1001 Nights Cast

Flying into Korea, August 26th. White fields with patches of damp green sinking into water; snow was not something I had seen before. Houses, villages, cities, lights, highways, all small, growing as we came closer to the ground. It reinvigorated my boyhood imagination, I wanted to play with those little toy cars, move them back and forth, honk their little imaginary horns. I put my hand up to the airplane window and grabbed a hold of them. And then the turbines were cut, and we landed, we hit the ground running. I braced myself a second too late, and my heart skipped a beat. Korea.

Introduction to the country: crowded air terminal, war time, seeming lack of newspapers, strange smell of odd foodstuffs, fish smells (baked beans at camp for the boys, thank Christ), small women (no offence, none taken?), and the men with faces like they had been iron-pressed. Beautiful skin: nothing like it in Australia. Cold formalism in manner, yes…but politeness too. Bowing seemed very respectful to me. Hands in prayer instead of a wave hello. Interesting, I took to it, though not many of the other boys did, they just tipped their hats, a little confused in their looks. Long highways leading out of the airport, cleaner and wider than at home—it was then that I mistook highways for a Korean invention (American, surely?) but they did stretches of road well, something we would come to appreciate as we made our way North. Few reminders of home: same sky, at least. Greater presence of clouds, though they rarely rained, a lingering threat. Every man and his umbrella. Architecture of thatched roofs, usually low, and the A-frame, as if in prayer (again). Buddhist temples, or shrines. I would visit these in Japan: did not step into a single one in Korea. We were at war, it never felt right. Green tea, something I would later import to Australia, for my own needs. As a brew of tea it was much less formal than the English varieties, a little less heavy in flavour, though bitter still. Cooler taste, perhaps reflecting the climate. I would grow to enjoy my rice cold. Locals thought me strange, but appreciated that I was making an effort, more than the other boys they would tell me. Thank you, thank you.

Lived in tents, khaki material, small aluminium polls dug into the ground for us. Tent pegs amidst the grass, had to be careful walking barefoot at night to take a leak, often bruised the sole of the foot when coming back to bed. Large tent used as dining hall and some basic training took place here. Shooting range was located among the hackberries (native to Korea and other parts of Asia). On a tree beside the barracks, ‘GO HOME AUSTRALIANS’, apparently this was carved into trees all around the world, most famously at the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York. I said to the tree, whispered into the wood, as if the tree were my confidant, ‘I would if I could’. A two metre branch fell from above, landing beside me. Three weeks later Lt. Graham Brody, from Leichhardt, was killed by a falling branch of the same size from the same tree. His body was sent back home. That tree ended up injuring more Australian men in our camp than any North Korean would.

This was the war, then. And for three whole months we would not hear a shot fired, apart from those empty rounds let off between the hackberries. They tried to sell us the war, at least convince us that we were doing the right thing, serving and duty and words like that. Col. Frank Shanahan baked ANZAC biscuits for the boys. He had a collection of Anzac biscuits shaped like the Australian landscape, coloured too. He said it depended on the amount of rolled oats and golden syrup used in the recipe. Here was the Nullarbor on his white crockery, also Simpson’s Desert, Kakadu, the Great Ranges, the Three Sisters—his favourite—and a delicious biscuit, trust me here, was Lake Eyre, covered in a fine coat of salt, adding an unexpected taste to the oats. He informed us then that texture played a great part in creating the right effect, but from biscuit to biscuit we found it difficult to taste any difference. Nobody touched Mt. Kosciusko, a great lump of a biscuit, baked to scale. Here were places that great men had got lost, walking, and we placed them in our mouths and chewed. Here was where the ancestors of the land had roamed, shed blood at the hands of white men, and there some baking soda in a clump: yes, the bitterness of the biscuit and the land. Here is where mystery, the heart of our mysterious country, lay, in a digestible form. Shanahan explained that he had intentions to master shortbread in order to create further landscapes, but he said, and we agreed, that Anzac would be the only biscuit to convince as our own landscape. Green icing, for Europe, the red rocks buried beneath, someone suggested, but Shanahan was not interested in going beyond our own shores.

‘But what about Korea, sir?’ someone cried.

‘Korea?’ Shanahan pondered. ‘Icing sugar, yes, for the snow. Soil? A brown colour. I don’t think that the Anzac biscuit is appropriate for the landscape. Perhaps, chocolate. Or a sweet ginger bread, something dark, almost black. Have you seen the soil ’neath this soil? Not the Anzac biscuit, that must be used only for Australian and New Zealand territories. Then, talking like the war technician that he was, more or less, he had us sold, on his biscuits, on his war.