Story for performance #763
webcast from London at 09:02PM, 23 Jul 07

If I could combine the prompts from the last five days, I could begin to form a story and I wonder if anyone has tried to write a whole piece this way. I notice this method was not included in the general instructions on how to write from yesterday’s post, and though everyone knows what is expected, something is still missing and although I have not yet been able to dissolve the air of mystery about where this story will go, I already know that it is too late to try the combinatory technique, because the story must come to an end, sooner rather than later. I’m in the unusual situation—for me—of having the ending, but not the beginning. In the meantime, I can’t let go of a prompt from a few days ago. I have been on the edge of a volcano, visiting a place made famous by a Eugene von Guerard painting from the middle of the nineteenth century.

The volcano is inactive, but somehow there is still an explosive magic attached to the place, where memories are for me even richer than the thick larval soil which flowed onto the plains thousands of years ago as the land was being formed. Perhaps it is a combination of the famous painting and all the other artworks based on the site—the lake and the nested caldera. Perhaps it is my own memories of walking all over the islands in the middle of the lake when I was at school and trees were being planted to imitate the heavily wooded appearance of the place as it was in the von Guerard painting. In any case, I knew nothing about art then and had only ever seen black and white reproductions of the painting in The Standard, which was leading the campaign for restoration of the site.

For a few years, before the reafforestation, the island was used for motor-bike racing and you could hear the roar of the engines echoing over the banks of the lake on Sundays, shattering the peace. Before the floods of ’46, they say there wasn’t a lake at all and cattle grazed on the dry mudflats, which could be leased by local farmers. The lake dried up again in the drought, but in the heavy rains of the last few weeks, there’s water in it again and old people are remembering the deluge and all the bridges washed away.

In the main town, the flood plain has been subdivided and redeveloped and hundreds of people are living in new houses, which are probably uninsured. But the past is gone, it can no longer touch us; everything lost to history is well lost as someone said, was it Hegel? Here comes the future, and it will be better. Before the flood, there was the war and a story from these plains, which rose to the surface when the records were uncovered and I began to play with words.

During the war, it was the local postmaster’s job to take the bad news to the families. I try to imagine what this was like. The Defence Services records in the National Archives are full of neat, handwritten abbreviations: ‘W.I.A.’ (‘Wounded in Action’) or ‘M.I.A’ (‘Missing in Action’), which condense the immensity of the experience. Hundreds of thousands of written records of every single serviceman, from the moment of his marching out at the end of basic training to final discharge, one way or another, through different camps and theatres of war.

The local postmaster would probably come in a horse-drawn cart, because petrol was rationed and he would find a way of telling these people, his neighbours, whom he had probably known for years that something terrible had happened to their son. And so it happened that a delivery of this kind arrived at the farm one day, the news that the second son was ‘Wounded in Action’. And then, a few days later, another visit from the local postmaster. The mother assumed the worst because in this family the worst was always assumed since happiness was not for the likes of them.

‘The poor fellow’s gone!’ she thought, but this time at least the news was good. His injuries were not mortal and he was still alive in the jungle of New Britain’s entirely volcanic landscape, where Australian troops were engaged in ‘mopping up operations’. This involved dealing with Japanese snipers and the remnants of a conquering army after U.S. forces had left and the Pacific War was coming to an end in the months before Hiroshima.

For the injured soldier in his early twenties, this boy from the country with bitter winters, the heat of the jungle and the constant rain and mud and mosquitoes presented a misery of a different kind. But nothing was worse than the job he was given after he had recovered enough from his injuries to resume service, and before he could be shipped out for discharge. It haunted him for the rest of his life, though it took him more than sixty years before he could speak of it to his family; perhaps it was the guilt of surviving. His job was to bury the bodies of those killed in action, young men the same age as he, hurled into shallow graves in the jungle and left there, while he was shipped home alive and ordinary life resumed.

Adapted for performance by Barbara Campbell from a story by Helen Grace.