For this navy veteran, there’s no better feeling than being rocked to sleep by the motion of the waves while being out at sea.
Jonathan says the, “water drawing up and down the side of the ship also provides the ultimate white noise for a great night’s sleep".
Working in naval stores in logistics for six years and spending over four of these out at sea, Jonathan is starting to reach back into his navy past and use his experience to begin to help others. When the Legacy Relay was promoted it sparked something in him to get back to those roots and be a part of the Veteran community again.
Jonathan is quietly understanding of the struggles that veterans can have. Leaving service, he found it hard to find employment that was equivalent to what he’d been doing in the navy. In some ways he had to start from the bottom again and work his way up.
”At the time I felt the prevailing thought was that veterans were unreliable. This obviously wasn’t true but it might have been a hidden barrier for me,” he reflected.
Now Jonathan’s skills are a great asset to the BAE System’s Henderson team where he works in logistics in the warehouse. From his time in service he gained a lot of life skills from a young age and now he supports others to get the most from their career and to “Just do life. [Service] gave me a lot of life skills and matured me early and now I can pass this on and help others.”
Coming from a long line of service history within his family, Jonathan’s great uncle Jim Connor was a prisoner of war for four years at the infamous Changi Prison during World War II. He survived the ordeal and would go on to share part of his story in a documentary called 'Changi Days, POW Poets'.
'Of the 22,376 Australian prisoners of war captured by the Japanese, some 8,031 died while in captivity' (Australian War Memorial). The people they left behind were the families that Legacy was set up to support, a promise made in the trenches of the Western Front during World War I.
Showing great resilience like his great uncle, Jonathan is reserved and humble: he acknowledges that, “It’s all of us that can have ups and downs at times regardless of what kind of career you might have had in the past”.