CHAPTER SIX
The Midnight Sun
Jock was packing to leave for Spitzbergen in the morning - June 26th.  He dressed up a skull and put it on Michael McCreadey's bed - with a pipe in its teeth and a bottle of gin beside it.  Michael, being a medical student, had a plentiful supply of bones, and Jock did not expect his humorous salute goodbye to his friend would elicit the dramatic reaction the smoking skull had received at Hog Harbour.


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'It is usually difficult to say when a journey begins - but in my case there was no doubt whatever.  It began, after a torrid time in a traffic jam, when a kindly guard thrust me into the luggage van of the train.'  The train was leaving St Pancreas Station to connect with the ship which was to take him to Goteborg in Sweden.  In one of the great cities of the world he had almost repeated the travel disasters of New Guinea - missing the boat.  Once in the train he settled down among the skis and trunks, and all the way to Tilbury corrected the final proofs of his book on the New Hebrides.

They crossed the North Sea, Sweden and Norway and took off to roll north from Narvick in Fiord-land in a little broad-nosed ice-breaker.  The archipelago of Spitzbergen lies deep within the Artic Circle with a chequered history of exploration, whaling, hunting, fishing, mining - all the European countries and Britain having taken intermittent interest.  The largest island, known simply as Spitzbergen, was visited by many European scientists seeking out Arctic secrets.  They landed at a place with the incongruous name of Bruce City where coal was mined, and found themselves on a shingle beach surrounded by snow banks and up flung ranges.  Only half a mile away was a large crumbling glacier.  The expedition was small.  It was led by an Austrian, Professor Dr. Hans Tollner;  there was another Austrian glaciologist and a South African botanist.  Both Austrians had Arctic experience, but Jock and the South African were new to the treacheries and beauties of this landscape, sunlit even at midnight, except when a summer blizzard swept everything into freezing grey.

Most of the time Jock found himself entranced and frustrated by turns.  Tollner was nearly twice Jock's age, and cautious - possibly born of bitter Arctic experience.  He had been the leader of a notable Austrian expedition to Jan Mayen in 1932-3, doing magnetic meteorological research for fourteen months, right through the Arctic winter.  The other Austrian, Frantz, was obstructive for other reasons - 'a complete old woman' said Jock, who was aching to get away and do something significantly different.  He was finding it hard to keep within the constraints put upon him by his leader.  But after considerably more experience and during a difficult trip when one of the others showed himself lazy, he appreciated Tollner's quality - 'the Dr. on the other hand, despite his primitive sleeping arrangements, is ready for anything.  What a grand man Tollner is.  We cook him a stew fit for the gods, fairly bubbling with the pig fat that he loves.'  Jock mentions cooking quite often.  He was interested in it although it was not an easy exercise for him.  He had amusing and ingenious ways of dealing with vegetables, and a good deal of health-giving peel found its way into his stews.

'I should like to make an expedition here under the midday moon & dancing northern lights.  Too, too much talk about the midnight sun;  not enough work done when it would take a lot of guts to do it.'  He mused on the mostly neglected 'dark' end of the work which he thought really worth while.  'What a study a person could make in a place like this were he to stay the whole year round ... glacial movement, migration, actually in relation to light or other factors;  a dozen other problems leap readily to mind.'  Impatiently he scribbled:  'I really must do something worthwhile.  Activity?'


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There was some activity when they went inland and onto the glacier, though it was not what Jock had in mind.  He was helping the Austrians with their work pegging wires across crevasses for measurements.  Finished and travelling down the glacier on the more treacherous lower face they plunged up to their thighs in slush, often crawling, and in drier areas, went ultra-cautiously for fear of the crevasses hidden under snow bridges.  'The learned Herr Dr. Prof. bellowed like a wounded calf when he slipped into a shallow crevasse & skinned his knee through his trousers getting out.  I felt so light-hearted at this that I sang a bit & was giving a false-spirited rendering of the flower aria of Carmen when my vigilance relaxed':  he suddenly found himself hanging by his hand and his ice-axe with his legs swinging over a gaping deep blue hole - 'I hauled myself out - thoughtful.'

He wrote of day-to-day fun, arguments, frustrations, discussions, good and bad jokes, the weather, birds, his work on the ultra-violet instruments, "watch" to be kept from their base-camp hut for the steamer which was to take them north to the wilder untracked country, occasional interesting diversions such as meeting on the steamer ' the great Prof. Wegener, geophysicist, brother of the "drift" man - a weird beetled old bloke, cordial & a German gentleman ... told me of expeditions to Samoa, Spitzbergen & the fatal Greenland trip [when] he lost his famous brother.'

He got away by himself on several occasions when the steamer dropped them to establish their camp on the North West Peninsula.  He took the launch and saw many glaciers creeping down the huge plateau of the inland area and dogs-teeth nunataks rising everywhere.  He also got away looking for nests on the mountain which loomed over their camp.  His description of the climb, its difficulties and his thoughts as he went up, and even more dangerously came down, alone with only an ice-axe and one arm is worth repeating in full because it is so indicative of his attitude to life, work, aesthetics and danger.  It was written as he rested afterwards on the lowest slopes, on a mossy bank where he sat several hundred metres up.  The cliffs faced the midnight sun, glowing red through the mists of the Northern Passage:

'The slopes!  Terrace upon terrace of mossy verdure ... a magical world of mosses.  Richer & deeper, softer & more luxurious than the most priceless Persian carpet, ones feet sink to the ankles in a spreading flora of soft greys & greens, silver-blue, pink, yellow ... Unearthly fairy region, with the incessant whirr of wings, & babble of Auk voices.  Puffins, grotesque, quaint, peer at me ... I was soon wet through;  for the going was rough & I soon had to put all I knew into getting safely further.  Never before did I realise how valuable an ice-axe could be;  it was a friend if ever there was one, keeping me steady on slopes of rubble, only lightly moss-grown (new!) & treacherously incapable of holding alone my weight.  Here and there was a frosty grey boulder - fallen off from above, & a dozen times bounding rocks, accidentally dislodged, went crashing downwards - thundering down the slope, leaping into space, hitting a snow-drift with a mighty spume of flying snow-ice, & out again & out of sight - That would happen to me too, I grimly reflected if I made a single bad mistake.  I came to feathers & egg shells, white & pale blue.  Previously Glaucus gulls had swept "anxiously" around, occasionally standing on the lichen-clad rocks regarding me;  flying once more with a swish of wings, wondering what I was doing.  And little Auks in ones & twos;  once half a dozen.  White breasts prominent against the rocks, but black head I could scarcely see at all - snow-buntings frequently flapped away over the dark rocks.  But not a single nest.

'Up higher I began to look carefully, & found that the Little Auks lived in the frost-cracked chinks always too far to be safely reached.  I heard the cries of baby birds & the swish of tiny wings as the auks left the crevices in swift surprise ... I felt the need of a rope & and a companion on half a dozen dangerous bits - but the ice-axe really was invaluable ... From gorge to ridge, around many shoulders, up snow-drift, with the gurgle of water running under, up another ridge, into another gorge - so it went on - searching the whole time for an accessible nest & getting closer & closer to the top.  I knew that the mountain itself is easily climbed from the E., but birds were my quarry & if I could climb to the peak from the west it would be all to the good.  With about 40 feet to go I was confronted by a pile of loose, ready to roll rubble - a path to the top - yet below a sheer drop of a couple of hundred feet to another spur, then a bounce to the gorge & away out of sight into nothingness.  I sat down & considered the question calmly.

'It would be good to climb the mountain from the W. - probably nobody ever has.  A satisfactory ending to an enjoyably exciting trip.  Against this I considered that there was no scientific value in it;  that I was risking not only my own life, but the enjoyment of the whole personnel of the camp.  I might not be back for days or weeks or ever if I "slipped" - & further it would be tough on the mater.  So I decided not to do it - I wasn't scared, but just decided that it wasn't worth the risk - & started to climb back again feeling very smug & righteous (& self-satisfied because 90% of my friends - & myself - would think me incapable of making such a decision)!!

'But guess what I found up there?  -  buttercups! ... I collected some ... & decided to go back.  Much worse than the ascent - here I really found the ice-axe of value - doubt if I could have made it without it.  My admiration for the Austrian mountaineering johnnies went up a 1000% when I experienced what they are always at - for fun! - & of course (as always!) my admiration for myself went up a million % !  for I did it one hand, alone & without a rope.  God how wonderful I am.'

He was feeling ecstatic.  His judgement had been true.  Or more likely his instinct - developed through years of moving about in environments which give man, along with other animals, challenges to the awareness of every sense.  Even in cities he had lightning reaction to impending trouble.  But this was high exhilaration.  Here he was sitting on the side of a high mountain, his loved place in the world - he had climbed and come down challenging himself all the way, grappling with perhaps more than the mountain, though he will not say so, pleased with the freedom to choose his dangerou path.  But in the final decision up there with the scree of rubble he showed his hand - he thought of other humans.  I am convinced it was not a decision out of fear but out of that other side of himself that acknowledged love.

Back in their camp he noted the terns became fearless and so aggressive that the men had to wear protective head gear - The Red Terror and The Little Woman Jock called the nearest pair who produced an ugly, wet, pale grey offspring.  'Should we kill it?  - & save future people trouble?  Born in an atmosphere of strife & uncertainty young James, if there is anything in what the psychologists say, will be a holy winged terror by the time the next expedition visits Bruce City.'  They did not kill him;  James survived to die "naturally" of starvation.  Jock's diary is full of asides about animal behaviour.  There was a baby seal called Tommy - 'his slate grey hide fairly glistened in the sunshine & the wash of our paddles danced his little ice-berg in the sun.  He was a pretty youngster with lots of grey whiskers, black eyes & ears that were slits in his gleaming head fur'; and a female Sandpiper running and flying across the dry tundra ahead of her chick which tore after her 'like an animated cotton reel.'

One day he woke to hear Acock muttering about ice on the porridge water, his boots frozen and the kettle deep in ice.  Jock crawled out into the sparkling morning and realised it was about seven p.m. on a Friday evening.  'Bloody wonderful.  The sun goes around in a great circle:  & I defy anybody, unfamiliar with the sun's direction in the locality, to tell whether it is midnight or midday.'  He made many notes comparing his situation now with the tropics a year ago when the night came down like a shutter on days that steamed in the high sun.

Unlike working in the tropics where it took a hurricane or an earthquake to disrupt activity, here the weather dictated their every move;  they were often confined to the hut or a tent while the wind howled and rain turned snow to treacherous slush - dangerous and unpleasant for work with the sledge, which was necessary on any long trip.  However, with only seven days left before the ship arrived to take them back they were finally able to attempt to cross the base of the North West Peninsula - an exercise not done before and which Jock had persuaded Tollner they should attempt.

They landed all the gear from the launch in the south corner of Smeerenburg Bay on August 11th.  Then they set out and around a spur to the Smeerenburg Glacier, then east as far as they could go.  They did a ten-hour sledge pull - easy over the frozen slush, but on a very bad slope it took an hour to go half a mile;  crevasses and snow bridges were everywhere, 'luckily frozen, but an eerie feeling to push ones ice-axe right through where a sledge & two men were on it!!'  Then came frost and low visibility.  Tollner went ahead roped, testing the ground at every step.  There were no birds, only silent mist, everything frozen and sunless among black snow-powdered peaks.  They moved on eastwards, working their way laboriously over the crevasses of glaciers and occasionally racing gleefully down a frozen ridge.  The whole trip from which they eventually returned safely was magnificent experience for the two Arctic "rookies".

On their way back, plugging slowly through a snow storm along broad roads of packed ice dangerously crevassed at the edges, Jock pondered Arctic exploration.  He thought it was 'just great caution & dam hard work.  Caution as to compass, provisions & crevasses & hard work pulling a sledge which carries the necessities of life.'  He wondered what the others were thinking as they plodded along in silence.  Good bodies were not enough if the minds 'could not stand the racket - the hourly, daily plod across white, wasted land with nothing to do except pull and think.'  He nibbled on his chocolate ration and thought about the working of the human machine which slowly hauled the sledge - 'The awful fatty substances that we had last night were already doing their work.'  He thought about writing to his friend Austen, telling him of plans for the future:  'good plans, & I think, a pretty good future - of Mary.'  He considered breeding seasons and ultra-violet light which, according to Baker, had an important bearing on the animals they studied in the New Hebrides.  'Yet what about here?  No radiation worth speaking of.  Yet sharply different seasons in everything ... there must be considerable radiation on the glaciers & perhaps on the sea.  Erect the apparatus on the ice;  & again on one of the small islands near the camp.  And what of an expedition to Jan Mayen or like place (tho' I believe it to be unique) to study breeding seasons in the Arctic.  Must talk to John Baker about it!'

They worked their way down the glacier which would land them on the coast within striking distance of their rendezvous with the launch.  But this turned out to be a crevassed and risky route.  Roped together they crawled across ice bridges, jumped exposed crevasses hauling the heavy sledge across after them, runners at right-angles to the fissures, ropes and ice-axes at the ready in case of the sudden downward plunge they feared.  And suddenly it happened:  the sledge collapsed on a crevasse - irreparably smashed.  So with two rucksacks each they set out on a 90 mile tramp.  They travelled the glacier to the southern seaward side - precariously jumping fissures with a double load.  It was tough going.  Jock arrived first and, after dropping his load, ran back a long way over ice to help Tollner who had not weathered the hellish march so well.

Back at base there were only three days left before the ship came.  There was work to do, final collecting of birds - and cooking some of them after the vital gonads had been removed, 'Glaucus breast fried (or broiled?) in butter is great!  Surprising?'  And on the last day, August 17th, he retrieved his ultra-violet equipment from the glacier.  It was a fine day.  He cooked, washed socks, aired the camp gear and in twelve hours the ship would arrive bringing letters - 'but 5 days on the Lyngen, sleeping in the saloon, carries no appeal.  Bad food, smells, a rough Arctic ocean, foreign passengers (insularity!) - only the kindliness of the officers makes the tub bearable at all.'

But with the smelly little tub came two vital letters;  'one from Dakin one from Briggs to change the whole course of my life?  I walked up & down the deck, nailed boots crunching.'


