‘Pain and Sin’ in wartime Australia: The Diaries and Stories of Duncan Murray Gordon (1912-2012)

Duncan Murray Gordon was born in 1912, the son of a commercial traveller. In 1927 he won a scholarship to Stott's College, Melbourne, and in August 1940 he began a clerical job at the Victorian mining company Broken Hill South Ltd. He served in the Second World War between March 1941 to July 1946, in both the AMF (Australian Military Forces) and AIF (Australian Imperial Force) in Australia and New Guinea (where he finds, as the second volume of the diary reveals, the only way to survive is ‘to find somebody to go mad with’). Following his demobilisation he returned to his old firm, leaving it in July 1949, 'in order to undergo a period of training for an entirely different occupation'. In 1950 he settled in England, where he seems to have concentrated on business affairs, and his writing career appears to have ceased.Gordon is a writer of high literary ambition, and fully alive to modernist influences. In a prefatory note to his proposed collection Goodbye to Elliott (B2 below) he could boast that eight of the stories within it had already been published in Australian literary magazines: three in Southerly, one in Pillar to Post, one in Coast to Coast 1944, and three in Under the Atebrin Moon. In 1946 Southerly’s editor R. G. Howarth would describe Gordon in print as ‘a writer versatile in form who shows much interest in pain and sin’; privately Howarth informed Gordon: ‘I read your work whenever I find it, with great interest. The latest story I’ve seen is the excellent one in Pillar to Post. Congratulations!’ (autograph letter, 28 September 1945, from University of Sydney, in third scrapbook, C, below).While staunchly middle-class – his literary tastes run to Faulkner, Hemingway and Joyce, and before his mobilisation he also enjoys listening to and performing classical music, with trips to the theatre and ballet – Gordon’s writing is remarkably frank in both subject matter and treatment – see for example his description in the diary of his treatment for gonorrhea in May 1940. His wartime diaries provide a vivid and intelligent view of Australia and Australians, from the viewpoint of a cultural outsider. Independent of the historical importance of these diaries, they contain, as the extracts given below indicate, highly finished and observant prose, well worthy of publication.The collection consists of ten items.A. Diaries (4 items)B. Story collections (2 items)C. Scrapbooks and printed volume (4 items)The first two of the four volumes of diaries and journals (A1 and A2 below) total around 700pp., describing the period between 1940 and 1944. The other two diaries are an account of Gordon’s ‘Voyage to England’ in 1950 (A3), containing his first impressions of that country; and an account of a fraught ‘Holiday in Spain and Mallorca, 1953’ (A4), with an apparent homosexual element. Also present, as B1 and B2, are two unpublished short story collections – Tales Natural and Supernatural (c.1944) and Goodbye to Elliott and Other Stories (c.1947) – the second being mainly a redrafting of the first. Of great value is the writing, redrafting, reading and publication history of each story provided by Gordon. There are also three scrapbooks (C1, C2 and C3), dating from 1944 to 1946, containing correspondence (including rejection letters), wartime ephemera, and several pages of cuttings relating to the ‘Ern Malley’ hoax. The final item (C4) is a volume containing Gordon’s own copies of three issues of Southerly, each of which features a story by him.A. DiariesA1 and A2 consist of two volumes of original typescript: 522pp., 4to, and 176pp., 4to. Printed on rectos only. Covering the following period: January to December 1940; July to October 1941; 14 December 1941 to 30 June 1942; July to December 1942; February 1943 to March 1944. Both volumes are in good condition, on lightly-aged paper, in slightly worn bindings. VOLUME ONE: 23 separately-paginated monthly sections and a long central section covering the start of Gordon's mobilisation. The 24 parts bound up in a plain black cloth binding. The volume begins with seventeen sections covering the months January to December 1940 (248pp.) and July to October 1941 (91pp.); followed by a 90-page section titled 'MOB' (i.e. mobilisation), covering the period 14 December 1941 to 30 June 1942; with a final six sections for the months July to December 1942 (93pp.) VOLUME TWO: Thirteen monthly sections, each separately paginated: February 1943 (beginning with p.13 of that month) to March 1944, loosely inserted into a black cloth binder.Loosely inserted in A1 is a letter of recommendation from Gordon's employers Broken Hill South Limited, dated 8 July 1949, praising him as 'a fast, accurate and neat typist', and his adeptness is apparent throughout. The various sections having clearly been typed at different periods. A number of sections carry Gordon’s details in his autograph: that of November 1941 has ‘S20684 | L/Sqt Gordon DM | 27 Bn | Darwin’, and that of December 1944 has ‘SX32907 | Sgt D. M. Gordon | DDMS | HQ NGF’.A1. Diary, December 1940 to October 1941. The first diary begins with Gordon living in Macclesfield, near Adelaide, and on the verge of attempting to enlist in the Australian Air Force. Within a few pages comes a vivid three-page description, dated 3 January 1940, headed 'RECRUITING OFFICE', which exemplifies all of his qualities as a writer. It begins: 'I arrive ten minutes late into the dusty, being-swept room. The only form has four men on it already. I stand leaning against a whitewash-shedding wall. I watch a man in khaki, and others in khaki, and others not in khaki, see the fresh packets of cigarettes have their cellophane removed and other fag lighted. I find a few inches on the form, and sit with the others, because there will be a roll call. | We wait and we wait, and each new man arriving with importance will be the one, we think, for whom we wait. Then comes a man with a short-sleeved khaki-coloured shirt to call our names. The four of us answer to our names. We follow him into a room and he tells us some conditions of the R.A.A.F. There will be discipline, you will realise that there must be where a lot of men are working together. The working hours will be about 7 hours a day for 5 days each week. Leave is not compulsory; we may curtail it if we so desire. We do not like more than 50% of the men away at the one time. Rate of pay for clerks is 6/- per day, with the addition of 1/- per day deferred pay if you leave Australia. Any of you chaps married? he asks. No we say, and one of us adds Not yet. The officer ignores the stock humour. | We troop back to our bench, and he calls us one by one. A cheerful larrikan comes down from his medical examination. STRUTH! They want me to start tomorrow, he tells us, do I get a uniform? Yes, of course, we tell him. Don't you reckon the A.I.F. uniforms are a disgrace? The Air Force uniforms are miles better, but I've got a better uniform still, I'm in the twenty-sevenths, spats and all. I wonder if I could keep that going too? They said I gotta stay in Adelaide. Hell, I start tomorrow. I don't know whether to keep me kilts or sell em. I could get £2. 