AAP General News (Australia)
04-23-2010
Vic: Tough upbringing prepared former VFL umpire for war
By Michelle Draper
MELBOURNE, AAP - Aussie rules aficionados would be familiar with the name Glenn James,
the Aboriginal umpire who presided over more than 150 VFL games.
But few would be aware that before his well-respected umpiring career, James served
in the Vietnam War.
The 20-year-old apprentice carpenter touched down in Vietnam in 1968, one year after
the 1967 Referendum changed Australia's constitution to include indigenous people in the
census.
Without accurate population records before that time, the number of Aboriginal servicemen
and women who fought or died in the first and second world wars will never be known, but
it is estimated to be in the thousands.
James, who had started an apprenticeship in Australia before being conscripted, was
part of the Royal Australian Engineers unit rebuilding destroyed bridges and marketplaces
in Vietnam, based at Nui Dat.
Although he says his tough upbringing as one of 14 children growing up in Shepparton
in Victoria's north may have prepared him better than others for the hardship of conflict,
he was still shocked at his first impressions of the war-torn country.
Within four hours of landing, James witnessed local Vietnamese scrambling for unwanted
food scraps his colleagues had discarded.
"It was a bit of an eye-opener right at the start," he tells AAP.
"It was a third world country, it was a very poor country, and they were fighting for
their existence and they'd been fighting for years and years and years."
He was also confronted with a barbed wire fence housing a prisoner-of-war camp for
captured Vietnamese.
"Within a space of four hours, you'd seen something that knocked you back about 10 feet.
"That's when everyone sort of woke up to the fact that this was sort of serious stuff."
But James says while other soldiers came from small families, being the 10th of 14
children and having to fight for "every darn thing in our life", contributed to how he
dealt with his wartime experience.
He'd also endured incredible prejudice in the Australian community as an indigenous person.
"It was terrible the treatment we used to get.
"Just in the general community, the colour of your skin mattered."
And it was an issue that carried over into the forces.
"They still picked on you. You were just an absolute target in the army," James says,
before deflecting to a positive anecdote.
James is even by his own admissions a positive person - an attribute that is clearly
evident from his ability to return to Australia from the horrors of war and swim upstream
to a successful umpiring and educational career.
"For some reason I just didn't have a negative thought about anything," James says.
When he returned to Australia after his 12-month posting, James threw himself back
into sport in Shepparton before moving to Melbourne and embarking on his well-known umpiring
career, which included the 1982 and 1984 grand finals.
He umpired 166 VFL matches between 1977 and 1985, when he was president of the Victorian
Football League Umpires Association.
"I just got stuck straight back into the community and footy. I virtually forgot Vietnam,"
he says.
But he didn't forget everything.
He recalls being at a reconstruction job on Long Son Island where he was told one of
his mates with whom he trained at Victoria's Puckapunyal army base was badly injured and
pleading for James.
He was flown to his mate's side at Vung Tau and witnessed his friend curled in the
foetal position, covered in black specks caused by exploding shrapnel.
"He got shot up big time over there," James says.
"He really didn't know where he was. He just wanted to hold my hand and all that stuff."
James says his friend never really recovered from the incident, physically or emotionally.
Back in Australia, James was a founding member of the Royal Australian Engineers Vietnam
Association, which reunites every Anzac Day to march in the parade and meet afterward
at a local RSL club.
He was named Victorian Aborigine of the Year in 1984 and received a Medal of the Order
of Australia in 1987.
After 35 years spent teaching carpentry and building, alongside his umpiring career,
the father of two and grandfather is passionate about improving the lives of young indigenous
people through his role as an Elder with the Koori Court in Melbourne.
He says he wouldn't change anything about his life, even that one, trying year.
"I wouldn't give back one second ... of the life that I've had. Now, that I'm at the
age that I'm at, it's just a cup of water in the ocean. But I got back, two feet, two
arms, all that sort of stuff."
AAP md/pmu/it/mn
KEYWORD: ANZAC JAMES (AAP NEWSFEATURE) (PIX AVAIL) RPTG
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