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The two letters did change the course of his life.  The Dean of the Faculty of Science at Sydney University had agreed to let him read for the degree without matriculation.  He was elated.  He might have had an interesting and adventurous life as an explorer of the few pockets in the world where that word had any relevance and as a collector for museums but, having tasted the challenge of research, it is unlikely he would have been satisfied.  The intellectual input was all the more important to him because he had been so far behind in appreciating it.  He was also drawn to the tradition of university life;  had alluded to it even back in the 'rattler' days.  It was no wonder he was crunching up and down seething with excitement knowing he could become a true university man.

So, on the uncomfortable voyage back through Arctic seas he made up his mind that the New Guinea expedition was less important than his academic future.  As it turned out it was probably not a decision that made a lot of difference to the fate of the expedition, because he discovered back in England that another member had withdrawn owing to a heart condition.  The Grand Scheme quietly faded away.


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He arrived back in Oxford on August 30th..  'John at the station beaming.'  Dr John Baker, with whom he was staying, had been a helpful friend and would have a degree of influence on Jock's career, both good and bad.  After dinner that night, having discussed the Arctic and an impending Conference at Nottingham, they launched upon an extraordinary conversation concerning the installation of a telephone in John's house.  He had never possessed one.  Chuckling like a schoolboy he announced he now had one and 'he fairly danced' as he declared nobody knew his number.  Jock called him a mad hatter in his desire for privacy but John was adamant:  'Here I am with my books and someone rings up to ask me to go and drink sherry - my God!! ... I, as an individual can enjoy myself with practically any  one person in the world, black or white.  With two people, much less so, with 3 or more, I loathe it & can extract no pleasure whatever".'  Jock was playing Devil's advocate  because he appreciated the desire for privacy but thought 'a sort of extroversion' might keep him communal for some years.  The discussion with John, however, interested him very much - especially the passion exhibited.  He mentioned it occasionally as a pointer to some of John's less explicable behaviour.

In mid September he and Baker went together to a Nottingham Science Congress.  Baker believed Jock should have the experience of reading a small paper on the work he had done in the Arctic;  Baker was contributing a paper himself.  'Interesting time - Crew on sex ratios - & later met the great man.  Inspiring bloke.  My part of the lecture went off O.K. but it was rather a shattering experience to contemplate.'  It was the first time he had taken part in a scientific congress.

After this he went on a lecture tour which took in Ireland, Scotland and northern England.  He visited Tom Harrisson in Bolton;  'Old Tom just the same, but we only had one scrap in a week which literally flew.  Got a lot done.'  One scrap in a week - probably because they were no longer competing over anything.  They were working on a joint paper on the New Hebridean bird work with John Baker, to be communicated to the journal of The Linnean Society, and on their own comparative study of closely related birds in the New Hebrides and Australia (the latter was not completed for publication).  They were also watching other birds - 'the young folk of Bolton do their courting huddled up against walls in the lanes;  figures dim, clasped together in the shadows, cold but not miserable.  Tom:  "Come right in!" to astonished couple, "& do it inside:  there's a kitchen fire!".'  They declined.

When he got back Jock was excited to find he had some support from Julian Huxley and James Fisher, well-known ornithologist, to do some field work in England.  But now sadly he must decline.  Huxley told him he could possibly get Institute of Animal Behaviour support to do his 'own heart's project - complete investigation of the bower-bird - up to 50 pounds?'  So his heart and his mind were now turned to Australia.  He had previously more than toyed with staying on in England - both for the expedition and possibly for Mary.  He appeared ambivalent about marriage, though a letter he wrote to his friend Ernie Austen as he neared Norway suggests he had a wish for it.  It was a pencil-scrawled excited six pages of plans for the following year:  "I will compose my wanderer's soul for five years ... I am determined to some day return to Oxford:  the thing it most taught me was how ignorant I personally am, & how little we Australians in general know ... I shall have the bloody Chair of Sydney some day:  you'll see!'  So he grandly planned.  Certainly he would not do any more exploration for several years.  'It's not worth the risk & wear & tear ... But seriously, I've come to believe that you can do pretty near anything  in this world with a moderate amount of brain, gut & personality - & Christ knows how I've tried to develop all three.  Does this all strike you as egotistical bullshit?'

He presumed he would have a difficult time financially - but 'lechery had lost a lot of its former savour.'  He followed up this statement by giving Austen instructions concerning which women were to be kept in ignorance of his homecoming.  'I think pleasant dalliance with guaranteed virgins will be more in my line in future.'  He thought he and Austen should do a lot of wandering in the mountains 'My chief difficulty, perhaps, will be keeping clear of matrimony - tho' having little money is certainly a help!'

CHAPTER SEVEN
Sydney University and Marriage
At the beginning of 1938 he entered the University year with a burning desire to get into it all;  and with the swagger of someone familiar with Oxford University and the experience of three scientific and exploratory expeditions in widely different lands.  In contrast, he was plunged into undergraduate life as a science student and had to face the hierarchical god-professor system;  not entirely unfamiliar to him, having taken Zoology 1 in 1935.  Because of his Oxford and expedition work he was offered a Tutorship in Zoology at the University's oldest college, St Paul's.  So he was off with a flourish as usual.

The tutorship pleased him enormously.  He enjoyed the old college, its rituals and traditional sandstone building reminiscent of Oxford;  and he enjoyed his relationship with the students;  an interesting balancing act between authority and camaraderie.  Two of the medical students, Ian Hume and Charles Arnold, became firm friends, as did one of the senior students, Bill Woodward,  and he kept in touch with several others.  But after the heady mingling with renowned scientists in England he found it irksome having to swot so hard on the basic material of the Science course.  It was no simple follow-on from school, where he had been far too busy with the business of combating authority to take the faintest interest in any of the science subjects.  Now he was faced with catching up on the whole spectrum in an absurdly short time.  'I have a horror of being beaten in the Nov.  Zoology exams by one of my own students - and that conceivably could happen!'

However, at the beginning of the next year he was exultant at getting through to second year, and delighted that so many friends were glad he'd passed.  He got telegrams and letters from many people, from the Museum and elsewhere, who had been convinced he had bitten off more than he could chew and had not hesitated to say so.  But Organic Chemistry had to be repeated and had been a worry.  There had been a regrettable encounter with the examiner, Professor Earl - in a post office.  Jock was writing a book on his English experiences - 'that bastard cost me about 100 pounds adv. royalties for "Thru' darkest England" which didn't eventuate.'  There is no record of the altercation, but it was indicative of his attitude to authority figures that if he disagreed with them there was no quarter given, even when their power could be destructive.

In September 1938, just a year before war erupted, rumours of it were blowing up in Sydney as they had been in Europe for some time.  Jock met J. Enoch Powell:  'noisesome young north Englander.'  Powell was the new Professor of Greek, and at only twenty-six self-confidently opinionated.  '[He] predicted a war within 48 hours (perhaps with good reason - Czech. crisis) & he's considering the advisability of flying home to England.  Several of the staff table at the Union suggested throwing in a few bob to help him!'

Also in that September Jock met Joy Wood.  He wanted to go to an Australian Museum Ball, but his partner for the evening was ill.  Joyce Allen - conchologist at the Museum - said she would ask a friend of hers to come:  'a fascinating glamorous brunette;  guaranteed.'  From that time on it was really a miracle he passed any exams at all.  He began ferrying constantly across to the suburb of Mosman which was spread around and up the hills from a small cove on the northern shore of the harbour, where Joy Wood lived with her parents.  'I'm now passing thru a Mosman period of ferry boats, red signs rippling across harbour waters & the great arc of bridge dimly spanned in the darkness.  The reason is Joy ... surprisingly straight thinking, v. attractive, v. vivacious girl.'  It was almost exactly a year since he had written the letter to Austen as he sailed towards Norway.  His academic plans were on course;  but he was about to prove how difficult he would find it to avoid matrimony or to do a lot of wandering in the mountains with Ernie.

Joy Wood was indeed a glamorous brunette.  She was twenty-two with many male admirers.  Jock, in typical style, simply took possession of most of her time.  He climbed the steps of the wharf in the deep waters of Mosman's Bay, where back in the early part of the Nineteenth Century the air had been full of the lurid language of pig-tailed sailors and the appalling stench of whale blubber - now scented with frangipani in rows of fenced gardens;  then up the road, lined with comfortable red-roofed bungalows to the house in Moran Street.  Night after night, after spending time in the city (where Joy worked as a secretary) or visiting the house, he made the journey.  One needs to picture the atmosphere of this suburb in the thirties in order to know the impact Jock must have had with his seductive tales of savage, wild or cultivated places, and his unconventional attitudes to almost everything.  Life was good in Mosman, but as in most of Sydney's northern suburbs, it operated within strict conventional rules about every aspect of living (I know because I lived in one).  Large old houses or newer brick bungalows housed families who all felt the same about the importance of 'moral' behaviour, correct possessions and correct procedure for one's passage through life.  They aspired to quality, but not to any untidy artistic or other licence.  Jock, in spite of being something of a cross between a sophisticated and exotic public success (his books and his exploits had been widely reported) and a larrikin, found favour with Joy's parents, especially with her mother, who was an excellent pianist but had settled down to the rearing of her only child.  Her father was an engineer whom Jock liked.  Joy was charming, with a strong sense of proper Mosman decencies which did not accord well with Jock's life-style but she had a fine sense of fun.  She loved dancing and was very good at it.  She discovered Jock did not love it at all.  'He was an appalling dancer - marched you up the room turned around and marched you down again' she said truthfully.  They quarrelled intermittently, but not seriously;  some of the clashes, though certainly not all, were engendered by Jock's work-load.

In March, 1939 he was delighted to be offered a part time job, because he was becoming seriously short of money.  His parents had given him the three years' University fees when he came home - 'I bludged on them at the age of twenty-seven' - but he did not expect them to support his taste for night-clubs and wining and dining.  Alister Deamer, the Editor of the Telegraph, asked him over a beer or two with Cyril Pearl if he wanted a job.  'Of course I wanted a job.'  But it meant he would have to work in the University from nine to three or four during the day, and then until eleven at night at the Telegraph - about fourteen hours a day.  And he still had a weekly broadcasting commitment with The Australian Broadcasting Commission.  He also wanted to keep on his tutorship at St Paul's and solved a fraction of his problem with time by becoming resident within the college.  Besides, he had been elected President of the "Pacific Islands Club" some time before, succeeding Ian Hogbin.  It should have been enough.  But when offered the editorship of the Science Journal at the University he accepted because he wanted to do it - 'I have a lot of ideas to shake it up.'

In 1939 he was in a state of almost pyrotechnic energy.  It was not surprising there was a certain amount of strain on the romance, though it progressed through six months of oscillation between argument and pleasure to an unofficial engagement.  'Apart from minor crises, which are mostly my fault, Joy & I get along very well.  She's a grand kid & could do much better than me.'  He liked her parents very much '& her friends are nice.  She is quite charming, has a type of personality all her own, v. popular with people, & tactful - really ideal in many ways & I should be quite hopelessly in love with her.  Unfortunately, I'm too selfish, egocentric and generally bloody to ever love anyone.'  Joy believes that neither of them were 'ever really in love - though we enjoyed playing the part.'

Jock was pushing himself to the limit at this time.  He was studying long into the night - 'my left eye probably buggered thru intensive study under bad light, is still a trouble - I get a fuzzy double image.'  That left eye was imperceptibly skewed and no problem normally, but always gave trouble under strain.  He was feeling listless and had a chest cold for the first time in ten or twelve years.  'Just as well I don't drink too much too!  Sleep & rest!  How I need it!'  But he would not be gloomy for long.  He described a new outfit of Joy's and that she looked magnificent in it.  The academic year had begun.  He was glad to be doing zoology again and felt much better, 'but still need sleep.'  It was also suddenly brought home to him how little he was interested in personal appearance.  At the insistence of his dentist he had a new gold filling, but had failed to look at the result for days - 'a bad thing not to be interested?  Yet I look alright when I get into good clothes.  And curiously I  like good clothes.

He went whirling through the year like a willy-willy over a dry plain.  It was August 1st before he began a flurry of jottings in his diary.  The Boronia on the College table reminded him it was Spring in the bush 'I've not been out in months - what a change in my life!'  The bower bird experiment was going well;  exams were approaching and he came home at midnight after hard hours on the paper to the big fig tree and the shadowy turrets of St Paul's.  The life in St Paul's College was a background to all else.  He rose early, studied, attended Chapel, worked with his zoology students and ate at high table in the evening.  Within that framework came university lectures, long hours of journalism and weekly broadcasts for the A.B.C. childrens' naturalist program.  'He who nonchalantly consumes a glass of beer in a Newtown hotel at 5.45 p.m. when he is due to broadcast at 6 p.m. (and what is more does broadcast at that time without a trace of flurry), is scarcely human' wrote a colleague at Saint Paul's in wonder at his awesome energy;  and '[he] found plenty of time to devote to College affairs.  He was a quiet and unobtrusive worker for the college.'  And he was finding time for "Science in 1939" phoenixing from the ashes of the old Science Journal.  It was the second week of September when he remarked enigmatically:  'Engaged now.  Announced a week ago.  But still in much the same position.'  They quarrelled about the engagement too - Jock thought the whole exercise not only absurd 'middle-class morality' but unnecessarily expensive when money spent on diamonds could be better spent later.  Turmoil was not only personal. This was nearly coincidental with the announcement of war in Europe into which Australia stepped almost automatically.  Jock was writing articles on the fighting, scientific notes on the behaviour of bower birds and studying genetics.  It was an incredible life.  'I'm moderately happy but wish I'd a bit of time to read history & novels & philosophy.'

He and Joy were together whenever possible.  'I spent a lot of time on my tummy watching him call up birds' said Joy 'I think that was part of the fascination - he was so different.'  Yes he was different.  And difficult - especially in those early days of returning to his home ground from Melanesia and Britain.  It had been an intense two year learning period at every level of his life.  Australians comfortably settled in their prejudices moved him to aggressive retort.  He gave public lectures occasionally to which Joy went.  'He was a good lecturer, but if some poor person asked a stupid question he would cut them down without mercy.  We would have an argument about it.  I usually walked out.  I did a lot of walking out.'  And there were a lot of arguments, which were almost always private, although they appeared to their friends to be the ideal couple.  'We both enjoyed a bit of play-acting' said Joy.

