YOUNG AND OLD PEOPLE OUT THERE MAY NOT KNOW OR MAY NOT REMEMBER NATION REVIEW — A SHORT-LIVED MAGAZINE WITH A VERY IMPORTANT ROLE… ONE OF ITS EDITORS WAS JOHN HEPWORTH… 

HE HAD A LONG-TERM RELATIONSHIP WITH ORIEL GRAY, A GREAT PLAY WRITER ON GENDER EQUALITY (WOMEN VS MEN, THEN...), ABORIGINES AND THE ENVIRONMENT. HEPWORTH WAS ALSO A GOOD FRIEND OF MICHAEL LEUNIG, THE WHIMSICAL CARTOONIST.

AS THE WAR IN THE MIDDLE-EAST FROM GAZA TO DAMASCUS IS RAGING, AND AS MORE THAN ONE MILLION UKRAINIAN SOLDIERS HAVE BEEN ELIMINATED AND AROUND 60,000 RUSSIANS KILLED, ONE SHOULD SAMPLE SOME OF HEPWORTH’S GREAT WRITING ON WAR…

There's enough bloody ocean for everyone!

However much one abhors war, there's always a temptation when old campaigns are spoken of, to strip one's sleeve and show one's scars. To say with quiet pride: this furrow here above the heart I got one summer evening after we had overcome the Nervi — stabbed with a pair of richly embossed beaten silver nail scissors by a spirited young Bessarabian whore whom I'd tried to bilk of her just due in that romantic avenue in old Damascus known for four thousand years as The Street of a Thousand Arseholes (famed in song and story).

Involuntarily the eyes will brighten and flash with martial ardor as one regards the half moon scar upon the hand — pale now with the passing of the years, but dripping scarlet still in memory. That hurt I got on Bougainville in desperate bayonet work upon a tin of bully. They can’t stand up to cold steel you know, m'boy.

Or one might run a nostalgic thumb along the cicatrix down the jaw line. An old shaving wound, honorably sustained trying to scrape the whiskers with a blunt razor and a shaky hand after being lumbered by the military fuzz one perilous AWOL in Sydney town.

These sort of displays tend to be brought on by such things as the dreaded outbreak of peace in Korea — a world-shaking event which Leunig the Peerless Limner reports this week from the exclusive confines of the Toucan club.

It is engendered by recalling that it is thirty years since the battles of the Kokoda trail. Thirty goddam years! — I didn't really want to know that.

But ah the merry days of youth in New Guinea come flooding back with golden memory. The delights of sleeping in a hole in the ground filled quite to the brim with stinking rainwater; the simple but healthily nourishing meals — ten men to a tin of bully beef per day, perhaps; the invigorating exercise of staggering up, and down, mountains

— up to your khyber in mud that smelt as though it could well be the residual contents over several centuries of a Turkish army latrine.

Ah yes, that was the life; and indeed it made men of us — quite often dead men of us. For apart from the pleasures of rambling through the rural countryside there were various cultural exchanges with gentlemen of another civilisation who sought to persuade us to their way of thinking.

And it was somehow quite touching — and in a way reassuring for the future of mankind — to find that, despite radically different lifestyles, we shared agreement on at least one basic point of human philosophy. That was that, despite what the jingos and the generals back home might say, it was not really a soldier’s duty to die for his country, but to persuade other soldiers to die for theirs.

...

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GUS: AND AS THE WAR MEMORIAL IN CANBERRA IS "SPONSORED" BU WARMONGERING WEAPON MERCHANTS, ONE NEEDS TO REFLECT ON THESE STORIES:

Why won't they tell it like it was

"History," as old Fed (we used to call him "Ocker"*) Andropolous used often to remark when I was but a barefoot boy, "is horseshit." Old Ocker kept a bespoke butcher's shop on the corner of the sordid but colorful street where I lived on what was at the time and for all I know still is popularly conceded to be the wrong side of the railway tracks in Perth.

Kuomintang headquarters was right next door to the bespoke butcher’s and the gaily wicked knocking shops of the city (they which in their earthy heyday were spoken of in hushed whispers of awe and envy in bordellos from Sydney to Port Said) were but a condom's throw away.

