The EGG MAN OF CHANGI
WHEN WE MET in Wollongong, New South Wales, in 2007, Guy Baker had just a few days to live. He was a big man, but his 86-year-old, once-powerful rugby forward’s frame was by then a useless burden. His breathing was fitful, and, tethered to an oxygen cylinder, he sat slumped in a chair by his hospital bed. Guy had heard me on ABC Radio a couple of weeks earlier, and although in terminal decline he resolved that we must meet. The ABC facilitated contact and so it came to pass.
It was an unusual first meeting; I arrived a stranger, yet an hour later we parted as friends. My presence somehow helped a dying old man tap a reserve of strength, and, as if there was some magic elixir circulating in that oxygen cylinder, he became animated and energised.
There would be no further contact – we had no time to lose. In those precious moments Guy determinedly ventured back in his mind to his young adult years in the 1940s when, like so many Australians of his generation, he saw more of life and death than he may have cared for. Therein lay our bond, a connection born of Guy’s wartime encounter with my long-dead father, Ian McGregor. We talked of that, and much more.
HAVING ALREADY SERVED in the citizen militia, 19-year-old Guy Templeton Baker joined the all-volunteer Second Australian Imperial Force (2nd AIF) in July 1940 and was posted to its 27th Infantry Brigade, one of three brigades of the Australian Army’s 8th Division. The 20,000-strong division had been raised for war in North Africa, but, with the rapidly escalating threat from Japan in Asia and the Pacific, the 8th was broken into four units and deployed much closer to home.
27th Brigade joined with the 22nd in reinforcing the British garrison in Malaya, while other elements of the division headed for Rabaul, Ambon and Timor. From August 1941 onwards, the 22nd and 27th brigades were involved in hasty preparations for the collective Allied and
