To Love a Sunburnt Country

by Jackie French

  She peered over the box, glimpsed a small figure, bent and intent behind the machine gun. Using the curtain as a cover, she thought. Using tonight as a decoy, the whole camp for a few hours focused on her, not war. For a few seconds she admired the prisoners’ showmanship. For that was what it had to be. A few men, especially wounded, could never hope that this attack would win them their freedom. They would die here. But what a show!

  Then anger took over. She looked at the colonel’s body, at the young man in the grass skirt and coconut breasts. Then she looked up. And smiled.

  Somewhere in the past, the man with the machine gun had a home above a bakery in a village with rice paddies and fields of buckwheat on either side. His father made the best ramen in the world.

  But that was gone. His life was gone. All that mattered now was honour, wiping out the shame of capture. He would die as a soldier, not a prisoner, among the bodies of the enemies he’d killed.

  Three more rounds of ammunition. The audience that had sat there like dummy targets was moving now, a wave of bodies so easy to shoot down. He fitted the next round and moved to fire again.

  Something dropped on him from the top of the curtain — a woman in a torn lamé gown. Her hands still held the rope that had pulled the curtain across. Her thighs, strong as a vice, crushed his neck between them. He felt himself lifted as she swung them both up on the rope again, then dropped him onto the stage beyond. For a second he was free of her, too stunned to move, then she was on him again, holding his shoulders down onto the stage. How could any woman have strength like that?

  Her brown mascaraed eyes peered into his. ‘You lousy dingo,’ said Gertrude Olsen. ‘You spoilt my entrance.’

  Chapter 54

  Gibber’s Creek Gazette, 22 May 1945

  Sleep-Outs to Relieve Housing Shortage

  The government has announced a program of ‘sleep out’ construction to help alleviate the housing shortage.

  It was reported on the ABC today that a house owner advertising his house to rent in Sydney received more than one thousand applications.

  Bungalows twelve feet by nine feet will be built by the government and can be hired for fifteen shillings a week. They will be available for householders who will give board to one or more persons engaged in the war industry, or for the accommodation of service personnel or their dependants. The AIF Women’s Association has highlighted the plight of families of Diggers living in appalling circumstances, such as the wife and two children of an Australian prisoner of war living in two damp rooms behind a butcher’s shop, with no cooking facilities other than a gas ring, a privy across the backyard and no bathroom.

  SYDNEY, MAY 1945

  MICHAEL

  He had learnt the age-old soldier’s skill of sleeping standing up on sentry duty. He had learnt to stamp Received on correspondence and to change the date on the stamp each day. He had learnt to feel that this work was still part of the war effort, was necessary, for if it hadn’t been, he would have been released unfit for duty.

  He was still of use. It meant a lot.

  What he hadn’t learnt was how to cope with loneliness.

  He had never been lonely before, not at home, the main house at the centre of a small village of sheds and workers’ cottages; not at school, where privacy had been hard to find, but not friendship; nor in basic training either, where a couple of World War I veterans who had lied convincingly about their age had forged their shared first-week blisters into some level of comradeship.

  He knew no one at the barracks here, nor was likely to as his shift ended at four am — the least favourite shift given to the newcomer, the young man who couldn’t even lift a box of envelopes, guarding the colonel’s car.

  Taylor had joined up the same day as him. He had no wish to visit Skimmer and, anyway, by the time he had a meal and slept through the civilised part of the day, the rest of the world was still working until his next shift began.

  The first week he had simply wandered through the night after his shift was over. The city was shut, the reception areas at the big hotels where he had stayed in the life before his uniform; the cafés, even the pie van at the Quay had gone. After the first night he avoided Surry Hills, where the brothels’ patrons wandered drunk and weary through the streets, and Kings Cross, with its forlorn tarts desperate enough to still hope for custom as the dawn broke over their heads.