16.-. for em. Struth! Tomorrow! Quick work eh? | I am the third to go in. I answer the questions. Have you been convicted in a police court? Yes, for riding a bicycle without a light. Traffic offence, he writes. How old are you? 27. 27? You are well preserved, you only look a bit of a kid. Taking care of yourself, eh? Yes, I lie. What made you decide to join the air force? I saw your advertisement in the newspaper. Do you know anybody who has already joined? Yes, Eugene Schumann and Bert Heaslip. What are your reasons for joining? I think quickly, and say that I thought I should do my bit. What are your sports? Tennis and swimming, I lie. Religion? Presbyterian, I lie.' A few days later Gordon learns that he has been rejected by the R.A.A.F.: 'I was only a little disappointed. By pretending to others that I didn't care I found that I didn't care very much.' Four days later, on 21 January 1940, comes an early example of Gordon's more 'literary' style: 'Sometimes I feel that my life is as aimless as those of the boys who stand in main streets on empty Sunday afternoons, watching the legs of girls who pass, amused when the Airedale and the Silky Terrier smell each other. | This is the place of shabby seafront boarding houses, their wire-screens rusted by the salt air . . . The Moorings, The Anchorage . . . brown bodies of lonely swimmers come from the sea, the shining wet leaving their bodies drip by drip as they amble apelike to their towells [sic] . . . the shadows slowly slide off the hills . . . a dark head and a brown body between two rushes of foam . . . in the shacks the women arrange their Sunday tea around a corned beef and mustard pickle base . . . what power is in this wind! Everything feels it, every animal feeling it, every weed made trembling by it . . . the hollow shrillness of the blown telegraph wires . . . Our Wurlie, Gitchie Gumee, Kosynook . . .'Gordon was also (according to the letter of recommendation quoted above) a shorthand writer ‘of reporting standard', and the diaries contain a number of vivid set-piece dialogues. A shorter example, comes on 24 February 1940: 'And here come toughs from slums, and this is what they say: | I've got enough money for a three-course meal in town. | Where? | Erics. | Erics' not open, and they serve the rottenest chop suey in town. | I wouldn't mind having a couple of them ferns in my back yard. | Me neither. | I could do with a nice steak and a couple of eggs. | What paper are you writing for, mister? | The Mail. | Never heard of it. | You fucking lousy bastard! | Kossy, looking at the side of your head, it's all pimples on that side. | Harry darling, will you lend me your comb and mirror?' In the entry for 2 May 1940 he gives a page-long dialogue with a colleague, after describing his job as follows: 'I work in the Shares Department and sit on a high stool alongside of Bill, who has been with the Union for over twenty years and who is the father of one. I and he have dialogues, while we hold our pencils ready to point against a column of figures and add up like mad.'On 11 June 1940: ‘Italy has entered the war, and everybody laughs because the black maria is tottling [sic] up and down Franklin Street gathering up the troublesome Italians. [...] Perhaps future generations will thrill to it, and find drama in the re-enacted sight of frightened Italian women in Australia and despairing Italian women in Italy. This morning in Currie Street a soldier guards the Home Service Store, and crossing the street was an Italian woman with a big ugly face, the same big ugly face reproduced on her young son. She was out-of-doors, and afraid of many things.’ And on the following day he reports the words of ‘Mrs P. C.’: ‘They say they have been rounding up all the Italians in Hindley Street, I wish I’d known, I never get to hear of anything like that till afterwards, but they deserve it, it proves they haven’t any love for Australia, giving us that watery tea, Howard and I went to a cafe kept by an Italian, and when I poured out the tea it was just like coloured water, I told Howard to take it back, and he did, we thought they had forgotten to put the tea in it, but they used damp tea leaves that had been used before, that’s what they expected us to drink, it just shows that they had little love for Australians.’In Sydney on 27 June 1940 he finds a novel method of seeing his brother Malcolm, a sailor on the troopship SS Canberra: ‘Marigold and I missed our ferry and we sat on the wharf and I am miserable in a pleasant sort of way, but cannot get the most out of it because Marigold is with me, but that isn’t her fault, I asked her. I looked across Neutral Bay to Felix’s house, and talk some nonsense, but things are not going very well, there is some strangeness between her and me, it was different last year, there was no cap-setting then. Perhaps there is none now. But why is it like this? What is wrong? Perhaps it is all her mother’s fault, suggesting that I am eligible. Perhaps I am not, perhaps I am just considering myself eligible when they have not got me in view. But I am not conceited about it. | The ferry comes, and on we get, and across the Harbour we go. There she is, there’s the Canberra, and he is on it, and may be watching this ridiculous little ferry ferrying us across to the Quay. Oh gosh, only two hundred yards away, and yet absolutely uncommunicable. I could swim the distance. | I drag off my coat and dive over the ferry. Marigold’s scream is cut off as I hit the water. It is choppy, it is not as easy as I thought, but I set out for those lights-through-portholes, with the overarm, then the sidestroke, then the overarm again. Nobody seems to worry about my black head in the Harbour, the ferry has gone on because there are people who don’t want to miss the newsreel. I am getting tired, it was silly of me to try, but I shall get there. It looms near at hand now, but nobody is watching me from her. I make another effort and am just under her. Hey! I shout. Not help, but hey! And somebody hears me, and says: Who’s that? I fell off the ferry! I shout up. They drop a ladder for me. And I climb up, giggling when my clothes hang on me dripping from every seam. And I only pressed them two days ago, but that was three hundred miles from the sea, and seven hundred miles from this sea. I collapse on the deck, and they crowd round. The officer comes along. What’s all this? He demands, who is