He was too busy even to make notes in his diary for most of 1940.  In September he bemoaned the fact that Spring in the bush was passing him by, final science exams were early and due in a few weeks.  He felt he did not know enough.  And the undercurrents of conflict with Joy were surfacing more seriously.  In the last days of 1940 they erupted into a decision on New Year's Eve to break off their engagement. They had been scrapping for months - 'nearly ever since we became engaged.  My fault as much, or more than hers.  I'm rude, domineering & generally unpleasant;  she hasn't the sense to ignore my bloodier traits & I'm not nice enough to make effort enough to eliminate them.'  He believed if either of them wanted marriage & happiness enough they would make the effort for change.  'But frankly I don't.  I'm too interested in the things I want to do in the future to hamper myself with a wife who will generally upset my ways of life (tho' not too much - she's too nice & understanding in most ways:  the mere fact of a wife will do that) & hold me back in other ways - money for instance.  I must get to Oxford or Harvard soon or stagnate.'

The rift lasted for two months.  Jock was always unsure how they came together again; and Joy has no remembrance of it.  It appears to have been a perception that if they were not ideal they might make a go of it.  Perhaps too they both thought it was time to be married.  Jock did.  In his letter to Austen, though he talked of avoiding it, he tacitly acknowledged a need for it.  And the war was having its emotional effect on everyone.  Whatever the reason, they came together to be married in St Paul's Chapel on March 8th, 1941.  There was no money for a conventional honeymoon - Joy was asked to tramp through the bush on the south coast - not her favourite occupation.

Jock was still deeply involved with work, some of which was now more necessary than ever to pay for an apartment at Elizabeth Bay - a prestigious enclave on the southern shore of the harbour near the city and not too far from the University.  He was seriously short of money after the expenses of a formal engagement and now marriage.  He had left the Telegraph for a time the previous year but now went back.  He was glad to have the money but upset to lose his 'work freedom & I'll be once more "bought" - or sold?!  And this year I so did want to publish an explosive series of essays ... on prevailing attitudes in b'casting, journalism, unemployment, politics, lies, graft etc., etc.'.  He did not publish them as essays but they became the book, Australia Limited, which was published the following year.  Work on it and the research for his thesis kept him constantly writing into the small hours of the morning, and he was now acting Sub-Warden of St Paul's College.  Then there was journalism.  On June 1st that year, besides working for The Telegraph, he began writing special articles for the Daily Mirror, a newspaper born only three weeks before.  He had also taken on the editorship of the University magazine Hermes.  The Sub-Wardenship of the college, the newspaper work, the broadcasting were all necessary financial props.  But what of the other responsibilities, and the writing of the book?  - were they necessary?  'No' said Joy 'it was ego.  Well, it was "anything you can do I can do better" - the arm, you know - it drove him.'  She herself was driven to frustration by the situation.  Being an extremely tidy person, she was appalled at the endless mess of paper cluttering their life.  One day, having invited her friends to lunch, she gathered the whole lot up in a rage and, regardless of order, shoved them under the bed.  They were both furious.  It was, not of course, about paper.  It was one of many straws pointing to deeper problems.  Joy says honestly:  'I was suburban and wanted our life to fit that form - Jock was a free spirit.'

But there was, and had been all the time, quite a lot of entertainment in which they both shared.  There was a bevy of gifted and amusing journalists working on these papers at the time - people such as Cyril Pearl, Elizabeth Riddell, Dal Stivens, Rex Rienits, Richard ("Monk") Hughes, Roly Pullen and artists Don Angus and Jack Earl.  They became companions in fun and vicissitude and some of them lasting friends.

As well, there were activities within the University that were radically unacademic.  A propensity for occasional creative theatre went rather further than the average practical joke.  Jock's natural bent towards debunking, re-enforced by his association with English eccentrics of all ages, occasionally found the opportunity for something spectacular.  'I remember him one day fighting with a man in the tower at Sydney University' said a colleague 'He was bashing away at the man and the girls shrieked in horror when Jock picked up his opponent and threw him sixty feet to the ground.  It was several seconds before anyone realised it was a dummy.'

More widely spectacular was the kidnapping of a pompous English knight.  In July 1941, Sir Evelyn Wrench, founder of the English Speaking Union and the Royal Overseas League, came to Sydney on a lecture tour to promote these worthy institutions.  One of the lectures was to be given at Sydney University at the invitation of the British Unity Society.  Hardly any of the large student and teaching population of the University were in the least interested in either British or English Speaking unity and the audience was unflatteringly small.  Despite the hospitality of Sir Robert Wallace, the Vice-Chancellor of the University, and Canon Garnsey, the Warden of St Paul's, Sir Evelyn chose to cancel the lecture and unceremoniously marched out.

Because of a family connection Ian Hume, went to the lecture.  He was so disgusted with the patronising rudeness of Sir Evelyn that he went streaking back to St Paul's complaining volubly to his friends and especially to Jock.  Ian, a great-grand nephew of the early Australian explorer Hamilton Hume, was a jolly Falstaffian figure, though he had another side to him - "fire in his belly" as Jock put it.  He and two of his friends, A.W.P. (Charlie) Arnold and Phillip Champion decided they must find a way to teach Sir Evelyn a lesson in manners.  They considered the cancellation an insult to the Warden and the Vice-Chancellor and to the whole university.  'You bastard, we'll kidnap you!'  they decided.  However, their plans were crude until they discussed it with Jock.  Knowing Sir Evelyn was due to broadcast on the national radio network, Jock devised a scheme.  The talk was to be given live in the evening;  so they would inveigle Sir Evelyn out in the morning on the pretext that the land line had broken down and it was necessary to pre-record the talk at the Corporation's other studios.  Having chosen a particularly unsalubrious venue from which Sir Evelyn would have to extricate himself, they set to work on the plan.

All went well on the day.  The easily recognisable Jock could not appear but he did the essential telephoning.  Putting on his most plummy A.B.C. voice he informed Sir Evelyn of the necessity to record and that he would be called for and driven to the studios.  It was now over to the two who would receive him and drive the car - Arnold and Champion.  Hume could not appear either, lest he be recognised.  So Champion, in suitably sober attire, met Sir Evelyn at the Hotel Australia and ushered him out to the large black limousine which had been hired for the purpose.  They wound their way out of the city centre through industrial areas to the south, Sir Evelyn becoming increasingly huffy as Arnold's nervous driving threw him around.  Finally they arrived at their destination - Tempe Rubbish Tip.  In those days the tip had elaborately grand cast iron gates and Champion handed Sir Evelyn out, told him to give his name to the gentleman inside the gates - "we have to rush now sir - we are running late to meet another appointment", and took off before the spluttering knight could turn around.

There was a considerable furore in the press the following day and at breakfast the Warden turned to Jock and said "I think this sounds like the work of Paul's gentlemen" and looking very straight at him "but we don't know who, do we!"  Jock thought he noticed a twinkle in the good Canon's eye.


CHAPTER EIGHT
The Heroic Myth
There was an extraordinary undercurrent to all this:  during 1941 - probably even since 1940 - Jock had been working at being accepted by the army.  The army's reaction was predictable.  NO.  Jock discovered there had been a one-armed sergeant in the A.I.F. during the First World War, and kept nagging them.  He knew his obvious usefulness would be in Intelligence but secretly thought to get himself into action.  It appeared ludicrous for an ambitious academic with only one arm.  He was certainly ambitious and fully aware that it would be taking several steps backwards in his academic career.  There was another complexity:  he had also applied for post graduate study at Harvard University - in the USA, not then at war - but with no money behind him he would not be able to take his wife.  He consulted her, and found she was 'mad keen for me to get into the Army and not go to Harvard.'  It was a dilemma.  He was showing an uncharacteristic ambivalence.  Their marriage was working no more smoothly than had their engagement - 'It's nearly a year now since Joy and I were married.  I believed after the first three months that the marriage was a mistake & that belief has developed into a certainty.  Joy doesn't interest me very much - and worse still !! I don't interest her.'  However, they were still playing the game.

The Army agreed to use him in Education.  Unacceptable though this option appeared, he had striven for it.  The A.I.F. legend was a powerful symbol deeply embedded since his childhood.  He was only seven when the Great War ended, and for four of those sensitive early years it had been central to the lives of almost every family in Australia.  The proportion of men who went away to fight was enormous.  The pervasive news and talk was of victories and defeats, guns, returning wounded, mourning for those not returning;  there was breast-thumping patriotism, rumours of white feathers sent to men who chose not to go and stories of extraordinary heroism.  The atmosphere of aggression was possibly more palpable at home than in the trenches;  it was easier to see war as heroism when the guns were not on one's own doorstep.  Jock's father was too old to go, but his elder brother joined the Navy and there was talk of the exploits of a cousin of his father who had gone to the Boer War as a child soldier.  The emotional focus of childish years receded but the idea of fighting for one's country had been well absorbed.  Everything about his personality suggested he would want to have a go;  and the fact that he had been baulked, for the first time ever, by authorities who insisted there was something he could not do without that arm, confirmed him in the apparent madness.

So, on November 14th, 1941 his army career began;  immediately after his final exams.  There was still his research thesis on the bower bird work to write up, but he expected to do that 'on the run'.  The Army noted his New Guinea experience.  He was given a captaincy in Army Education.

Having arrived he found himself in a thoroughly frustrating position;  a state to be repeated too many times in his army career.  He did not believe trying to find troops to whom he could give edifying lectures a particularly useful occupation.  He was in a western Sydney suburb and thought the place an organisational shambles.  It had taken him more than two weeks to get a bottle of paste or an issue of paper and he was sleeping with a respirator as pillow.  On December 29th he saw Paul Laurence, a solicitor and acquaintance from St Paul's, 'saluting me smartly - I nearly fell over.  He was throwing mud on tents and scraping dishes.  I put in an immediate report and today he starts in as a clerk with two stripes.'  It is not the report which Paul remembers, but Jock's recommendations to the astonished officer in charge:  'Mr. Laurence is a famous rugby five eighths and' - mentioning a world-famous luminary playing in the same position - 'Spong is terrified of him.'  'Furthermore', said Jock with another imaginative flourish 'Mr Laurence is an expert on ancient Hebrew law.'  Sometime afterwards Paul, who declares he knew nothing about Hebrew law, became a Warrant Officer, and later he was Jock's solicitor and very good friend.  They lived on different continents for many years, but Paul said:  'I probably saw Jock on less occasions than very many - probably all - my other friends, but he had a more profound effect on my life and thinking than any one of them.'  After twenty one days in the Army Jock had moved to right what he perceived to be a crazy misuse of talent.  Of course this could be construed as throwing one's weight around, and was;  but he could not be simply an observer of mess and trouble.  It was obvious he saw no God-given rights in authority.  The army would be no different.

In hospital at the end of January, recovering from cellulitis of the jaw, he was still frustrated.  The morning papers reported Rabaul radio silent after repeated Japanese bombing as a prelude to invasion. 'I ought to be there.  I bet the Germans would have used me had I been a German.'  He made up his mind to try and transfer to Intelligence.  He knew his knowledge of the northern Queensland country, which the Japanese might well invade, must be useful.  Singapore fell with 13,000 Australian troops taken as prisoners.  His book Australia Limited had just been released, and the Army was making enquiries concerning his authorship;  his scarifying look at Australian attitudes and institutions worried the top Intelligence brass temporarily.  But nothing came of it.

On February 18th, the day after his 31st birthday ('I don't feel my age') he saw Colonel Powell, Intelligence chief at Victoria Barracks, and learnt that he was being suggested for a possible Intelligence commission in the Commandos.  He was transferred to an Intelligence School in the A.I.F. where he learnt a great deal, though, in practical bushwork, found he ran rings around even the instructors.  He was then summoned to Northern Command and given a job to make a reconnaissance of the McPherson Ranges for a possible army crossing.  He was now attached to headquarters, 1st Australian Army, Toowoomba, as an Intelligence officer.  Arriving at Toowoomba, a town on the tablelands of southern Queensland, he sniffed at a problem of security - 'If I had been an enemy last night or this morning, I could have eliminated the whole of the "I" staff, including the Colonels, with little trouble.'  All of this diary and many passages of other war diaries are written in a code of his own devising - no doubt necessary in view of some of his remarks and confessions.  One of the Colonels, Paul Cullen, remembers Jock losing no time asking to be sent behind enemy lines in the Sepik area of northern Papua.  Cullen told him he could not possibly arrange this.

After making a preliminary examination of northern Queensland reports, Jock was appalled to find they lacked so much detail. He found no information on the east-west coastline of the Gulf of Carpentaria, and the rest was sketchily dealt with.  He noted a dangerous lack of information on the eastern coast of Cape York between Cairns and Cooktown.  'What if a Japanese pincer-movement clutched these areas?  ...  We'd know nothing about the country we'd have to defend.'  Two days later he saw Colonel Wills, the commanding officer, and emphasised his concern about the lack of detailed information on the Gulf and Cape York.  'Wills listened impassively & said he realised our data is sketchy, but said he didn't propose to do anything about it until we find out what we don't know everywhere.'  Jock was horrified at the thought of more inaction while he felt the need for information vital - 'Wills knows this too, but (a gem) pointed out that as we have no troops whatever to defend Cairns & higher, the result of a recce. would be a "matter of academic interest only."  Jesus!!'

Unknown to Jock there was a highly secret and controversial agenda at that time not to defend the North beyond what was known as the Brisbane Line.  No doubt Colonel Wills and other senior officers found Jock's incisive analysis of army information and his forthright way of putting it far too bold from a near-civilian in their eyes.  But it was happening - or not happening - against a background of the bombing of Darwin, the naval battle of the Coral Sea raging off the Solomon Islands, Japanese reconnaissance flights over Townsville and enemy submarines sighted off Karumba in the Gulf.

It transpired there were many senior officers - including Colonel Wills - pushing for more information on the Gulf and Cape York.  Not long afterwards Jock was called to Brisbane and then sent out in charge of a unit to reconnoitre the southern and eastern sections of the Gulf.  There would be six drivers, four or five technicians, a U.S. command car and two 3-ton trucks.  Jock admitted to being quite excited about it - 'a bit different from natives & boat!'


