RUTHFULLY YOURS

Exactly 96 years after Trooper Thomas O’Leary won the Military Medal for gallantry in the 1917 Charge of Beersheba, a memorial headstone was dedicated at his grave on Thursday.

The ceremony in Townsville’s Belgian Gardens Cemetery was organised by the RSL to coincide with the Poppy Appeal in the run up to Remembrance Day.

Trooper O’Leary was a cavalry scout with the 4th Light Horse Regiment who raced ahead of his unit into the Palestinian town of Beersheba, in modern-day Israel, where he captured 30 Ottoman Turkish soldiers and a field gun.

But after returning to Australia in 1919 he became a recluse, living alone in a shack on the edge of Townsville.

He committed suicide in 1956 at the age of 72 and was buried in a pauper’s grave, the RSL said.

His post-war story is one the charity works to avoid being repeated with modern-day soldiers.

North Queensland RSL district president Steve Sergeant said many Queenslanders were unaware of the Irish-born soldier’s exploits because he died in obscurity.

“We’ll never know if he opted out because of his war experiences but the upshot is he became a lonely, forgotten figure,” Mr Sergeant said.

“Today we’ve made up for the dismissal (by society) of a brave and possibly traumatised man”.

A force of 500 Australians seized Beersheba from 1500 Ottoman troops in just an hour.

The battle was the beginning of the end for Ottoman rule in Palestine and cleared the way for Britain to sign the 1917 Balfour declaration that contributed to the creation of a Jewish state.