10/05/2026
'Dear Mother…Your ever-loving son Reg'
Private Reg Brotherton, a cannery worker from Leeton in the Riverina was just eighteen years old when he enlisted in June 1943. Posted to the 2/5th Battalion he spent most of 1944 training in northern Queensland.
He regularly wrote bright and chatty letters to his beloved mother Daisy who ran a café on Sussex Street in Sydney. In them, Reg mused about the weather, the progress of the war, gossip from home and daily life in the tropics. He often asked her to send him ‘essential’ items such as fruit cake, his swimming trunks and cigarette papers because the ones they were issued with were ‘bloody awful to smoke enough to kill a bloke “dinkum” they are’. If his spelling was rather poor, his Ocker expressions were sharp and brilliant and certainly of the time.
In one letter written on 9 February 1944 he told her ‘Gosh the beer up here is rotten mum we git some every week I tried it once and I sure don’t want any more, it’s not like the good old NSW beer.’ Three weeks later he informed her ‘Gee mum you should see the ants up here struth these big cows and one bit me on the backsides the other day and “strike me pink” didn’t it hurt I had to hit it over the head with a bren gun to knock him out then finish him off with a bayonet they are about the size of your little finger…’
By November 1944 Reg was sorely missing home and in a letter dated 21 November he wrote ‘Lord mum how I wish I was down there with you I’d put in for leave but under the circumstances its impossible for me to do so.’ He was however feeling positive about his future. Telling his mum that he had sent her some photos of him and his mates he wrote ‘for lords sake hang on to them whatever you do don’t lose them as you see when I am about 80 or so I want to be able to sit back in my armchair and tell my gran kids how I won the war…’
On 29 November 1944, the 2/5th Battalion disembarked at Aitape in New Guinea. It spent much of the next seven months engaged mainly in arduous patrolling to clear the Japanese from the Torricelli and Prince Alexander mountain ranges. Reg’s letters to his mum remained bright and humorous. On 1 February 1945 he wrote ‘Lord these native police boys are bloody animals thank God they are on our side otherwise a bloke would be in more strife than Ned Kelly.’ In April the weather was yet again noted in his letters. On the 3rd he wrote ‘sure is warm up here mum fair dinkum its that flaming hot that a bloke breaks out in a sweat just thinking of work gee I’ll be glad to git back south and git a few beers to cool me off.’ A week later he wrote again, requesting that mum send him a silver chain for his ‘dead meat ticket’ (identity tags) because ‘string ain’t much good up here for it seems to rot in no time in this heat…send it up as soon as possible for I may need it soon…Gosh mother it sure would be bloody rotten up here of a night if the salvation army bloke didn’t play a few records or play the wireless fair dinkum a bloke would go nuts…’
Reg clearly loved his mother very much. In a letter dated 7 May 1945 he added a PS which stated ‘Wishing you all the very best for Mothers Day darling and hope you have many more of them. Your ever loving son, Reg.’
Just two months later, on 13 July 1945 Reg Brotherton was killed in close-quarter jungle fighting.
He was 20 years old.
Reg was buried at the Lae War cemetery in Papua New Guinea. Today he is commemorated at the Leeton Anzac Memorial Clock Tower and the WW2 Memorial in Leeton’s Mountford Park. In 2006 more than sixty of Reg’s lively and loving letters were generously donated to the Anzac Memorial for safekeeping.
Lest We Forget.
You can view the Leeton memorials here:
👉 https://www.warmemorialsregister.nsw.gov.au/content/anzac-memorial-clock
👉 https://vwma.org.au/explore/memorials/9940
📷: Portrait photograph of NX173854 Reginald Charles Brotherton, AWM P09241.001.
