Most of these things I did not get to personally experience because my sojourn in Holdsworthy lasted only two days. Then I was rescued and that by none other than Sergeant Harding himself.
    This should not be mistaken for any kind of humanitarian act. Harding’s iron-fist rule of his subjects at Canungra was so fanatical that he simply could not tolerate that one of them might have escaped his grasp. He made inquiries and quickly determined my fate. I can only imagine the torrent of thundering abuse that befell those responsible for the chain of minor errors that had precipitated my incarceration. Moreover, he arrived in a commandeered helicopter.

… Then he reached up and pulled back the grille of the air-conditioning system and reached far back inside to the right and moved still another sliding sheet of metal and took out a book. Without looking at it he dropped it on the floor. He put his hand back up and took out two more books and moved his hand down and dropped the two books to the floor. He kept moving his hand and dropping books, small ones, fairly large ones, yellow, red, green ones. When he was done he looked down upon some twenty books lying at his wife’s feet.
    “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t really think. But now it looks like we’re in this together.”
    Mildred backed away as if she was suddenly confronted by a pack of mice that had come up out of the floor. He could hear her breathing rapidly and her face paled out and her eyes fastened wide. She said his name over, twice, three times. Then, moaning, she ran forward, seized a book and ran toward the kitchen incinerator.
    He caught her, shrieking. He held her and she tried to fight away from him, scratching.
    “No, Millie, no! Wait! Stop it, will you? You don’t know… stop it!” He slapped her face, he grabbed her again and shook her.
    She said his name and began to cry.
    “Millie!” he said. “Listen. Give me a second, will you? We can’t do anything. We can’t burn these. I want to look at them, at least look at them once. Then if what the Captain says is true, we’ll burn them together, believe me, we’ll burn them together.”
    Ray Bradbury, the American science fiction writer is regarded by many to be the best of the modern age. Mostly he wrote short stories, excellent yarns of normal folk discovering themselves in strange environments, or else strange creatures penetrating normal suburbia. Either in space or on other planets or on Earth following some sort of catastrophe, the man next door and his family face the crisis as best they can. Suburban cosmology—truly wonderful. Stories were his talent but at novels he was not so hot—which is a pun because I first encountered him in Fahrenheit 451, a near future yarn set in totalitarian America, which seems perfectly normal until you realise that the firemen light fires rather than put them out. Moreover, the fires they light are for the purpose of burning books, which are totally banned. The hero, a fireman, rebels, secreting a book and taking it home, although he accumulates a number before he finally finds the nerve to look in one of them. It is the ultimate crime and he is pursued by The Mechanical Hound, which no one has ever escaped, until now. It ends with the discovery of an intellectual utopia outside the boundaries of the cruel state. The title refers to the temperature that which a book will ignite.