‘War,’ wrote the American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘is an organised bore.’ His experience was of the American Civil War, but his observation held true eight decades later as Allied and Axis armies groped about in search of one another across the vastnesses of Africa and the Pacific. Indeed, only a sixth of Australian servicemen in World War II experienced active combat first-hand.
Nonetheless, whether they were exhilarated by fear or numbed by boredom, the lives of countless soldiers, sailors and airmen were irrevocably changed. Had he not been a brave RAAF pilot placing his life at risk, David Campbell might not have had the nerve and need to begin submitting his evocative lyric verse to Douglas Stewart at the Bulletin in 1942. Had they not been underemployed vassals in the peculiar bolthole of Alf Conlon’s Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs, Lieutenant James McAuley and Corporal Harold Stewart might never have arrived at the impish notion of inventing the poet ‘Em Malley’ to puncture Max Harris’s modernist bubble. Young official war artists like Albert Tucker and Ivor Hele were destined to become painters of great renown. Service experiences would inform the works of writers as varied as Robin Boyd, Ivan Southall, Jon Cleary, Russell Braddon, Paul Brickhill and Rohan Rivett. An underemployed RAF intelligence officer in the desert, Patrick White felt that ‘detached from my past, real life, and with no clue of the future, I was temporarily a free being’.
For Jack Iverson, VX23811, the experience was also of temporary freedom. Had it not been for World War II, chances are he’d never have bowled a cricket ball in anger. Before his enlistment, his life and career had appeared predestined. Whatever his ambitions were, he sublimated them so effectively that nobody was aware of them. But war changed everything, and did so by being ‘an organised bore’.
By the third week of April, 2/4 LAA Regiment had regathered at Kairi in Queensland’s Atherton Tablelands, the 9th Division training area. Or, at least, most of it did. Twenty-one soldiers were absent without leave, compelling its new commanding officer, Lieut. Col. ‘Bullet’ Myers, to issue a stern directive: ‘Attention is directed to the fact that the seriousness of the offence of absence without leave is not properly appreciated and that the commital of this offence has become very prevalent.’ The prodigals eventually returned, though this did not stifle the constant cadging for leave. Two soldiers wrote slyly to their wives, for instance, soliciting letters saying that their children were ill, rather forgetful of the fact that all mail went via censors.
The unit would spend two months at Kairi. There was no clue to its next destination aside from the training regimen: a great deal of marching, which blistered feet softened by leave, experimentation with the loading of equipment and stores, and a mock amphibious landing at Trinity Beach at Cairns. For 11 Battery, there was the new discipline of becoming a so-called ‘airborne battery’, which involved endless stop-watched practices at Mareeba Airport shoving the components of their guns into fuselages of derelict DC2s and DC3s. But for Jack Iverson, the most significant aspect of his spell at Kairi was that for the first time in uniform he began playing cricket regularly.
Evidence for this is actually in Jack’s own hand. A typewritten screed survives on which, in seven columns, Jack enumerated his individual performances in every wartime match in which he participated. It is a remarkable document, as it could scarcely have been compiled retrospectively, and must be thought of as almost unique: few soldiers would have bothered to document their services sport in such detail.
Jack, of course, had long had this sedulous streak; much like his father, a trained accountant. His detailed station diary at Landscape testifies to an orderly and retentive mind and, if his few surviving colleagues have any recollection of Jack apart from being ‘tall’, it is of his meticulous and methodical manner and habit. ‘Oh, yes, he was a meticulous man, Jack,’ says Ken Noldt. ‘Wouldn’t have been running transport if he hadn’t been.’ Bill Carmody recalls one unusual faculty: ‘When we played football, Jack would always be waiting at the end of the game to tell you how many kicks and marks you’d had. I suppose he must have kept statistics.’
Jack certainly kept them for cricket, and his documentary proof shows his interest dawning at Kairi. Up to his spell on the Atherton Tablelands, he had played only half a dozen intraunit games spaced over three years. Despite the Kairi training schedule, he now played another half a dozen for 11 Battery, including four in a fortnight. The results would have pleased him, even if his three hat-tricks in consecutive games imply a rather poor standard of competition. If he managed to hit the ball with any success—and he did not score more than 21 at Kairi—he lovingly appended to his record the number of ‘sixers’ he struck.
In matches at Kairi, Jack seems merely to have been reproducing his schoolboy medium pace. Max Scott, a gunner in 12 Battery, recalls:
My only real memory of Iverson is getting out to him. We were having a match to select a regimental team. I wasn’t a regular cricketer, more of a footballer, but Iverson gave me a short one on leg stump. I thought: ‘Hello. Here’s one to clout.’ What did I do? I hooked him straight to square leg.
