It's been 75 years, but former prisoner of war Colin Hamley has not forgotten how special a gift from a mate was as he celebrated his 21st birthday while working on the notorious Thai-Burma Railway in Burma.

"My mate gave me a present," Mr Hamley, now aged 96, said.

"He pulled out a packet of 10 cigarettes that he had kept for the last 18 months.

"We shared this packet of cigarettes on my 21st birthday in June 1943. That's how you got through. You had people you could rely on all the time."

'Our men were dying like flies'

Mr Hamley grew up in Melbourne and enlisted as a soldier in May 1940, and a year later he arrived in the Middle East, serving with the 2/2nd Pioneer Battalion in Syria.

Colin Hamley, pictured here with his brother, is one of the few remaining survivors of the Thai-Burma railway. His brother did not make it home. ( Supplied: Colin Hamley )

Early in 1942 he set off on the journey home to Australia aboard the ship Orcades, but it was diverted to defend the Indonesian island of Java.

"Once we left Colombo, we started heading eastwards towards Australia, then suddenly, instead of turning more southerly we started to head in a northerly direction," he said.

"We realised we weren't coming home to Australia; we were going somewhere else."

Mr Hamley was captured by the Japanese forces early in March 1942, and he would not set foot in his home of Melbourne for another three-and-a-half years.

His brother, Don, was serving in the same unit and was also taken prisoner. He died in June 1943 while working on the railway.

During his years as a prisoner of war, Mr Hamley laboured on cuttings, bridges and embankments and worked in a quarry to help build the railway in terrible conditions, particularly during the wet season.

"Food supplies were very hard to get through if they were ever available to us anyway, and we had no medical supplies," he said.

"Diseases like dysentery and malaria and malnutrition and pellagra and tropical ulcers all started to make their devastating appearance to us on the line and we had nothing to treat them with. Our men were dying like flies."

75 years since the tracks met

A service being held in the regional Victorian city of Ballarat today will commemorate the fact 75 years have passed since the two ends of the Thai-Burma Railway were joined in the middle, marking the project's completion.

Australian war veterans Colin Hamley (left) and Norman Anderton were prisoners of war forced to work on the Thai-Burma Railway. ( Supplied: Department of Veterans' Affairs )

A handful of veterans, including Mr Hamley, have made their way from across the country to take part in a service to acknowledge the experience of building the railway common to 60,000 Allied prisoners of war, including more than 13,000 Australians.



Ballarat's botanical garden is home to a memorial to former Australian prisoners of war.



It's estimated around 200,000 labourers from Asia also worked on the Thai-Burma Railway project under slave-like conditions, with estimates that up to 75,000 of those men died during the work.

Australian War Memorial historian Lachlan Grant said the extremely harsh conditions the prisoners of war experienced had a lasting impact, with many suffering post traumatic stress disorder.

"Illness had a big impact, including tropical diseases," he said.

"They were working in very remote areas of the jungles in South-East Asia, in the mountains.

"There were shortages of food and medical supplies to the camps where the prisoners were working. And of course there was also very poor treatment by the Japanese guards, literally enslaving these prisoners to work seriously hard hours, back-breaking hours, building this railway through mountainous cuttings."

The construction of the 420-kilometre railway between Ban Pong in Thailand and Thanbyuzayat in Burma led to the deaths of 2,700 Australians, and more than 12,000 Allied soldiers.

"It had quite a huge impact on Australian society because the Australian population during the war was only about seven million, so quite a large number of Australians experienced the captivity of the Japanese," he said.

"If you expand that and think about all the families and friends at home, these men went missing for a three-and-a-half-year period.

"One of the most common aspects of that experience was working on the railway, so it's become a really significant part of Australian national history and the story of Australians at war and as prisoners of war."

'It reminded them of a scene from hell'

The construction of one particular section of the track through a cutting at Konyu in Thailand, dubbed Hellfire Pass, looms as an embodiment of the most extreme conditions those working on the railway faced.

A memorial sits next to the railway lines at Hellfire Pass, a cutting on the Thai-Burma Railway, Thailand. ( ABC News: Greg Jennett )

The cutting was 75 metres long and 25 metres deep, and the section's name came about because of the striking scenes that stuck with those who witnessed work on it.

"If you can imagine what it would have looked like … you've got emaciated prisoners cutting away, working at night time and the scene is lit by lamps and fires," Mr Grant said.

"So you have the flickering light, the noise and this is why for the prisoners who worked there, it reminded them of a scene from hell - from Dante's Inferno - so they named it 'Hellfire Pass'."

The six weeks of work on the cutting started in late April 1943, and shifts lasted 18 hours, with prisoners expected to move three square metres of earth each day.

It is believed about 700 Australians died during the construction of Hellfire Pass.

Listen to their stories

Mr Grant said it was crucial for Australians to stop and reflect on anniversaries, and to listen to the veterans still around who can tell their stories.

"It's our last opportunity to listen to some of those veterans and hear about their experiences," he said.

"They were the eyewitnesses to these horrible events, these catastrophes that occurred in the early part of the 20th century."