REQUIEM: Signs, not things are all we see.

September 1939. Beyond the horizon a slow red could of dust materializes and begins to grow. A cacophony of boisterous sound shifts passim within the red cloud. The sharp crack of stock whips intertwines with lowing cattle and the shouting of men as they urge the beasts on through on through the red dust. This mob of men, horses, dogs and beasts has been up in the gulf country for six months. The mob moves with a life of its own through the red dust as they stride home to Roma.

The world of men has turned since they’ve been fattening the mob for slaughter in the gulf country. Mars has led the world to the brink of war. The red cloud advances and amongst this mob of beasts and men are ‘Les’ Charles Lester John Ollevou and his brother ‘Rudy’ Rudolph St Hilarie Ollevou, brothers. The pair have lived a hard life, placed in an orphanage as children then farmed out to relatives across Queensland and NSW. Mars has decreed that more hardship will come. The men sit high within the red dust cracking whips and urging the beasts forward, as the camp dogs dart in and around the mob of cattle, barking and nipping at fetlocks to move them along. The red dust envelops the cacophony of man and beast.

As the red could advances to Roma, my Mother Bridget Hilda Judge, ‘Ettie’, and her family sit in the parlour of their home in Edmund Street, Charring Cross in Sydney. The family of thirteen crowds around the radiogram to listen as the Prime Minister, known as Pig Iron Bob declares, ‘It is my melancholy duty to inform the Australian people the nation is once again at war with Germany.’

In Roma the red cloud lingers at the edge of town with its echo of man and beast. When the cattle are penned in the sale yards and the men have washed the red dust from their skins and had a beer or two, the talk turns to Europe and the War. War, the great adventurer is knocking at their door. It doesn’t take the brothers long to decide that as soon as their paid there off to Brisbane to enlist. My father’s uncle, who says he knows a thing or two about war attempts to bribe my father into with the promise of leaving the family station to him once he goes West, but on the condition that he gives up this foolish notion about enlisting, ‘why your not even twenty one yet.’   No! No discussion. No reflection and no wavering. Les has made up his mind. The brothers have been together since their Mother dumped them in an orphanage when they were aged four and six and nothing is about to separate them now. ‘You stupid bastards do you have any idea what your getting into, its not a day at the races its War, WAR,’ he shouts and across the night sky the laugher of Mars is heard at the folly of men.

Mars lovingly embraces the world with his mantle of misery and in six long years of attrition and sorrow fifty five million lives will be forfeited to appease his desire.

The next morning amid curt farewells Les and Rudy bade farewell and begun the ride from Roma to Brisbane to enlist. It took them a few days of sleeping rough under starlit skies warmed by campfires; I have to wonder did they discuss what they were letting themselves in for? Rudy enlisted in the Second AIF as QX 9084. My father having no birth certificate, or means of identification was declined admission to the army, which always stuck me as odd seeing that the enlisting Sergeants would normally tell them to ‘come back tomorrow when your twenty one.’  Seeing as this advice was not forthcoming the brothers sold their horses and saddles and put the lives of stockman drover behind them for neither would return to that way of life after the war. As for their Uncle he died when they were in Libya and disappeared from the family narrative. With the money they brought a 1937 Indian Chief motorcycle on which the two of them rode down to Sydney. My father told me it took them a week to arrive in Balmain.

What words passed between the estranged sons and their Mother I have no idea. My Father never once spoke of his Mother in my presence either as a child or an adult, I have no memories or stories to tell of her, only a photo of a photo of her and that is all I posses of my Grandmother.

On the 5^th of January 1940 my father enlisted at Victoria Barracks, Paddington, and became NX 21546. In February 1941 Les and Rudy embarked for the War in the Middle East from the finger wharf at Woolloomooloo.

As a child I was never told of the boredom, mundane routine and sheer unmitigated horror that makes up a soldiers life. My Father never spoke of how high explosive rendered the human body into monstrous sculptures or how the desert sands soaked up the blood of men, or the mud and malaria of the Pacific jungles. The tales my Father told were of a variation of boys own adventure stories. At a two up school in Cairo my Father claimed to have thrown five straight heads, ‘no mean feat let me tell you.’ I was particularly taken by the story of  ‘Horrie the Wog Dog.’ Horrie was an Egyptian Terrier adopted by soldiers from the 2/1^st Machine Gun Battalion. Horrie’s hearing saved the lives of many men from German air attacks and Horrie served with distinction in Libya and was wounded in the evacuation of Crete. When these troops came back from the Middle East they smuggled Horrie into Australia in 1942. The authorities found out about Horrie in 1945 when a book recounting his adventures was due to be published, and the Government flying in the face of public opinion declared the Horrie a threat to the health of Australian animals. Horrie was taken out and shot in March 1945 or at least that is what the public and the authorities knew. It was not until 2008 that the truth was revealed Horrie’s owner Jim Moody swapped dogs with a stray from the local pound who was put down in Horrie’s place. “After all we had been through do you think that I would let them kill my mate?”