this? My brothers, says one voice. And there he is, and I found him by this ruse. Your brother! well, what’s he doing swimming round the ship at this time of night. What do you know about this, Gordon? Nothing, sir, but it is my brother. Well, he’ll be taken ashore immediately in the launch. May I accompany him, sir? Certainly not. They take me down the steps and on to the launch. I look back, they are all standing by the rail, he too. I wave; he waves back.’On 15 August 1940: ‘The long arm of the army is hanging above me, its finger points at me, accusing me. We want you for the war, why are you running away? Not a coward, I cry, not a deserter. All I want is my holiday. And the military laughs at me with a snort, at me and my selfish desires.’On 28 August 1940: ‘Well, I have evaded the army so far, I have escaped it as far as Albury. I feel that the finger of the army no longer points at me, that it lost me in the streets of Melbourne and to save its own skin has gone back to Ballarat and rests there and says that is the place where I was last seen alive. But there is nobody at Ballarat, not Scottie now, nobody there, I am not there I am here near Albury, and it cannot get me until I am in Sydney. It can take me away from Sydney straight away, tomorrow night it can do it, but at least I can have one look at Sydney before I go back.’29 September 1941: ‘I loathe the V sign, it being introduced in conquered countries to keep up courage and to show furtive defiance of the Germans, and from there it spread and is now a blatant flambouyant [sic] flaunted commercialists meaningless symbol, worn as a doo-da on flapper’s [sic] frocks, used as an eye-catcher by department stores. And I feel the same about another of the lesser horrors of this war – the song called There’ll Always Be An England.’On 2 October 1941 he transfers with 27 Battalion, Darwin, to Warradale Camp. Six days later he writes: ‘Midday is a mess of cottage pie and they fear there isn’t enough to go round, so give us small helpings, then find there is plenty over, so Pte Luscombe asks who wants some and many hands shoot up and he wants to know if they have bloody paralysis or something, and makes them come over to the table and then Sgt Nancarrow tells them to get back to their seats and bawls out Fatty Luscombe for trying to run the mess. | Then they bring on tapioca and dried apricots. This’ll go through you, says Pte Best, the regtl bookmaker. Murray laughs like mad. Go on and eat it, you bastard, says Fatty Luscombe. That’s all right, says Best, whose bum is it, yours or mine? Murray laughs like mad. Shut up, you mad bastard, says Pte Best.’Gordon does not shy away from the reality of army life. On 28 October 1941 he writes: ‘I wake up and find that I have diarrhoea. It is half past twelve, and I can see that Murray is putting his boots on. He goes out and I lie for a moment and then know that it is no use, so I put on my boots and great-coat and track over under unreal moonlight to the latrines. Murray is there and Pte Price is there too, and two others. We all have diarrhoea, and we think that it must have been something we ate. Murray and I go back and whisper about it and laugh about it, and go to sleep again. | At half past four I wake up again and have the same loose bowel-feeling and so put on my boots again, this time with a sore throat, and go across to the latrines under the first dawn-light. It is not far from our new tent to the latrines, and Pte Price is there again, also the Regtl Pullthrough. And Pte Price has been three times since he saw me last and has a bad pain in his stomach too and is in a bad way. I go back and sleep again. [...] | There is a long line for sick parade, most of them with diarrhoea, about forty of them, and all from HQ Coy. At mess we compare notes and try to find the cause, and pin it down to the pudding, because whoever didn’t have pudding didn’t have diarrhoea, but then one man who didn’t have pudding did have diarrhoea, so we don’t know where we are. [...] | At midday mess all those who had diarrhoea are isolated, because the MO claims that it is contagious. So we sit apart from the rest, about forty of us, as if we had leprosy or v.d. During the morning there was a good inspection of the cookhouse and investigation, and we all laugh at the MO for suggesting that we were infected by a mess orderly who had it last Friday.’On 3 November 1941: ‘Camp is in full swing by now and they have found two typists in the coys and have brought into Bn HQ to help me. One of them is assistant manager for the Metro Theatre, but in this bn he is a mere pte, the other is a peculiar cove with thick lenses in his glasses and hair down over one eye and not much of a typist, and I show them the army style of letter writing and am irritated in my instruction, and the first of them took half my desk and the second the other half, and I wander round with nowhere to sit not knowing what to do next, and with all this I am still only a pte and everybody says what a shame it is I get no promotion this side of the ocean.’4 November 1941: ‘The difference between us and the aif is that we have no nobility of character. I am astounded by the things I hear in camp, where a third of all men called up have applied for exemptions or had exemptions on their behalf asked for by their employers. The one thought in the minds of all of them is to get out of camp as soon as they can. A system that allows a state of mind like this, a state of mind that says to itself I want to have this war won by England, but I don’t want to make any sacrifice myself, is not good. Should such a system make way for Communism? I don’t know.’25 November 1941: ‘I’m a tent comd now, and have five drummers in my tent, and one of them is beautiful in face and another of them is beautiful in character and one was born in Wales and one of them calls me Corp and the fifth was absent from parade at tattoo last night when I took it, when I went down to Bn HQ lines at 2200 lines to the first tent, where two new snoozers who bugle for their army pay were preparing for sleep and they asked me hwo their chances stood if they didn’t come back from ten o’clock leave until half past ten and I said I couldn’t be bribed and went on to the next tent, which held all NCO’s and strangely enough they were all there because it was picture night for 27 Bn in camp, and then to my own tent, and then to the next which was in darkness, but amongst the side drums I could see a figure on hands and knees making his bed, and I ask him where Pte Clark is and he doesn’t know, he has been to the pictures and hasn’t seen Pte Clark since mess, and I think you bloody little liar (amusedly) you have been closely associated with him for the last two weeks and you don’t know where he is now, and I am almost going to tell him to get Pte