MOST Australian towns have memorials honouring citizens lost in wars.
But relatively few go back to the Second Boer War in South Africa at the beginning of the 20th century.
Clarence Town is one of them.
The second of the two Boer wars broke out in October 1899, triggered by the discovery of gold in the state of Transvaal, specifically the Witwatersrand gold fields, and the political dispute over the voting rights of British expatriates who came for the precious metal.
The Boer States were independent, self-governing republics formed mainly in the last half of the 19th century by the Dutch-speaking inhabitants of the Cape Colony and their descendants.
More than 11,000km away, Australia still comprised six self-governing British colonies. Most colonists saw themselves as British, and each colony offered troops in support of the Empire.
Australians served mostly as mounted soldiers, and as the war became a long guerrilla struggle in its later stages, Britain relied more and more on mounted men from the colonies.
Clarence Town’s Alexander William Eagleton was one of them. For reasons still unknown, he did not enlist in a New South Wales unit, but as Private 165 in the 5th Queensland Imperial Bushmen.
Eagleton was in the contingent of 500 men who sailed on the Templemore on 6 March 1901, landing at Port Elizabeth on 1 April. They served in General Plumer’s column throughout the latter phase of what was a war of attrition against the Boers.
On 4 January, 1902 a British advance guard of around 110 men, including Queenslanders, halted on Bankkop ridge near Amersfoort, in the south-eastern Transvaal, for a midday meal.
A decoy herd of cattle drew them down onto lower ground, where some 500 Boers hidden in a ‘kloof’ (a steep-sided wooded ravine or valley) attacked from the flank. The Boers called the place Onverwacht.
Aged 22, Eagleton was one of as many as 13 Queenslanders who died at Onverwacht, although the exact number is unknown. It was the contingent’s heaviest loss of the war.
A total of 606 men of the Australian contingents died in the Second Boer War.
News of his death was felt keenly in his home district.
A public meeting at the Clarence Town School of Arts on 10 March, 1902 formed a committee to raise a memorial. The Alexander Eagleton Memorial Gates were officially opened on 8 December, 1902.
Now standing in Clarence Town Memorial Park, they are the only Boer War monument in the Dungog Shire.
His name is also recorded on the Clarence Town War Memorial, unveiled on 24 September 1921.
The First (1880-1881) and the Second Boer Wars reshaped South African politics and paved the way for the Union of South Africa in 1910.
They marked shifts in military technology and tactics, and foreshadowed one of the bloodiest wars of all time, World War I, which followed soon after in 1914.
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