As the train sped along I began to wonder where the highlands were and when we would start the climb. I had pictured scenes similar to photographs I had seen as a child of the Rocky Mountains, with huge plantations of pines and other cold weather trees and rocky outcrops.
It was not to be. The train did slow down a little as we started to take on the slopes ahead. Some timber appeared and the air become cooler. It was a gradual change from the city which was not very far away. The train negotiated a tunnel or two and we stopped at some very small stations that were empty of people. It was a complete contrast to the tiny villages where the Indian trains stopped and there were always more people than there was room to stand. Still, I enjoyed soaking in the scene.
The countryside was quite different from any I had experienced before in my journeys. The grass was not as green as the pasture in England and the trees carried a different shade of green from the trees in the tropics. Of course, I realised that this was a dry continent that lacked the lushness of growth of vegetation in the wetter regions.
The engine slowed again and I looked out of the window to catch the view ahead. I began to wonder if it would be anything like the climb up to my home town of Maymyo in Burma. The air became decidedly cooler. I was excited at the prospect of getting off at Canberra, which I knew from early geography was somewhere near the Australian Alps.
It was the end of April 1951. I pondered the nine years since I had set out on that fateful journey. Now I was a strapping young man, free once again, and the gypsy spirit was running in my veins. Farms appeared alongside the track. They seemed to be orchards of some description. Shades of autumn, I figured. The train stopped again at the town of Mittagong. Strange name for a town. Off again, and this time we entered a fairly long tunnel.
On emerging from the darkness I looked out at a landscape that seemed miraculously to have changed to a place I remembered dearly, my home town in Burma. The countryside was green and the trees had taken on a different shade. Some were changing colour with the season, and they were surely temperate trees. The train stopped and I alighted to stretch my legs and to admire the scene. I had occupied the last carriage on the train.
Now I stepped out on to the platform marked with a sign saying ‘Bowral’. I was confronted by an older man, with newspapers tucked under his arm. He was a newspaper vendor. I bought a paper and while we chatted for a moment I looked about and my eyes caught the view of hills on either side of the track. One of the hills appeared to have been quarried. It was as if the ghost of my home town had suddenly appeared before me. Maymyo, too, had a similar hill that had also been quarried and I remembered as a young lad playing rather dangerously there, among the gravel. Surely this must be another hill station.
As I looked about, absorbed in what I saw, the train took off without me. My earthly belongings, too, were being carried away. I waved to the guard but got no response. Nonetheless, I felt good. The place had a good Karma. Almost nine years to the day, I had arrived.
Afterword
Verona Burgess
On 1 July 1942 a supply officer in the Royal Indian Army Service Corps, Major Alasdair Ramsay Tainsh, found a young boy and his sister lying at death’s door not far from the Burmese– Indian border.
Tainsh, a tough, determined Scotsman, was tasked with preparing the Indian forward receiving camps for the North Burma refugee evacuation that was being conducted with the Indian Tea Association of Assam.
He personally led many heroic forays into the jungle over the border to rescue survivors.
‘They were in a dreadful state,’ he would later write of the two ‘Macfadgen’ children in his memoir, … and some fell by the wayside, published by Orient Longmans in 1948. ‘The girl was suffering badly from dysentery and the boy was very weak.’
The boy was surely Colin, the girl was his sister Ethel – Macfadgen being an old Scottish spelling of the modern name McPhedran.
In 2005, three years after the publication of White Butterflies, a couple from Tasmania were holidaying in a French hamlet, Les Amalrics, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, and met a gentleman named Dr Michael Brett-Crowther, who lived there with his wife. They gave him a copy of White Butterflies.
Dr Brett-Crowther, by extraordinary coincidence, is not only editor of the International Journal of Environmental Studies, but also Tainsh’s literary executor.
‘My wife had met him, as a child, because he and her guardian had both been at Elizabeth College in Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands, and I met him in 1971 at a reception for the Institution of Environmental Sciences, held at the House of Lords,’ he explained last year.
Tainsh was awarded an MBE in 1946 for his work on the North Burma evacuation. He married and lived in Sweden, where he became a consultant and, drawing on his wartime experiences, made his life’s work lecturing on rural health and nutrition problems with particular emphasis on Asian rural and village life.
So Dr Brett-Crowther read White Butterflies with enormous interest – and put two and two together.
Convinced that they were the same girl and boy described by Tainsh, he emailed the publisher of White Butterflies, the late Ian Templeman of Pandanus Books, and provided his own contact details, including a telephone number in France where Colin could reach him.
Col, for whom email was an alien form of communication never to be conquered, had received hundreds of letters from readers wanting to thank and congratulate him. White Butterflies seemed to be one of those books whose readership is largely inspired by heartfelt word-of-mouth recommendations.
