Anzac Day 2023 in Armidale: Guest speaker Jason Sears reflects on family and sacrifice

As a teenager, Commodore Sears completed his education in Tamworth at Farrer Memorial Agricultural High School.

From there he got a scholarship with the Royal Australian Navy from high school to attend the Australian Defence Force Academy in 1986, but still has family in the region.

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Family was a strong theme in his speech on Tuesday when he returned to the region.

He was the guest speaker at Armidale's Anzac Day service in Central Park, and stepped up to the lectern to reveal a little about his own upbringing and the lives of his grandparents during World War II.

He described hearing Anzac Day stories as a child, but said they never seemed real until he and his brother met their grandfather, Robert Gaynor, for the first time when he was a teenager.

"It might seem strange that we were meeting our grandfather for the first time as teenagers, but it was within a high-walled health institution where he had already been for a number of years," he said.

"The meeting was to provide me with the first real personal evidence of what sacrifice of our soldiers, sailors and airmen had made during the war."

He said his grandfather was very unwell by the 1980s, after seeing combat in the Pacific and New Guinea where he suffered serious illness.

"Over the years his sacrifice became more evident in the illnesses he suffered."

Wearing his grandfather's medals on Anzac Day, Commodore Sears said he wished he had known his grandfather better.

"So that I could better understand the cost that the experience had upon him and our family," he said.

As he embarked on his own career in the military, it brought the opportunity to reflect more on his grandfather's experience.

After Commodore Sears spent four years at ADFA, including an honours years in history, he went on to serve as a deputy supply officer on the HMAS Torrens and HMAS Adelaide then became the Chief of Navy's speech writer.

He would go on to complete a PhD on the social history of the Royal Australian Navy.

He was then posted to Cairns as the deputy supply officer for the patrol boat base supporting Bougainville then wrote two chapters of the Oxford History of the RAN to mark the Centenary of Federation.

Later he was posted to Western Australia and Washington, on the HMAS Kanimbla.

It was during this period, in 2009, as a supply officer on HMAS Kanimbla that his ship's company visited a war cemetery at Bomina in Port Moresby, where his grandfather had served.

"It was a sobering experience to walk through the cemetery of 3823 Commonwealth war graves and stand at the headstones of those men from my grandfather's unit. Men who my grandfather must have served alongside and known," he said during the Anzac Day speech.

"It was surreal in the quiet, orderly beautiful atmosphere of the war cemetery, to imagine the hardship that he must have suffered for so many years before returning to resume his normal family life."

Commodore Sears then mentioned his grandmother's story. She lost her older brother, George Fogo, who had served and became a prisoner of war after he was captured when Singapore fell in 1942.

He would endure the hardship of working on the Thai-Burma railway. Then in September 1944 he was killed while he was being transported on a prison ship, which was one of two which were torpedoed by a US submarine and sank. Nearly 1200 died.

"As a teenager and since it's stayed with me how tragic George Fogo's death was," Commodore Sears said.

"To have survived the horrors of captivity. Changi, Thai-Burma Railway, the Japanese prison system. Only to die at the hands of an ally."

When he was promoted to Commodore only a few months ago, he said he visited the Australian War Memorial with his two young sons to visit the roll of honour.

There they got to see their great uncle's name inscribed on plaque 23.

"While they never know him as my grandmother did, at least they some of his story," he said.

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