Nonetheless, in Jack’s statistical vade mecum is at last a hint of his future.
Jack’s regiment was bound for Port Moresby, and began its staged embarkation by air from Mareeba Airport on 12 July 1943. Transport units shipped out from Townsville on the Taroona a month later. They were headed for another unusual theatre of war, as far removed from the parched sandscapes of North Africa as could be imagined.
New Guinea had assumed vital strategic significance within weeks of Pearl Harbor. Port Moresby, with its secure and protected Fairfax Harbour, was the ideal location from which to launch an invasion of Australia’s vulnerable north, and the prospect of the Japanese flag fluttering over it had seemed for a time unpalatably real. The first bombs had fallen on the town on 3 February 1942 and, though the Battle of the Coral Sea on 15 May had turned back a planned seaborne invasion on the south coast, Japanese soldiers crossing the Owen Stanley Ranges from the north had come within twenty-five miles of the town by September.
Increasingly desperate fighting had averted the immediate threat, but the island remained unstable, ‘the loose front step on Australia’s porch’. Moresby assuredly looked like a town in the teeth of war, littered with bomb craters and with a civilian population a fraction the size of its prewar level of about 400 whites and 1000 natives. Even Fairfax Harbour testified to Japanese offensive force, featuring the devastated hulk of the old Burns Philp steamer Macdhui bombed to blazes in June 1942. The clouded Owen Stanleys that loomed to the north, meanwhile, betokened an interior of almost impenetrable mystery. So uncharted was the range at the commencement of the war that two American officers seeking the remains of a downed aircraft had discovered two entire mountains unmarked on maps: Mount Rennels and Mount Graves still bear their names.
Soldiers of 2/4 had to acclimatise swiftly to this alien landscape. Again, there were strict instructions to minimise the risk of myriad diseases: malaria, impetigo bullusa, tinea pedis. The kunai grass that grew as tall as a man hid the threat of scrub typhus inflicted by tiny red mites. As hand-to-hand combat with the enemy was finally in prospect, soldiers were instructed in some none-too-polite conversational Japanese: susume (advance), shitsumoni kotaite kudasai (answer my questions) and the essential watashi wa nihongo ga wakarimasen (I cannot understand Japanese). They even had to get used to a sight to which few Australians in 1943 would have been accustomed: black faces, on their valued native bearers. On 13 August, ‘Bullet’ Myers enjoined his soldiers to remember: ‘The natives do not like to be called "George". The correct term is "boy".’
It was to be the busiest and most gruelling period of 2/4’s war, and simultaneously the dullest of Jack’s. A fortnight after Myers’ imprecation, 10 and 12 Battery sailed with the 9th Division for two months of often torrid action around Lae and Finschhafen-Langemak. In particular, on 17-18 October, they helped see off an attempted Japanese landing at Scarlet Beach. Eleven Battery saw far less action, being peripherally involved in a 7th Division assault on Nadzab, and Jack little if any, having remained with two detachments in Moresby. Though he didn’t know it, his war was virtually over. And, though he would scarcely have realised this either, his cricket career was dawning.
Life in the desert had often been harsh, but at least there had been the prospect of a little leave in the exotic surrounds of Alexandria, Cairo or Beirut. Moresby, by contrast, was pokey and isolated, a crumbling colonial outpost with a soporific tropical climate, few entertainments beyond a solitary cinema and mostly soldiers for company. Many Australian servicemen posted there loathed it, a gunner in another anti-aircraft unit turning his thoughts into verse:
If you can live in Moresby
Settle down with some old gin
Then you can say, you’re a better man
Than I am, Gunga Din
Stationed at Porn Porn Park neighbouring the airfield, with its steel-plate airstrips, the members of 11 Battery left behind by their regiment took to the unlikeliest of amusements. Although he had no training or special interest in entomology, for instance, Ken Noldt chased and collected butterflies: ‘They were huge there, and just beautiful. And otherwise there was very jolly little to do.’
Many soldiers when bored headed for Porn Porn Park’s well-stocked YMCA tent, with its hampers of minor luxuries from the Australian Comforts Fund. Generations of soldiers had done much the same. Tents provided by the Young Men’s Christian Association had been features of military life since the American Civil War, while emissaries of the Australian YMCA had travelled abroad with Australian servicemen as early as the Boer War and the Boxer Rebellion. There had been a YMCA dugout on Gallipoli, with a red YMCA triangle on its tarpaulin roof to discourage Turkish aircraft. There was now one at the Australian prisoner-of-war camp at Changi, its two volunteers having accepted voluntary incarceration and created the ‘Changi University’ where soldiers were distracted from their hardships by such initiatives as debating, drama and a music appreciation class.