**********


It was different but some of the local attitudes were akin to the pace of life in the jungle.  While having an injured finger attended to Jock mentioned to the doctor that he'd found people strangely uninterested in army activities and the need to move fast.  'In Queensland, said the doctor 'only the emu hurries.'  But the patrol needed to emulate the emu.  They had to cover the huge area around the south eastern curve of the Gulf of Carpentaria.  There were no roads worth mentioning and their surveyor, Sgt Eric Beach, discovered that an alarming number of points on their maps were not in accord with the landscape.  Towards the end of the reconnaissance, after endless problems with maps and running over schedule, Jock remarked 'if we'd had no map we'd never have been bushed & we'd have been through by now.'  It was a tough assignment, though not dangerous unless the Japanese had landed (which seemed not inconceivable after the bombing of Darwin) - but it was the sort of thing in which he revelled.

After some weeks there was a slight incident which demonstrated his style of leadership.  It concerned his second in command ('I like Whitehouse more and more ... does exactly as he wants to.  Rarely wears hat or boots - funny to see lieut's pips but little else') and Ogilvie ('grey haired, cheerful, talkative, typical bushman, with scientific training, Sydney B.E. behind it, a great knowledge of west & Gulf').  The green truck would take the two men out on a laterite reconnaissance which they had both been trying to dodge.  Whitehouse looked like digging in his toes - 'but I made my ideas on the matter v. plain in about 3 sentences terse comment.'  Both men went out to do the job with good grace.  They had come up against that sense of authority which so many people felt - no nit-picking criticism but no ambivalence.  He had a good rapport with the team of thirteen - 'I couldn't have hoped for a better bunch even if I'd picked them myself.'  Years later Eric Beach, who was not given to much speech or exaggeration, agreed:  'We got on well.  He was a born leader - knew when to slacken up and when to drive - looked after us all too.'  Jock thought so highly of Sgt Eric Beach that he made a special request for him to join the next reconnaissance of Cape York.

They headed for the Flinders River whose network of tributaries finally comes together to run into the extreme south east corner of the Gulf of Carpentaria.  They camped one night at Crocodile Creek 'where a ghost lives, according to old teamsters tales.'  Nothing much else appeared to live except ants, flies, mosquitoes, a whistling eagle and some bustards - 'a stark desolate region of spinifex & anthills, top-rock & shining white-trunk river gums.'  As they toiled through difficult trackless country, Jock noted the number of feral cats and dingos, but no foxes, which were used as the common excuse all through this country for killing a large endangered bird, the bustard - "we may as well get them as the foxes".  This was not only dangerous but utterly false - 'Military exped. or not, I must get something out [i.e. published] pointing out that it is MAN, not fox, that is wiping out the Australian bustard.'  Throughout his army career his ecological and zoological senses were alert and his diaries are peppered with notes on anything from the parasites on the tail region of a groper fish to the size and architectural comparisons of enormous termite mounds.  He also sent specimens back to the Museum in Sydney whenever he was in a position to collect them - a rare creature or a specimen to prove an animal's range.  They arrived pickled in a variety of containers and alcohols never normally seen on laboratory shelves.  Once, in New Guinea, he traded a bottle of gin for the use of a jeep and bemoaned the fact that, for the first time since he joined up, he was without pickling fluid.  His diaries are littered with pressed flowers (sometimes in rather bizarre attachment to descriptions of violence) and well-preserved squashed mosquitoes.  He was interested in the malarial problem and thought it should be investigated in the future - 'anopheles are plentiful & we were all bitten:  I dosed everybody with quinine.'

They spent some time checking the accuracy of maps.  Then wishing to discover whether large numbers of men could cross the desolate salt pans and blue mud, he took most of the men on a trek to the coast.  'Left Sgt. Kelly in charge with Tommygun, primed grenades (I had to fuse 'em myself:  nobody else had any experience - a ticklish job fooling with detonators with one's remaining five fingers, but I could hardly ask anybody else to do it) & a bottle of petrol to destroy the maps in the event of trouble.'  There was no trouble - but nothing taken for granted.  They then crawled, sweating and swearing, over 'a nightmare country of low yellowing quinine bushes', trying always to find a faint track, crossing small rivers and creeks, until they came to the Mitchell River Aboriginal Mission - 'an oasis of delight' - near the mouth of the big river.  Here they were lent Aboriginal trackers to help them take a close look at conditions on the coast.  After this they were invited to dine with the manager.  Talk turned to the reliability of the Aborigines if there were an invasion and they found the attitude of the manager appalling - 'he says there are two he will shoot immediately an invasion begins (!) & the rest he will try & drive into the hills in front of him.'  Like cattle - '& they wonder why they won't stick to them if the Japs come.'

Then they turned to survey the southern arc of the Gulf, and heard that Darwin had been in the firing line.  Jock thought they might be going into 'tiger country', but the Japanese did not land and lack of petrol and time turned them around.


**********


Back in Toowoomba he had five days to write up his report and fly to Cairns to join a long range reconnaissance patrol that was leaving to work on the other side of Cape York.  This was a very different affair.  Big, unwieldy;  more than eighty men, seventeen 3-ton trucks and various other vehicles under the leadership of a young lieutenant who had regimental training - something Jock lacked.  He was attached as adviser.  Although he was senior to the Commanding Officer, knew the country and 'certainly no one but myself has the slightest conception, beyond what is written down, of what is required of such a recce' he thought he would benefit from some regimental soldiering.

They lumbered out of Cairns.  As they crawled slowly north Jock mused on their extreme vulnerability to enemy attack, the vehicles taking a bashing and being clumsily unsuitable, slow and difficult river crossings, unhealthy food, a river hopelessly wrong on the map, trying to reconcile a jumble of observations and improve the inadequate and faulty map sheets at their disposal.  Trucks were averaging three miles to the gallon in the tough stop-start, backing and filling country.  He was constantly wondering what might happen if an enemy were waiting in ambush, and concerned at the fourteen days it had taken to cover four hundred miles.  He decided to detail the reasons for this cumbersome performance in a report to Headquarters recommending 'a complete revision of all laid down principles for recce. patrols under Australian conditions.'  Almost all such principles had been laid down in the light of Middle East desert work and were proving near disastrous in the equally trackless, but diametrically different, hilly, rocky, swampy, creek and river-ridden terrain of Cape York.  He thought the heavy vehicles carrying heavy guns were useless because it would be difficult, if not impossible, to use such armament in these conditions.  They would be 'sitting ducks' for a concealed enemy.

The whole organisation of the reconnaissance had been poor - 'faulty, almost negligible' - and this included the selection of C.O..  He appreciated this man's energy, equability of temperament and tact but felt that these qualities were not enough - a broader outlook and knowledge of the problems and requirements of the job were needed.  'By air tomorrow I propose to send a detailed criticism of the planning & size of the present show:  toning down (have to really, dammit) on the poor judgement shown in selection of O.C.  If he were a louse one could do one's duty & tell the truth:  as it is he is a good bloke, & therefore one cannot thoroughly do one's duty.  It is a queer world - an axiom to remember is that as long as people like you, you can do almost anything, or almost nothing, and get away with it unscathed.'

Several months later, in New Guinea, he had a feedback from his report to Headquarters:  '[Smithy] told me an excellent story very much against myself.  Laverack, Sir John O, after reading my recce-training plan (Peninsula) in which I had cracks at soldiers, M.E. people, etc., said:  "No doubt many useful suggestions in this [report], but probably not as many as its author thinks there are." !!  I should think he was right?'

Dissatisfied with the tedium and wastefulness of the main patrol travelling up the backbone of the Peninsula, Jock worked out a plan with the C.O. to get badly needed data to the East.  With three key personnel, two vehicles and five crew he set out to try and discover what sort of landing facilities would be available for a flank attack on Cooktown.  This turned out to be an excessively uncomfortable journey - the first of many.  Much of it had to be done on foot, bleeding and exhausted.  It was one of the most trying short trips he had ever done:  'but we now know what the country is like, what it will support, how far military landing craft can get up the Morgan, how a group of militiamen stand up to most exacting conditions (magnificently!) & other odd bits & pieces useful to army.'  Surprisingly, nobody was injured 'except a log-sized fragment of twig in Lieut. Linklater's eye:  easily extracted with burnt, feathered end of a wax match.  (Link, by the way, tho' he was in Greece, Crete, desert & Java, is an H.Q. wallah, but tho' obviously weary, stood up to the job magnificently:  must tell Col. Spry this when I get chance).'  That would not have been an idle intention.  Quick to criticise poor performance he was also quick to praise and take it to quarters where it would do good.

So they travelled north through terrain that was everything from fascinating to 'damned unpleasant country.  And the idea of actually fighting for it is slightly absurd:  much better to give  it to the damn Japs & watch them slowly starve to death in it!'


**********


At Coen Jock searched for and found a talented Aboriginal guide to take them through coastal land laced with unmarked rivers and creeks leading to the Lockhart River Mission and Iron Range, from where they would set out over the Divide.  During a break in the difficult journey crossing tidal rivers Jock had a long talk with Joe Callope, the guide.  It corroborated all he had heard on the Gulf side about the disgraceful treatment of the Aborigines.  Callope said nothing was done to provide them with a scheme of education - although he and his wife had been lucky because they had been taught by a rare, gifted teacher:  a half-cast woman at Mapoon Mission.  He wanted his children to get an education too, a good one, to help them 'make something of themselves';  better than he had done - 'but, v. wistfully, he saw little chance for them.  Isn't it tragic?  And this is 20th Century Australia - we, who are so bloody proud of ourselves, must surely lag behind almost every other civilised country in providing opportunities for [these] people.  Joe, carefully & quietly spoken, using better English than many of the Patrol, gentle of speech & demeanour, pleasant company, by no means unintelligent & with a general outlook (as far as I can see on a few hours acquaintanceship) little different from our own, is doomed from the start, & so are his family, because he is born an Australian Aboriginal.  He can't vote, he can't get a drink (tho' he does, of course, when he wants it) he can't even touch the money he has rightfully earned by his honest work as a skilled tradesman (stockman).  What a bloody travesty of fair play - & now the whites sneer & complain that they can't touch the natives, that they might readily cooperate with the Japs at any moment.  Sure, why not?'

Unhappily, that talk would surprise no one today;  even if they had never heard of the war and the Japanese as enemies.  True, the Aborigines can now vote;  they can drink but are often gaoled when they do;  and many of the old attitudes prevail to deter them from sharing in the 'privileges' of white education, though the law says it is their right.  The degredation an invasive colonizing society inflicts upon the original population will be a measure of the support they receive in times of war.  After Jock's Gulf report on such degradation First Army had indicated their awareness of a possible danger should there be an invasion.  In fact, when he returned to Townsville after the patrol, General Milford spoke to him at length and in particular about this problem which he considered important enough to warrant a special job to deal with it - perhaps Jock himself.  'It's a big job & I'd like to do it.'  This came to nothing.  New Guinea was considered more urgent.

In the meantime Joe Callope was a tower of strength in his knowledge of the country and its hidden difficulties.  He warned that tidal river crossings would be bad, but Jock decided he would go forward up the coast, rather than follow the main group crossing further inland.  'I've not had a job in years with so much discomfort, but one which I was happier in - out on my own, in control of a contented, well-tried harmonious little Australian unit;  & above all, doing the job as a Captain in the A.I.F., a thing which means more to me (possibly owing to the difficulties I had in being accepted) than I've admitted to anybody.  In actual fact I find myself inordinately proud of the "Australia's" on my shoulder.'

They reached the Lockhart River Mission.  Joe Callope went back to his job.  Jock's team set off to cut a road over the range, which was meant to link the two sides of the peninsula;  it would have been extremely useful in the case of large troop movements.  As the war rolled away from the Cape rather than towards it the bush probably claimed back the single track that was won from it with a great deal of hard effort.  They pushed it to the top ready for the link to the big Missions on the East side of the Gulf, but time ran out again.  The convoy had to return to Headquarters.  Jock decided the heavy patrol, with all its faults, had been far more effective than any others which, up till then, simply drove up and back on existing roads.  He remarked candidly:  'And one of the reasons for this, if not the chief reason, will be the work of the small highly mobile, trained topo [topographic] & general intelligence patrol that is under my command.  I'm really sure of this, with fullest allowance for my great natural conceit & belief in the surpassing excellence of anything in which I have a controlling interest.'

Back in Townsville he finished his report, indulged in some mild debauchery, celebrated Sgt Beach becoming Lieutenant Beach and took off by train for Brisbane.  He then spent six days leave in Sydney before leaving for an Intelligence job in New Guinea.



**********



New Guinea - it was six years since he had left.  The man was different and the country, beneath a familiar cloak of jungle, was changed utterly by invasion.  He arrived by flying boat from Townsville at the Australian Army Headquarters in Port Moresby on October 17th, 1942.  'Since I arrived I've been really busy in the most ineffectual way possible.  I spend most of my time walking up and down the hill to Lt. Col. Vial's tent, & not a very interesting hill, either.'  He was given on arrival what promised to be a fascinating job but rapidly found that he was hamstrung from the start.  'There are several piddling little shows, none producing anything yet, all cloaked in a hush hush atmosphere of tremendous importance.'  He thought few would have had a chance anyway since there was no driving brain behind them.  It was impossible to get his energy and teeth into anything;  and it was all the more galling because he had turned down an Eastern Australian Naval liaison job working on the coast of Cape York in order 'to do this "urgent, important field job".'

So began three months of frustration and disillusion - although the disillusion was not complete.  He had an ambivalent attitude to the army.  He was a constant critic of the 'pigfriggery' and wastefulness that emanated often from sources more informed by jealousy and rank-climbing than by useful and accurate information but he had also an emotional admiration for the devil-may-care, give-it-a-go, rough and courageous image of the fighting soldier.  At the end of the three months, as he was awaiting a transport south with the 6th Division, frustration was evident:  'just back from forward area after one of the few interesting experiences I've had up here.  It is an odd thing that my pre-military life was packed with interest, often excitement & not infrequently danger.  Then I joined the Army & except for two patrols for 1 Aust Army, I've led a dull, parasitic existence ever since.'

