It was a tragic end for repatriates on their way home after suffering so much.
These deaths were in stark contrast to the way the victims of other tropical diseases were getting stronger and healthier every day through continued good food and relaxation.
Even men prone to seasickness were having a pleasant voyage. The Indomitable was sufficiently large for the heavy seas to produce little roll, and they were able to join in the amusement and entertainment. The carrier commander even arranged for films to be projected onto a large screen hanging from the ship’s bridge on the flight deck.
The hours and days slipped by.
The sea and its fresh, clean breezes were so different from the foul air and dark interior of a Japanese coalmine, and the food and relaxation was a joy after so much starvation and slavery.
The men spent hours watching dolphins playing in the bow wave of the huge carrier, and picked up flying fish from the lower decks as the ship ploughed through their shoals.
Then came the excitement of seeing what they had dreamed about for three and a half years… Sydney Heads!
The repatriates, dressed in newly issued Australian service uniforms, crowded the flight deck as the carrier slowly made its way up the harbour. Then came the sight they had never expected to see again-Sydney Harbour Bridge.
‘Hey, look’, a man shouted. ‘The coathanger’s still there.’
Years before on the Death Railway the Japanese had tried to destroy Australian morale by saying that the Sydney Harbour Bridge had been bombed and was no more.
Jim Bodero, tears in his eyes at the familiar sight, remembered the Japanese guard who had boasted to him that Japanese forces had conquered most places in the Pacific and were attacking Australia.
‘Takusan boom boom (plenty bombing)!’, the Jap had said.
Bodero had rattled off the names of several Australian towns. ‘They bombed, too?’ he asked.
‘Hai, takusan boom boom!’ he was told.
‘Burrenwadgee, that town bombed, too?’ Jim made up the name.
Yes, that town had been bombed.
‘The Sydney Harbour Bridge?’
‘Hai. Bridge gone.’
‘How many spans were destroyed?’
‘Many, many spans.’
‘And Phar Lap? Have the Japanese bombed Phar Lap?’
‘Hai. Phar Lap bombed. All towns gone. Takusan boom boom!’
Bodero grinned at the memory. Here was the Sydney Harbour Bridge, without a mark on it. Phar Lap was safe in the museum, too.
The British aircraft carrier berthed at Woolloomooloo. As the repatriates filed off the ship, some kissed the Australian soil they’d given up hope of ever setting foot on again.
Buses were waiting to take them to Holdsworthy army camp. There, they were given brief medical checks and allowed their first sleep in Australia in what seemed a lifetime.
The next day, old mates who’d been through so much together were split up. They were being returned to the capital cities where they had enlisted-Fred Barnstable and George Beavis to Melbourne, and Chilla Goodchap, Ronnie Crick and Jim Bodero to Brisbane.
Everybody had lost track of Tellemalie, who hadn’t been on the carrier.
‘If it was anyone else I’d worry about him’, Bodero said, ‘but you can bet your boots Tellemalie will get back to Australia, even if he has to swim.’
And he did get back, although nobody knew how, and he wasn’t saying.
It became part of post-war folklore that Tellemalie was in Brisbane working for the city council sweeping gutters. It was said that anyone looking for him only had to find a pub with a broom and shovel outside and they’d find him in the bar telling his tales to the drinkers.
Jim Bodero went searching for him and, sure enough, found him in a Fortitude Valley pub.
‘It’s bloody Bodero’, Tellemalie said. ‘Get sick of all that Nip tucker, did yer?’
‘You’re the only bloke I know who appreciated their menu, Tellemalie.’
‘Have a beer.’ Tellemalie held up two fingers to the barmaid. ‘What are you doing with yourself, Jimbo?’
‘I’m back in the newspaper game. I can see you got yourself a good job.’
‘Temporary arrangement. I’m thinking of running for mayor.’
‘How the hell did you get back here? You weren’t with us on the carrier.’
‘It’s a long story. I’ll tell you about it some day.’
And that was all Jim was to learn about Tellemalie’s repatriation, as he moved on to discuss his home life.
‘You wouldn’t believe it, Jim. When I got back here, I found out that my sister was going to marry a Dutchman. A bloody Dutchman!’ There was horror in his voice.
‘You mightn’t like the Dutch’, Jim said, ‘I mean, nobody did in the POW camps, but you didn’t interfere in your sister’s love life, did you?’
‘Interfere?’ Tellemalie gave one of his lopsided grins. ‘Whenever he came to the house to visit my sister I’d get out my three-bladed pocket knife, strop it on my boot leather and tell him how many Dutch throats I’d cut with it in the POW camps. He stopped coming around after that.’
The years of imprisonment hadn’t changed Tellemalie.
When the Queensland repatriates arrived at the South Brisbane railway station on 21 October 1945, they were bundled into fleets of taxis and driven through the city streets to a rousing welcome home. Bodero’s brother had travelled from Rockhampton to meet him.
After the emotional greetings, the men were taken to an army depot and given another surprise: ration tickets. As prisoners of war, they’d become used to having little of anything, but they’d never expected that food and clothing would be in such short supply back home that it had to be rationed.
With preliminary procedures completed, leave was granted. Christmas 1945 would be spent at home.
Bodero had accumulated leave of one hundred and thirty-three days.
On 18 January 1946, he was discharged from the AIF after two thousand and thirty-nine days’ active service, one thousand three hundred days of it spent as a prisoner of war.
The war left him with a painful legacy-amoebic dysentery, malaria, stomach ulcers, nervous dyspepsia, constant back, shoulder and neck aches and pains, arthritis, strained knee ligaments, continuous pins and needles in both feet, scarring to both eyes and malnutrition.
He wondered if it had all been worthwhile.
While he was slaving on the Burma Railway in 1942, a Japanese soldier had boasted to him that Australia would become part of the Japanese empire.
‘Bullshit’, Bodero told him. ‘For that to happen, Japan has to win the war, and it’s not going to do that.’
‘We see, we see’, nodded the Japanese soldier. ‘Nippon win the war, but if not, no worry. Japan will own Australia, even if it takes a hundred years.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE PAIN
IT was a sunny Sunday afternoon in 1966. The war had been over for twenty-one years.
Steaks as thick as a Sydney phone book smoked and sizzled on the backyard barbecue as the sweating man in the apron sloshed beer on them from a bottle.
People who had been paying close attention to their thirst sniffed the air, put down their drinks and took up paper plates, holding them out like begging bowls as they edged towards the hotplate.
The cook, wielding his spatula with the casual dexterity of one skilled at his trade, turned the steaks over and moved them about like chess pieces. Blood and juices dribbled out as he scooped up a t-bone the size of an Olympic discus.