Through the Sandakan Memorial Scholarship Trust, established by historian Lynette Silver and her husband, Neil, Barker College sponsors girls from farmers’ families in remote villages to attend secondary school at St Michael’s School in Sandakan.
Silver told The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) that so far, 37 girls had been sponsored to complete their studies, with eight going on to tertiary education.
However, three girls in particular have been singled out to spend three weeks at Barker itself, as a tribute to six Australian POWs who survived the Sandakan Death Marches of 1945 thanks to the Dusun community.
The Sandakan Death Marches were a series of forced marches by the Japanese of Australian and British POWs from Sandakan to a jungle death camp in Ranau. Over 1,000 POWs died on the marches.
Only six survived, thanks to the Dusun Christian community which hid them for up to five weeks, according to Silver.
“They never gave the POWs away despite the fact the Japanese were offering money and food to starving villagers if they handed over the POWs,” SMH quoted her as saying.
“The risks were enormous. Had the POWs been discovered, the Japanese would have killed everyone in the village,” she said in the report.
Genevia Binti Handry, 17; Suzie Binti Aitor, 18; and Agnes Jackson, 18, are being hosted at the college in honour of four Barker “Old Boys” who died in the atrocity – Corporal James Lillyman, Gunner Isaac Sefton, Lance-Bombardier Charlie Starky and Staff Sergeant Alan Waters.
Lillyman, 37, died of starvation and malaria on June 17, 1943. According to the report, he was too ill to be sent on the death march. The other three, however, all died in 1945.
Sefton, 43, died from beriberi and starvation on April 4. Starky, whose age was not provided in the report, died in January of starvation and malaria. Waters, meanwhile, died in Sandakan on June 9.
Tony Gamson, president of the Old Barker Association which paid for the girls’ airfares to Sydney, told SMH that a total of 92 Old Boys died in war.
“Hosting these girls is an opportunity to give back something to those people who put themselves in great danger protecting Australian POWs,” he was quoted as saying.
According to the report, Genevia will soon begin university in Kuala Lumpur as a pharmacy student. Suzie wants to be a nurse, while Agnes wants to be a teacher.
Barker College was founded in 1890. In a statement on its website, it said hosting Genevia, Suzie and Agnes helped form a more meaningful connection with “one of the nation’s saddest stories of WWII”.