Clark to report when he returns but decide that I am too tired to wait in the orderly room and move on to the next and see that every man is on his palliasse, and go back and make out a tattoo report: 3 leave, otherwise all accounted for, and hand it in.’14 December 1941 finds Gordon and his colleagues ‘sweeping through Adelaide and farewelling it.’On 17 December 1941 he is in camp, ‘The ground is crawling with insects. Our palliasses are on the ground with nothing under them, and the cockroaches and caterpillars and beetles and the rest of their kind being crawling over us quite naturally. I learn not to brush them off, because if it is a caterpillar it squashes on my leg and smells.’19 December 1941: ‘We move on, after half an hour we stop and looking out we see an aboriginal who is trying to sell boomerangs. He is barefooted, standing on the burning sand, and wears a tattered pair of trousers and a pullover, and is free of sweat. He has a collection of things given to him by the soldiers, and besides the biscuits and cigarettes and boomerangs he carries a billy can full of dirty water. Hiya Jackay, says the stupid Mincham. Me no Jackey, me George, says the black.’6 January 1942: ‘The Tokio radio announces that we are to have an air raid tonight or tomorrow night, so everyone is getting a letter written today in case they won’t be able to write one tomorrow, and I am looking forward to the experience of an air raid, but cannot bear the sound of our siren, and wish we had one like those they use in London that sound like the wail of the banshee, even if the simile is mine only.’21 January 1942: ‘There is a short unplanned blackout when all the electricity in the camp is cut off for fifteen minutes. I am just going to bed and am taking notes to four coys before going to the latrines and then to my hut, and of course I fall over an empty drum just outside of Bn HQ that shouldn’t have been there and after asking for Sgt Brideson in HQ Coy and getting no answer, although I can see the blacknesses of three men inside I walk into a tropical shrub that wets my chest because it has been raining all evening. And after delivering my messages I go to the latrines where no lights ever shine and can see no paper and have to wait until the lightning flashes again.’On 19 February 1942 his camp is subject to an air raid: ‘We are out watching the planes and saying things about them, I making a bigger fool of myself than anybody else by saying that it gave me a good feeling to see so many planes in the sky at one time. Then we hear the siren, and so we scramble like mad in not much confusion, grabbing rifles and respirators, and I even take along with me, to read in case of a long raid, Poe’s stories and a copy of Salt, and so I run to the nearest slit trench, which is by one of the huts in - - coy, and we dodged the first because it had a muddy bottom and got into the second and sat listening to the firing and the bombing – were they really bombs? we had never heard them before – and it is incredible, I can’t believe it and each bomb rattles the walls of the hut and makes it seem worse and I hardly dare look out and it is a beautiful and calm day and the sun is a bright clear shiner and it is most like one of South Australia’s days of all that I have seen in Darwin, and there is a calm and then more gunfire and then the howl of a low plane and I look up and it is one with red discs on the wings and not one of ours and I can’t believe it, it astounds me and I feel as I felt the first time I had to broadcast and have a thudding heart, and there is another one and it seems that the bombs are dropping only a hundred yards away. Then there is quiet and we poke up our heads and look around, there is not a soul to be seen in the camp, but then along comes Tom Price grinning all over his cheerful face, and he seems even less alarmed than we are trying to appear, and he says that he was watching them all the time and has he talks excitedly and wonders if he should go back to the RAP where he has been in attendance, and so we get out of the slit trench but the RSM warns us that this is a dangerous thing to do, to sneak out when things become quiet, because then the Japs come back again, so we return to the slit trench and its damp goodsmelling earth. And the allclear sounds, and so we creep out and meet each other and talk about it, I knowing that it was what I wanted, although while it was on I was saying that it wasn’t what I wanted at all [...] | The town is to be evacuated by all civilians, and past our camp there begins the stream of them, hundreds and hundreds of them in their assorted skin colours, in trucks and cars, on bicycles and on foo[t]. The aboriginals follow the railway line. A taxi dr was offered £350 if he would take a man down the road for forty miles – but he turned it down, as he had his cab booked by a family against such an emergency as this.’In July 1942 he learns that a friend from Broken Hill has been posted missing on a bombing mission: ‘I feel bad about it, flattened out, [...] And I think about Scottie, who claimed that he had been in every Broken Hill hotel except three, and so to reduce that figure he and I in one lunch hour went way down to the Allnations and he shouted and I shouted and there were some drunks in there and an old woman serving and I was intrigued by the degradation of the place but it offended him and he dragged me out. [...] That was the only time I enjoyed drinking in any other way than sitting in some pub lounge with a femme [...]’.On 19 July 1942: ‘I work from half past eight until eleven o’clock on a story I started almost a year ago. I sat at first for half an hour thinking of a title, and I found one and it is Nobody Was To Blame, and I set about retyping it all and improving and adding and taking away, and when coffee time came I drank two handles of it, although it is never good coffee, but I felt well-stimulated and worked on happily, finding that I still had comd of a neat phrase and new way to say a thing, until the lights winked once and I knew that it was two minutes to eleven and that they would be turned off in two minutes’ time, so I packed my papers reluctantly and chatted in the big tent to Dick Ward, a peacetime solicitor, who owns all of Tolstoi and Dostoievesky and Gorki and Thomas Hardy, and looked with him at illustrations in New Writing in ?Europe, and told him that I had read The Dog Beneath the Skin and explained to him the scene in the nightclub where the mob shouted Rembrandt! Rembradt! and told him that I had taken part in The Ascent of F6, and the lights went slowly out and I felt my way out of the tent, and walked pleased as punch through the beblackened camp over the rd, picked up a slab of cement that I had had my eye on for some time, and carried it to my tent to put my things