Amongst the Dead by Robert Gott

was crowded with dense and ominous clouds, and by the time we walked out of Larrakeyah Barracks, with Luther as our guide, and without Glen, I was sweating profusely. Brian and I were both wearing shorts, our pale legs betraying us as new arrivals. We were to catch a small boat and make the short crossing to Channel Island; but first, Luther wanted to give us a brief tour of Darwin’s shattered streets.
    It wasn’t a long walk from the barracks to what had once been the commercial centre of town. Houses along the way stood or had fallen according to a random pattern of destruction. Here, a lush and flowering garden sat unscathed, its house empty but intact; there, a garden had great gaps blown in it, the yard pocked by bomb craters, and its house a tangle of blasted, scorched timbers. At the gate of one property, Luther drew our attention to a now-faded notice dated April 1942 and bearing the mayor’s signature, exhorting troops to forego looting abandoned properties and reminding them, as if they needed it, that the abandonment had not been voluntary but the result of enemy action.
    It was difficult to determine what the streets might have looked like, so extensive was the damage. The Bank of New South Wales, which must have been a rather grand building, was now a crumbling shell, and its neighbours sat roofless, or boarded up, or with great, jagged holes in their walls. There were plenty of men about clearing the roads of rubble, or doing the best they could to repair what was repairable, or tear down and make safe what wasn’t. Almost to a man they were dressed only in shorts, and most of them were hatless.
    ‘A lot of these blokes are Civil Construction Corps volunteers,’ Luther said. ‘Not army. Without them, practically nothing in this place would work.’
    ‘Where are they from?’
    ‘All over. Some of them have been directed into the corps by Manpower. How’d you be? One day you’re in Melbourne doing some job Manpower thinks is useless, and the next you’re on your way here. You’d be pissed off.’
    I couldn’t disagree with him and, after looking around, refrained from suggesting that perhaps the nation hadn’t lost too many significant buildings. By this stage we were approaching the enclave at the end of what had been Cavenagh Street. This, Luther said, was where the notorious, open-sewered Chinatown had been. It had been looted bare, and more or less dismantled.
    ‘No great loss,’ he said. ‘It was a squalid and immoral place, apparently.’
    The way he said this reinforced for me the suspicion I’d been harbouring that Luther Martin’s attitude was rooted in a thoughtless Christian revulsion for anything that might offend his God. I immediately distrusted him, and told him that Brian and I needed some time before catching the boat to work out what we were going to do to entertain the lepers.
    Luther left us at the harbour, where the skeletons of many ships protruded from the water, and where men were busy repairing the wharf. We had half an hour to sort out what we’d do. We’d already decided the night before, after finding a recording of a Glenn Miller swing tune in the Mess (and having been assured that there was a gramophone on Channel Island), that we’d attempt a demonstration of the jitterbug. We agreed that it would be pointless of Brian to slip into his Jean Harlow sheath.
    ‘We need to run through this dance,’ I said.
    ‘What, here?’
    ‘We rehearse where we can, Brian. Our stage is wherever we happen to be.’
    Where we happened to be was on the partly repaired timbers of the long wharf, surrounded by Civil Construction Corps workmen and others, all hammering and carrying and swearing. I have no doubt that, for those who looked up from their work and saw us, the sight of two men moving woodenly through the steps of the jitterbug was very strange. Woodenly at first, that is. Having established the general shape of the dance, and who was to do what, I counted us in and