
But her father's answer was different. He posited that the war's great benefit might - ironically - be the way it advanced medicine.
He explained to his daughter if he had been wounded at the beginning of the war, he probably would have died fairly quickly.
Indeed, some of his mates were lost at the start of the war in the Middle East of fairly simple wounds but died from infections.
Yet, as Harry was wounded towards the end of the conflict, it was the intervening advances in medicine that saved his life, he told her.
Reylee Waugh at the Hellenic RSL in South Melbourne Source: SBS Greek
