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- Introduction

 

 

The accompanying story is ‘warts and all’.  It is the actual memoirs (hand written and transcribed here; but with my headings added) of Corporal Ross Smith, a young Australian man, 18 years of age, from humble circumstances [read more...] who was drawn by World events into the Second World War.  He tells it as he saw it.  The action takes place near Rabaul in New Britain. 

 


Corporal Ross Smith

 

At no point does he tell us about his concern for freedom; for the women of his family or for the Australian way of life.  These had little or no influence on his decision to join up.  

Of course he had  deep love and regard for his mother but in his circumstances he had no reason to love ‘existential freedom’ or his Australian way of life.

For some reason the Japanese had decided to attack Australia.   They were clearly the aggressors and when someone attacks you, you fight back.  They were small, Asian, determined and implacable.  They had a strange religion that regarded their Emperor as a God and admired courage, ‘family honour’ and death before surrender.  

He came to fear and hate the Japanese and to see their defeat as a ‘job of work’ to be done; and in that there is implicit patriotism, nationalism and not a little xenophobia; all certainly reciprocated by the Japanese soldier. 

The story tells us of his desire for something different and exciting in his life; the prospect of adventure; a need to prove himself; to be equal in guts and strength to other men; to carry more than his fair share of the burden; to ‘be there when the whips are cracking!’. 

We can speculate that has always been a primary motivation of young soldiers; in the armies of Ozymandias, Alexander the Great, Caesar, Napoleon, Wellington or Haig. 

There is initiative in our young man’s preparedness to take risks and break the rules.  But at the same time here is a picture of a young man with an underlying respect for authority and the social structure.  The officers have a battle plan; and they are to be obeyed without question.  For him and his mates the only important thing is the immediate action; the immediate surroundings and the next few hours or days. 

Once in action it is kill or be killed.  It’s like rabbit hunting at home where he became a 'crack' shot.  But now against rabbits that shoot-back and kill your mates; that lay ambushes and booby traps; and torture prisoners.  At one point, recalling Tol Plantation, his anger overwhelms us.  He still regrets the one that got away.

Maybe the lot of our fighting men and women today is a different.  Maybe they each understand the strategic significance of each action and the importance of each objective.  Maybe they can make moral judgments ‘on the fly’ and weigh the benefits and necessity of completing an action; or abandoning it because the moral cost is too high or the strategic gain too low. 

Maybe they see the enemy for who they are; understand their motivations; understand their fears; and weigh the cost of death, on both sides, against the benefits of future freedoms and new affiliations.  We might like to think so.  But then, that’s the image we are given when the remember those that ‘gave their lives for freedom’ in many past wars.

We are used to fictionalised war.  Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Full Metal Jacket’, like many other movies, attempts to give us a sense of the immediacy, chaos and surreal disconnectedness of battle.  Full Metal Jacket is the story of a single action during the Battle of Hue in Vietnam but was not shot there.  We recently visited the actual site and were struck by the waste of lives on both sides to reach the present, rather lovely, outcome.  But I was also struck by the realisation that this present is entirely contingent on that history; just as it was.  

And so it was in New Guinea.  Each act of bravado; each bout of malaria; each bullet’s flight; was essential to our young man’s survival and to the circumstances of his future.  In due course this future led to a chance meeting with Joan at Luna Park in Sydney; to their courtship and marriage; then to the birth and nurture of their children and so on; to grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

But unlike the movies this story is not fiction; except insofar as it is seen from a particular perspective; through the prism of memory.  I hope you find it as interesting as I do. 

 


 

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Travel

Southern France

Touring in the South of France

September 2014

 

Lyon

Off the plane we are welcomed by a warm Autumn day in the south of France.  Fragrant and green.

Lyon is the first step on our short stay in Southern France, touring in leisurely hops by car, down the Rhône valley from Lyon to Avignon and then to Aix and Nice with various stops along the way.

Months earlier I’d booked a car from Lyon Airport to be dropped off at Nice Airport.  I’d tried booking town centre to town centre but there was nothing available.

This meant I got to drive an unfamiliar car, with no gearstick or ignition switch and various other novel idiosyncrasies, ‘straight off the plane’.  But I managed to work it out and we got to see the countryside between the airport and the city and quite a bit of the outer suburbs at our own pace.  Fortunately we had ‘Madam Butterfly’ with us (more of her later) else we could never have reached our hotel through the maze of one way streets.

Read more: Southern France

Fiction, Recollections & News

Love in the time of Coronavirus

 

 

 

 

Gabriel García Márquez's novel Love in the Time of Cholera lies abandoned on my bookshelf.  I lost patience with his mysticism - or maybe it was One Hundred Years of Solitude that drove me bananas?  Yet like Albert Camus' The Plague it's a title that seems fit for the times.  In some ways writing anything just now feels like a similar undertaking.

My next travel diary on this website was to have been about the wonders of Cruising - expanding on my photo diary of our recent trip to Papua New Guinea.

 


Cruising to PNG - click on the image to see more

 

Somehow that project now seems a little like advocating passing time with that entertaining game: Russian Roulette. A trip on Corona Cruise Lines perhaps?

In the meantime I've been drawn into several Facebook discussions about the 1918-20 Spanish Influenza pandemic.

After a little consideration I've concluded that it's a bad time to be a National or State leader as they will soon be forced to make the unenviable choice between the Scylla and Charybdis that I end this essay with.

On a brighter note, I've discovered that the economy can be expected to bounce back invigorated. We have all heard of the Roaring Twenties

So the cruise industry, can take heart, because the most remarkable thing about Spanish Influenza pandemic was just how quickly people got over it after it passed.

Read more: Love in the time of Coronavirus

Opinions and Philosophy

The reputation of nuclear power

 

 

One night of at the end of March in 1979 we went to a party in Queens.  Brenda, my first wife, is an artist and was painting and studying in New York.  Our friends included many of the younger artists working in New York at the time.  That day it had just been announced that there was a possible meltdown at a nuclear reactor at a place called a Three Mile Island , near Harrisburg Pennsylvania. 

I was amazed that some people at the party were excitedly imagining that the scenario in the just released film ‘The China Syndrome’  was about to be realised; and thousands of people would be killed. 

Read more: The reputation of nuclear power

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