  On the seventh night he found himself in the Anzac Buffet. Even the buffet was quiet at five am, the dancers and the music gone. But women still buttered bread and cut sandwiches, stirred cocoa and brewed vast pots of tea. For two mornings he sat at a table, making his cup of tea, his toast and scrambled powdered eggs last.

  On the third morning, he found a dark-haired woman standing by his table. She picked up his empty teacup. ‘If you’ve got nothing better to do, you could give us a hand.’

  She looked like his mother, though she was firm-hipped where his mother was wiry and her hair was untouched by grey … She was nothing like his mother, in fact, except in her air of taking charge.

  He followed her. She handed him a knife; placed him by a vast tub of butter and an even more enormous pile of bread slices. He began to butter. And kept buttering, letting the laughter and the gossip flow over him, so like the women at home at any of the ‘bring a plate’ affairs, women making food and sharing it, the heart of life.

  He graduated to slicing bread by the second week; he tried assembling sandwiches the week after and was sent back to slicing. Whatever the knack was needed for carving two slices of bread filled with cheese and tomato into four pieces, he didn’t have it. His sandwiches fell apart.

  He was no longer lonely.

  Those were his days now: sentry duty (he didn’t even try to get his roster changed), signing off and signing on, slicing bread and talking of home and sheep and cows, of sunlight on the river and the smell of rocks in sunlight, and once, in the silent recesses of the pre-dawn morning, about a girl called Nancy of the Overflow.

  They listened to him, these women, as he spoke of her — the strength of her, the curl of her hair, how she had run away to join the drovers pushing cattle up to Charters Towers and back, how they would be together, when the war was over, now it seemed that, truly, the war might one day end.

  In return they spoke of husbands, sons, fiancés overseas, family lost, untraceable until peace was declared, in the bitter chaos that was Europe. And then they wiped their tears and went on buttering and slicing, making sandwiches and stirring cocoa, putting on toast and scrambled eggs as the first of the uniformed breakfast eaters appeared.

  The war went on.

  The referendum to give the Commonwealth government power over national health, family allowances, giving citizens the right to free speech and ex-servicemen the right to government-funded rehabilitation failed. Michael paid it little attention. At nineteen you could die — or stand guard duty — for your country, but you could not vote.

  The flagship HMAS Australia was badly damaged by a Japanese kamikaze suicide bomber. Michael wondered if ‘badly damaged’ meant sunk — it was impossible to know the truth. The High Court had ruled that newspapers could only be published if they reported nothing that might damage the government’s handling of the war, or that hadn’t been passed by the censor.

  Yet it seemed that victory was at last possible, at least, even if it might still take years to achieve. There was victory after victory in New Guinea, and across the rest of the Pacific, and in Europe too. The Japanese had underestimated the resilience of the USA after the bombing of their Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, and had overestimated their own ability to supply their troops as they conquered lands further and further south.

  Michael wondered if the Japanese newspapers and wireless too were governed not just by the censor, but by propaganda news writers. Did the Japanese generals believe their own propaganda so deeply that they based their decisions on it? Did the Allies?

  Impossible to know, when you were just a midnight gua
rd at the barracks. He suspected his father, with his war contracts, might know more. Michael wore the uniform, but his father spoke to men who knew how the war was truly progressing. Or thought they did.

  He stood guard. He sliced and buttered bread and sometimes even toasted it. He thought the latter was probably more use to the war than guarding.

  He had been buttering for three hours, was thinking of becoming a customer and having breakfast when he heard voices at the counter. ‘You wouldn’t credit it, would you?’ The voice was high, indignant.

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Krantz flatly. She handed the soldier his scrambled eggs, then came back to pick up four more plates.

  Michael looked up from the crock of butter. ‘What is it?’

  ‘A piece in the paper about Japanese prisoner-of-war camps.’

  ‘Anything new?’ he asked urgently.

  ‘Another lot of our boys were picked up when a Japanese transport ship was sunk. The article’s what it was like in the prison camps.’ Her voice was still carefully uninflected as she said, ‘Same story as all the other ones. Pretty bad.’