on, lay for a time with one thickness of blanket over me, and went to sleep.’On 18 October 1942 Gordon writes in experimental fashion, merging two texts with a diagonal gap in the typescript, in a style foreshadowing Burroughs’s cut-up technique: ‘It is my birthday my birthday and I work in the morning in the morning And in the afternoon, in the afternoon, at four o’clock they turn the showers on again, on again, our pumping plant from the bore was I broken, quite broken, but they filled up the tanks with creek could go water, yes creek water, and at four o’clock they turned them there one on, turned them on, and we all went and showered with ptes, day and yes, ptes, and I loafed about in the tent, in the tent, look and with Alex and Fred, watching two goannas play up and look and look’.A2. Diaries, February 1943 to March 1944. In the second volume Gordon – now a sergeant – is drafted, and travels from Saint Morris to Melbourne, and from there to Adelaide. On 31 December 1943 he writes: ‘And so another dawn comes, and we are warned to fall in at 0830 and so yet again I pack. I have collected a tin of powder, a bottle of ink and a book of short stories since arriving here. I have to tie my boots on outside my pack. We line up, get an embarkation number, and climb on the train. And they wave us through the town, large grey women running to their gates and waving yellow dusters at us and making a V sign with two fingers. Some of us wave back – others of us can’t move for packs on our backs. And I almost feel a thrill of adventure as we crawn through Townsville, through the railway yards, on and on, slowly and clankingly, until there is water on both sides of us, we are right on the wharf, and at last we stop, and climb out and stand for a long time in the sun, with a cool breeze coming off the sea. | We climb the gangplank. This is it, I say. An officer at the top of the gangplan[k] is calling ou[t] cpl, sgt, sgt, pte. I’m a sgt, I said. Wear your stripes, chap, he says, but I get a sgts’ ticket and find my cabin, holding two in peacetime, four now. Gordon is down in the bowels of the ship, he says, but it is only C deck. We lunch, and Gordon and I sprawl on the quarter deck with books. And things get busy and the tug comes along, and we pushed away from the wharf, and sail. | And now we are far enough out to sea for me to wear a service chevron, if I want to . The crew is juvenile, hardly old enough to be in the Army and oh the sea is wide and deep, and it is almost night now and the coastline is dark where before it was blue, and the sea is iron grey where before it was pale green, and it is night.’On 1 January 1944: ‘I wake when a concertina went past playing Auld Lang Syne, and seven men followed banging their mess tins together in irregular rhythm, singing drearily should old acquaintance be forgot. That was the New Year being welcomed in. So, I said, this is the beginning of a dreary year to be spent in New Guinea. The men went round the stern of the ship and came past us again lamenting the fact of old acquaintance being forgotten. Shut up the bloody noise! a voice said from out of the darkness of prone and prostrate men. They passed on and took their clamour with them.’Three days later they approach New Guinea: ‘After breakfast we gather on deck and watch it and there is a wonderful coastline with staggering mountains. And we discuss it as we come nearer and yet nearer, and flotsam floats by with seagulls perched on it. And some fuzzy-wuzzies pass by in a canoe, and we come into the harbour and see the town there and are full of excitement at everything about us, and finally we tie up. It is very hot. Various men come aboard, and everybody is in everybody else’s way. All sgts and WO’s will go ashore, somebody calls out, so I collect my stuff, and stagger down the gang plank and on to the dock and on to a truck. We get going through the town, through avenues of palm trees, then pine trees, along an ocean road, and up a hill with a wonderful view of the harbour, coastline and islands, and over it into a valley that might be in the Adelaide hills, and so to the staging camp.’By 14 January 1944 he is feeling the pressures of the military life. ‘In self defence I shall have to find somebody to go mad with, because that is the only way to endure this kind of life, to go deliberately troppo, tell all the pointless jokes you can think of, tear round like children, carry on like lunatics. | I must not get lazy, I must not beachcomb. This is just the place to get that way, the hot sunny days, one after another, with no variation in them. Worse in that respect than Darwin, because here there is less rain. I always came to life in the storms there. I wish we could have some here, all we are getting tonight is a drizzle of rain, making the night intolerably muggy but bringing out the bird calls, an upward whistle from one and a chuchuchuchuchu from another. The wet season is nearly over, it is said. [...] I am killing every mosquito that comes within reach, why I don’t quite know, because the death of three dozen in an evening makes little difference in the mosquito world. I feel that I have settled into this life quickly and nicely. Certainly much more than I did at Rear. [...] | Here we go round singing The Swine that Raped Cecilia. And there was a man who had been up here a terrifically long time without leave and he was heard to be singing I’m Dreaming of a White Mistress. Gordon [elsewhere referred to as ‘Gordon Mk II’] lies in bed in the mornings while we are all shaving and he sings I’m Dreaming of a Late Breakfast. | Every time I wash my green shirts the dye comes out, and I am wondering how long it will go on. With every rinse the water is green, and yet there is still the colour in my shirts. The stripes on one of the shirts have gone curry-coloured. There are some strange-coloured shirts round the camp, something gone wrong with the washing, shirts boiled with blue pyjamas, blue shirts, green shirts, khaki shirts, bottle green shirts, emerald green shirts, stagnant-pool green shirts.’16 January 1944: ‘In the afternoon I take Gordon Mk II and Des into the town, and we get a lift for a certain distance, then have to walk along the coast road, and they say How far is it and I say About a mile and we go on and on, with all of the area out for pleasure that never quite realises, and there are soldiers and Papuans in a lakatoi, pushing off from the shore but not in the right place for an exposure, and the coastline looks magnificent, richly green with billows of clouds behind it, and the sun twinkles on the water, and we watch a fuzzy-wuzzy up a palm tree pulling off cocoanuts [sic] and throwing them down, then climbing down the trunk, using feet and arms with great skill, [...]’. 