Free Amongst the Dead by Robert Gott Page A

darkness because I was afraid the people around me might see my trembling as unmanly.
    ‘Not a bad show,’ someone said.
    ‘Oh yes,’ I thought. ‘Let’s bring on the fucking dancing girls.’
    We returned to the Sergeants’ Mess with Luther. The others went off to help put out fires and assess the damage.
    ‘I don’t think people down south know that Darwin is still being bombed like this,’ Brian said. Luther crossed to a desk and withdrew from a drawer a sheet of paper with the words ‘Army News’ in a banner across the top.
    ‘This came out two days after the first raid. The twenty-first of February. Printed here. Not a bad effort, considering.’
    I ran my eye over it, expecting to read something significant about the bombing. It turned out that it wasn’t considered sufficiently important to warrant more than a few bland paragraphs. Or, rather, it was considered so important that it had to be censored into nothingness. There was an assurance from the Honourable A.S. Drakeford, Minister for Air, that service casualties numbered only eight. Bizarrely, no mention was made of the fact that the harbour had been attacked or that bombs had fallen in the centre of town.
    ‘Not quite the truth?’ I asked.
    ‘The truth is that that first raid was devastating. God knows how many hundreds of people were killed in the town and in the harbour — especially the harbour. The RAAF base was more or less destroyed. I’ve heard stories that there were so many casualties that bodies had to buried wherever a convenient place could be found for them, and that crocodiles kept digging them up and taking chunks out of them.’
    ‘That certainly didn’t make it into The Age or The Argus ,’ I said.
    ‘You’ll see tomorrow that Darwin doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s just a whole lot of soldiers wandering around in rubble.’
    ‘Civilians?’
    ‘A handful. The blacks and the whites were evacuated. There are some nurses. A few others. Something else you won’t read about in the papers? After the RAAF base was carpet-bombed, the airmen there were spooked, and just up and left. Headed south to Adelaide River, that’s what I’m told. The Adelaide River Stakes, they called it. They couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Officers, too. Some blokes I’ve spoken to reckon they were told to go bush. I don’t know if they were scared, or just confused and poorly led. Most of them came back eventually. Thank God for the Yanks. I’ll tell you something: you won’t hear a bad word said about the Yanks up here. They’re bloody marvellous.’
    Glen, who’d said very little, suddenly spoke up. ‘The bloody Japs are going to do it, aren’t they? They’re really going to land here. They’re actually going to invade.’
    There wasn’t the slightest trace of fear in his voice. I imagine his experiences in Milne Bay had steeled him against panic — but neither was there any excitement. He was simply expressing a reasonable assumption. Luther nodded.
    ‘That seems to be the general view. If Port Moresby falls to the Japs, we’re next. Like I said, thank God for the Yanks.’
    Brian, whose nerves were doubtless as shaken as mine by the air raid, cut across the conversation and asked rather sharply, ‘So what are we doing here? I mean here, in the Sergeants’ Mess? Why the privilege?’
    I couldn’t see that sitting in an ugly room full of stolen furnishings was a privilege, but I took his point. We ought to have been banished to barracks that housed soldiers without rank; unless, of course, James Fowler had been wrong, and Army Intelligence had alerted a few people up here to who we were and what our mission was. When I thought about this mission I realised that I hadn’t allowed myself to ponder its magnitude, except in the beginning when it had seemed as safe and uncomplicated as a parlour game, where simple deduction would solve the puzzle. Who is killing the Nackeroos? No worries. William Power will find out for