The letters came from far and wide – from distant relatives on both the Burmese and Scottish sides; from school children; from members of the Burmese diaspora, including a handful of trek survivors or people whose relations had either perished or had survived the trek but had taken their secrets to the grave; from old school friends from India or Burma, a few who sent old photos of Colin’s family and friends and even one of a painting done by his mother; from members of Probus, Rotary and book clubs, writers’ festivals and other forums he had addressed; and from readers who simply felt moved and wished to thank him. Many felt compelled to tell him their own life stories.
He kept all the letters bundled in manila folders and would bring new ones to show us as they arrived.
Colin had a natural grace and charm that drew people to him. He loved to talk with the many interesting people whom he met along the way – as always, he remained more fascinated by other people’s stories than his own.
He was very touched by a chance meeting with an elderly gentleman who approached him in Mittagong after one talk.
Colin later recalled, ‘He told me he had flown from India on several bombing missions against the Japanese against the town [of Mogaung] and nearby trail. And he said, “Every time I looked down at the terrain, I prayed that I wouldn’t crash. I thought, how could anybody walk through the jungle and cross all those rivers?”
‘He must have been only about 20 when he flew those missions – a boy himself. And I don’t think he’d spoken much about that time to anybody until he came across me. Tears welled in his eyes as he recalled flying over the places mentioned in the book.’
Colin was able to thank him for helping to save his life.
Time after time, letter after letter, those who did not know Col personally wanted to know: what happened afterwards? What kind of a life did he lead?
But the message from Dr Brett-Crowther was of a different magnitude.
Colin plucked up the courage to telephone him and their conversation stunned him so much that he found himself unable to respond properly.
Not only did his rescuer, Tainsh, suddenly have a name, but he had died only in 1998 – four years before White Butterflies was published, ironically just before Colin began to write it.
Dr Brett-Crowther then sent him a follow-up letter, explaining more about Tainsh and including an extract from the book naming the ‘Macfadgen’ children.
‘Nothing in Tainsh�
��s account seems to contradict the substance of yours,’ he wrote to Colin. ‘But because, again, of the lack of a diary element in your account and the fact of your having been a severely debilitated, ill, disoriented child of 12, some things may have become altered in your memory and even have been altered at the time they happened, out of very normal reasons: survival is the only criterion.’
Colin was in a state of shock. He had read everything he could get his hands on about the evacuation but had never known about this long out-of-print book.
We managed to obtain a copy of … and some fell by the wayside from an antiquarian bookseller in Adelaide.
Colin took it home to the Southern Highlands and read it alone. He found it deeply traumatic.
His rescue and the death of his family had lived on only in his childhood memory and like many recollections of trauma, it was as Dr Brett-Crowther intimated – fixed vividly in his mind but incomplete, including some confusion about dates.
Written in the form of a diary from 6 May to 22 July 1942, … and some fell by the wayside covers the first and biggest of three phases of the evacuation, when some 20 000 refugees crossed the Pangsau route to India. Another estimated 20 000 died along the way.
The grim rescue mission on the corpse-strewn trail at the tail-end of the monsoon was well underway when Tainsh teamed up with a new offsider, a Mr Mackie from the Indian Tea Association, at a forward camp, Flagstaff House, in Shamlung on 23 June.
Mackie’s name would soon cause some confusion because Colin’s middle name was also Mackie – a family surname on the Scottish side of his family.
Tainsh and Mackie were out searching for survivors on 1 July when Tainsh came across ‘a pretty girl of about 19 and her brother’ beside the Tagung stream.
‘I made them some hot tea and gave them a tin of milk and several packets of biscuits,’ Tainsh wrote. ‘I told them that if they could manage to get down to the Abor Bridge somehow Mackie and I would carry the girl to Shamlung.’
At this point he did not name them, but spent nearly an hour helping them and then had to push on.
Later in the day, on the way back to camp carrying a little Ghurka girl, Tainsh found the pair still where he had left them.
‘If it had not been for the Ghurka lass on my back I would have carried the sister to Nawnygang,’ he wrote. ‘I sent her brother for a bucket of water so that she could be washed, and I helped her out of her shelter where she had been sitting in her own dirt for a week. She had filthy ulcers on her buttocks, and her whole body was crawling with lice. I left them some more food, but it was impossible to stay longer and get back before dusk, so I hurried on.’
On 4 July Tainsh returned with a larger party of some 30 men, on the lookout for the pair he had promised a few days earlier to help.
On the way he met Mackie, who was returning from Tagung Hka ‘and confirmed that the MacFadgen girl and boy were still alive’.
A little later he met a ‘coolie’ carrying a huge bundle of clothes and swapped some biscuits for it. ‘The clothing was clean and dry so I relieved him of most of it as it would be useful to the girl we were hoping to save’.