  He untied the apron over his uniform. ‘I’m going to get a paper. Would you like me to bring it back for you?’

  ‘No.’ She realised she was being curt and added, ‘Thank you.’

  Her husband was missing in action, one of her sons too. She said quietly, ‘There is only so much you can bear if you are to keep on going.’

  He wondered if this was wisdom, cowardice or pragmatism. Whichever it was, it was her choice. Instinctively he kissed her cheek, then headed out.

  The sunlight hit him like a wave. Mum’s letters spoke of the drought getting worse. Here in Sydney it meant too much light reflected from the pavements, even the harbour. He needed trees and mountains.

  Instead he followed the cries of ‘Papah! Papo! Read all about it!’ to the paperboy, and handed him threepence. Usually he first turned to the lists of missing, wounded and dead, but today the story was on the front page. It was as Mrs Krantz had said. Australian prisoners of war rescued from a torpedoed Japanese transport ship. No other details except what the rescued men had said.

  Torture. Men burnt on the soles of their feet; their heads held back while water was forced down their throats; bamboo huts with earth floors or ankle deep in mud when the wet season came; hacking a way through thick jungle, laying railway sleepers, digging through mountains to bring supplies to an increasingly desperate enemy; working barefoot and in loincloths; living on a handful of rice and water stew; and finally thirteen hundred POWs crammed into a transport built for one hundred and eighty-seven passengers, to be sent from Singapore to labour in Japan instead.

  The photo said more than the words. Faces like skeletons. Eyes, too big, too blank, looking out of faces like skulls. What had those men seen? What had been done to them?

  Singapore. Malaya. Nancy.

  Above him fighter planes roared and dived, a War Bonds stunt. His body shivered with the shock of noise.

  Surely they would not mistreat women like that. Perhaps Nancy was not even a prisoner. Maybe she was living with her sister-in-law and nephew, made to work at a factory job perhaps. No, not in a factory. He could not bear to think of Nancy between the grim walls of a factory. She’d be working in a native village, conditions no rougher than when she’d slept in her swag up north, planting rice, picking bananas, maybe managing a rubber plantation if he knew Nancy …

  His mind offered the solutions. His body and his soul would not accept them. As deeply as he knew that she was alive, he knew that whatever she was doing, wherever it might be, it was bad.

  Chapter 55

  Matilda Thompson

  Drinkwater Station

  via Gibber’s Creek

  16 August 1945

  Flinty Mack

  Rock Farm

  Rocky Valley

  Dear Flinty,

  The war is over. Oh, Flinty, my sons will be coming home. I felt so guilty yesterday when that was the first thing I thought of — my sons have made it through the war alive. I know I shouldn’t write this to you, not till Joseph is found, and that I should have been thinking profound thoughts about world peace forever, and sorrow for so many with so much lost, but instead in that moment I was entirely, totally selfish. They are safe. They are safe. They are safe.

  I can’t even tell Tommy this. He is thinking logistics, how the economy needs to change from war to peace, how will the men be demobbed and when. But I know that you will understand. When I heard about the thousands dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I even thought ‘I wish more of them were dead’ and then was so ashamed of myself I was nearly sick. How do you weigh so many horrible deaths against so many just as horrible that would have happened if those terrible bombs had not been dropped? Not just the deaths of our people but those tens of thousands of Japanese women and children committing suicide as the Americans took Okinawa, all the other Japanese civilians who might have done the same. How do we judge this, Flinty? What should we even feel?

  I think I am writing to you because I have to talk to someone who will understand and I can’t to Blue, not till we have word of Joseph. I am worried about her, to tell the truth, but I do not think there is anything any of us can do until she gets word one way or another. You must feel the same.

