Let the Land Speak

by Jackie French

  * * *

  This does not diminish the heroism or achievements of the men who volunteered to serve in New Guinea. In 1942 no army had managed to hold back Japan’s inexorable advance, and it seemed impossible that any should. Even though at first the Australian and Papuan forces too were beaten back, it was in relatively planned stages, not a rout like the campaigns in Crete, Singapore and Malaysia.

  It was not like any warfare Australian soldiers had seen, or trained for. Infantry – foot soldiers – were used to being supported by tanks, aircraft and heavy artillery. One group would move forward while the one behind covered them, firing at the enemy with artillery, submachine guns and grenades. In World War 1 – and in other theatres of war in World War 2 – long sweeps of solders advanced, taking new territory. Not in New Guinea.

  Apart from the major battles, much of the fighting and plain survival in New Guinea was undertaken without generals or commanding officers, small groups of young men fighting hand-to-hand with the enemy, whether it be Japanese or jungle.

  In the thick New Guinea bush, on slopes you had to scramble up, hauling on vegetation so you didn’t fall back into the mud, the enemy could be two metres away in the green and you wouldn’t see them. An army might be half a kilometre away, hidden in the cloud, fog or rain. The best visibility was only twenty to fifty metres, and often far less, so conventional tactics of the time were useless. Reconnaissance was almost, though not quite, impossible (some men would perform miracles, hunting out the enemy). But communication and leadership was almost impossible too. Company and platoon commanders often could not even see their own men, much less communicate with each other or with headquarters.30

  The soldiers adapted, fast. Groups of four to six men crept through the jungle. A scout might locate a Japanese trench. Part of the group would fire on them while the others went in fast and low to try to lob grenades into the trench, either killing the occupants or forcing them out to die in rifle fire or to surrender. It was a series of tiny battles, fought by small, close-knit groups.

  Conditions were appalling. As at Gallipoli, bullets were only one of the hazards: add to them typhus, malaria, hookworm, dysentery, vomiting, diarrhoea, pneumonia from the cold of the high mountains … The men were dressed in camouflage for the desert, sandy khaki colours that were all too obvious in the jungle, with thin shirts and shorts that allowed leeches to cluster on their legs and creep up their body, eventually dropping to the ground satiated and swollen with blood.31

  They were offered no protection from the cold of the mountains, nor the tropical rain. The entire force of 553 at Deniki had seventy blankets between them and no waterproof ground sheets. Their uniforms rotted; so did their boots and feet. Ulcers swelled on arms and legs, or where cloth chafed at their knees. Each man had to carry at least eighteen kilograms plus their rifles, but most carried far more. Their boots were not made for mud and moss – the Papuans’ bare feet served them far better.

  The rations of biscuits, bully beef, chocolate, tea and sugar were spoiled by heat, rain and rodents. Later, tinned fruit, dried potatoes, sausages, vegetables, jam, butter, beans and dehydrated mutton both survived better and provided better nutrition. The lack of planes and airstrips, and tracks that were only barely passable at best, made supplying the troops a nightmare. Nor were the Papuan carriers able to bring in stores: it would take them eight days to reach the troops, and one man in that country could only really carry enough food to feed himself for eight days. Most rations were dropped by what were known as the ‘biscuit bombers’ – small planes flying through clouds and crags to drop a hundred kilograms of ration packs.32

  Reading the despatches, memoirs and letters of these men you are struck by two overwhelming themes: you do not let your mates down, even if it means your death; and you do not let your country down, even though you know your death may be inevitable.33

  The New Guinea campaign could be seen as a collection of stories of heroism: Private Charlie McCallum, with a Bren gun in one hand and a Tommy gun in the other, covered the withdrawal of 12th Platoon.