1941 on a troop train outside of Damascus a young Arab body comes running up to their troop train and yelled ‘Hey dig, dig, you buy whisky, Johnnie Walker good one mate’  ‘Hey Mustafa give us a look, come on give it up son’.  My Father inspected the bottle and saw the seal was intact. ‘How much?’ ‘For you dig two pounds.’ ‘Two quid! Back it up sunshine.’ The haggling continued till the price was agreed upon and money exchanged hands. My Father cracked the bottle and took a swig, ‘What the fuck, its full of cold tea.’ ‘Well at least its not camels piss.’ Upon closer inspection a small hole was found in the base of the bottle caused by a hot poker and the contents drained. From then on every bottle they bought was scrupulously examined.

One of my Fathers mementos from the war that fascinated me as a child was a Sam Browne belt where he’d sewn the cap badges of various regiments and nationalities. One badge in particular was of a Palestine Police officer obtained after a brawl erupted in a Jerusalem club between Australian and British troops. The Palestine Police arrived to quell the affray and in my Father’s words ‘ this mongrel pommy copper belted me with his night stick so I knocked him flat and stole his hat, mind you some smart bastard made off with the till while the fight was on.’ The Palestine Policeman’s badge still sits on the Sam Browne belt. When my Father died my I took a Royal Core of Engineers badge emblazoned with Hermes also known as Mercury the messenger of the gods as a memento of the time he spent in the Old Testament landscape.

Upon their return to Australia the brothers were stationed in Queensland, which had been over run by Yanks,  ‘over here, over paid and over sexed’. Pineapples the diggers called them, ‘Green on the outside, yellow on the inside.’ The Americans were better attired, had money and manners to match and hence the attention of the women. My Mother told me one night she was at the State Theatre in Sydney watching Bambi, in the movie Bambi cries out ‘mother, mother, where’s my mother?’ To which a booming digger cried out. ‘She gone out with a bloody Yank love,’ whereupon the whole theatre erupted with laughter.

In Queensland resentment between the Diggers and the Yanks simmered till it erupted on 26^th November 1942 in ‘The Battle of Brisbane.’ My Father and fellow soldiers were stoped on the King Georges Bridge at a sand bagged machine gun emplacement. When questioned as to their movements the officer in charge replied that ‘we’re were off to join the fun.’ They were subsequently separated from an assortment of brass knuckle dusters, coshes, and small arms and admonished by the senior officer at the checkpoint. The riots caused by the death of an Australian killed by an American MP, lasted for three nights and entered Australian folklore

In 1945 at the end of hostilities my Father and Uncle were offered roles in the Australian occupation force garrisoned at Hiroshima but in his words, ‘I’d had a gutful of army life.’  My Father marched in the Victory parade in Sydney before being demobbed and then tossed his medals in a draw, where they stayed out of sight and out of mind. At first it was good to be back home but he found that he couldn’t settle down. So he headed south and worked on the Kiewa dam project in Victoria. After that he went to Albury and then the Snowy River project. He had a locomotive engine drivers ticket and enjoyed the company of men who didn’t mind a beer or two.

At a dance in Sydney in 1953 he met my mother and told her she would marry him. My Mother laughed him off but there must have been something for in 1955 they were married.

One night a year after they were married my Mother awoke to find my Father strangling her, he was dreaming of an incident involving hand-to-hand combat with a Japanese soldier at Tarakan in 1945. She frantically beat him away, and he broke down as he told her ‘This Nip bastard leap out of a bush and knocked me flat, I tired to bayonet him but couldn’t get the blade into the mongrel, I didn’t have one in the chamber and he just kept coming back at me every time I knocked him down, in the end I had to strangle the life out of the bastard, it was him or me.’ Japanese soldiers held fast to the cult of Bushido and refused to surrender in the face of defeat. In 1956 ensconced in the safety of their marriage my Father spoke for the first time to her of the horrors he had witnessed in the War. It was a common story of death and bloodshed, retold in many Australian households during the 1950’s.