19 January 1944: ‘Frank corners me and tells me about various experiences he had as a male nurse before the war, about working in a VD hospital, all the inmates mad with it, and doing the most appalling things, like eating each other[s] excreta, and then about another place where they kept children born from it and deformed with it, who really were the living dead, lifeless in chairs all day, just staring, some most dreadfully deformed. I tell him to stop, that I can’t bear it any more, but he keeps on, and every time I look at him now I am overcome with a feeling of disgust at him for having done that work.’21 January 1944: ‘It is too hot, it is unpleasantly hot, and I am clammy with it. But the ditch-digging Papuans dig without sweating. [...] And I spy a caterpillar on the roof of our tent and ask Gordon to knock it down because it is one of those that fall on one and cause an unpleasant rash, but Gordon just grins and then I grin too, seeing that if it fell it would fall on Don’s bed, and we don’t like Don.’23 January 1944: ‘Look, everybody, I am swimming again in the sea, after two years out of it, in the tepid salt sea at . . . Beach, never at Darwin did I swim in the sea, only in the creeks, the rivers and the lagoons, but now it is the sea again, the warm heavy sea with the Americans with gogles on, resembling Men from Mars, diving with little tridents to stab fish, but all they got was a clam. With coral rocks under my feet, cutting them once only, as I walked over them, float over them, swim over them to a clear patch of sand at the bottom that is bombcrater, the obliging Japs.’ He proceeds to describe his memories of previous swimming, culminating with: ‘And then we went to Darwin and there was no time for swimming at first, but one rest day we went to the RAFF pool, and found it set in the midst of machine gun posts and pandanus palms, swamp water draining into it, the pool with its bottom mud[d]y with so much diving. And later we moved out to that place and camped there, and we swam in the pool and washed our bodies and clothes in the creek below it. But we were hauled away from it, and swam in it for the last time the night before we left, Miles and Harman and I, and sat on the edge of it and talked about ourselves and what we had been, about the women we had loved and the books we had read on Sex, and next day moved a long way down the road to where no water was, where it was carted from Coomalie Creek, where a crocodile ate an LAC. But there were always the manoeuvres, those spirit-killing safaris into the expanse of Northern Australia, and one day Harman and I in B Echelon found Heather Lagoon, and after a day’s easy work went there with towels and rifles, and Herman shot at an Ibis across the lagoon three times and missed three times and said he couldn’t understand it, and there were water lillies [sic] on the water, because there, on the dirtiest pools will be water lillies, and it wasn’t very long that we were in the lagoon, because in a neighbouring one there were crocodiles. We were told it and we had heard them splashing heavily about in the night, and I waded into Heather Lagoon and swam about for two minutes only. Then Harman went in, but his courage left him and he came out within ten seconds, and his and my laughter echoed down the length of the lagoon.’On 25 January: ‘I approach the s/sgt in the Q Store and say I want a new towel, I have lost mine and he says You mean you lost it and I say Yes, lost it, and he says We can’t just give you a new one, you’ll have to fill in a form saying you lost it and we’ll see about putting through a stoppage, and I say Yes that’s right and he produces a pro forma and I write my number, rank and name and what I had lost and how I had lost it, why I had lost it and where I had lost it, and I call him over and show it to him and he reads it and says Will you take this to the Camp Commandant, he will fix you up, so I walk out of the Q Store and to the camp office and a pte with one fallen eyelash takes the form and reads it and says I doubt if you will be able to get one without having a stoppage put through, mate, and I say That’s OK, mate, and he takes it into the office of one of the assistant camp commandants, waits for a spell, then returns with the form and reads it to himself and says I doubt if you will be able to get one without having a stoppage put through mate, and I say to myself that he has said that before, and he says Will you give more details as to how you came to lose it, so I take the form and write on it LOST AT SEA (left in bathroom) and say Will that do? and he says Just a sec, and goes into the assistant camp commandant’s office, and returns and says to me Will you come in, please, so I place the receipt for my rifle, rifle sling, oil bottle, pullthrough, bayonet, bayonet scabbard and frog bayonet which I have returned, now being protected under the Geneva Convention, into my pocket and march in, salute and wait’. The account continues in much the same Kafkaesque vein.While on New Guinea he is a member of a ‘Cultural Group’. Tensions within the group come to a head at a meeting of 9 February 1944: ‘We came to a poem by a man written "over the mountains", the usual nostalgic thing, slightly self-pitying, called Men Without Souls. And nobody liked it, and Ian said he felt a bit like smiling while he was reading it, and Ezra says it was nonsense, and then John dropped his bombshell. I won’t say whether it is good or bad, he said in his plaintive voice, but at least the man is sincere, which is more than I can say for some of those present. I don’t think this club will see me again, because I doubt very much the sincerity of some of its members. Consternation! Smithy was knocked on his arse, and so was Ian [...]’.On 20 February 1944: ‘I go with Gordon to Gemo Island to see Harry Jackman, who is at an ANGAU school there, and we swam in clear cool sea water and looked at the black breasts of female Papuans with ringworm and syphilis, and gaze lazily about the sea and dreamily upon the coastline, and it was idyllic, such a happy day, going to and fro from on a launch that was steered by a native’s black foot with spread toes, with Harry delighted to play host to us[,] bringing us cup after cup of grape fruit juice, insisting that we smoke no cigarettes but his, showing us all the patients. I saw big papaw trees, and marvelled at the beauty of the frangipani, the white ones, not the pink ones, but Gordon says the white ones remind him of funerals, because they are used in the wreaths of Queensland’s dead. We returned by the launch and swam at Ela Beach, where the water was smooth and sluggish. I ate the first mango of my life, and found it strange and palatable, with the flavour of pine cones, sweet and later sour, very stringy, and by the time I had sucked most of the flesh off the big oval stone of it, I felt that I was