Wat Cooney

Wat Cooney is an Australian prisoner of war sent with Dorrigo Evans’s J Force to work on the railway. The novel gives him little individual speech or interior life; instead, his significance emerges through the cramped journey into captivity, the postwar prosecution concerning his death, and the survivors’ later act of remembering him among their dead.

Transfer to the Railway

Two weeks after arriving at Changi, Wat left with the group later designated Evans’ J Force. The prisoners travelled in closed steel wagons originally used for rice, twenty-seven men to a wagon, with too little room to sit. The journey lasted five days without food; after six stops, three men had died. Wat’s presence in the group places him inside the system that transported Australian prisoners from captivity toward forced labor, though the account does not identify him as one of the men who died en route.

At Ban Pong, forty miles from Bangkok, the prisoners were transferred to trucks carrying thirty men each and taken through the jungle. The onward movement marks the threshold between confinement at Changi and labor on the railway. As food grew scarcer and the monsoon arrived, the Speedo imposed longer shifts, higher quotas, and the loss of rest days. Prisoners were driven to clear jungle, break rock, and move earth with basic tools and their own physical labor; many became sick or died. The account situates Wat among the men exposed to this escalating regime without specifying his particular duties or the date of his death.

The Charge Concerning His Death

Wat reappears in the narrative through the postwar Australian military trial of Choi Sang-min, a Korean guard. The court dismissed a charge that Choi had participated in the murder of Sergeant Frank Gardiner, citing contradictory evidence and written testimony. It upheld a separate charge that Choi had ordered the murder of Private Wat Cooney, along with charges of ill-treatment, including withholding food and medical supplies in ways that caused avoidable suffering and death. Choi was found guilty as a Class B war criminal and sentenced to execution by hanging.

Choi disputed the accusation. He argued that he could not have ordered a prisoner’s death and that Wat was no longer at the camp when the alleged order was given. The camp records were confused and incomplete, however, and did not establish that Wat had left. The trial therefore records both a formal judgment against Choi and a gap in the documentary evidence; it does not provide an account of who physically killed Wat or fully resolve the disputed timing.

Remembrance and Historical Record

After demobilization, former prisoners gathered at the Hope and Anchor. As they recalled the dead, Wat was named alongside Lizard Brancussi, Yabby Burrows, Jack Rainbow, and Tiny Middleton. Jimmy Bigelow began singing, and the gathering briefly held the dead within the survivors’ shared memory. Wat’s place in this roll call is the clearest personal confirmation the narrative gives of his death and of the comrades who continued to remember him.

The novel places that remembrance against the larger contest over how the railway’s dead are recorded. At Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine, locomotive C 5631 is displayed, while a plaque omits the deaths and suffering associated with the railway. The number of Asian and European laborers who died remains unknown, and many of their names have been forgotten. Wat’s story is not presented as a complete individual biography: his name survives in the court record and in the recollections of fellow prisoners, while the conditions that took so many lives resist any complete accounting.