Stanhope and the Montevideo Maru
On 1 July 2025 a service will be held beside a hardware store in the small town of Stanhope for soldiers who were missing at sea for more than 75 years. Why the service is being held at the hardware store is a story almost as old as the town itself.
Stanhope is a small Victorian town on the Midland Highway between Shepparton and Bendigo. The town is home to less than one thousand inhabitants and two striking murals. The first mural is a montage of 11,000 photos across the local cheese making plant forming the words “Welcome to Stanhope, The Town of the Tastiest Cheese.”
The second points to another, more obscure, part of the town’s history. This mural, painted across the side of the local hardware store, features a Japanese transport ship being stalked by an American submarine under a moonlit sky during the Second World War.
Just how this mural came to be painted across a hardware store in the middle of Victorian dairy country is a story stretchings all the way back to the foundation of the town itself. Stanhope was born as a Soldier Settlement, blocks of land granted to returning soldiers together with the gift of 650 pounds to start a new life as a dairy farmer in the years following the First World War.
The Stanhope RSL Sub-Branch was formed by the returned soldiers and became the social centre of the growing township. When the Second World War began, its young men followed their fathers into the military and enlisted in the defence forces.
Many of the sons of Stanhope marched out with the 2/22nd battalion in 1941 and found themselves in Rabaul in modern day New Guinea. It was formerly a German stronghold, captured by Australia at the start of the First World War.
The 2/22nd arrived in Rabaul before Pearl Harbour or the fall of Singapore. For the young Australian soldiers, it was a paradise. The men took photos of the tropical beaches and sent letters home to family while the war was being fought far away northern Africa and Europe against Germany and Italy.
This changed as Japan swept through southeast Asia in early 1942, the garrison on Rabaul hopelessly outnumbered in the face of the sudden Japanese onslaught. The men of the 2/22nd were killed or taken prisoner in late January to early February 1942. Their Japanese captors allowed them to write one letter home, informing their family they were taken prisoner and were “in good health and well care for”. It would be the last time their family ever heard from them.
On 1 July 1942 the Stanhope soldiers were among 1000 prisoners of war on board the Japanese transport ship “Montevideo Maru” in the South China Sea when it was sunk by an American submarine. The Americans were unaware the ship was carrying POWs.
The final resting place of the Montevideo Maru remained unknown throughout the war. The Australian POWs were officially missing presumed dead.
In 1956 the community of Stanhope installed a memorial for all those in the community who had died in war. The three locals lost on the Montevideo Maru were among 11 names listed on the memorial.
Time passed and the membership of the Stanhope RSL Sub-Branch began to decrease as the First and Second World War passed on. The memory of the Montevideo Maru began to fade as well but when George Gemmill became Stanhope RSL Sub-Branch secretary, he made it his business to know the history of every person on the Stanhope memorial. He saw that three men Percy Crombie, Alf Poole and Bill McLennan were lost on the Montevideo Maru.
“Stanhope RSL is very small,” said Sub-Branch secretary George Gemmill. “We only have eleven financial members and an average age of 75. But we are active and when the idea of having a mural painted on the side of the local hardware store was raised, I immediately thought of the Montevideo Maru.”
The RSL committee approached the owner of an art gallery in town, Deb Dodd, to see if she could help bring the idea to life. Deb then contacted Benalla based artist Tim Bowtell, knowing he had done murals for other RSL Sub-Branches and silos across Australia.
“I had never heard of the Montevideo Maru when they contacted me,” Tim Bowtell said. “When I heard the story, I was actually shocked and a bit embarrassed that I didn’t know anything about it.”
The side of the building was not a perfect blank canvas. There were gutters, windows covered with bars and roller doors to contend with.
“I did not have any clear idea of what I wanted to do,” Tim said. “The committee had some strong ideas about what they wanted and the idea of what to do just came to me when I was standing in front of the building. The windows and other obstacles kind of dictated what I could do, and the committee went with it.”
Around half the funding for the project came from a grant from the Salute their Service grants program from the Department of Veteran’s Affairs, with the rest in the form of thousands of dollars of donations from the local community.
“The funding application was done by the Stanhope Development committee,” said George Gemmill. “But we had fantastic support from the local community which meant we could go ahead with it.”
For Tim Bowtell the project became both enlightening and rewarding as he spoke to more and more people connected to the story of the Montevideo Maru.
“I got to speak to relatives of those who were lost,” said Tim Bowtell. “It was incredibly moving, as they were reduced to tears talking about the story. For me, it made me realise how we just aren’t taught stories like this, with real local significance, at school.”
The mural has touched many people both in the region and beyond. Clive Toms lives in Kyabram and had two uncles, Hector and Howard Toms, on the Montevideo Maru though he knew little of their story until much later in life.
“It wasn’t something that my family every spoke about,” Clive said. “My father lost two brothers on the ship, and it was very painful for him. As a result, I didn’t have anything to do with my cousins growing up.”
When he entered his 60’s, Clive started researching his family and came across the story of his uncles. He found that not only were they lost on the Montevideo Maru but they had no grave site. He decided to add a plaque about his uncles on his grandparent’s grave in Kyabram and took the opportunity to get in touch with his cousin Marie Thompson, the daughter of Howard Toms.
Marie Thompson lives hundreds of kilometres away in Sale, in eastern Victoria, where she was raised by her mother and her second husband. She only had one memory of her father, a vague image of running down to meet him in the hallway of her house, his arms opened wide to embrace him when she was very small. She had little knowledge of her father or contact with his side of the family.
Clive invited her to Kyabram to see the plaque for her father on their grandparent’s grave, the first time she had a place to mourn him. He then took her out to Stanhope to see the mural of the Montevideo Maru so she could know more about how he was lost.
“She stood silent for ten minutes in front of the mural,” Clive said. “She could not speak, she was wrapped up in emotion, connecting with the father she could barely remember.”
The mural was unveiled on 15 April 2023, only one week before the wreckage of the Montevideo Maru was located at the bottom of the South China Sea. While there was relief that the resting place of the missing were finally found, for Clive Toms and other relatives it did not end their grief.
“Some people, like the Prime Minister, said finding the ship can bring closure for the relatives. It is only partial closure. We know where they rest, that part of the story is closed, the emotions we feel we will take to our last breath.”
Opposite the Stanhope mural are eight storyboards which tell the history of the Montevideo Maru and the connection the small town has to the tragedy. Now that the ship has been found Stanhope RSL Sub-Branch is adding a final panel telling the story of the search for, and discovery, of the Montevideo Maru.
On July 1, 2025, the Stanford RSL Sub-Branch is holding its third annual service for the Montevideo Maru beside the mural. The service has become an important event for many relatives of the fallen soldiers, with people expected to come from across Victoria this year.
For Tim Bowtell the Stanhope RSL Sub-Branch is an example of what even the smallest of RSL Sub-Branches can do.
“Stanhope RSL punches above its weight,” Tim said. “Small groups like this with drive and persistence can make stories like this happen.”
