A XAVIER College student is set to travel to Vietnam to study the Vietnam War after being awarded the premier’s Anzac Spirit School Prize last week.
Year nine student Laura Cassell was one of 16 students chosen
for the prize, from more than 1000 entries, for her research
project on her great-great-grandfather corporal David Spry.
Laura spent much of this year collecting and organising war
records, letters and information about corporal Spry, who served at Gallipoli, the Western Front and Egypt during World War One.
Corporal Spry lived in Denial Bay, near Ceduna, and enlisted in
the Australian Army at 22-years-old, before embarking from Adelaide on June 23, 1995.
He returned to Denial Bay at the conclusion of the war and later died of natural causes in February 1970.
Laura said it was “eye opening” to learn what corporal Spry
had been through during the war.
“At the start I knew nothing about him, I saw a picture and
some war letters at my nan’s house and it went from there,”
she said.
“It opened up a lot for me, I was reading his war letters and
they were from when he was in the trenches and when he was
fighting.
“He had put all his emotion in those letters; in some letters he
said he was exceeding the limit of how much they (soldiers) were allowed to write home.”
Laura completed the project with support from her grandfather, private David Harding, who also served in the military in Vietnam and Papua New Guinea.
Much of corporal Spry’s war medals and letters were in Mr
Harding’s possession, but he said he knew little of his grandfather’s war history.
“I used to spend a lot of time with him and he never talked
about the war much at all,” he said.
“I found a lot of the information about him after he died and I
saw his war records.
“It was very hard what they had to put up with; I spent 12 months in Vietnam, but I wouldn’t have liked what they had to put up with in World War One.”
Laura said her grandfather, who described himself as “pretty
rough and ragged”, was emotional when he saw the finished project for the first time.
“My pa had stuff everywhere, he had letters in one corner, medals in other, now we have it all together, now he actually has a record of what actually happened,” she said.
“He really enjoyed seeing my project, he cried when I gave it
to him.”
Private Harding’s father, private Edwin Gordon Harding,
also served in the military during World War Two from 1940-41.
Laura will now head to Vietnam for two weeks as part of a
16-student study tour as reward for her research project, something she said made her grandfather proud.
As part of the tour, she will research a friend of her grandfather who he served with in Vietnam, meaning her and private Harding will work together again to shed light on another Australian serviceman.