The Railway Man: Australian keeps legacy of Thailand's 'Death Railway' alive helping relatives of POWs gain closure

Wielding a machete, Rod Beattie slashes at tangled undergrowth and soaring bamboo to expose vistas from one of the second world war’s iconic sagas. Out of the jungle appear remnants of a railway that cost the lives of more than 100,000 Allied prisoners and Asians enslaved by Japan’s Imperial Army.

As the 70th anniversary of the war’s end approaches and its veterans dwindle by the day, the ageing Australian still slogs along the 415km length of “Death Railway.” With his own money, he maps its vanishing course, uncovers POW relics and with his vast database helps brings closure to relatives of the dead – not only those who perished building the railway, but also those who went to their graves never having shared their traumas.

Beattie acknowledges to being a man obsessed.

“The life I have given isn’t just for them but for their descendants,” he says. “Their children are now at an age where they have retired. They’ve got time to ask questions – ‘Where was my father? What happened to him?”’ And many, bringing along their own children and even grandchildren, are making what Beattie calls pilgrimages to the railway to seek answers, find peace and shed tears.

One daughter he escorted was able to learn for the first time exactly where her father, Private Jack McCarthy, died on July 21, 1943, of what diseases and where he was initially buried.