Read Online Amongst the Dead by Robert Gott - Free Book Online

vaudeville. The driver of the truck behind was spared the worst of the spectacle by the impenetrable clouds of dust thrown up by the vehicle in front.
    The convoy stopped briefly for lunch, which was a tin of peaches, and to refuel. All the tension between Brian and me had been juddered out of us, and we speculated, along with Glen, about what awaited us in Katherine. None of us had travelled overland this far north or west before; to our eyes, the landscape was brutal.
    ‘It’s not all going to be like this,’ Brian said, assuming his irritating, teacher’s voice. ‘It’s the wet tropics where we’re going to end up, not this arid stuff.’
    I was reassured, and began to entertain visions of cool gullies and dark rainforests, where dust never blew and where crystalline streams flowed over picturesque moss and lichen. The four days it took to reach Larrimah, from where we caught a troop train to Katherine, remain a blurred progression through desert, spinifex, termite mounds, sudden expanses of grassland interrupted by the startlingly white trunks of lone ghost gums, great stretches of thin scrub, and always, always the obliterating miasma of dust, dust, dust. Camooweal, Banka Banka, Elliott, Daly Waters — these are places we passed through, but the character of which I can’t attest to. The overriding impression was one of persistent grimness, although this may be symptomatic of my usual optimism having been shaken loose and jostled into the disarray of despair. I do recall that the shared hideousness of the journey created an unexpected intimacy amongst my fellow travellers, and particularly between Brian, Glen, and me.
    The makeshift camps at the end of each appalling day enabled us to talk; and, despite being harried and horrified by rats, scorpions, centipedes, ants, and an entomological encyclopaedia’s worth of flying insects, our talk was easy and warm. By the time we’d reached the railhead at Larrimah on Saturday, 24 October 1942 I was confident that, whatever befell us, I’d be glad of Brian’s and Glen’s company. In a completely unexpected rush of fraternal emotion, I even began to look forward to meeting my youngest brother, Fulton, who was still, as a result of the years that separated us, a child to me. Given that he was now an admired member of a secret army unit, I had to concede that perhaps he’d left his childhood behind. I began to wonder whether I’d even recognise him. His face was indelibly etched in my mind as the face of a boyish eighteen-year-old, which was probably the last time I’d looked at him closely. I don’t think he’d even used a razor then. It seemed extraordinary that, at twenty-one, he was now unequivocally a man.
    The lorries were brutal, but the train from Larrimah to Katherine put paid to any notion that soldiering generally, and entertaining specifically, were glamorous. We were herded into cattle trucks still redolent of their former occupants, and the symbolism wasn’t lost on me, I can assure you. I was too discreet to mention slaughter and abattoirs to the men around me, although I did make the observation, sotto voce, to Brian, who nodded and disconcertingly pointed out that the irony extended to us as much as to anyone else. He was right, of course, and it is a testament to the understanding between us that I wasn’t in the least irritated by this, and confined my response to pointing out that ‘irony’ wasn’t really the word he was looking for.
    When we arrived in Katherine it was just before lunchtime, and we were in the process of locating the members of the concert party when Sergeant Rothfield, the show’s producer, whom I had barely seen since our arrival in Maryborough, found us.
    ‘Slight change of plan,’ he said, and he made no attempt to disguise his annoyance.
    ‘You three have been redeployed. No idea why. It’s not my business, but it leaves us short for tonight’s performance, which is my problem, but a pain in the arse.’
    I