Veteran at Mossman's Kubirri Aged Care recognised for Service to Australia

Salvation Army

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The gardens at Kubirri where Mr Snow lives and where he was presented with his medals. Image: supplied.


86-year-old Raymond Snow is a resident at the Salvation Army’s Kubirri Aged Care Centre in Mossman. On Anzac Day this year he was recognised for serving his country more than 67 years after leaving the Navy. The following is a short recap of Mr Snow’s story, how he came to live in FNQ and why he was unexpectedly presented with service medals.

When Mr Raymond Snow was nineteen-years-old, he enlisted as part of Australia’s National Service, or military training that was compulsory at the time, at an Australian Navy training facility in Victoria, the HMAS Cerberus. After he completed his six-month training period, half of those he trained with travelled overseas, whilst he was assigned to a ship that sailed from Jervis Bay, in New South Wales, to Queensland. “The Captain said he wanted to go fishing; apparently he liked the fishing up that way,” Mr Snow explains with a chuckle.

When he returned to the HMAS Cerberus, Mr Snow was discharged and embarked on an apprenticeship in Sydney, which he completed before getting married in Coffs Harbour on the New South Wales north coast in 1955. “I then saw an advertisement in the paper for an electrician in Tasmania and we thought we’d like to go there, so we applied and got the job,” Mr Snow says of the decision he made with his wife, and where they would spend the next eighteen years.

Raymond Snow wearing his received medals. Image: supplied

Mr Snow is now a resident of Mossman’s Kubirri Aged Care Centre, located in Far North Queensland and one of The Salvation Army Aged Care’s twenty-one residential aged care centres in Australia. “I knew there was probably one Medal,” Mr Snow says of the recognition he received for his Service in Kubirri’s Chapel this year. “But then I ended up with two Medals! It was a little bit exciting. It was Anzac Day, actually, and I hadn’t been to an Anzac March or Service or anything since I left the Service; I didn’t have anything to show and I don’t know what happened to my Navy uniform.”

Susanne Green, Kubirri Aged Care Centre’s Chaplain, had kept Mr Snow’s Medals hidden at the Centre for six weeks prior to the ceremony. “The representative from the RSL, Mr. Wally Gray, who had helped us get the Medals, was also there,” Susanne explains of the attendees honouring Mr Snow on 25 April 2021. “And Ray’s granddaughter and grandson. And our residents, of course. They joined as well. It was a proper Anzac Service in the Centre. I don’t think there was a dry eye in the house at the end of it.”

Mr Snow didn’t initially think that he was eligible for his Service Awards. Those in his intake who went overseas could claim Service and join the RSL but those who stayed in Australia didn’t get that opportunity, he says. “It was many, many years later that I heard in the newspaper, or maybe it was on the news, that the Australian Government was going to issue all national Servicemen with Service Medals.” Then, he met a Serviceman in Mossman whom had also been in the Navy and who explained how Mr Snow could get his Service records. He did this but he didn’t proceed any further until his granddaughter got hold of the information.

“She started us off,” Mr Snow explains, until he started discussing his service with Kubirri’s Chaplain, who was able to get a response from the RSL. “That’s how we came to get the Medals.” Having members of his family in attendance when he was awarded them was “extra special,” Mr Snow says. His granddaughter and her husband, who have been in the Air Force for many years, presented them to him at the ceremony.

When Mr Snow was eligible for National Service, he says that he did apply for the Air Force but was put in the Navy. “We did a lot of training to build our bodies up, and armoury work where they would take us out on the ranges to learn how to use a rifle; that sort of thing,” Mr Snow explains of his early days with the Navy. “Because of the branch that I was in, they didn’t teach us much combat work because we were confined to looking after the electrical side of the ship and the machinery.”

When the time came for Mr Snow to be discharged from the Navy, he was asked if he wanted to stay. “I think the biggest percentage of us said no,” he says. “I don’t know why. I’ve regretted saying no for many years now because I would have loved to have stayed in the Navy. But it’s one of those decisions you make. A snap decision. Being young, you don’t really know what you want.”

When Mr Snow was sixty-years-old, he retired from the white goods business he had started in Brisbane where he and his family had eventually moved after their time in Tasmania. He and his wife then decided to travel around Australia in their motorhome, “as much as they could,” he says. “You know, on the pension, you don’t get too much,” he explains. “We hopped from one place to the other during pensions, and eventually we sold our motorhome in Mossman. I’ve been here ever since.”

  

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