AT EASE
WHY THE RSL IS RALLYING THE TROOPS AHEAD OF ANZAC DAY
Acar bomb had just exploded down the street and a shaken Ross Eastgate, then a young Army officer serving with the United Nations Truce Supervision Organisation in the Middle East, had a rifle poked in his chest in the confusion that followed.
But it wasn’t until Ross stumbled back into the flat he shared with his wife Anne and toddler son during the tumultuous period of the Israeli invasion that the real trouble started.
“The blast had shaken the flat and all the cockroaches had scuttled out of the Arab squat toilet. The place was crawling with them,” Ross says. “Anne was not happy.” Ross first put on a military uniform when enlisted as a cadet as a 13-year-old Bundaberg schoolboy in 1963, together with Nine News anchor Bruce Paige, who grew up in nearby Maryborough.
The duo formed a friendship over shared training, which still exists to this day, with Bruce a regular at the Surfers Paradise RSL where Ross has recently been re-elected as president.
Like many of the veterans he welcomes into the RSL, Ross’ time in the military was filled with camaraderie and globetrotting.
As well as his time in the Middle East where he lived in Damascus and Jerusalem and served in Lebanon, Ross was also twice deployed to Papua New Guinea during the Bougainville Civil War and to East Timor during their transition to independence. But it wasn’t all firing Israeli AK47s on the southern Lebanese coast, being awarded an OAM for services to veterans or being interviewed by journalists midway through a Port Moresby hostage siege with a pistol in one hand and a radio in the other.
While a military career is often thrilling, sometimes our troops see horrors the rest of us only visit in nightmares.
As a 22-year-old signals officer fresh out of the Royal Military College Duntroon, Ross was posted to Papua New Guinea, at the time still an Australian territory, just before the RAAF’s worst ever peacetime disaster.
A Caribou aircraft crashed killing 25 of the 29 people on board – most of them school cadets.
“They were bringing the children back from a cadet camp and they got lost in cloud,” Ross says.
“I spent a week in the morgue preparing bodies for funerals. “It was the worst week of my life.” Again, like many of the men and women who file into his RSL, who hold themselves in a way only military service can knock into you, Ross didn’t spend his whole career in the Army.
He left in 1991 to return to PNG with Chevron Oil during the construction of the Kutubu Oilfield Access Road in the Southern Highlands. As a member of the first graduating class from the Royal Military College Duntroon to receive university degrees, his was a Bachelor of Arts majoring in military history, Ross took his love of the written word and forged a career as a journalist.
This included a stint at the Gold Coast Bulletin under former editor Bob Gordon.
To this day he still writes for a living, including a defence opinion column for the Townsville Bulletin and specialist pieces such as the medals poster published in the Gold Coast Bulletin last week to commemorate Anzac Day.
However, the father of three made a brief return to full-time service when the then Chief of Army Peter Cosgrove asked Ross to serve as one of his two speech writers.
The other was LGBT advocate Lieutenant Colonel Cate McGregor prior to her transition.
Ross has seen it all when it comes to the Australian Defence Force but there’s one thing that hits him right where that impressive swag of medals is pinned on his chest: the sight of young veterans standing on the fringes comes Anzac Day.
“We want them to know they belong and are welcome,” Ross says.
“That we are available if they need help not just on that one day but every day. If you know of a veteran who needs something give us a call. He needs a carpenter? Well we’ll find someone. It’s about mates helping mates just like when we were in service.”
It’s been two decades since Ross had his last stint at the helm of the Surfers Paradise RSL.
There are still the trickle of old blokes enjoying a “battle juice” at the bar and the young families having lunch. But there’s a lot Ross wants to see change.
“When I was first president we had to fight with the old blokes who wanted everything done their way.
“But now? I’d love it if some young men or women came in and said, ‘piss off, it’s our turn now’.”
Veterans are entitled to free membership of the Surfers Paradise RSL, which includes free parking at the Bruce Bishop carpark.