ANZAC Songs BY LLOYD GORMAN
JOHN PATRICK O’DONNELL AND HIS TWIN BROTHER THOMAS HENRY WERE IN THEIR EARLY TWENTIES WHEN THEY LEFT THEIR HOME IN TULLOW, CO. CARLOW TO MIGRATE TO AUSTRALIA AROUND 1911. Following in their father’s footsteps, the O’Donnell boys found work with the Bank of Adelaide in South Australia and stayed with an uncle in their adopted home. When World War I broke out, John – like many thousands of other eager young men – quickly enlisted aged 23 on August 26 1914 with the 10th Battalion (his brother enlisted with the same battalion in 1916). His hometown for enrolment was given as Balaclava, Wakefield, South Australia but his next of kin was given as Mrs Elizabeth M. O’Donnell, C/O National Bank Ltd, Carlow. Co. Carlow. Ireland. The young bank clerk shipped out for Egypt on October 20 1914 and it would be another five years before he returned to Australia. O’Donnell was amongst the men 34 | THE IRISH SCENE
of the 10th Battalion who landed at Gaba Tepe, Gallipoli on April 25. According to a newspaper report he was “hit 10 times and wounded four times” and there was another strange incident where: Corporal John Patrick O’Donnell “[he] with 28 others he was posted as missing, but subsequently the whole of these Australian heroes reappeared in the trenches”. He would later serve on the Western Front. We don’t know if O’Donnell might have ducked across to Ireland while he was back in Europe, but we do know that a poem (see right) he wrote about Gallipoli was published in the Dublin Evening News on 18th September 1915 and then reprinted in the Advertiser (Adelaide) on 2 November 1915. In the final months of the war, O’Donnell had a chance to pen some more poetry while he was recuperating from war wounds in Netley Hospital in Hampshire. One of those was a poem in memory of his twin who died at Weshoek, Flanders on 28 September 1917. That poem (far right) touched on their emigrant past and the sacrifices made by so many in that war. O’Donnell returned to Australia in June 1919 where he would live out the rest of his life. He died in Adelaide, on March 7 1982, aged 91 years.