  How did you celebrate up in the valley? I didn’t even know about it till I heard the Land Girls screaming. I was down in the river paddock and thought one of them had been bitten by a snake. I raced up and they were throwing their hats around and dancing and Annabelle, she’s the one who was on the music hall before the war, was at the piano singing, ‘They’re coming home, they’re coming home!’ to the tune of ‘Jingle Bells’. She yelled at me, ‘The war is over!’ I managed to smile and hugged each one of them and said, ‘Generator’s on tonight, hot showers for everyone. I’ll tell Mrs Mutton to make a cake,’ then vanished to my study and just cried. But happy crying this time.

  There. I feel better now. Thank you for listening, dear friend. Thank you for being there all through this war, someone I could talk to, even if just by mail. And now God has given me back my boys and we must pray He gives us Joseph too.

  Love always,

  Matilda

  Chapter 56

  Gibber’s Creek Gazette, 16 August 1945

  Party for the End of the War

  By Elaine Sampson, aged thirteen

  Today the students of Gibber’s Creek Central School decorated the school to celebrate our victory. We put up red and blue streamers in all the classrooms. Later we marched to the CWA rooms, where the CWA ladies put on a splendid afternoon tea with scones and jam and cream and pikelets. We sang ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ and ‘Along the Road to Gundagai’ and ‘Waltzing Matilda’. Later the town band played. Mr Henderson the headmaster said that we will sing the songs again when our brave servicemen come home.

  PULAU AYU PRISON CAMP, 20 AUGUST 1945

  NANCY

  The war had changed.

  She didn’t know how it had changed. The guards did not bring out their radio again. None of the villagers left messages in the precious parcels in the bushes outside. Perhaps they too did not know.

  But for five days the young guards had kept their helmets on their heads, formal with their chin straps fastened, and stood ringing the camp with machine guns in their hands.

  The guards did not talk. She wondered if they even ate, for most were almost as gaunt as their charges. But they must have drunk, she thought vaguely, or they could not have stood there.

  She could not stand. Her dysentery was worse again; every sip of water she took seemed to leave her within minutes. An ulcer on her leg was as big as an orange.

  ‘Nancy, darling, you must eat.’ Moira sat by her bunk, holding out the bowl of vegetable gruel. She had taken over picking hibiscus buds and greens.

  ‘Give it to Gavin.’ Nancy tried to smile. ‘It’ll just end up in the latrine if I eat it. Won’t even stop on the way through.’

  She
peered out the door as Gavin chased butterflies across the dusty yard. He was thin, desperately thin, his tiny legs slightly bowed; his skin so tanned that he might be a native child, native of here, native of there …

  ‘There’ was home. She had to keep thinking of home. While she could think of home, she would still be alive; she could still watch for Gavin, even if the other women gave him his meals; she could still hold him warm against her each night.

  An engine rumbled. She blinked until she recognised the sound. A car. She hadn’t heard a car since the commandant left. She propped herself up on her elbows to look.

  A shining car, very black under the sun. A Japanese man got out, small and tall and upright. He opened the back door for another man, this one in a uniform that shone almost as much as the car, covered in medals and braid.

  The ring of guards bowed as one man. They kept their heads down while the newcomer stepped sedately into the officers’ house.

  Nurse Rogers grabbed Gavin, and joined the others by Nancy’s bed.

  ‘What’s happening?’ asked Mrs Hughendorn quietly. ‘Do you think this means they have lost the war? Or won it?’

  Nancy shrugged. Even that was too much work. I have to keep what’s left of my strength for when it’s needed, she thought. Not waste it on shrugs. The war was the world, would be the world forever. How could it be lost or won …?

  The youngest guard came out of the soldiers’ quarters, machine gun in his arms. He barked an order at the prisoners. The meaning was clear. The women lined up, Gavin holding Nurse Rogers’s hand. Only Nancy didn’t stand, but stayed lying on her bunk inside. Once that would have prompted yells, a beating.

  Now the guard ignored her.

  Another yell.

  The women bowed. Nancy bowed her head too, on her bunk.

  The officers’ house door opened. Nancy watched as a line of three officers came out, each in a clean uniform with medals on his chest, every officer carrying something in each hand. The translator followed them.