  When his commanding officer was killed and his sergeant badly wounded, Corporal Lindsay Bear took command as the Japanese began to break through the Australian lines, potentially taking the whole battalion. Corporal Bear manned a Bren gun and held them off until he was too weak from loss of blood. Fainting, he passed the gun to the man next to him, Private Bruce Kingsbury. Kingsbury stood, the Bren gun on his hip, then charged the Japanese, firing from the hip, as the enemy machine-gun fire rained around him – and through him. He cleared a path of a hundred metres before he died, creating enough time and space for the battalion to retrieve their position and beat the Japanese back. Kingsbury was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.34

  John French (no relation, although an uncle with the same name did serve in New Guinea) was also to win the Victoria Cross when with the 2/9th Battalion in August 1942 their company came across three Japanese machine-gun posts. John French ordered his men to take cover. He lost his life while single-handedly taking the first two Japanese posts with hand grenades.

  Medical officer Tom Fletcher volunteered to stay with seven wounded while another forty-two men stranded behind enemy lines tried to get back to their own forces. When rescue finally arrived, all eight were dead. Tom Fletcher could have fled, saving himself. He didn’t.35

  From city boys to fighters

  As with the Anzacs at Gallipoli, there is some truth to the long-held popular belief that the Australian lifestyle made these boys not necessarily good soldiers but good military potential. Unlike the Australian Anzacs at Gallipoli, the militia boys of World War 2 had already been cadets at school, spending at least one afternoon a week and usually one weekend a month learning how to drill, fire and clean weapons, put up tents, follow orders and understand the basics of army discipline.36

  These militia had also grown up in the Great Depression, when in some areas one in four men were unemployed. (There are no statistics on the percentage of women breadwinners unemployed.) There were no unemployment benefits, only ‘susso’ rations. In Australia, the Depression was survivable if you worked together, building shanties or at least a closed-in veranda at a relative’s, and sharing vegetable plots. As Depression boys, many had gone on the road from as young as twelve looking for work. Like the Gallipoli veterans, these men had also potted rabbits to feed their families.

  Even city boys from Sydney and Melbourne spent their high-school holidays lugging bales of hay, dossing down each night in the farmer’s shed. They fought bushfires together, especially from 1939 to 1942 when the older bushfire brigade men were serving overseas, and boys as young as twelve were expected to cycle to the fire shed at the first sign of smoke. They were competitive in their sports and intensely physical in a way that any post-1950s generation can’t understand.

  The men of the militia were used to hardship in a land of long distances and bad roads, few phones or fridges, and where local communities created makeshift hospitals during polio or diphtheria epidemics. When I remember the men of my early childhood – every one of them a veteran – they seemed to exist in groups, whether it was for sport or some community project. In the days before social services, TV and computers, Australian society functioned more in larger units.

  And they were still larrikins. When you read the letters from the men in New Guinea, like 39th Battalion member Alan Sullivan, they tell of pranks, not valour: hiking up the Laloki River with his mates, swimming nude near a Catholic girl’s mission school, then hiking over to what turned out to be a nunnery dressed only in his shorts and getting a thorough ticking off by the priest. It is telling that despite serving with eight units in World War 2 and experiencing many battles, Alan Sullivan wrote of skylarking, not heroism and battles. He also stated that of all the units he was attached to, none could possibly compare with the 39th, especially in comradeship.37

  I knew several of the New Guinea pilots, too. They were mostly from a wealthier middle- or upper-cl
ass background; you had to be reasonably well off to afford lessons and access to a plane, plus be able to afford the leisure time to fly. To understand their achievement in New Guinea you need to know the combination of larrikinism, skill and offhand courage with which these men flew in the 1920s and 1930s, gaining the experience that would enable them to do almost impossible flights through the mountains of the New Guinea highlands, landing in clearings rather than on well-prepared strips and dropping supplies even with wild headwinds.

  Most pilots came from rural areas, or lived near an airport and were fascinated with all things technical. Flying was both a young man’s sport and a way of getting supplies to remote areas. Passengers told hair-raising tales of taking off from wheatfields, eventually carrying what seemed like half the crop with them. The airmen landed in stock-filled paddocks, assuming that the noise would scare the cows, sheep or roos away. They flew without air-traffic controllers, reckoning via landmarks below, or compass bearings, or by moon and stars.

