Roy Whitecross was a prisoner-of-war who went on to establish Sydney's business credentials in international markets.

For three years from 1942 to 1945, Roy Whitecross EM (BEc ’53) was a Japanese prisoner-of-war, forced to work under extreme conditions on the Burma-Thai railway line. Roy later wrote about his experiences, and his book, Slaves of the Sun of Heaven, now has close to 200,000 copies in circulation.

“Post-traumatic stress wasn’t even known about when we came back from the war,” he says. “We were told to go home and forget about it, and our families were told not to discuss our experiences. That had a terrible effect on us. Many blokes took to drink and drugs to try and get over their experiences.

“I had a desk job after the war, and when a thought came into my head about what happened in the camps, I'd write it down. I'd also kept a diary while I was in Burma and Thailand. I buried it somewhere in Tamarkan before the war ended, but I was lucky enough to have a friend who went out and dug it up. The diary finally found its way into my hands, and it’s now in the rare book department of Fisher Library.”

Roy returned from the war and enrolled in the Faculty of Economics in 1946, graduating in 1953. He became a private secretary for a minister of the Crown in 1954, and he says his degree was responsible for his appointment to a two-man economic mission in 1958, charged with encouraging industries and merchant banks from around the world to come to NSW.

The mission’s success led to the establishment of a permanent NSW government office in New York, which Roy administered for three years from 1959. In 1963 Roy became assistant registrar at the University of Sydney, retiring in 1978.


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