NINETY-year-old Kokoda Trail veteran Colin Richardson, of St Lucia in Brisbane, never got to thank the army chaplain who anointed him as he lay bleeding from a massive chest wound partly held together with safety pins.
But Mr Richardson believes he had an extraordinary communication, one which “made my neck hairs stand up”, from the priest – Monsignor James Lynch – when he visited his grave in the priests’ section of Nudgee Cemetery about 45 years later.
On October 17, 1942, Colin Richardson, then a lieutenant with the Third Infantry Battalion, was shot with a Japanese dum-dum bullet during a seesawing and bloody battle around Templeton’s Crossing in Papua New Guinea’s Owen Stanley Ranges and left to die.
The injury, close to his heart, shattered many of his ribs and destroyed his left lung.
He would eventually discover during a “fortuitous meeting” at an army reunion many years later that he owed his life to Dr Geoff “Pa” Mutton who he would eventually track down in Orange, NSW.
After that meeting in the early 1990s, Dr Mutton was moved to say: “There’s only two people who have come back to life, Jesus Christ and Colin Richardson”.
Meanwhile Mr Richardson, having lost the use of one lung as a result of the injury, would never again have the endurance to walk the Kokoda Trail, such a central and nearly fatal part of his young life.
However, the determined veteran became the driving force behind a program at his old college – the University of Sydney’s St Paul’s – starting in 2006 to encourage young men to walk the trail and connect to the sacrifice of their forebears.
When The Catholic Leader visited him, Mr Richardson opened his remarkable story by saying “I never did get to meet Fr Lynch because I was ‘dead’ by the time he arrived”.
The priest arrived with Dr Mutton from the nearby Second 33rd Australian Infantry Forces to offer assistance, having been alerted by men from the Third Battalion that their officer was badly wounded.
The veteran doesn’t know to this day what had become of the doctor and padre from his own battalion.
“Things were pretty sticky,” he said.
“Maybe they had been lost in action.
“The doctor and priest didn’t arrive until six hours after I’d been hit – by then I didn’t have a pulse, probably because I’d lost so much blood.”
Then 22-year-old Lieutenant Richardson had a wound the size of a fist in his chest and a bigger one in his back and his mates had given him up for dead.
Mr Richardson has a letter he received from Dr Mutton in 1995 which fleshes out the story.
The doctor writes: ” You had a bloody great hole in your chest …
“I found some cat gut in the bottom of my haversack … and closed the hole.
“I then rolled you over and to my horror found a bigger bloody hole coming out of your back. I had run out of gut!
“I found a few safety pins in my haversack and was successful in closing the wound.”
Mr Richardson, an Anglican, said he learnt there was some debate over administration of the last rites.
“Dr Mutton told me Fr Lynch asked if I was a ‘Proddy’ or a ‘Tyke’.
“As neither knew, it was decided to administer the last rites with a bit from both sides,” he said.
“In his letter, Dr Mutton also said: ‘Of course the priest took all the credit of bringing you back to life!'”
After the makeshift operation, Mr Richardson was carried by the locals (known as the Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels) for two days to Myola, then a forward supply depot along the Kokoda Trail back to Port Moresby.
Next stop was Sydney’s Concord Hospital and a long and painful rehabilitation, dealing with drainage tubes from the lung “which had been shredded by the bullet”.
It would take Mr Richardson until 1946 to completely recover from the wound.
He studied at St Paul’s College from 1944 to 1948 to become a chemical engineer.
However, his injury would prevent him from working in this field due to sensitivity to chemicals.
Eventually he would become Australian sales manager for Lightburn, an Adelaide manufacturing engineering company.
He resettled in Brisbane about 1951, having been advised to do so due to the detrimental impact of the southern smog and cold on his damaged lung.
It was at a reunion of his old battalion in the early 1990s that Mr Richardson got the lead which would help him track down the doctor who saved his life.
“I’d only been down from Queensland a couple of times to the annual May reunion held in Goulburn as it was too cold at that time of year,” he said.
“Fortuitously, a former soldier mate I hadn’t seen since New Guinea decided to come that year also.
“He said he’d met a Dr Mutton who told him he’d patched up an officer from his battalion with safety pins.
“The mate realised it had been me.
“I went on a search for the doctor and finally found him through a surgeon friend in Sydney.
“Geoff and I spent three days together reminiscing about our war experiences.
“Our conversation came to the priest who had anointed me.
“I said when I find out what happened to Fr Jim Lynch I’ll let you know.”
Not long after that Mr Richardson contacted “the Sydney hierarchy”.
“I discovered Fr Lynch, eventually becoming a monsignor, had died and was buried in a grave at Nudgee,” he said.
“That’s somewhere near Brisbane isn’t it?’ the chap asked me.”
Mr Richardson, with one of his wife’s female friends, decided to visit the priests’ section of the cemetery and find the monsignor’s grave “to thank him for having anointed me in my hour of need”.
“It didn’t take me long to find the grave and I decided to photograph it to send Dr Mutton,” he said.
“It was a beautiful sunny day although there was a slight shadow.
“I looked up and noticed a very small blackish cloud directly above.
“I took a couple of pictures.
“I then said: ‘Well, Jim, I just want to say thank you and if you hear me can you give me a sign?’
“Well, bless my soul, at this precise moment the little dark cloud dropped a downpour around us – probably in a circle of fifteen metres or so.
“The hairs on both our necks stood up – it was the first time in my life I’d been scared stiff.
“We were so stunned at this quick response to my request, neither of us could say anything.
“When we reached the car parked nearby it was completely dry.”
Mr Richardson finished his reminiscences by outlining the success of his project to drive the development of a program to encourage young men at St Paul’s, his old college to walk the Kokoda Trail.
“My motivation was to help them towards manhood by appreciating the courage, endurance, mateship and sacrifice that Australian soldiers underwent on this trail so their descendants could be free.
“These are the tenets that we as Australians should always strive to live by.
“In fact they are the ideals which have kept me going through what’s been a pretty tough life at times.”