  They dropped supplies at mountainous places like Binnabura in southeast Queensland, or Ben Lomond in Tasmania. One pilot told me how they would choose a windy day, fly into the headwind, then slow down to just above stalling speed and open the back to shove out supplies or building materials. The headwind was essential as it allowed the plane to be almost stationary, an awe-inspiring flying for the time. The land created superb pilots, and the air force relied upon their expertise.

  If you have a mate, you might survive

  Mateship is perhaps the strongest of Australian clichés. Other cultures play sport together and hunt together, but they don’t put the same weight on the word ‘mate’. Mate is something more, and less, than ‘brother’ or ‘comrade’.

  In World War 2, in the horrors of the Japanese prison camps, the Australians boasted that no Australian ever died alone. With a few exceptions – including one officer who returned fatter and with his uniform intact – officers shared the privations of their men. In the 1990s, collecting oral history from the men who had survived these camps and trying to find a common link between who survived and who did not, I was told time after time, ‘If you had a mate, you lived.’ If you had a mate, they’d bring you food and water when you had dysentery. A mate would talk to you when you were down, when you thought that you’d die here in the alien jungle. A mate would get you through. Next day, perhaps, you’d get them through instead.38

  Over 60,000 years the land of Australia forged a culture of cooperation. If you didn’t cooperate – if you didn’t live with a fierce concept of consensus – you died. European Australians had been on the continent for less than two hundred years at the times of Gallipoli and Kokoda, but it is that same force that would create the concept of ‘mate’.

  The men on the tracks near Kokoda were ostensibly fighting for their country. I suspect, in the day-to-day operations, they were mostly fighting for their mates. If you did less than you were capable of, your mates would die.

  So they kept going.

  CHAPTER 14

  A land of flooding rain

  The rain came, soft as a whisper, in the late afternoon of 2 June 1852.1 By evening it fell, heavy and impenetrable, on the town of Gundagai, the wattle and daub houses, the more substantial two-storey homes, the blacksmiths’ forges, the harness repair shop, the grog shanties and the hotels that catered for the travellers on their way to Melbourne or Adelaide, waiting for the ferryman to take them across the river. Mud ran down to the river, carrying the droppings of the horses and the mobs of sheep and cattle that had passed along the main street.

  It kept on raining.

  By the second week of rain Morleys Creek, an anabranch of the Murrumbidgee, had risen, a wide rush of water and debris too high to get across. The river was rising too.

  The old black women had warned that a big flood was coming. The river and the creek were mother and daughter. Now their arms were going to close, sweeping away the town. But what did darkies know? Most in the town had been there fifteen years, or more. The river often rose, slipping up a foot or two towards the houses, nibbling at doorways. There had been a bigger flood, back in ’44. There was nothing to be worried about now.

  Still the rain fell, hard and cold. The river rose, its water rushing now, down to the Murray, but the rise was slow and steady. The rain must stop soon. And if it didn’t, there’d be time to get away.

  The rain eased, just a little, yet it was as though the river didn’t know about it. When dawn broke on the morning of Wednesday, 23 June, filled with a grey cold wind, the river’s flood on one side and Morleys Creek on the other had cut off Gundagai. But the rain had stopped.

  The ferryman was wary, despite the blue sky that now peered through the grey. He offered everyone a free ride on his punt to the higher ground to the south of town. Most refused. The wind blew the clouds away. The people of Gundagai went to bed without the sound of rain for the first time in weeks.

  The townsfolk woke on Thursday to another sound. The river had risen again, lapping through the streets, nodding at low doorways, swollen and yellow, tree trunks twisting and rolling in its tide. The ferryman still poled his punt up to the south, but the force of the water made it hard to control now. The townsfolk moved to the highest homes and to the hotel, dragging their belongings with them.

  The flood kept rising the next night, black and cold. The river’s roar was a constant now, the ground vibrating with the force of water. The air smelled of death and debris. All night the inhabitants of Gundagai retreated, up to second storeys and, finally, onto the roofs, hauling children on their backs, shoving dogs through windows, bringing blankets if they could, a loaf of bread, cold meat, some cheese. They waited for daylight while under them the buildings shuddered.