sucking hemp. In the evening we saw a bad film at Koki called Passage to Suez.’On 29 February 1944: ‘I pulled a chain, I went to the sgts’ club at Moresby for a haircut, and there was little waiting, and a good haircut with electric clippers and all the incidentals in a nice little green and cream room upstairs, and when it was over I gave him two shillings, not knowing what the price was, and as I needed a shit I went into the place labelled Showers only for Resident Guests, and had my shit, and then pulled the chain, and with a vigorous shish the water ran, and I thought how nice it was to smell a lavatory again and not a latrine, and that water running was so hygienic and final, I loved the sound, so much that I went into the next cubicle and pulled the chain there. Shish, went the water. Lovely! I pulled the chain in the next privy. Shish, it went. And the next, and the next, and the next. Shish, shish, shish! The secretary of the club came galloping up the stairs. What’s the big idea? he demanded. I looked at him coolly. Have you ever stopped to think, I said, have you ever stopped to listen to the lovely sound of water coming from the cistern, how it carries away our vile excreta and leaves an antiseptic smell? He looked at me strangely. Come along with me and I’ll show you, and I took his arm and led him into the first alcove. Now pull, and listen, I said. He did so. I offered him a cigarette and took one myself. Now tell me in your own words, I said, what your sensations were. He blew out smoke and looked at me. He spoke. I think, he said, you’ve got something there. Of course I have, I said, I knew you’d see it my way. Now, you go into No. 5 and I’ll go into No. 4 and we’ll pull together. Our satisfaction and excitement was doubled. Arf a mo, he said, I’ll get some o’ me mates. He came back with six soldiers, ranging from s/sgt to TGIII (Clerk). I have been experimenting in your absence, I told, would you mind if I arranged your men? No, go ahead, he said. So I placed them and instructed them, they which memorised [sic] and repeated to me. Right, I said, and so Nos 1, 2 and 5 pulled consecutively and 3, 4, 6, 7 and 8 came in together. Perfect! I cried, an exact tonal reproduction of the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.’12 March 1944: ‘At the Gomo Island hospital we find that when a native becomes sick his whole family goes to hospital with him, if it wants to. It was peculiar to stand in one of the wards O each of them built on piles over the sea – and look at a group and wonder which was ill. I decided in one instance that it was the sick-seeming child, but the child was perfectly healthy and it was the mother who was receiving treatment. They sit there, looking at us, and when we have gone they sit there looking at nothing at all. Papuans are peculiar in that with the slightest sprinkle of rain or the slightest cloudy wind they pull on old Army pullovers. I know that their blood is thinner than ours, but should think they would be hardy enough to stand extremes of heat and cold.’27 March 1944: ‘I wake up to find the light full on, and Maj Stewart standing over me, saying I thought I was supposed to be wakened at half past four. I struggled to come out of sleep and couldn’t say anything except What’s the time now, sir? And he said Ten past five. I said Sigs were suppose to call me at half past four, and he said Well, then, sigs have fallen down on the job, so will you go and wake Colonel Ford, I don’t know where his tent is. I put on some clothes and take a torch and go to wake Colonel Ford. But when I come to his tent I find that he has left his bed. I go back to the office, but Maj Stewart has gone. [...]’28 March 1944: ‘It has become dark, and I boil my clothes in a kerosene tin by the light of a hurricane lantern. One may light fires only with the permission of an officer, and certainly not at night. A figure comes up the hill and I say Oh God it’s the provost sgt, but it is only John Field, who is boiling clothes himself, and he, the great gangling loose-limbed youth, stands on one leg and then the other, talking about what our futures are to be. And my clothes are boiled and the water that boiled them is black with green dye.’A3. Typed account of ‘1950 | Voyage to England | Arrival in London.’ 70pp., 4to. On 70 loose leaves, in card covers with title in autograph. The first entry is dated 21 June 1950, and the last 3 December [1950]. From Adelaide and Perth Gordon’s party travel to Colombo, through the Suez Canal, and on 23 July: ‘Mollie comes to my cabin and tells me that England is sighted. I get out of bed, go to the bathroom, and look out of my porthole, see England, yawn and go back to bed.’ Most of the rest of the journal is devoted to his first impressions of London, with which he is much taken: ‘All the comparisons I make in London between Australia and England are to the latter’s advantage. The people I meet in the process of getting about and buying things are kind and courteous, the pavements are clean, the bus and tube directions detailed and easy to follow, the people have musical inflections in their voices, no matter what their accent is, the advertisements are neat and often quietly surrealistic, the passers-by don’t stare at one, the negroes are almost accepted as equals, the Englishman, so distant until you speak to him, will stop his own business to show you the right place to catch a bus, the lift attendants thank you for letting them carry you to your floor and the housemaids bid you good morning, and notices are more grammatical. People seem to be more interested in their jobs than they are in Australia, even the ticket collectors in the tube stations examine each one to make sure nobody is scaling.’ At the end of the account, on 1 December, he sees ‘snow falling for the first time in my life, discounting my early childhood at Jamestown, S.A., where I’ve been told I saw it and what I said about it, though I can remember nothing about it. It is very light snow and melts as it touches the ground. This of course means that the air is cold, and I shiver on my way round to South Kensington for lunch.’A4. Typed account, headed ‘Holiday in Spain and Mallorca, 1953’. 