As dusk fell you might see inscrutable tongmen slipping out of the sinister looking lair of the Kuomintang, clutching their precious little parcels of illicit dim sims. And on a still night you could hear from Roe street the lively chatter of hooves, the rumble of wheels and the arrogant cries of competing coachmen as luxuriously appointed barouches with false crests on their doors rattled up to deposit some of the highest in the land in their pursuit of clandestine nocturnal pleasures.

Old Ocker Andropolous was friend, guide and mentor to us lads at that time and there was nothing we loved more than to gather round his chopping block on a saturday morning, scuffing our grimy sandgroper toes in the sawdust and listening wide eyed to his scabrous tales of mesalliance in high places.

"Take my word for it, lads," said Ocker. (I remember as though it were but yesterday - that find old ouzo-colored face; those wise, kindly, piglike little eyes.) "Take my word for it, history is horseshit. They don't write the bastard proper.”

I took Ocker's word (as a fully paid up Greek and a bespoke butcher) for it, then. And, by God, I take Ocker's word for it still! History is horseshit. They don't write it proper.

It has, I fear, become painfully apparent that when all the several tons of old laundry bills that the government has benevolently released under the guise of the secret history of our last war but three, are pawed over and released to the startled world with glad yipping cries we will be no nearer the truth of what it was all about than we are now.

Revelations of blundering, panic, comedic naivete, malice, bitchiness, attempts at self aggrandisement, venality, cowardice, inefficiency and plain and fancy stupidity are hardly news. It's not what any reasonable man or (I hasten to add) Ms is entitled to expect in the way of guaranteed first grade war secrets. Surely we can hope for something just a little more. These are definitely not the goods as advertised.

Have you seen one line, one word, one suggestive syllabism, even reflecting on the mysterious and sinister affair of the gold-plated pissaphone on the Atherton tablelands in the dark days of 1943? No you have not - nor I.

And yet, so far reaching it was it in effect so enormous, almost inconceivable, the potential danger emanating from it — that the free world, had it but known, might well have held its breath while the peril persisted from the middle of the ironically balmy winter of 43 through the full-blossomed spring and well into the gently golden summer that ensued.

Have you ever heard of L-Force? Few people have. Fewer still have any idea what it was. It's fairly reliably known that the idea was the brainchild of the prime minister of the day — that it had something to do with lizards and that he kept it secret even from his generals.

The full details were perhaps only ever known to the PM himself and to the small handpicked group of lizardeers from the western Queensland town of Eulo who joined him in that historic midnight meeting on the parliamentary tennis courts.

The bare facts, it seems — and I stress seems are that this group (volunteers to a man and all of them unmarried) slipped out of Canberra by night travelling in unmarked army vehicles with the lights dimmed. Each man was accompanied by his favorite Paroo lizard — than which there is no more cunning and loyal breed in the world.

In a remote camp in the Gibson desert, man and lizard for two years endured a spartan regime and constant rigorous training to fit them for the task ahead — though neither the nature of the training, nor of the task was known to any but them.

At the end of that period they moved out of the Gibson — travelling fast by night and lying hard by day to escape detection to make their rendezvous on a desolate stretch of beach somewhere in Arnhem Land

There, standing close inshore a flotilla of midget submarines waited to take them on the death or glory mission for which man and reptile had trained for so long and with such deadly singlemindedness of purpose.

But the bright ironic gods had the last trick up their sleeve. Even as the fIrst leather cheeked lizardeer and his inseparable companion climbed into the rubber dinghy to row themselves out to their sub — the war ended.

The veterans of L-Force who yet survive — man and lizard — are most of them still up Eulo way. And you can pick them, you know, even among the tough, self reliant inhabitants of that area. The L-Force veterans stand out. There seems to be just that extra edge of alertness about them, the hint of rare reserves of physical and spiritual strength.

Spring an unexpected question on them about L-Force and involuntarily their shoulders will straighten and a certain kindling light will come into their eye. But they recover quickly. "L-Force," they'll muse. "No, I wouldn’t know anything about that, mate.'

It may seem a bit unnecessary — coming the preux chevalier a bit much you might almost say — to maintain silence because of a word given (to a man now dead) at midnight all those years ago on a tennis court in Canberra. But that's the way they are, the lizardeers of Eulo. They don’t give their word lightly and when they do give it, it's for keeps.

The veterans won't speak out, so it's up to the government. They’re releasing wartime secrets, they say, but it's pretty clear that there's a hell of a lot being held back. Have we heard so much as a whisper about L-Force? Echo answers — we have not. It's time, high time, we did.

