You follow Duffy down the path to the first trap, a barbed wire entanglement, you scale a wall, leap ten feet into a mud pool, plop! swing on ropes, crawl through steel tubes, plop into the slime, across a swinging bridge, smoke everywhere, don’t breathe it — it chokes you, gets in your eyes, stings, leaping over fallen trees, across a pool of slime, plop, you’re sweat saturated already, hand over hand on a rope, slop in the mud, climbing ten foot fence into six feet of ghastly slime, splog! How many times had you done this, a dozen? It doesn’t get any easier, there is nothing new except the Sergeant who is Harding. You walk across a log, swing on more ropes, more smoke, more slime, watch out!
    Duffy spills and sprains an ankle, and goes down hard, ripping skin off knees and elbows. You grab him as you come by, dragging him on. Nobody stops for any reason. You have five minutes to get through or else. Other men help you drag him, Duffy cursing, in pain. Harding is waiting for him when he comes out, near the end off the line.
    “Seven bloody minutes, Duffy. Where the fuck have you been?” Duffy doesn’t answer, there is no air in his lungs to answer with. Like a man drowning, he gasps for breath. You run on, helpless, there is no point hanging around to explain.
    Harding rages: “Why aren’t you running, fella. Why are you walking?’’
    Duffy leans against a tree and glares. ’I’m not walking. I’m limping.’’ Between punctuating gasps.
    “Don’t answer me back, Duffy. You’re on mess duties for a week!”
    The medics had to cut his boot off, but the mess duties remained,
    “That’s what happens when you’re cIumsy,” Harding tells us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alan Marshall liked to jump puddles. I liked to jump in them. Of course, Marshall was a cripple (to use the proper expression of the time) and to say I Can Jump Puddles was an immense achievement for him. Alas, my school-teachers thought so too, and so it became one of those books that they taught me to hate. When I read it again as an adult, I realised that it must have taken a more than average effort for them to achieve that.
    Wild Cat Falling by Colin Johnson, was a quite different direct appeal to our sympathies, this time because it claimed to be the first book ever published by a writer of aboriginal blood. It is really a rather blunt and bland autobiography of a mis-spent youth amid bodgie gangs in which the aboriginality of the writer is almost indistinguishable in his appearance, certainly so in the text. There was a long way to go to Sally Morgan who would do the same thing with a bit of flair. I think this road leads more accurately to Chopper Reid.
    In any case, given the time of publication, I suspect it was the first novel written by someone willing to admit to aboriginal blood. The world turned and suddenly a touch of the tar became a fashionable state whereby later editions were published using his tribal name, Mudrooroo. Then the awful truth—it was revealed that he was a fake. No traditional background at all. As white as Omo. What was the world coming to?