What a day it was. Briggs confronted the class, ashen faced and wordless, and handed out the corrected drawings with the red‑inked mark in the bottom right corner. When they saw their results, none of the students wanted to say anything either.  “You should all be deeply ashamed,” Briggs sighed, and walked out, leaving them to contemplate their obvious shortcomings.
    Of course, I was not there. I was out in the quadrangle as usual. My drawing was left casually thrown on the tabletop, along with those of several other more legitimate absentees. These the boys eventually glanced at, and saw what was to be seen. The cries of astonishment echoed across the schoolyard, and immediately several boys ran out in search of me, found me, and only after much insistence that it was not a joke, persuaded me to return to the class. It was a triumphant return, with much backslapping and bockering.  I stood in my one moment of glory, in this room that was to me still an alien place, grim and forbidding, and was well pleased when the bell rang and we could carry on to other classes, and a more familiar state of the world.

But they held their fire, and he heard the sibilant hiss. “This way!”
“No!” he suddenly yelled, his horror-stricken voice ringing like a cracked gong through the clearing. “No, Charlie!”
Blinded, Charlie on his knees, his hands held out in front of him, turning his head in bewilderment. “Jack! Greg!”
Again there was the sibilant call from further down the track, in a voice deeper than the normal Japanese voice. “This way, quick!”
Jack heard Greg call out in a shrill, frantic voice. “Here, Charlie, this way.”
Then Charlie got slowly to his feet, mud dripping from him like after-birth, as if the earth had just spawned him, blind and lost and alone as a new-born animal. He stood, his head twisting from side to side, his hands clutching with fearful hesitation at the air about him; then like a child taking its first frightened steps he began to walk towards the clump of sugar cane.

There was a shout from the other side of the track and Jack could hear Greg yelling something with a sob in his voice, and then abruptly he saw Vern standing behind his tree.
“Charlie, the wrong way!” Suddenly Charlie stopped, and in that instant Vern gave the bush cry, something the Japanese could never imitate. “Coo-oo-ee!”
Charlie turned as Vern gave the cry again; then stumbling, crying incoherently, he began to run towards Vern. Jack saw Vern come out from behind the tree in a crouching run, then he stepped out into the open himself.
“Bore it up ‘em!” he roared, and opened up with his tommy-gun at the clump of sugar cane. He heard the sharp stabbing sound of Mick’s bren, the crack of rifles, and the sugar cane waved and snapped and flew as the fire poured into it. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Charlie stagger and fall…
    The Climate of Courage by Jon Cleary, and a terrific portrait of Australians fighting along the Kakoda Trail, but the love story in Sydney lets it all down. The battle scenes are classical and excellent—the one above obviously based on Damien Parer’s immortal footage of a blinded soldier being led back down the trail by his mates. There a nice scene too when the Jap mini-sub sinks the harbour ferry. This was as good as Cleary ever got.
    But two other of his books were made into excellent films—The Sundowners in which Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr demonstrated that the Australian accent could be done without parody after all; and The High Commissioner which was a pretty good thriller with Rod Taylor, Christopher Plummer and a terrific supporting cast. For inexplicable reasons, some versions bear the title Nobody Runs Forever. Cleary battles on, still writing reasonably popular books often made into reasonably popular movies but I have nothing to say about them. Those mentioned are the superior efforts in my opinion. He spins a good yarn but he's a bit bland for my taste. He was probably Australia’s most successful living writer until he died in 2010, but was generally more popular overseas than at home, which, I guess, makes him rather typical.


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