It was after I’d read “The Brisbane Line” that I went back and flicked through my Father’s War Record. I say flicked through because there is very little written down. Most in spidery faded ink and almost all in code. Squadron number 107, number 2 R.P.P and so on. Occasionally in the truly sparse document a place name slips in; Wagga Wagga, Bradfield Park, Port Moresby, Townsville.
As a record it gives only a ghostly outline of my Father’s true war experiences. There is no mention of his being strafed while manning a signals hut in the New Guinea Jungle. Being evacuated with black water fever, malaria, and recouping in Townsville. Being on a troop truck on his way to Darwin when the bombing forced an unexpected bivouac at The Devils Marbles in the Northern Territory. Working as a signals operator keeping in contact with flying boats patrolling our east coast for Japanese Submarines. This real action he revealed to us bit by bit over the years and that’s why the sparsity of his offical record came as such a shock.
JP Powell wouldn’t have been so surprised. But she is an historian after all and knows only too well what secrets bald facts can hide. Her book “The Brisbane Line” adds some muscle to the skeletal remains of wartime Brisbane in the early 1940s.
The Brisbane Line was, supposedly a line curving across the Australian map, perhaps following the Murray-Darling River system, from Adelaide to Brisbane. Depending on whom you believe it is either an election lie, the Menzies Government’s plan to sacrifice the bulk of Australia to any invasion by the Japanese or a cock-a-hoop Australian Army defensive stratagem for wise old General MacArthur to kybosh in his wise old American way. Who knows?
Anyway it’s a great title because Powell’s fictional murder mystery is set against a Brisbane already sacrificed to our American allies rather than the Japanese. In 1941 after Pearl Harbour we Brisbanites were relieved and delighted to see the US Troops arrive. They had money and manpower and would drive the Japanese back up the globe where they belong. But by 1943 all that manpower and money were starting to irk. The Yanks were over paid, over sexed and, more importantly, over here.
Judy Powell captures a big country town Brisbane of yesteryear. Very white, of course but fascinated by the jazz and jitterbugging the Americans brought. Money was there for the taking and black-marketeering, illegal alcohol, prostitution, clubs and bars proliferated. It’s a time that has been only too willingly forgotten.
The story is a simple one of a yankee military policeman, Joe Washington, who finds personal meaning against the mad backdrop of war, in investigating the murder of one of his own. It’s his own Brisbane Line that Joe won’t retreat from. Murder investigations were handled by the corrupt Brisbane police of the time and conflict naturally arose as corruption wasn’t the prerogative of only one of the allies. Everyone; police, soldiers, populace, were crossing moral boundaries once considered sacrosanct.
There’s love too. There always is. And it’s all about boundaries as well. Joe is married.
You only have to attend an ANZAC Day celebration, or read my Father’s discharge documents to see how necessary books like “The Brisbane Line” really are. With out them we might imagine war to be a movie, more like Breaker Morant and less like Sergeant Bilko.
At the End of the Day 