Free The Port Fairy Murders by Robert Gott Page A

indifference that had been encouraged by his parents’ belief that they were English first, and Jewish a very poor second. Joe felt no connection to the Jews he saw in Carlton. His father had dismissed these ‘ostentatiously Semitic’ types as an embarrassment. He’d called them ‘ shtetl peasants’ who gave Jews a bad name. The Sables were several cuts above, possibly even aristocratic.
    Joe had never experienced overt anti-Semitism, which was why he’d been so dismayed when news of what was happening in Europe had begun to find its way into the newspapers. It was a trickle, never a flood, but he cut out whatever he could find, and put the pieces in a folder, as if in marshalling them in this way he could contain the horror. He couldn’t. He read and re-read the reports; and, when he did so, outrage, despair, and shame grew and spread like gangrene in the soul. The discovery that National Socialism had local admirers had shocked him. When he’d first read The Publicist , a magazine unknown to him before the investigation, he’d been sickened by its brutal certainty that he, as a Jew, represented a threat to everything that was decent about Australia. Two sentences from among thousands decrying the presence of Jews had taken up residence in his mind, and they hummed constantly, like a hovering wasp: ‘What is the solution to the Jewish problem? There can be none while a Jew lives.’
    He’d kept his feelings to himself, and it disturbed him to think that his contact with Australia First and with the psychopathy of Ptolemy Jones had poisoned him. It had weakened his capacity to trust, and Joe worried that he might never recover from this blight. So he searched the papers looking for proof that optimism was a kind of moral blindness. The past week had been dominated by stories covering the bushfires, which were even more devastating than the fires in 1939. There’d been growing panic that the state would be overwhelmed. The fires had swept into the suburbs: Rosanna, West Heidelberg, and Preston; and Mentone, Beaumaris, and Cheltenham. Beyond the city, in Daylesford, Woodend, Gisborne, Mortlake, Hamilton, Camperdown, Seymour, the whole Western District; Pakenham, Gippsland, the Dandenongs — north, east, and west of Melbourne — the fires burned. Even the air in Princes Hill smelled of smoke. It came in through Joe Sable’s windows.
    He noted, within the catalogue of destruction reported by the newspapers, that William Dobell had won the Archibald Prize. It was hard to tell what his portrait of Joshua Smith actually looked like. The black-and-white reproduction of it made it look odd. He cut out the image and put it among his other cuttings. He did this because he liked Dobell, and he thought the picture would provide some relief when he hunted through his collection.
    The fires had taken up so much space that there’d barely been room in the past week for war news. The Allies were advancing into Italy — that, at least, made it to the front page. But tucked away in The Argus , on page 16, was an article that snagged Joe’s eye:
    Hungarian War Criminals Seek Refuge In Germany
    From Our Own Correspondent
    LONDON, Friday
    Admiral Herthy, Regent of Hungary, has been forced into the extraordinary position of having to demand from Hitler the extradition of three war criminals who were whisked across the frontier into Germany. They are the Hungarian officers Field-Marshal Ferenc Feketehalmy-Czeydner, Gen Joseph Grassy, and Col Lazlo Deak.
    They are accused by their own government of mass murders in a Jugoslav town on the Danube which the Hungarians occupied and renamed Novisad. After holes had been knocked in the frozen river, between 1,500 and 3,000 Serbs and Jews were driven at bayonet point to the river and drowned.
    The officers now in flight are alleged to have directed the massacres, news of which could not be suppressed. After an official inquiry they escaped with the connivance of the Germans. There has been