Rye Park war widow Joan Birnie remembers husband Tom, 55 years on

Joan Birnie was playing the lead in a Lavarack Barracks Theatre Group play in Townsville when, late one night in March 1971, someone came to her door to say her husband had been wounded in Vietnam. The next morning, two cars pulled up outside her married quarters. "It was the Presbyterian padre who was in the play, and that's never a good sign," Joan said. Tom Birnie, a sergeant with the Second Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (2 RAR), had been shot by a sentry from his own platoon who mistook his patrol for the enemy. He died on 25 March, aged 31. "It was friendly fire, which made it worse," Joan said. "It wasn't his fault." Joan, who now lives near Boorowa, shared her story on Tuesday 20 October, the day after War Widows Day. The couple, both from Northern Ireland, married in Brisbane in 1963, the year their son, Mark, was born. Mark was seven when his father was killed, and Joan broke the news to him in his bedroom. "He just lay and kicked the wall for hours," she said. Joan was 28. When she went into a Townsville shop to buy a black dress for the funeral, the shop assistant asked what the occasion was. "I said, 'It's my husband's funeral.' And she just looked at me and nearly died," Joan said. She later moved to Canberra, where she worked at the Australian National University for 32 years, and she never remarried. "You have to pick the pieces up and get on," she said. "If you've got a child, everything's devoted to that, not yourself." Legacy became involved soon after Tom's death. Clive Shepherd of Legacy Yass/Boorowa is now her legatee, and Joan has become a legatee herself, looking out for three other widows. Tom often wrote poems for Joan and Mark. His last letter home, in February 1971, included one called 'The long hill home'. "That one really knocked me out," Joan said. Its final stanza reads: 'I stand atop the long hill home With wife and son, we three alone; And far away in the jungle's mould The bones of my youth lie stiff and cold Never to walk the long hill home.'