He went on, ‘A little further on I met the girl’s brother wandering down the track. He had at last realised that he could do nothing for his sister and if he was to reach India safely he must desert her. He told us that his sister was now mad and lazy, and would not come with him. A few minutes later we found the poor girl lying in a hut. She was not quite sane, and kept talking about her uncle, Mackie, who had been so kind to her in Burma. I realised at once I had come too late by a day to save her, but having come so far I was determined to try to take her back alive to Dr Robertson.’
He ordered some of his men to make a bamboo stretcher, while others heated water. He gave her a cup of hot tea, stripped and bathed her and dressed her in dry clothes. At one point he resuscitated her as she stopped breathing, and eventually they put ‘this light, starved girl’ on the stretcher and carried her on the hazardous, slippery track, picking up other survivors on the way.
At that point in the narrative he does not mention Colin but says they made it back to their camp at Shamlung late at night with six survivors on stretchers (one probably Colin) and another 30 walking.
‘Mackie and I were digging graves all the following day with the help of the sweepers,’ Tainsh said. ‘Dr Robertson examined all the refugees we had brought in and did what he could for them. I went to see the eighteen-year-old Macfadgen girl whom we had tried so hard to save and said goodbye. Her long cold fingers gripped my wrist as she tried to smile and murmur her thanks. They were probably the last words she ever spoke.’
The next apparent mention of Colin was on 9 July, when Tainsh was ordered to evacuate to Nampong because of the loss of life of so many porters.
They had to leave 20 people behind in Flagstaff House who were too ill to travel to India. One was ‘the boy whom we had found on Tagung Hill whose sister had died’. They promised to be back within three days.
Colin was eventually transported to the Assam Oil Company hospital in Digboi.
Tainsh later visited the hospital to see some of the refugees ‘and the boy whose sister I had tried so hard to save’.
He wrote, ‘Everything possible was being done for them, but their progress was very slow and they were all suffering from amoebic dysentery, hookworm, malaria, pellagra, Naga sores, and septic leech bites.’
It is there that he may have had the conversation with Colin about Ethel’s death which Colin described so painfully in White Butterflies.
Finding his recollections being tested by an eyewitness account was frightening to Colin and brought a flood of difficult feelings, not the least being wracking guilt about his sister. He had no memory of leaving her and he felt he had betrayed her, as he believed he had betrayed his mother. He found himself grieving anew.
Yet Tainsh himself observed it was common to see children alone or in groups on the trail, having been sent on ahead by their dying parents or relations in the hope that they might survive.
Colin, who replied to many of his readers, could not bring himself to answer Dr Brett-Crowther’s kind and helpful letter. He was too overwhelmed.
A year later, concerned, Dr Brett-Crowther wrote again, this time thoughtfully enclosing a scanned photo of Tainsh and a photo-copy of the title page of the book.
‘It is a little more than a year since we made contact and I can only trust that my letter of July 26th 2005 did not so much cause you pain as bring you in touch with what I believe was your path, the events and the rescue, and the rescuer himself,’ he wrote with compassion.
It had, of course, done both, but Colin was deeply grateful.
On Monday, 24 March 2003, Colin was honoured to deliver the annual Alan Missen Memorial Lecture at Parliament House in Canberra. The late Senator Missen had founded the federal parlia-mentary branch of Amnesty International.
Colin’s speech was published in the December 2003 issue of the Australian literary journal Meanjin, edited by Dr Ian Britain.
He concluded it thus.
‘I chose to end my book on the day I arrived in Bowral, which became my home. Many people have asked what happened afterwards, why I chose to end it there and when can they expect to read the sequel. The answer is very simple. The day I set foot on that platform in Bowral was the first day of an ordinary life. I married, raised a family and experienced the same joys and sorrows as everybody else in Australia. My journey had been long, full of adventure, drama and tragedy. It was most of all a spiritual journey, guided by the memory of my mother and her final words to me. Some may think that what came afterwards was an anti-climax. They would be wrong. I think Alan Missen would have understood that to me an ordinary Australian life was the greatest gift that I could possibly have been given in my new country.’
February, 2017
About the Author
Colin McPhedran lived in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales for more than 55 years. Whi
te Butterflies is an autobiographical account of his remarkable survival, as an 11-year-old and beyond, of one of the most hazardous and tragic wartime refugee trails in the world.
Colin was born in 1930 in Burma to a Scottish father, an executive with Shell Burmah Oil in Rangoon, and a well-born Burmese mother.
With his mother, brother and sister, Colin fled the Japanese occupation of Burma in 1942, walking through the dreaded Hukawng Valley to India during the monsoon. Barely alive, and suffering malaria and dysentery, he was rescued on the border and spent months in hospital struggling back to life.
Having survived, he spent the next four years without his own family, but nurtured by the warmth and colour of the vast Indian culture. Completing his schooling in India, he spent several years in England before arriving in Australia in 1951.
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