However, the plurality of authorities and other reasons that caused such comment gave him valuable time tied to base;  useful for finishing the preliminary draft of his thesis which he thought had a lot of completely new and perhaps revolutionary work in it.  But this was not enough.  'I've been biting Vial's ear for a job - L.O. [Liaison Officer] to get away from these shiny-arsed staff officers for a while ... I want to do a bit of scrapping in order to justify my pips and "Australia" if not to be able to look myself squarely in the face after the show's over.'

This theme - getting into a fighting unit and seeing some action runs through all his war diaries.  It even over-rode the culmination of his other ambition - getting his degree in science.  It was early December 1942.  His thesis was almost finished and with two other previously published papers would go down before the final faculty meeting.  '[I] should graduate BSc (Research) March next.  It's the only thing I ever had to work for, that damn degree.  Everything else has come pretty easily;  but Sydney Univ. certainly got its pound of flesh in return for the miserable bloody thing, which, now that I've achieved it, seems hardly worth a damn in the larger scale of things.'  He admitted it would be useful later if he survived, and the work had 'made the world & the universe a more real thing to me I suppose.  Or the chemistry & the geology of it did anyway.'  He was feeling depressed.  Falling behind in the academic race began to surface as a worry whenever he was comparatively inactive.

Biting Lt. Col. Vial's ear apparently had some effect.  Vial, 'a helluv a fine chap:  young D.S.O.', took him for an interview with Major General Allen who commanded the 7th Division - veterans of Syria, North Africa and then the pushing of the Japanese back over the greater part of the Owen Stanley Ranges in New Guinea.  Vial went in first and explained his mission.  The General replied he thought him nuts to want to give a forward job to a person with only one arm.  However, Col. Vial persisted citing Jock's experience with guns, exploration, the Arctic and especially the jungle.  Allen still said no but decided to see this phenomenon - 'How did you wangle your way into the army?'  Jock told him, and gave him an outline of his prewar and war activities.  Allen appeared impressed and asked what his previous job was - 'Cutting up birds' balls!'  said Jock, which brought the house down.  The General decided to give him a job when his Brigades came out in a few days time.  If he did the work well and the men liked him he would get a place with an A.I.F. fighting division.  He was pleased, but his feelings after the interview were mixed.  'Allen has bright palish blue eyes - a hard look dumpy body (Tubby, they call him), a jovial disposition, but obviously would see through bullshit or pretence.  I kept my eye on the ball during conversation, & apparently made the grade.  After it was over I felt slightly degraded:  that one should have to go to so much trouble in order to impress a general in order to get into a job which, tho' less congenial than those I've had, one could probably do one's best for one's bloody country.' Nevertheless Jock sensed a character near to his own spirit, and many months later there was an interesting postscript.  He was commenting on the decorations which various senior officers had just received - 'Tubby Allen missed out again, of course.  Apart from my loyalty to Tubby (McSmith says how when I'd got to 6 Div & New Guinea Force wanted me back Tubby said:  "Fuck 'em - it's so rare that a staff bloke wants a fight:  he's coming with us!") - it's just another injustice - he missed the U.S. decoration, & now this.'

A few days after talking with Allen, in late December, Jock was told that the Commander in Chief, General Blamey, was reading Men and Birds of Paradise, the book he had written on his New Guinea experiences.  Later, after his posting to 6th Division, on January 11th, 1943, he got a message that Blamey wished to see him.  What about he wondered?  He thought perhaps some of the recommendations he'd made on the malarial problem had been passed to the General.  But no - it was the book.  The General was extremely pleasant about it, and Jock remarked 'so was I!  & we talked about the country for half an hour.'  Jock was impressed and surprised at Blamey's interest in and grasp of biological subjects and his aesthetic appreciation of such things as orchids which were a minor passion.  He promised to collect some for him and to write him a few articles for Guinea Gold - 'wrote him 4 today when duty officer.  Actually I liked him v. much;  & he's certainly a damn shrewd old citizen.'

In view of the number of published and private references to Jock having persuaded Blamey to get him into the A.I.F., it is interesting to note the date of this talk.  Jock himself was to some degree responsible - he made no attempt to correct most of the erroneous statements, partly because the truth was complicated but also because they had a good ring about them.  He had, however, been in A.I.F. Intelligence for almost a year and had already been accepted for a fighting unit by Allen when he met the General for the first time.  He did, on this occasion, put in some propaganda about getting forward just in case it should come before the General as the ultimate authority.

Afterwards he talked often with Blamey, both in New Guinea and Northern Queensland.  Mostly he was called up to discuss some aspect of the great hinterland and particularly a small national park that the General had asked Jock to find close to Port Moresby.  'Marshall found a charming little lake, complete with water-lillies, lotus birds, dab-chicks, a sago swamp, a lonely crocodile, and even a reputed ghost' reported John Heatherington.  The General liked the site despite sinking up to his waist in the sago swamp when Jock took him there.  But Hetherington noted 'In April 1946, the park was taken over by the Papua Administration, which abandoned it to the jungle about two years later.'

Even after he became Second-in Command of A company in the 6th Division, Jock took the opportunity when talking to Blamey to press for the permanence of his position in a fighting unit.  He was concerned that lesser ranked men with the power to remove him would do so out of their deep-rooted prejudice that no one with one arm (no matter what his record) could go into action effectively - Generals Allen and Stevens were exceptions.  He mused on the effect of talking to Blamey, but had no concern for his own motives because he was not after higher rank or more money;  he simply wanted to get into action.  His ambition would certainly not, either financially or physically, assure his future.

So three months had passed with no exciting or significant work except for a mission dropping leaflets which he had written for the native population:  messages exhorting loyalty and support.  He went on a wild flight with an American pilot over Japanese held territory to drop these.  They had to go in low over the jungle of the valleys and were rocked by ack-ack fire, though not hit.  Seeing some Japanese heads he wondered about meeting them in less than congenial circumstances - 'apart from weary looking P.O.W.s the only Japs I have ever met have been consular officials whom I have shaken warmly by the hand!'

The Sixth Division was being withdrawn for a spell in Queensland.  He was going with them.  'I will go south with mixed feelings.  I don't think I really want to go - but if I got another job here it would be a seat warming one.'  The thought of possible leave was a plus;  his mother had been having a very hard time with his father's illness and his wife was three months pregnant.


**********


The 6th Division went to the Atherton Tableland behind Cairns.  Six months later the brigade got leave and Jock was able to go to Sydney to see his ailing father, his wife and his baby daughter, Nerida, born on July 9th, 1943.  Her presence, which might have brought harmony to a seesawing marriage ('even on brief leaves, on the qui vive  to avoid bickering'), failed to do so.  Jock was chafing at inaction with the 6th Division and kept anger deeply coiled within;  he was withdrawn, unhappy and behaved badly.  Not long after Nerida's birth there was talk of divorce.  Though this row subsided, it was acknowledgment of a misalliance foreshadowed years before.  He wrote:  'despite Neri I doubt if we will ever live together after the war.'

The domestic upheaval went along as a sour note behind what promised to be a sour six weeks at the First Army Junior Staff School in Brisbane:  'it has all the characteristics of a medieval monastery except that there is less freedom.'  He then proceeded to display the most abrasive aspects of his personality - 'forceful and strong, destructively critical mind, intolerant, unco-operative and tactless, during the course this officer was most offensive and overbearing' announced his report at the end of it, and added 'has no sense of discipline - not recommended for any staff appointment.'

He was outwardly amused - had all his friends sign the report.  His inner assessment of the course was that it wasn't all loss, especially the bit that said he would not be recommended for a staff appointment.  He thought he had learnt a great deal in his own way, but accurately predicted failure.  He thought the instructors had been malicious in their assessment.  But he had lashed out, criticised them, was bored with the course (spent as much time as he could wangle with two American Army medical friends in Brisbane) and was afraid he might be left behind if his unit went north.  He heard it had begun to embark for New Guinea to go into the battle for Finschafen but had been called back by Blamey at the last minute.  It was an irony that Jock was sent north briefly 'for the good of my soul' and became embroiled in the mopping up at Finschafen while the unit was left on the Atherton tableland.  He did not leave, however, before the G.O.C.  "Jackie" Stevens tore 'several strips' off him as a result of the report on his course.  He listened to Jock's criticisms of the school but was adamant that the report was the worst he had ever seen, although he terminated the interview by wishing him 'Good luck!'

Really, the sort of behaviour Jock displayed at the school was repeated many times in a more light-hearted way whenever he was confined to an inactive role - when in hospital for instance.  Twice he had been hospitalised.  On the first occasion he amused himself by stealing the distinctive black shoulder "pips" of the padre in the ward, going Absent Without Leave with various young officers of the same mind and buying wine, which was restricted, ('for the Communion you know') and then settling down with wine and food behind the railway station to harangue the troops as they passed through on the trains.  This probably did nothing to improve his health but it allayed frustration.  He was A.W.L. the second time for more personal reasons but was constantly shocking the nursing sisters and disconcerting his ward companions.  'Living beside you is like being in the wakewash of the Queen Mary' said the young man in the next bed (the Queen Mary was a large passenger ship which had been converted to troop-carrying).

After talking with Stevens he was sent to New Guinea.  The Japanese-held Lae had fallen to the Allies and Finschafen was going the same way.  Jock's liaison duties took him into thick action - his dairy is almost unreadable.  He returned to Australia on November 19th and was appointed to become Second-in Command of A Company in the 2/2 Battalion, 6th Division.  They were tough.  Their nickname was "Crime marches on".  This was precisely what he had been angling for all along.  But it was not the 'into action against the enemy' excitement he had hoped for.  He learnt plenty about the practical side of living with and commanding a fighting unit - although it was in a resting and training mode.  The 6th Division had been devastated by casualties and was now augmented by militiamen who needed the training.  The only fighting Jock saw then was entirely internecine.  Twice, while they waited on the Atherton Tableland behind Cairns to be called back to New Guinea or further afield, he commanded the company.  The first time was through the sickness of the Commander;  the second came about purely as a result of his ability to control difficult men.

A Company was certainly difficult, but Jock knew their sort.  He had grown up with them.  He was tough but he had a humanity underlying discipline which gave those he commanded absolute faith in his fairness.  While he understood and respected the need for discipline - and loved tradition - he could disregard both when he felt the need.  And he was still in tune with those anti-authoritarian instincts which were a strong element in the character of the A.I.F. - 'touchy, individualistic modern crusaders who also have all the Australian insularity & hatred of anybody who is different', as he described them himself.

"Crime marches on" brought some lighter incidents before Jock.  One of them concerned a young man brought up on a charge for painting on tent flaps.  Frustrated in his artistic talent, he had found so much canvas irresistible and decided to make use of it.  Jock took a look, decided the crime showed some talent and let him off.  This was Clifton Pugh.  Cliff was delighted to be let off, but 'I was frightened then - he was my commanding officer and he was very tough.  I was surprised when he rang me up in Melbourne seventeen years later.'

Jock engaged himself in enjoyment of army life and the solace of a love affair with an army nurse.  His frustrations and domestic difficulties were pushed aside by the exhilarating idea of going into action with his unit.  But there were ominous straws blowing from higher up the ranks.  Despite having said that Jock was 'a born leader' the Brigadier was uneasy and declared 'it's a pity he ever came into the show.'  No matter how they might appreciate Jock's talents, the majority of senior officers, and some junior ones, understandably could not encompass the image of a one-armed man roaring into battle doing things with guns and grenades.  He was super-fit.  He would have been able to out-shoot most of them; he had used guns constantly in extremely difficult circumstances over fifteen years, and could and did pull grenade pins out with his teeth.  A pistol, the weapon of officers, would have been no problem to him.  It is true, at reloading, which he did with the gun poked between his knees or against any other possible surface, he may have been a little slower than others, but he would have been quick with judgement and swift decision.  Professor Brian Lofts, a lecturer in Jock's Department at London University in the '50's, declared his larger than life recollections of Jock included the image 'of a one-armed man rushing onto the lawn at Bart's waving a shotgun and shooting an escaped experimental bird out of a high tree, with a shot that would have been difficult to match by someone not thus handicapped.'  It is probable that Jock's behaviour, whenever he was not involved in any serious action, reinforced the officers' prejudices:  his maverick activities, the keeping of strange pets ( he had a baby wallaby called Gremlin and a glider possum) and social pranks verging on showmanship, masked the real sense of responsibility he showed towards the men under his control and his involvement with the serious work of training.

There was another thorn in some egos - his comparatively easy access to the ear of the Commander in Chief, General Blamey - so easy that he had dined with him and Lady Blamey in Melbourne while on leave.  Though not discussed, it was obviously well-known among senior officers, as well as the fact that he was involved in giving advice on the Reserve in which the General had a great interest.  'I feel no compunction about using Tom tho' - I am not trying to get promotion.  That will come - but first I want to get some soldiering.'  It may have worked against him.  He was quietly, and deviously, extracted from the Company as the Division prepared to embark.  He was to leave for New Guinea, but was furiously stuck with Headquarters.  There is no evidence that Blamey did anything to keep Jock in the fighting unit - when it came to the crunch he certainly did not save him from being plucked out of it.  It was General Stevens who used him in an active role behind enemy lines.

Some time before this Jock had shown a fairly objective attitude to the C. in C., much as he liked him.  The air of scandal that encompassed General Gordon Bennett and the virtual extinction of his army career after his escape from Malaya had interested Jock:  'Why was he, one of our most capable commanders, & at one stage the only one who had fought, & beaten the Jap, buried away in an arm-chair command?'  He knew Blamey was responsible and thought that Bennett 'can make it extremely embarrassing for TAB [Blamey] & Curtin [the Prime Minister] if he so chooses.  It all adds up to the conclusion that TAB would be guilty of gross maladministration & dangerous manipulation of competent senior officers ... except  that, unlike most C. in C's he had an ample stock of tough, capable men [senior officers].'


**********


Townsville 1944
It was October - his career had caught up with our meeting, and he was enthralling me with the telling of all this experience and adventure:  the bravura of the wild streak was powerfully attractive.  Indeed he was altogether powerfully attractive;  touchingly tender in moments of intimacy and in his response to the beauty of scenes around us, an aspect of his personality that then and ever after was crucial to our partnership.  We were both slipping into uncontrollably deep feeling and yet for quite different reasons also clutching at a strand of caution.  We had no notion when we might meet again.