The War was black and white photos and films; even now I mentally picture the years of the Second World War in stark black and white.I have a picture taken by a street photographer of my Mother with a group of friends in Hyde Park when Peace was declared in August 1945. Their smiles still radiate ecstasy and bliss sixty years after the War’s end.

I remember one night while watching  “Combat” staring Vic Morrow, my Father began abusing the TV ‘bloody Americans, they think they won the war single handed.’ ‘LES not in front of the children’, my Mother admonished him from dining room table from her nightly round of solitaire and Pall Mall cigarettes.

As a child I grew up in the omnipotent shadow of the War. That was the way it was for my generation of boys for Australia were the victors. I had a wooden fort made by my Father based upon the design of the fort in the film ‘Beau Guest.’  With my Australian toy soldiers, in their khaki of the western desert, I would constantly destroy the Africa Core of Field Marshall Rommel on the lounge room floor. In these battles a Sherman tank that played ‘the Halls of Montezuma’ aided my diggers. I possessed an arsenal of toy guns, a Thompson machine gun, and a Colt 45 pistol amongst others. In the back lane behind our flat I would wage War wearing my jungle greens and slouch hat, made by my mother with my brother and other neighbourhood children from which we emerged victorious against the Nazi or Nip hordes.

Occasionally I would take out my Fathers service medals and ask about them, there are six, the Africa Star, Pacific Star, 1939/45 Star, Defence Medal, War Medal, Australian Service Medal, all inscribed with his name and service number. Then they would vanish to the back of the draw till the next time inquisitive young hands sought them out.

After an afternoon in the pub he once told my brother and I how in New Guinea he looked after and cared for the needs of the native bearers, ‘you’d see that they received their rations and see the medics if required.’ They were paid a bounty of two shillings for the left ear of a Japanese soldier. ‘One morning, one of the blokes came in and gave me this bag, it must have had five quid in it, so I took it up to our CO a right snob and green he was.’ ‘What do you want Private.’ ‘Five quid for the bearers sir.’ ‘Five pounds?’ ‘Well he took one look in the bag saw all the ears turned green and threw up.’  ‘LES not in front of the children.’ Mum admonished him for assailing our tender ears with such horror.

Anzac Day was just a day off to my Father. Once I sat on the front steps of the flat we lived in on Bondi Rd watching the local RSL members march up to the shrine. ‘Dad why don’t you march.’ ‘Bloody waste of time if you ask me.’

I was too young to know of my Father’s drunken rages and how our Mother nearly left him, but then where could a woman go with two young children in 1963? Her Mother advised her to stay, ‘It’ll get better dear, give him time.’ Time? The War had been over for twenty years. The drink was a crutch for a generation of Australian males, when it all became too much, the men would retreat to the pub with their mates, then roll home pissed.

One night in 1982 I was at home with my Father watching  ‘The World at War’ it was about the battles of the Western Desert, my Father became pale and began to shake I asked him what was wrong then muttered ‘Jesus wept, Jesus wept what can you say. Jesus wept.’ I went and comforted my Father as he had done for me as a child; he told me that if it happens again neither my brother nor I would go. ‘Fuck it, let some rich bastard’s son go and do it.’

My upbringing had forged me to accept that as a son of a 2^nd AIF veteran and as a member of the working class I would go and do my duty for my country in its hour of need. That was a given, a tact understanding between the sons of the diggers and the State that when the next War came it would be their offspring’s turn to have the great adventure.

I remember fetching something from him from his bedroom cupboard and out tumbled dozens of unopened packets of Valium that had been prescribed for war neurosis. They would be eventually flushed down the toilet unopened.

In 1987 my Father died of heart attack at home in bed. When the Undertaker came to our home to make the funeral arrangements, he took out his cigarettes offered me one and duly noted that my father was Second AIF a ‘Digger.’

‘Well he got in early and gave it a go.’ He informed my Mother they would place the Australian flag on his coffin as a mark of respect. My Mother was duly placed on a War Widows pension by the Department of Repatriation and Veteran’s Affairs, who forty-two years after the cessation of hostilities recognised that my Father had succumbed to war wound, this was during the Hawke Labor years, when the country still honoured the debt to its citizens who served.

After his cremation my Mother and I found a niche in the commemorative wall at Botany Cemetery for his ashes. His ashes are interned facing Bunnerong Power Station where he worked as a rigger for twenty-seven years. His plaque bears the rising sun badge of the AIF and is inscribed “always in our hearts.”  When it was installed we visited the Cemetery and as the  sun shone on the wall at smoko  my Mother  kissed it, ‘He would have liked that.’

NX21546 in Syria