And who was the man who hammered in vain on the porter's gate at the prime minister's lodge late on the dark and blustery night of 29 august 1941? Who the man, and what his mission?

What we know of him is scanty — save that there was a man who beat upon that door, and upon that same fateful night. He was no trick of celestial light or desire-induced figment of combat-crumbled minds, such as the Angel of Mons or the Bellydancer of Bardia.

He was seen on several separate occasions and in each case the report as to his aspect coincided. There was nothing to mark him from the ordinary, except perhaps that he seemed preternaturally tall and appeared to be dressed in a particular fashion of full cossack uniform which is peculiar to the small village of Titomsk on the lower reaches of the Don river — and even there is reserved almost exclusively for the ritual baptism of third sons of third sons.

And all who saw him agreed, with varying degrees of certitude, that he had snow on his boots. "I thought it was snow," said Ms Angelina Treadwell, a retired Canberra chickensexer of modest private means. “It looked like snow.”

Arthur Thrummell, an early morning milkman and presbyterian, was quite explicit. "Of course it was snow," he said. "Do you think I don't know bloody snow when I see it? For chrissake do you think I'm going to invent a bloody silly thing like snow on the bastard's boots if there wasn't snow on the bastard's boots?" 

For the rest, all we know with any degree of certainty is that as he went towards the prime minister's lodge the man appeared to be possessed of a nervous, almost feverish urgency. In a statutory declaration (which we have in hand) Ms Treadwell deposes that when she encountered him he was muttering to himself over and over in a voice that appeared to be shaking with some deep emotion: "Pray God I'm not too late. Pray God I am in time. The fate of the world may well hang on it.”

Arthur Thrummell has similarly declared that when he met the man (as has been established, after he had been to the lodge) he appeared aimless and distraught "like a bloody stunned mullet".

The unknown purchased a pint bottle of milk from Thrummell and drank it with the relished greediness of one who has long abstained from food and drink. He paid for it with a coin which, on later examination, proved to be a Carpathian 30-drab piece (on the then current exchange rate worth slightly more than three times the value of the milk provided) and thanked him with a polite but distracted "danke schoen" before walking away into the darkness — but not before he had paused twice and changed direction, as though uncertain which way his path lay.

And thanks to Ms Wilma Thrittel, a spinster of the parish whose hearing is nevertheless excellent and who has almost all her own teeth — we do know something of what went on at the lodge itself. We may even hold the clue to the mysterious man's name — though of that we cannot be really sure.

Ms Thrittel who was walking a small Sydney terrier named Max saw the man at the porter's gate of the lodge ("there was snow on his boots”) where apparently he had been knocking for some time without gaining the attention of the inmates.

As he came under her observation, and she within hearing of him, he beat once more on the gate in what appeared to be desperation. When there was no response he emitted something very like a groan of despair and Ms Thrittel is almost certain that the words he uttered at this point were: "Too late. Dear God. It may well be the end of civilisation as we know it."

Then he raised his head and called loudly into the unresponsive darkness: "Tell them I came, but no one answered." As he did so a random flicker of light illumed his face and Ms Thrittel swears that there was on it such a haunting look of resigned despair as she hopes never to see again on the face of any human being.

Then he shouted once again — more loudly this time — and there was a deep but hopeless note of appeal in his voice: "Tell them Jimmy Clancy did his best!" Then his head dropped, his shoulders slumped and he stumbled away into the darkness. ("There was definitely snow on his boots.”)

Goddam it, this is the sort of intriguing mystery one can surely reasonably expect to have cleared up when secret documents are released. Was that man himself the "Jimmy Clancy" whom he wanted the world desperately to know had done his best? Was (as he so despairingly believed possible), civilisation as we know it destroyed because he arrived late that night at his rendezvous, or because those who should have waited failed a trust and left before their time?

Somewhere in Canberra are the documents that would unravel this mystery. They're not releasing them, are they? But let them take warning, the world will very soon demand to know.

I repeat, who was the man who hammered on the porter's gate at the prime minister's lodge late on the dark and blustery night of 29 august 1941? Who the man - and what his mission?

There are ten thousand — maybe ten times ten thousand — stories of the war that the world should know, locked away in the still secret secret files in Canberra.

Those I mention are just a few of them.

WE NEED TO REFLECT....

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.