At this moment New Guinea was the only future.  He was overwhelmingly involved with his part in that future - and the lure of action.  Only two months before he had fumed into his diary:  'Jesus, what a waste of one's life!  ...  How long will this silly negative existence continue?'  But the promise of action had swung his feeling to positive and the depth of it can be gauged from his remark:  'I would sooner command A Company of the 2/2 Australian Infantry Battalion than do almost anything I know.'  It was an emotional involvement with the fighting units of the A.I.F. which I did not really comprehend at the time.  I had been listening to his description of the Kokoda Trail, the cruel track over the Owen Stanley Mountain Range where the Australians had forced the Japanese back over the top.  Before the trail was cold he climbed alone every foot of the way to see for himself the appalling conditions through which they fought.  I listened - and wondered at such apparent masochism.  Only later did the implication of his involvement become clear:  it caused him to refuse twice to go to higher rank in Intelligence, and to refuse to go into a Commando Unit with his old friend Tom Harrisson, who turned up in Australia and was forming a force to drop into the jungles of Borneo.  Afterwards he said, 'had I known I was to be pulled out of A Company, nothing would have stopped me from going with that madman, Harrisson.'  The other important implication was that so far he had lost three years of concentrated academic work.  Not being a scientist, I was only dimly aware of the consequences but discovered later how few people who made a name for themselves in the scientific field spent time away from it during the war.  But any regrets he may have had were whisked away with the promise of action.

Of course there was also that other element - his one arm must prove stronger than two.  Ignoring this because it was easy to ignore, and thinking uneasily about fighting and dying, I asked if he were afraid.  'No - I can honestly say no.  But there's something I am  afraid of if I think about it - losing my right arm.'


**********


Aitape 1945:  he was back again after nine years.  It was an almost exact anniversary - January.  'The rear elements of U.S. 43 Div. are just moving out along with other US installations.  The whole place looks like a brothel.'  There was not much left of charming little Aitape.  And Wally Hook was dead - killed by treachery.  But there was no time for Jock to mourn the past.  On January 4th, a few days after he arrived, a directive was sent out from Major General Stevens, Commander of Sixth Division:  'I would like Capt. MARSHALL, 2/2 Aust Inf Bn, to undertake a deep patrol to the South to gain information concerning the enemy in that area...'.

Significant action at last! - his experience with men, both white and black, and his knowledge of the country would be put to real use.  Apart from one lieutenant named in the directive, Jock was able to select eight men from A Company volunteers.  Each was a marksman.  Within the constraints put upon him by an order to avoid trouble, except in defence of the patrol, he had wide powers of initiative in gathering information.

The patrol was named "Jockforce".  On January 8th they left to cross the Torricelli Mountains into the huge Sepik Valley to feel for the Japanese flanks, get as much information about the enemy as possible and search for possible airstrip sites.  Jock picked a good team of men he knew, and they were well-equipped - as much as any Australian soldiers were in that Wewak war.  As they toiled behind the Papuan carriers over the range he found it was a journey into past sensations:  the smells, the sprawling D'Alberti's creeper over the streams and the squelching mud of the slopes.  He was determined to keep a line of reliable carriers because 'a pack takes about 90% off a man's efficiency & alertness - he is prone to put his head down on the track & not care a damn on the hills.'  His own previous experience, and that of the invaluable Warrant Officer Edwards, was extremely useful in the tricky business of selecting men from villages.  The danger of a Japanese nurtured Fifth Column could not be ignored.

Six days out Jock became extremely ill with dysentery.  He had instituted rigid rules about not drinking from creeks and certainly had not done so himself.  But there were flies and native fruits.  And the Japanese, he learnt later, were riddled with both baciliary and amoebic dysentery.  They had spread it everywhere they went.  He was in a nightmare of fever and bloody exudation for two days.

The plane with supplies came in en route to a bombing mission.  They brought it in with radio and an aldis lamp, got the vital information away and asked for supplies at Masalanga.  Then, although Jock was very sick, they bolted - 'it was obvious that every Jap this side of the black stump would realise something odd was happening at Tau.  The 4-5000 yds to this hide-out was one of the most harrowing experiences I've ever had, but it was necessary.  Every footstep was a struggle.'  He sent a spy to Apos and got a lot of information.  Although still weak and dysenteric, he knew they must move the next day - and keep moving, never retracing their steps.  The nearest Japanese concentrations were much less than a day away, hard going, but - 'we know how swiftly the bastards travel.  The lads are fit and in great heart.'  Three of the lads became unfit shortly afterwards - dysentery again.  They kept going uncomplainingly as Jock had done himself.  The plane drop was due - food and mail.

They turned south.  The next village was polite but not effusive and Jock knew there had been trouble there before - 'only a few moons ago.'  He was wary but absorbed the atmosphere:  'dusk, with all the insect noises crowding in, the snatches of boy talk, the low hum of our lads' voices & the curved yellow moon caught between oveca, pawpaw & coconut palm.  And bright stars gleaming in a blueblack sky ... All night the Wogia drums have been going - "Calling up reserves?" someone suggested humorously.  I gave the lads a yang-talk last night ... on today's technique.  It will be conciliatory to the nth degree unless they get tough, yell and throw spears.'  Conciliation worked.  The villagers refused to trade but let them pass.  It was a complex situation.  They also came across some Indian soldiers, prisoners of the Japanese since Malaya, now fleeing their captors who had been driving them relentlessly on a starvation diet until they were ill with Beri Beri.  Jock dosed them with his meagre supply of Vitamin B1 and sought what help he could.  Later - 'The Beaufort boys came at 1200 hrs & dropped 4 [carrier] pigeons (& food) & medical supplies for Indians.'

After three weeks he had gathered much of the vital information requested by Division, but they were still searching for a suitable site for an emergency landing strip.  He heard rumours of Japanese movement to the east of them and decided to investigate.  With the next pigeon post he sent back that information.  'It's inspiring the way Div. are leaving me alone.  I feel so happy I could stamp on the bloody drum - & all the lads likewise.'  So in a mood of excited expectation they set off to cross the flood-swollen Bongo River.  There was some hilarity in a hamlet perched above the rushing brown waters.  One of the men who had false teeth took them out - 'We nearly lost half our carrier line!' said Jock.  'Wild & typical people - they started apprehensively & then cackled delightedly.'

After crossing the river with a lot of effort and some drama - two soldiers and several Papuans could not swim - they had news of Japanese nearby.  There were ten of them in a twin hamlet in the area and strong rumours of "plenty-plenty 'e stop" to the south.  The rumours were probably correct - 'these 10 blokes wouldn't be out so far on a limb by themselves.'  He mused on the potential for disaster if the Japanese were moving a larger force across the lines of the Australian Intelligence Bureau who were trying to operate in the area.  'The whole set-up gives me excellent reasons for observing the Japs at close quarters (& if it appears necessary) to vary, as commander in the field, my op instruction re no fighting unless in self defence.'  He also heard that there were three large flat patches of kunai grass between them and the hamlets, which might well be what were needed for an air strip.  The elastic native term 'long-way lik lik', meaning close, kept stretching, though Jock discovered that the kunai patches existed, and were precisely what Division was looking for.  This was a valuable discovery.

Finally they crept up, in the half light of moon and dawn, to the back of the village which straddled a small ridge.  They found themselves in a sago swamp.  This country was on the fringe of the vast Sepik River swamps.  All their boots were off now - just socks.  During the muddy approach Jock discovered that socked feet made less noise because mud didn't squelch between toes.  He went forward with a guide and found that most of the houses were forlorn and empty but one long one was new and obviously used.  The guide crept forward and signalled that he saw Japanese soldiers moving around.

And so it began - a short sharp action of 'grenades & rifle & DSMG fire into the long hut.'  One Japanese was killed, others obviously wounded judging from the state of the hut, but there was no attempt by the Japanese to do other than escape and Jock was unable to follow up this action - 'a single casualty would obviously make the attack, in view of JES's instructions, inexcusable.'  However, the element of surprise and the fact that the Japanese would have no idea of the numbers involved had almost certainly removed an immediate threat.  Back at their previous base Jock sent off two pigeons bearing a duplicated brief report of the fight and its result.  'Our sole casualty was a chip from one of my front teeth - an obstinate grenade pin.'

The most important thing after this was tea.  Then considerations of returning.  With the exception of the Lieutenant 'nobody wants to go back.'  But Jock knew they would be ordered to return;  there was action elsewhere.  And so it was.  The plane was very late and the drop of supplies inadequate, but they were ordered to come out.  It was many days march and they were seriously short of food.  Food was scarce in the villages too.  Jock worried about their faithful and reliable carriers.  But there were more important things to worry about.

They had been ordered to Musendai and as they approached he received a note from a platoon commander which presaged trouble:  he was withdrawing because his spies informed him there were at least 70 Japanese very close indeed.  Jock sent his cargo line ahead with the platoon, but "Jockforce" went to investigate the rumours.  They found them accurate - there were at least 100 of the enemy judging by signs at their last camp, only just evacuated.  Now satisfied by personal investigation he sent off the information by pigeon.  A little later they heard the sound of fighting, and later still as they moved on, got messages that the Japanese were in strength in the area.  They then came upon and became embroiled in a fight which had begun by the River Nanu when a company of Piper troops had been ambushed there.  Jock put his small force at the disposal of the Company Commander.  Four men had been hit badly, one seriously wounded.  "Jockforce" had a fierce and busy time but suffered no casualties themselves.  Jock then had to move on.  He organised to get the wounded out.

One Japanese prisoner was sent along as well.  'An interesting note on the A.I.F. infanteer - which I've commented on previously.  Both Piper troops & ours would have murdered the Jap prisoner out of hand had they got the chance - even though they've been TOLD, & TOLD again, how vital they are for ops - that this bloke would be able to say, e.g., whether his party were just wandering & starved - or moving up for an attack on SAMUSAI - here ... For their mad unreasoning & quite bestial attitude they gave the excuse (1)  Cobbers killed  (2)  They'd do the same to us!  Primitive "Kanaka" reasoning of course, of the worst kind.  They strongly disapproved when I gave the wretched skinny creature a cigarette!  And the toughest & best of the wounded blokes deliberately spat on the stumbling Jap as his stretcher passed [him] - our blokes were all vastly amused & approving.'  Jock's admiration for the troops stopped a long way short of glorification.

Back in Aitape Major General Stevens congratulated Jock and all the men - 'Everybody has been most cordial & complimentary.'  But soon Jock was evacuated to hospital with positive tests for amoebic dysentery.  Hardly surprised, he suffered the long treatment philosophically.  He wrote a lot:  acerbic, amused or sad comments on the fighting in which his previous company were involved, the deaths of men he knew, the general conduct of the action, the loss of planes and crew, the Americans' fear of jungle, his thoughts on power politics in and out of the army, inefficiency and gossip.  Still in hospital, on May 8th, he recorded the lack of excitement at the end of the war in Europe.  Out of hospital he was in action of another sort - putting down a riot in the Detention Barracks.  Then, on July 15th, he was sent away at forty eight hours notice to report to Z Special in Brisbane.  But the war with Japan came to an abrupt end with the bombing of Hiroshima.  He immediately applied for discharge.

CHAPTER NINE
Interlude
Four years had passed.  He was alive, his right arm intact.  He had his degree.  In retrospect he talked of that time as enjoyable and satisfying.  It did finally, with "Jockforce", satisfy the call to the heroic myth, although that potent symbol had cost him too much time-marking.  But he considered he had learnt from it.  At one time, in the elation of risk-taking, it caused him to set out his spiritual views.

It was the night before "Jockforce" took off.  'It is night & I am in my tent on the beach at Aitape ...'  began a pile of 58 pages which grew beside him under the lamp, while the rest of the men slept in the translucent dark.  Just as he had described the tropic coast one night nine years ago, there was a full moon glittering the black sea.  He headed it Testament of Doubt, which spells out his agnosticism.  He had thought about this philosophy ever since his father pointed the way.  His library attested his interest.  He was emphatic he was not an atheist '& I do not deny the existence of "God" or gods.  But as a rational being I require evidence & proof of "His" or their existence.  As a scientist "faith" has no place in my philosophy ... I frankly don't know how the Universe came into being (if it is necessary that it came into being) & neither, apparently does anybody else at the present stage of human knowledge.'

The Bible was a fascination.  'To me the Bible is a stupendously interesting collection of narratives which, in the form of verse, legends, drama, history, sermons and letters comprise the greatest single collection of literature ever got together.  But nobody but an imbecile, it seems to me, would claim for it verbal infallibility.  The books of the Bible differ from each other as much as do the Decameron & the London Times.'  He pointed up the different faces of God displayed by the various authors - 'And what of that extraordinary old Cynic Ecclesiastes, agnostic & sinner, whose wisdom, revealed by his sayings, is as authentic today as it was a couple of hundred years before Christ was born.  One of the many pearls, I remember, is:  "Wisdom is better than might, better than weapons of war, yet (?) wisdom is despised." '

He wrote on until the moon was down and the sky lightening.  In the circumstances of war he found it more impossible than ever to believe that there was a benevolent deity watching over the affairs of people.  His writing was indeed a testament of doubt rather than an affirmation of any particular belief.  But he did believe (though denying his deity) that Christ existed '& was one of the greatest & most courageous individuals who ever lived.  I cannot accept the creed, & I do not believe the bible to be the word of "God" in whom I also do not believe.  I see no reason to believe that Jesus Christ was sinless.  I do believe however, that many professing Christians of my acquaintance are among the most unchristlike bastards I know.'

Five weeks later he returned to claim the writing of that night.  He saw no divine hand in the fact, any more than he saw it in the death and injury of the enemy.  Life was a one-off gift to make of it what one would, and take the consequences.  He passionately wanted to make his life significant, but believed the tools were within himself.  His mention of Ecclesiastes' wisdom is an echo of his thoughts on war back in 1939, when he was densely annotating Aldous Huxley's Ends and Means (commenting in the margins of his books was a revealing habit).  He scored heavily a passage in which Huxley remarked - in 1938 - that Buddhism forbade even laymen to be involved in manufacturing or selling arms, making poisons or intoxicants, soldiering or slaughtering animals.  He was not a Buddhist so his determination to fight for his country was no paradox.  Intellectually he was totally against war, but when it became an actuality, the forces of his history, emotion and personality were overwhelming.

