Peter Sellers was the only member of the Goons to really make it into the movies bigtime. A remarkable and unusual comic talent, Sellers wasn’t inherently funny, but he could be very silly—the humour usually arose because the plausibly ridiculous person he played was placed in serious situations. An early demonstration of his skill was The Mouse that Roared a cold-war comedy, years before Dr Strangelove, in which Sellers also played multiple roles.
    A tiny European Duchy is bankrupt and realises that the way to financial success is to fight a war with the USA and lose, thus attracting all those reconstruction dollars. But it all goes horribly wrong—the invasion force from the Grand Duchy of Fenwich, in chain mail and armed only with medieval weaponry, defeats the United States by accidentally capturing a new doomsday bomb. Sellers played the entire Fenwick royal family, including the Queen, as well as the scheming Prime Minister (ably supported by Leo McKern and William Dr Who Hartnell). All this before Vietnam, when it was inconceivable that the US could lose a war, especially to a small impoverished nation.

At the time, although I didn’t realise it mattered to me, they were forming the 7th Battalion at Puckapunyal, a unit designed to have somewhere to put all those conscripts when they arrived. I had no idea I would be one of them. And at the time, the British offered to present Australians with a British Vietnam Medal despite the fact that the Poms did not participate in the war in any way. What were they thinking? Was there something they were trying not to let go off? In any case, the troops rejected it and the Yanks eventually offered one instead. But you had to wonder why? The good news was, of course, that Bob Menzies finally quit, having done enough damage for one lifetime. So what, I sighed.
    I was on holiday and didn’t give a damn about any of this. I was driving down the magnificent Victorian south-west coast in  Denis Chaffey's old Hilman, camping out and having a great time. Who needed the rest of the world? But of course, that was to look at the matter upside-down.