The corporate RSL quietly soldiering on

Ian Bubb, OAM, was a 20-year-old banker in the NSW town of Hay when he was randomly selected in the 1969 ballot to be conscripted to the Australian Army and sent to the Vietnam war.

“I wasn’t the first to be called up and wouldn’t be the last,” says Bubb, among some 63,000 to be drawn in the National Service Scheme lottery between 1964 and 1972, including 19,000 who went to Vietnam.

“I was young, excited, saw it as an adventure. It didn't really sink in at first that you go over there and people would be shooting at you.”
  

After almost a year of intense military training, including at Victoria’s Puckapunyal and NSW’s Ingleburn army bases, Bubb was flown into Tan Son Nhut Air Base near Saigon with the Army’s Royal Australian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers corps. Before he knew it, he was serving as a store clerk as part of a team tasked to retrieve, repair and maintain artillery and equipment at the Australian task force base in Nui Dat.

“I certainly had to grow up very fast,” Bubb recalls.  

“You had to keep your mind on the job. It was a strict time, but that was needed to keep everybody safe.”

Alongside hard work and camaraderie, his strongest memories of those 10 months are of heat, khaki – “the only colour there” – and the ever-present sounds of danger.

“You could always hear it. The artillery would be firing Howitzers all night when there were battles going on outside the base. The danger was always there,” he says.  
 

Like many other returning employees, when Bubb was discharged in 1971 it was Westpac’s RSL sub-Branch that helped accelerate him back into a job and banking career that would span a further 40 years. He says the focus on the welfare of veterans and their families is still at the core of the sub-Branch’s activities, along with annual wreath ceremonies on ANZAC Day and Remembrance Day, and quarterly member gatherings.

“We try to look after anyone that needs looking after. We can act as a conduit to the DVA (Department of Veteran Affairs) and RSL defence care and find the right help,” Bubb says. He also conducts the special RSL eulogy at all members’ funerals – including former Westpac CEO Bob White last year, a WWII veteran – and supports widows left behind.

Bubb looks back fondly on past activities of the sub-Branch, including the annual “prawn night” inaugurated in the 1950s and the formation of a rifle club in which members regularly competed against the police and army. Also in the 1950s, it leased a strip of land on Remembrance Driveway between Sydney and Canberra on which more than 200 trees were planted as part of a memorial honouring all Australian defence personnel.

While Bubb says he will carry on as President of the RSL sub-Branch for as long as he “is wanted”, he admits concern that there may be no one willing to take the baton from him. But he has faith that the groundswell of community and industry support for newer initiatives – such as Invictus Games and the Prime Minister’s Veterans Employment Program – will carry on that important role.   

“In a perfect world, there would be no need for an RSL at all. That would mean there were no conflicts in the world. But unfortunately that will never happen,” Bubb says. “And whenever there are veterans, they will always deserve support.”