His obligatory involvement with the religious rituals of St Paul's College gave him great respect and affection for Canon Garnsey and for the literature of the Bible, but did not change his own philosophy at all.  It did give him an ability to surprise many years later.  Jock and some zoologists from the Department at Monash University were on their way to Hattah Lakes on the River Murray.  Fraser Hercus had arranged that they should stop for sustenance at his mother's house in Bendigo.  A delicious meal was brought to the table.  'It was a real old-world atmosphere - starched linen and polished silver.  Mrs Hercus suggested Professor Marshall might like to say grace.'  Nobody else expected Jock would do any such thing, but he rose, and with no hesitation solemnly intoned - 'Benedictus Benedicat per Jesum Christum Dominum Nostrum.'  Mrs Hercus found it a rather strange grace and the zoologists admitted to coming close to sliding under the table in shock.

Before his first child was born he even considered having it baptised by Arthur Garnsey at Pauls but decided to eschew such sentimentality.  'When he grows up he can get confirmed, or embrace Popery, or join the Seventh Day Adventists - or remain a healthy honest agnostic - or do anything he likes - but at the moment I don't feel like foisting on him anything in which he hasn't a chance of an opinion.'  He was showing his prejudice for males and agnosticism, but his tolerance may have been real.  His children did not test him.  Many years later at Monash University he clearly showed tolerance.  Some members of the Rationalist Association were trying to prevent the Jesuits from holding mass on campus.  Father O'Kelly, then a Zoology student involved in the discussion, remembers Jock turning to their representative and saying:  'You stand for free thought.  The Jesuits have a perfect right to hold mass as you do to hold your views.'  The editor of The Rationalist  magazine, Bill Cook, was a friend and had published "Testament of Doubt" in 1945.

The word 'agnostic' often carries a connotation of barren practicality, denying mystery and wonder - though its true meaning leaves mystery always lying beyond known phenomena.  Jock found the world wondrous, as his writing showed.  He did not deny mystery, only 'faith' in it - always conscious of the cloak of 'science' about him and wary of expressing intuition except in private moments.  At home he had the endearing habit of descending into joking superstition with "Little Grey Men" who had strange powers for protection, or "Hughie", the bushmen's god who sat on his left shoulder invoking good luck.


**********


Sydney 1945
At the end of the year Jock handed me the manuscript written on the beach at Aitape.  The content did not surprise me though the fact that he had sat up all night writing it did.  When I knew him better I would not have been surprised.  He would not have wanted to die without making clear his thoughts on death.  His knowledge of the Bible was unexpected, but again I found his library full of interesting religious writing and he often consulted one of his favourites, The Natural History of the Bible.  We had talked of agnostic philosophy in Townsville and found some parallels in our early experiences of it.  My father, Reginald Graham, a very quiet rebel from his conventional old pioneer family in Melbourne, had, when I was about ten, subtly engineered my removal from a Methodist Sunday School where we three children were sent, probably more for peace than Protestant instruction.  My questions concerning the teaching had been answered with a sceptical flavour.  He called himself an atheist but he was probably nearer to agnostic, that much less rigid word coined by the great scientist T.H. Huxley.  My mother had been brought up in a strictly Anglican household in an overwhelmingly Catholic country, Belgium, but now was seduced by agnosticism and more than a passing interest in some Eastern religions.  There was plenty to talk about.

Talk is one of my abiding memories of the large, comfortable house on the Northern side of Sydney overlooking a small park, a railway line and glimpses of the two rivers that flow into the Harbour.  My parents were good at talk, loved it and so did many of their guests.  Father was a wool-buyer but much more in character as a frustrated writer.  He spun short stories but didn't send them to publishers.  Predictably he enjoyed Norman Lindsay's blasts at icons of every religious and other persuasion and Norman's brother Percy used to visit us and was responsible for my going to Art School.  Father had been wounded on Gallipoli and was quite often ill with intestinal problems.  Our friend and doctor, Eric Bridges, an amusing warm-hearted man interested in writers and writing, came often to tend Father, or just to eat and talk in the large room filled with Belgian antiques and colourful rugs.  He also brought many of his friends, one of whom was Beatrice Davis who became the reader for Angus and Robertson, the Sydney publishers, and later Eric's wife.  Being the eldest by four years I had more access to these scenes as I matured than my sister and my brother, who later called it 'masterly inactivity'.  In the first eight years of my life there had been plenty of activity in moving house and travelling - long sea voyages and foreign experiences in Belgium and England.  There was a lot of money then.  But suddenly such luxurious activities stopped as the depressive thirties took over.  Talk and books, however, were cheap.

Our mother (Muriel Lawrence, but known as Bibi), a warm and sensuously attractive brunette, educated in Belgium, England and the Sorbonne University in Paris, had coped with all this;  and an often invalid husband, the raising of three children in a strange land, and now a lover for her eldest daughter unlike anyone she had imagined (she had a streak of conservative ambition for her children, though she acknowledged a desire for some fire).  And he was married - and he had a child.  Neither parent thought this was acceptable eligibility but knew that the only decision they had to make was their attitude.  For parents of that thirties and forties era living in a conventional suburb of Sydney they were unusual;  they were, for their own private or vicarious reasons, not unsympathetic to what was fashionably called "free love".  They were devotees of Julian and Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells, Evelyn Waugh, Conrad, Rebecca West, Frazer of The Golden Bough etc., etc. - I remember a condescending remark of Jock's made to me which ruffled my feathers:  'If you'd actually read all the books in this library you'd be quite well educated.'  When he came to the house, after the decision for divorce was irrevocable, he found he did not have to work very hard to find an atmosphere of ease.

That atmosphere in which I grew up may have been one of the reasons Jock and I found ourselves so in tune.  My parents, because of an old friendship, first landed as strangers on Sydney Harbour's northern shore rather than its southern, and eventually bought a house there before going off to Europe again.  There was then no large Harbour bridge, and the water divided the north from the rich and poor, Bohemian and wicked, grand and slumish heart of the city on the south side.  I think they were not unhappy with the choice but felt themselves out of kilter with the solidly suburban families around them.  School was totally conventional for me and my sister but at home we absorbed some of their feeling of difference, though we had friends among our contempories.  When I went to art school, housed among other disciplines in the great sandstone complex of buildings in Darlinghurst which used to be the main gaol for Sydney, I identified longingly with the few pockets of Bohemian life there.  In the classroom in 1937, the acanthus leaf, heroic plaster caste and life drawing reigned supreme - but the models, who also painted, educated us in other ways.  There was the witch Rosalie Norton - perhaps we didn't discern black magic but she was certainly different with her long eye teeth and long cloak;  and Wolf Cardamalas whose life mission, at the time, was to gleefully and nakedly shock anyone, but particularly young women straight out of school (and our schools were no education for people like Wolf).  Then I was chosen to go to the "Black and White Club" among the sophisticated cartoonists and others who gathered to draw from the model.  I climbed the stairs in the old building in George Street the first time, terrified, but ambiteous to be part of it.  I went often but never did become really part of it.  I was a fringe dweller in Bohemia, but I learnt the value of eccentricity and the creativity sparked by another way of seeing.  So when Jock appeared so precipitously some years later he was the different other half - the embodiment of so much I loved but could not fully enter into myself.  We were a good jig-saw, though at the time he wrote 'she can be a little blue and gold spitfire but WE get along alright.'


**********


Demobilization from the Army, however, found Jock bombarded with practical and emotional difficulties.  His father was dying, his mother stressed, his disintegrated marriage was on the way to the courts and, however civilized both parties tried to be, there was nothing easy about it.  'Almost everyone will blame me as the bastard who caused it' he predicted with reasonable accuracy 'which is only half true and will do me no good professionally.'  For everybody's sake he was anxious that the reason for it should be seen for what it was - two people temperamentally misfitted for the intimacy of marriage together.  For that reason, and above all for professional concerns, he was at pains to keep his association with me from public knowledge, which added to the strain he felt.  He knew it was unfair to Joy, but dare not tell her.  She was seeing about a divorce.  Because he was leaving the country, the only option at that time was for him to leave her and for her to move in the matter.  'Whatever happens I shall appear in a poor light.'  The war had made it easy to keep their failure entirely private apart from their families.  Leaving her, he would be seen to be deserting a very charming wife;  if she left him 'there must have been something bloody wrong with me!  But neither of us, in the most friendly discussions possible, can see any other way out of it.'

Divorce is now so commonly accepted it is difficult to cast a line back over more than forty years and drag in the images it then evoked.  Not that it was rare.  But, apart from the more bohemian fraction of society, there was no sense of style about it - not in England or the lands she had socially imprinted.  The process was lengthy, difficult, often appearing to be tinged with, if not actually dyed in scandal, no matter what the reasons for it.  Despite royal precedent in England the court set an example of disapprobation and ostracism which still had the power to set the mores of the time.  Jock knew that working as a journalist the divorce would do no more than give an interesting flavour to his reputation, but to get into an Oxford college in order to read for his Doctorate of Philosophy he must not advertise the event or allow scandal to be blown into the simple truth.  It was almost as socially undesirable in the medieval universities as in royal haunts and suburban drawing rooms and could be a reason, if fault were found and publicised, for 'sending a person down' (a euphemism for dismissal from the University).

Apart from the divorce, he had two major concerns:  to get into an Oxford college - which was necessary in order to read for a degree because it was the colleges, not the university, who dealt with such matters;  and to obtain a grant to make it possible to work academically without having to seek jobs on the side.  On December 26th he had word that he had been accepted by Oxford both in candidature for a Doctorate in Philosophy in the Department of Zoology and by Saint Catherine's Society;  an alternative for overseas students who could not get into a college.  He was delighted and relieved.


**********


Meanwhile money was needed for these matters, domestic and professional.  For the months between demobilisation and being allocated a passage on a ship for England, he went back to journalism as special writer for the Daily Mirror, a Sydney evening paper.  He also decided to spin some more money by writing a historical sketch of the Mosman cove he knew so well, and the careening of whaling ships there in the early days of the colony.  While away in Melbourne, Rex Rienits, editor of the special pages and a friend, took the manuscript with him for comment at Jock's request.  Rex sent it back with some notes - 'they're all minor points, which means that I've nothing to offer in the way of major criticism.'  - but he was not happy with Jock's sweeping slam at the worthy burghers of Mosman.  'I know how you feel about them, and I've said exactly the same myself many's the time, but it does strike a sour note;  like a Stravinsky discord worked surreptitiously into a Mozart symphony.'  Rex would not have been intending to liken the slim manuscript - which Jock later refused to publish because he thought it not up to standard - to a work by Mozart, but it was an interesting metaphor for something he did quite often.

Rex also read The Black Musketeers  for the first time - and was appalled to find Jock was writing infinitely better ten years ago than he was now.  'It's really first class writing, Jock - and I mean this in all sincerity - smooth, graphic, interesting, and strongly reflecting yourself;  a younger, less cynical (though equally sardonic) yourself that seems to have got lost by the wayside.  You've become tainted with the rottenness of professional journalism since those days;  you've developed a Pearlian slickness and superficiality and surface smartness that is very clever and quite worthless;  and you've lost something that I (knowing you only from your Daily Telegraph days) only dimly suspected you had.  "Black Musketeers" was an eye-opener to me, for though it taught me a great deal about the natives of the New Hebrides, it taught me a hell of a lot more about its author.  You had something back in '35;  I believe you've got it still - in fact there are passages in "Whalers' Cove" which convince me this is so.'

Those two books on the New Hebrides and New Guinea, published by Heinemann in London, did well in the competitive world of literary publishing and criticism.  But Rex was right.  Jock had now lost the impetus of that graphic elegance through years of war diaries and journalism.  He was tired and troubled.  Whalers' Cove  was an exercise without inspiration written to raise money - which he recognised and discarded it.  During the war he commented on his own writing.  'My most wistful ambition, & one that I shall never realise, is to develop a Voltairean satire rather than the robust pungency that I at present strike with.'

He had undoubtedly struck with 'robust pungency' in Australia Limited.  It was interesting that such a pithy analysis of the least attractive of our national characteristics went into five editions in the middle of a war.  No section of society escaped his critical search-light.  Not even the war effort, and even less the politicians who dictated the effort.  The universities were not spared:  'our universities are not universities but diploma factories.'  And the student 'has little time for broad-scale integrated knowledge, is scarcely aware that it exists ... Sydney university turns out competent tradesmen (lawyers, chemists, pharmacists, surgeons, vets) but its output of intellectually equipped citizens is practically nil.'  In New Guinea he found one of the senior officers had read the book and agreed with most of it but was annoyed that he agreed because, he told Jock, 'it's violent style infuriated him.'

But a very different book was drafted out in the hiatus between the Army and a ship:  Darwin and Huxley in Australia.  It would have pleased Rienits but was unhappily not published until after both he and Jock had died.  'Australia lost not only a distinguished zoologist but a writer of rare charm' wrote the reviewer of The Times Literary Supplement.  But this subject, unlike the Mosman one, was close to Jock's heart and his work.  The human aspects of the two great men of science, who came to Australia in the thirties and forties of the last century had intrigued him for years.  He was especially interested in Thomas Henry Huxley's visit, partly because it was so little known that he had such intimate associations with this country and partly because of Huxley's involvement with a piece of tragic Australian history - the Kennedy expedition to Cape York.  Huxley did not go all the way with Kennedy which meant he survived to do greater things.


**********


Now, however, Jock was back again in the staccato world of fast words and deadlines.  Special writers were supposed to deliver a modicum of culture, so there was a modicum of interest too.  But he was aching to be given that berth on a ship which would get him away to the work he really wanted to do. In the meantime, there was some lightness.  In November 1945 he went to a dinner given by the delightful Senor Manuelo Eduardo Hubner, Charge d'Affaires for Chile, who had read Australia Limited and sought him out.  'Dobell was there.  He is either one of the dumbest men I [ever] met or he deliberately cloaks a devastating mentality with a most successful pose.  Like many great scientists he doesn't reflect his talent socially tho' he plays the party game prettily enough - with the old women mostly.  Drysdale there too - a satisfactory bloke, worth talking to.  ...  And Ure-Smith;  & a lot of hangers on, typical camp-followers of Art.'