74pp., 4to. On loose leaves. Gordon makes the journey with ‘Terry’. He has clearly lost none of his eye for detail: ‘How I enjoy Palma now, at this moment of 10.30 in the night, when Terry has gone to bed with diarrhoea and aching limbs from learning to swim, leaving me free to sit on the pavement drinking coffee, alone – and I want very much to be alone. | But the echo of his words is still in my ears: "The olive oil is of very poor quality – I can’t inflict this stuff on my stomach." His aversion to it, mentioned during every meal, at each dish of every meal, when every dish is given an audition, sets my nerves on edge, particularly as the horrors and perils of oil are also described at half-hourly intervals during the day. | The complaints ring in my ears, above Spanish-French-English gabble of tourist voices, of constipation, tiredness, lack of sleep. The memory of interminable window shopping, the long periods before cheap shirts at low prices, when I was so bored with it and wanted to move on. | But the hysterical outburst at dinner I remember almost with pleasure – he would go straight back to London, I was cynical and supercilious, everything he liked I disliked, he couldn’t bear it any longer, he wasn’t being hysterical, he was only sad that things had turned out like this, God knows he was doing his best to make the holiday a success, the trouble was I could never admit I was wrong, he wasn’t hard-boiled at all as I hinted, in fact once I had actually made him cry, he couldn’t remember what it was I had said, but I had been brutal to him - - well, why didn’t I say something, instead of just staring at him with that supercilious smile . . .’B. Story collectionsB1. Typescript of the collection ‘Tales Natural and Supernatural | Murray Gordon’. 199pp., 4to., on rectos only, in loose-leaf binder. There are twenty stories in the volume, which consists of a total of 158pp. of typed text, with twenty manuscript title-pages, and a separate page preceding each story giving its writing and publication history (for example, the story ‘The Twin’: ‘1943 Completed | 1.7.43 Pillar to Post – rejected | 1.8.43 Coast to Coast 1943 – rejected | 19.9.44 Read NG Writers’ Club Gp3 | 30.9.44 Under the Alebrin Moon – accepted’). The layout of the stories indicates that they were typed at different times: with some carrying manuscript emendations, and some with docketing on the reverse of leaves.The collection contains the following twenty stories, written between 1940 and 1944:1. The Trouble (9pp.)2. A Baker’s Life (11pp.)3. Miss Field [previously titled ‘Sunday Afternoon and Miss McMinney’] (6pp.)4. The Keys (7pp.)5. Nobody Was To Blame (5pp.)6. The Heart of Darwin [previously titled ‘Near Darwin’] (7pp.)7. The Twin (4pp.)8. Goodbye to Elliott (11pp.)9. Harry Comes Home (6pp.)10. Mother of Dan (10pp.)11. Night and Day (6pp.)12. Somebody is Playing the Gramophone (7pp.)13. They All Laughed (18pp.)14. The Annotator (7pp.)15. Lines of Communication (9pp.)16. The Ghost Who Came to Darwin (10pp.)17. The Memory (10pp.)18. The Quaint Gentleman (4pp.)19. The Oboe Player (5pp.)20. The World’s Greatest Tenor (6pp.)B2. Typescript of the collection ‘Goodbye to Elliott and other stories | By Murray Gordon’, dating from around February 1947, and containing twenty-two stories – eight previously published and fourteen unpublished. 248pp., 4to, typed on rectos only, in loose-leaf binder. In autograph on first page: ‘Murray Gordon | C/- Broken Hill South Ltd., | Broken Hill, | N.S.W.’ The volume contains 22 short stories, neatly double-spaced, with text totalling 222pp., 22 title-pages and 4pp. of prelims, including a dedication to Felix Barton (1888-1979), headmaster of Turramurra College, and the following note: ‘Of the stories appearing in this book, Mother of Dan, Somebody is Playing the Gramophone and Lines of Communication have appeared in Southerly, The Heart of Darwin in Pillar to Post, The Ghost Who Came to Darwin in Coast to Coast 1944, and A Baker’s Life, The Twin and The Sore in Under the Atebrin Moon.’ This collection contains all but five (B1: 4, 5, 9, 18, 19) of the stories in ‘Tales Natural and Supernatural’, most of them neatly typed out in double-spacing for submission to publishers. It is clear from the layout of the stories that they were also typed out at different times; the publication notes in this collection are shorter than those in that volume, and are here transcribed here in full.The collection contains the following twenty-two stories, with the earliest date to a story (no.2) 1 May 1943, and the latest date to a revision (no.21) 26 February 1947:1. Goodbye to Elliott (12pp.; ‘Revised 6 Dec 46.’)2. A Baker’s Life (11pp.; ‘Revised 1 May 43. | Revised 4 Mar 46. | Revised 6 Dec 46.’)3. Infectious Diseases (6pp.; ’18 Jan 45. | Revised 4 Dec 46.’)4. They all laughed (20pp.; ‘Revised 27 Jan 46.’)5. The Memory (12pp.; ‘Revised 10 Dec 46.’)6. Somebody is Playing the Gramophone (8pp.; ‘Revised 12 Feb 47.’)7. Mother of Dan (12pp.; ‘Written 20 Oct 43 | Revised 6 Jun 44 | Revised 20 Dec 46’)8. Golden Grove (5pp.; ‘8 Feb 45. | Revised 20 Nov 46.’)9. The World’s Greatest Tenor (6pp.; ‘Written 18 Oct 44. | Revised 7 Jan 46.’)10. Lines of Communication (9pp.; ‘Revised 19 Dec 46.’)11. The Annotator (9pp.; ‘7 Jun 44. | Revised 28 Nov 46.’)12. The Cloud (3pp.; ’18 Apr 45 | Revised 5 Dec 46’)13. The Heart of Darwin (12pp.; ‘Revised 17 Jan 47.’)14. The World’s Worst Soprano (17pp.; ’13 Feb 45.’)15. The Trouble (14pp.; ‘1940. | Revised 19/11/46.’)16. The Ghost Who Came to Darwin (10pp.; ‘Written 16 Jul 44. | Revised 24 Feb 47.’)17. Night and Day (8pp.; ‘Written 1 Mar 44 | Revised 17 Jan 45 | Revised 11 Dec 46’)18. Miss Field (9pp.; ‘Revised 29/11/46.’)19. The Twin (7pp.; ‘Revised 12 Feb 47.’)20. The Mountain (6pp.; ‘Murray Gordon, | C/- Broken Hill South Ltd., BROKEN HILL, N.S.W. AUSTRALIA’)21. The Sore (5pp.; ‘Written 22 Oct 44. | Revised 26 Feb 47.’)22. Sunday Night at Fitzroy Chambers (21pp.; ‘14 Mar 45.’)C. Scrapbooks and printed volumeC1, C2 and C3. Three volumes of scrapbooks, totalling 216pp., folio, dating from between 1944 and 1946. The first (90pp., folio), numbered 1, with ‘Murray Gordon’ on the brown paper wraps, and titled ‘The Slap-happy Scrap Book.’; the second (84pp., folio) numbered 2; the third (42pp., folio) without title or number. Containing magazine and newspaper articles (mainly relating to cultural matters), autograph lists (‘Digger Expressions’, ‘Words Overused by the Army’), mimeographed army circulars, cartoons (both original and printed), ephemera, correspondence. In the second volume Gordon has pasted in two pages of rejection slips and letters (1944 and 1946) under the heading ‘They’ll Be Sorry’, and the third volume contains a further two pages of similar material. Cuttings relating to the ‘Ern Malley’ hoax on the magazine Angry Penguins cover a total of nine pages (five in the second volume, and four in the third). Loosely inserted in the third volume are ten letters to Gordon, dating from 1945 and 1946, including correspondence relating to the magazines ‘Under the Atebrin Moon’ and ‘Coast to Coast’, as well as a letter from Australian CEMA declining a filmscript.C4. Bound volume containing three issues of Southerly, the magazine of the Australian English Association, each containing a story by ‘Murray Gordon' (vol.5 no.1, 1944, 'Mother of Dan'; vol.5 no.3, 1944, 'Somebody is Playing the Gramophone'; vol.6 no. 2, 1945, 'Lines of Communication').