  Dawn came as though it had never known clouds. Trees crashed and tumbled in the water, which was now two metres high. Dead animals floated by, stiff and swollen. Gundagai was a few specks in a flood lake more than a kilometre wide.

  The ferryman had valiantly tried to keep up his rescue work but his punt had crashed into a tree, killing all but one passenger. The force of water was too strong for rowing boats now.

  The survivors sat helplessly on rooftops, watching the swirl as a hut wall floated by and an edge of foam rose to meet them.

  A lone figure appeared in a small canoe. His name was Yarri, of the Wiradjuri people. According to the Sydney Morning Herald report he was ‘belonging to Mr Andrews’.

  He belonged to no man now.

  Yarri manoeuvred the tiny canoe between the clumps of debris, managing to paddle it exactly where he wanted despite the force of water, edging it against the roof so that someone could scramble down. The canoe was only big enough for one other passenger. Even then it dipped, almost below the water. But Yarri kept on paddling, weaving between the logs and bucking tables, up to the safety of the high land to the south, pausing only long enough to let his passenger scrabble up the mud to safety, digging his paddle into the flood again, heading back to town.

  All day he paddled, back and forth and back and forth, rescuing children, women, men, forcing his fragile craft through flotsam, twisting in the currents of the flood.

  When darkness fell on Friday night the water was still rising fast, over a metre an hour. By now the survivors had swum to the few remaining rooftops as theirs were swept away, or clung desperately onto the tree tops. But even in the darkness Yarri kept on going, one wet and shivering passenger after another.

  By Saturday morning the river had peaked at six metres and was over one and a half kilometres wide. The town had vanished. All of Gundagai had been swept away except for the flour mill, and few survivors left were still clinging to the trees, battling hypothermia, exhaustion and terror as the yellow water raced around them.

  Yarri still paddled, one person against the flood. This was a man with not just the skill and power to manoeuvre a bark canoe through the debris and torrent of a flood but to keep at it in darkness too. This was a man of compassion. Yarri would have
been raised on tales of a dispossessed people, but he still risked his life to save the dispossessors.

  On Saturday morning, Yarri was joined by another Wiradjuri man known as Jacky Jacky (almost certainly not his real name but a nickname or contraction of his name assigned to him by Europeans). Jacky Jacky wielded a slightly larger canoe that could hold more people. At least two other Wiradjuri men, one called Long Jimmy and the other unnamed, now also manoeuvred their canoes through the flood, rescuing as many as they could carry.

  The four men kept paddling that day, all Saturday night and well into Sunday. By then Yarri had paddled his flimsy bark canoe for three days and two nights. It was a superhuman effort of heroism and stamina. These men knew how to match their bodies and their strength to the flood.

  Yarri rescued forty-nine people in those three days and two nights. Jacky Jacky rescued about another twenty. There seem to be no figures for those rescued by the other two men. At least eighty-three people died – it was possible to count the number of townspeople dead or missing, and the bodies recovered, but it is suspected there were many more travellers who went uncounted.

  The Murrumbidgee floods every few years. You don’t need much land lore to understand evidence of regular flooding – it’s as easy as tracking an elephant over a bowling green. Grass and sticks lodge high in trees, tidemarks of wreckage lace around high points. Then there is the rich alluvial soil itself, laid down by flood after flood. So why build a town on land that had almost certainly been recently flooded? How had the disaster happened?

  If Gundagai had been built in the last thirty years the answer would probably have been ‘profit’. Fifty years ago, when I was growing up in Brisbane, no one built on creek edges, or on the sweep of land between the bends of the Brisbane River. No one built on the swamps behind Surfers Paradise either. This was land that had flooded before, and would again. But land in cities is scarce and valuable, especially river frontage. Even sandy swamp areas are drained and built on – and then they flood after the developers have moved on. Somehow, within a decade, it seemed that the flood maps had been lost. Councils no longer refused to give building permission for flood-prone land.