The name older diggers still remember is Bruce Ruxton. Bruce was Victorian president of the Returned and Services League (RSL) from 1979 to 2002, and he was saying in public, years before Pauline Hanson reached Canberra, what a great many returned men were already saying in RSL halls, opposing the Asianisation of Australia.
Bruce Carlyle Ruxton was born in Melbourne on 6 February 1926 and grew up in Kew. He went to Melbourne High. In February 1944, still a pupil surveyor, he enlisted in the Second AIF, service number VX94379, and served with the 2/25th Battalion in the islands, including Balikpapan in Borneo. After the war he stayed in, trained as a cook, and served with the British Commonwealth Occupation Force in Japan until late 1948. He was discharged a private on 13 January 1949. He never climbed the ranks. That mattered to the men who later dealt with him. He had been one of them, not an officer talking down.
He joined the League while he was still serving. Back in Melbourne he went into the family stationery business, married in Fremantle in 1952, and settled in Beaumaris. By the early 1960s he was on the Victorian state council, then vice-president, then senior vice-president. In July 1979 the branch elected him state president, an honorary job he held for twenty-three years, longer than anyone else. The work that earned him the loyalty of older readers was not the television appearances. It was pensions, widows, nursing-home beds, and the long grind of entitlements as the Second World War generation aged. Even people who disliked his politics allowed that he had helped tens of thousands of veterans and their families. He also led the early campaigns to buy back Australian Victoria Crosses that were being sold overseas. The Queen's honours followed the service: MBE, then OBE, then AM, with French decorations and the Centenary Medal beside them.
He was also, on purpose, a public nuisance to the new consensus. From the early 1980s he argued that immigration had changed racial character, that multiculturalism as official policy asked the host country to stop expecting newcomers to join it, and that ordinary Australians had been told to keep quiet about both. In a 1983 debate with Al Grassby he said he was one of the few willing to take a public stance, and that the rest were silent from what he called an Anglo-Saxon guilt complex. His line was not "no Asians." It was numbers, absorption, and one loyalty. Migrants were welcome if they came in at a pace the country could take and if they became Australian in more than the passport. He thought the post-war Italians, Greeks and Dutch had done that, and he did not believe the later policy settings were asking the same thing. And history has proven Bruce right.
That was more than a decade before Hanson's 1996 maiden speech. When she defended herself that year she named the people she thought had already "manned the barricades" on immigration and multiculturalism: Bruce Ruxton, Peter Walsh, John Stone and Graeme Campbell. Blainey had opened the same argument in 1984. Ruxton was the diggers' version of it, delivered without apology and without a script. Asked later what he thought of being called a racist, he said he could not care less. He was just as blunt, and often cruder, on other subjects: the republic, Aboriginal land rights, homosexual ex-servicemen laying wreaths at the Shrine. His own public-relations officer used to tell him he could not say a thing. Ruxton's answer was, "You watch me."
For the older readers who knew him, the appeal was not that every sentence was well judged. It was that he would not pretend. Anzac Day in his years moved from something fashionable people sneered at to something young Australians wanted to understand, and he was a loud part of that change. He remained a monarchist when that too became unfashionable. In 2000, on a visit to Boer War sites in South Africa, he caught viral pneumonia that broke his health. He resigned in June 2002 and moved to Queensland. He died in a nursing home at Tewantin on 23 December 2011, aged 85, after dementia and a short coma, his son beside him. David McLachlan, who followed him at the Victorian RSL, called him a fearsome fighter for veterans and for what he thought was right. Ted Baillieu called him an unassailable champion of the nation's veterans and the nation's values.
The life, then, is not only the controversies. It is the private soldier who spent half a century making sure widows were not fobbed off, who treated plain speech as a duty rather than a career risk, and who said in the 1980s what Hanson became famous for saying in the 1990s. Men who marched with him did not need that translated. They had heard it from him first.
Rest in peace digger; the battle though still goes on for those you left behind.