Manuelo Hubner became a friend and after Jock left for England they corresponded until Manuelo was recalled to Chile and there was an impenetrable silence.  Drysdale, the 'satisfactory bloke' became a life-long friend.

Finally he was given a berth on a ship.  It was July when the call came.  A few days earlier, on July 8th, his father died.  Robert had asked the medicals what his chances were and they were objective about it.  'So was he' said Jock 'I feel very proud of my old man - he's actually joking, not "heroically", but naturally, about the thing.'  He was upset that his baby daughter Nerida's birthday was the day after the death and he was not able to see her.  He had become deeply attached to her.  'Nerida is back from the mountains & is more charming & beautiful than ever.'  He felt at this stage so torn by various aspects of his emotional life that it was sometimes difficult for us to look into the future.  But we knew we would:  'Tomorrow is exactly 18 months since I first saw her.  I wish we could be married.  It is perhaps not curious that I have lived 35 years through the most divers experiences before I decided I'd found the one woman I needed & wholly wanted to mate with.'  We were committed even though all seemed to be in flux.  At times I felt desperately inadequate - I was completely untried in almost all aspects of his present turmoil.  And we were about to part again.  It would be six months before there was another berth on a ship.

As the S.S. Empress Clarenden (a converted refrigeration ship) sailed west from Melbourne he wrote copiously in his diary.  Without taking into account the events of the past few years, some of it would read strangely from a man who had explored, loved, written about, struggled and argued to be allowed to fight for, during four years, this country he was leaving.  His mother took Robert's death well enough, and as she was letting half the house to people whom she liked, he was able to leave Sydney, 'not only without worry, but with profound relief.  I would devoutly thank God, if I believed he existed (or that anybody but myself was responsible for my getting out of Australia);  the sole wrenches I had were leaving Nerida behind ... & Jane ...  The sea is flattening, there is a watery sun,  & thank heaven we are past Leewin & headed N W W across the Indian Ocean - the end of Australia, my Australia! at last.  I feel as Darwin did as he passed over this same spot just 110 years ago - "I leave your shores without sorrow or regret." '

CHAPTER TEN
Dreaming Spires Revisited
It was early September 1946 when he landed in England - the end of summer.  He was installed at 128 Observatory Road, Oxford, in typical undergraduate digs, run by a kind motherly woman and her half-blind cobbler husband.  He had spent the first week after arrival with John Baker in Oxford and travelling to London to see old journalist friends who were working there - Len Richards, Clarrie McNulty, Eric Baume, the Lady Margaret Vane-Tempest Stewart (whom Jock addressed lovingly as Lady Flushbucket;  she was partial to champagne) - and people at the Royal Geographical Society.  Strangely - 'I see no great change in London & none at all in Oxford.  Lots of people are dead - Hinks, Goodenough, Balfour, Gander, Moy-Thomas, Haddon, etc., etc. & my mistresses are all married (nearly) with babies.  A lot can happen in eight years.  A good thing.  I've not looked at another woman since I left Sydney.  I am today recovering from a bad attack of malaria.  I am sick as hell.'

Malaria had been shadowing him since the New Hebrides and New Guinea.  It was a depressing fevered state.  A few days later the depression persisted.  'The investigation will be The seasonal variation in the gonads and genital tracts of vertebrates, with special reference to chemical changes ... I am now working in a desultory sort of way.  It will be a sweat getting up my biochemistry, but it is both essential and worthwhile.  I don't feel that there is anything in the thesis title, or in my present mood, which will lead to any outstanding discovery.'  As a person giving the impression of constant energy and confidence he could surprise occasionally with a black mood;  not often, but more than he ever showed superficially.  This time he was drawn out of it by some good news from the Linacre Professor of Zoology at Oxford, Alister Hardy.  Jock had met him several times,  and liked him more and more;  especially his insistence on keeping research always in touch with the actual field.  'He, like Baker, is not an out and out mechanist.'  Professor Hardy had succeeded in getting him into Merton College as a senior student:  the Linacre Chair of Zoology is tied to Merton as well as two of the English professorships (the combination interested Jock and continued to do so throughout his career).  He had hoped against all comment and advice from friends and officials that he might get into one of the old colleges in spite of post-war crowds.  To get into one of the very oldest and most charming was extraordinary good fortune.

Then there was bad news.  John Baker, himself divorced, while joking with Jock about it nevertheless solemnly warned him of College "stickiness" in the matter.  If newspaper clippings of divorce proceedings were sent to the proctors and it were found he was living with another woman he would assuredly be 'sent down'.  This coincided with a piece of journalistic ill-fortune.  The divorce hearing in Sydney was widely publicised and along with some damaging misinformation concerning money was picked up (an unlikely chance one would have thought) and published in the Oxford Mail.

Jock was infuriated.  He considered the whole thing ridiculous in 1946 after four years of war, but knew he had to take it seriously.  He had visions of his D. Phil. slipping away, the years of work withering and a journalistic jungle looming, simply to live:  'Sometimes I don't feel that Jane is worth risking the jungle of journalism for - but I know she is & inevitably I'll risk anything to give US a chance of success.'  In one respect he was worrying unnecessarily.  However painful it may have been there were other alternatives to living together in Oxford.  The divorce news, however, was a worry.  He decided to go and see the Warden of Merton College himself with the information about divorce, believing as usual that trouble would most likely be deflected by personal communication.  The Warden, a charming and civilised man saw no problem.

Then there was a brighter snippet - he was being paid in sterling to write for The Mirror.  And 'I am fit again, though very thin & haggard.'  While in London one day he heard a Rolls Royce come to a purring halt beside him and from the back emerged the vast bulk of Dr. Norman Haire, a medical practitioner and journalist who was flourishing in London as he had flourished in Sydney.  He was beaming complacently at his cleverness at having picked Jock out of the crowd, but immediately pitched into him for not looking after his health;  was he feeding himself, was he worried, was his sex life normal?  'He says I look ten years older than when he saw me in Sydney.  I told him I'd drink lots of milk, and go to bed a little earlier and take regular meals.'

In October a chill autumn was taking hold of war-weary England.  Yet he was content to be there.  Australia was not high in his estimation and went down even further.  He got a letter from the Department of Post War Reconstruction saying that his application for Post Graduate training overseas had been unsuccessful because they were not prepared to fund such training.  'Of this I have one comment only:  that at least I am independent, as usual.  My country has never done a damned thing for me in the past and in a way I'm glad that this occurred:  I shall have no feelings of "loyalty" to ever go back unless I want to - which I think is doubtful, except to see Nin and Neri.'  Here was a hint of real bitterness which perhaps reflected the years of fighting Army bureaucracy - very different from the criticism and comment out of love which had spawned Australia Limited.

On October 22nd he became a member of the University.  He enjoyed the ceremony in the Clarendon building.  He was matriculated in the traditional white bow tie, sub-fusc suit, dark socks and shoes, the half length gown of advanced students and "square" pressed to his chest.  They were each presented with a Memorandum on the Conduct and Discipline of Junior Members of the University.  'I note that I am not allowed any longer to have a drink in any pub or other place unless I am having a meal ... I am not allowed to keep an aeroplane within 20 miles of Oxford (this maddens me).  I'm not allowed to have a woman in my digs after 10 p.m. (fornication O.K. before 10?) & so on & so on.'  He loved it;  and more still the fact that he had been given a room of his own in the Department of Zoology.

The Department of Zoology was in the sprawling Victorian neo-Gothic building that housed the University Museum and the great hall where Charles Darwin's Origin of Species  was attacked with crusading fervour by Bishop Wilberforce.  Jock's room was one of the many brown caves filled with the paraphernalia of scientific work and an aroma of old wood, preserving fluids and tobacco.  One night he sat alone in the deserted Department waiting for a phone call.  It was a windless night, but inside he thought he understood the English preoccupation with ghosts, poltergeists and 'haunts' in old houses.  'The Department is a dusty old rambling atticy, creaky place, full of odd stairways & unexpected nooks.  As I sat near the telephone, in a dim circle of light, reading J.R.B. on argenine & thinking - creakings, soft paddings, bumpings & sometimes violent door-bangings intermittently arose.  Quite involuntarily (of course) I got a prickly feeling behind my ears:  & I was interested in this, because I felt no fear, only acute interest.  The breeze had either risen outside, or the doors left open (Sander's in particular I found on the way out) responded to the least amount of air pressure.'

He saw no evidence in favour of ghosts.  However, as he waited - about eighty yards from the Hall where Huxley and Hooker smote the anti-Darwinians in 1860, he built up a fantasy of a return of that long dead crowd, to the historic hall to renew the encounter which was surely the highlight of most of their Victorian lives.  'I thought of the shrieking females, tittering at the snarling Wilberforce's unctuous sallies, the stern side-whiskered Huxley, the volatile Robert Fitzroy stamping & waving his bible, the gentle, rational Kingsley;  Brodie, Lady Brewster & the others.  Do they ever come back to stamp and roar & titter & wave ghostly bits of lace as they did 86 years ago?  And what of the other people who have lived & worked in the department?  As I sat outside the door of the Linacre Professor of Zoology, I thought of the long line of illustrious Linacre Professors who had walked or shambled or strode or crept, each according to his fashion, past the telephone, long before telephones were invented.  Do the giants of past biology ever come back?'


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In October he met Dr Oleg Polunin, the botanist again.  It transpired Polunin had built a shack in the woods at the very back of a sizeable estate abutting Shotover Common.  He was not going to be in Oxford for two or three years so he offered it to Jock.  Though five miles out of Oxford, this was ideal.  It was a place where my presence, when I finally arrived, would not be advertised.  He moved into it on October 28th.  There was an indescribable amount of mess to clean up.  Ivan had a notable aversion to cleaning anything and over a considerable period a rubbish haul of almost explosive artistry had accumulated.  Jock decided to keep one souvenir of the haul - two bottles in which were preserved human foetuses three or four months old - 'A deterrent to boring guests' he said, arranging them strategically on a shelf near the door.

Meantime he was working hard in the laboratory and at other things.  On November 14th he accepted the leadership of the Oxford University Exploration Club's forthcoming summer vacation expedition to Jan Mayen the following year.  He had been interested in the wild, lonely island with its volcanic crater poking out of the Arctic Sea ever since he was on Spitzbergen in 1937 and Tollner told him of his adventures there during the Polar year of 1932.  For three weeks he had refused to go, knowing it would interfere with work on his Doctorate, but they had no one with Arctic experience, so finally he agreed if he could find a physiological investigation or two which could be included under his thesis title.  The problem of 'non-breeding' in the Arctic was one, and possibly Arctic migration.  'I hesitated because of Janey too - it is hardly fair to her ... I would take her with me as artist if we were legally married & if it weren't such a bloody place for storms:  it is notorious - quite unlike the inner fjord zone of Spitsbergen.  But Janey won't mind because she's reconciled to our separation later in the Antarctic & she'll understand that if I want to go its best that I do in the long run.'  Yes, I understood, but when it came to the time my decision was not entirely selfless - having by then enjoyed and suffered the worst winter England had experienced for more than a hundred years, I decided I would cause Jock no trouble in wanting to accompany him to either polar region - ever.  He still had a huge interest in exploration, or at least in doing his scientific work in the most inaccessible and uncomfortable places in the world.  He calculated that this expedition, small as it was, with Spitzbergen, his war service and doctorate, would put him in line for the post of chief scientist or perhaps leader on the next Antarctic expedition.  Mawson was interested in it but probably too old:  the Australian Government was asking the Royal Geographical Society what personnel were available in England because they had no adequate men at home.  'Good.'  said Jock.

November was setting the scene for that winter.  It was wild and wet.  Perhaps as an antidote he decided to write an article on Africa for the Sydney Daily Mirror.  He remembered an early film which triggered his ambition to explore wild places - 'I will write the story of David Livingstone, mentioning Stanley.  The film "With Stanley in Africa" which Don [his brother] paid for me to go to Kogarah to see when I was very little, no doubt influenced my later career.  I still remember vividly individual scenes - & I was not more than 11 or 12?'  To 'explore' was the operative verb for Jock.  Simply to travel without a specific purpose, no matter how arduously, did not interest him.  There was an element of personal challenge in all his exploits but even this was not enough.  He needed another element - geographical or scientific discovery.  He had soaked himself, since those early days, in accounts of the great European explorers and scientists who trod new ground, actually and metaphorically, with a mixture of crusading courage and excitement in discovery.

On one windy, wet Saturday night he wrote:  'I feel (unlike me) subdued & (!) rather lonely.  I listen to Paris, drink saccharined tea & try to read Ford on butterfly genetics & Goodrich on comparative anatomy of the vascular system & finally Dufferin's Letters from High Altitudes'.  But he could not concentrate and wrote letters.  He had decided not only to climb the Beerenberg, the brooding extinct volcano central to Jan Mayen Island - which had been done several times before - but to cross the crater and come down the other side somewhere.  'As this decision doesn't cheer me up as much as it did when I made it last night I feel I must have some malaria near.'

The malaria did not eventuate but he was feeling depressed about his baby daughter:  'I miss Neri terribly.'  He was worried about her health:  she appeared to have chronic bronchitis.  'We'll have to get her away from Mosman inland this winter.  Poor little kid - I'll radio tonight ... she doesn't deserve this:  & neither incidentally, does her mother.'  A small amount of financial relief was on the way for problems like this.  In mid November he was to wear academic dress and appear before the Carnegie Committee.  He was asking for a research grant.  The Committee gave him 200 pounds.

He had an ambivalent attitude towards the Arctic.  Although he found the prospect exciting he was worried about his research.  One man shocked him by saying that an expedition put him off for so long that he took four years to get his doctorate.  Jock planned to get his in two.  Nevertheless he had agreed to read a paper at the Grey Institute Ornithological Conference, and to do the next term's lecture to the Exploration Club;  also to lecture on Northern Australia to the Royal Geographical Society and do extra seminars and tutorials in nutrition with agricultural students.  It hardly seemed a likely proposition - his doctorate in two years.


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