About 150 YMCA personnel were now overseas, many in New Guinea, distributing sporting gear, stationery, toothpaste, chocolate, coffee and Christmas cards under their charter which was ‘to organise and provide for the social and recreation facilities and the moral agencies’ of the soldier. Some, indeed, were as brave as any soldier. Ron Bain produced the Busu Beaut, a daily news-sheet composed from radio bulletins, for his corps of engineers. George Trenholme created capacious Christmas stockings from mosquito nets for his machine gun battalion. Leslie Taylor ran a roving boxing school with the same verve as he gave to a Christian address. The ‘YM bloke’ never carried a rifle, but would sometimes carry one for a soldier who was evidently struggling, and they recognised the risks they were running. Taylor, for instance, would always take his tum as a sentry: ‘I felt more comfortable when I was watching than when I was lying and listening, and if a Jap had sneaked up on us he would not have said "Oh, YMCA? So sorry" and passed on to drop his grenade on the next fellow.’
Jack had been a habitue of 2/4’s YMCA tent in the Middle East, for one reason in particular. The unit’s first shipment of sporting goods from the Australian Comforts Fund in January 1942 had included inter alia two dozen table tennis balls, and Jack had played the game incessantly with two others from 11 Battery HQ, Bombardier Bert Davey from South Australia and Gunner Max Mulligan from Western Australia. Jack’s party piece, of course, was spinning it, so that it swerved round in the air and jinked round corners. ‘God, he could spin it,’ says Davey. ‘There wasn’t anything he couldn’t do.’
It was the same at Porn Porn Park. A ball would appear from his pocket at any opportunity, and feature in a variety of amusements, including spontaneous games of French cricket. As Jack explained to the sports writer R. S. Whitington for an article published six years later in Sporting Life:
The idea was to try and spin the ping pong ball to beat the bat-the 12-inch ruler-and hit the pole. I found that by flicking the ball (as one does with a marble) with the thumb across the index and second finger, I could send it up straight, but could not impart any spin.
Then I got the idea of doubling the second finger of my hand back into the palm, placing the ping pong ball on the back of that finger and holding the ball in position with my thumb. With this grip I did not have to use my index, third or fourth fingers. My second finger became a lever or spring and by releasing that finger I found I could get an abnormal amount of spin.
I also found that if I held my thumb horizontally to the left I could flick the ball far to the leg side of the tent pole and make it break terrifically towards the pole.
Under the rules of our French cricket we weren’t allowed to lift our elbow and bowl overarm, so I could not reverse the process and point the thumb to the right or leg side and deliver an off break or ‘wrong ‘un’ as it is called.
So I started flicking the leg spinner. I found that I could flick the ping pong ball about six feet in the air with this one. It would drop quickly and bounce two feet in front of where the batsman played for it. I got a lot of catches at silly mid on and silly point with this ball. Also, with this action, the ball would come in as an inswinger and when it pitched turn very sharply from the leg.
This gave me the idea of trying to bowl the same type of ball with a tennis ball overarm. The peculiar thing was, though, that when I flicked it underarm with a ping pong ball I got an inswinging leg break but when I bowled it overarm with a tennis ball it gave me a natural wrong ‘un. It was a wrong ‘un, too, bowled with the wrist over the ball which caused it to appear to the batsman as an ordinary leg break.
This last factor was actually not peculiar at all; a leg break underarm would naturally become an off spinner overarm. But as diversion from the tedium of being in the rear of a war now fast being won, it was a bewitching discovery.
Jack’s other distraction was cricket itself, which he was now playing with the zeal of a convert. According to his own digest, he featured between December 1943 and December 1944 in fifty-three matches. It is now hard to guess at their quality. The regiment featured some handy cricketers—Bombardier Stan Semmens later turned out in sub-district ranks for Brunswick and Gunner Duncan McKenzie played after the war for North Melbourne—although Jack’s scratchings in his personal Wisden suggest that the standard varied quite widely.
Jack represented 11 Battery, captained by Warrant Officer Steve Henderson from Melbourne. The majority of games were played at Porn Porn Park itself, whose ground was flattened earth largely encircled by kunai grass and on whose matting pitch he often appears to have been lethal: in four weeks alone, from mid-January to mid-February 1944, he picked up 52 wickets. In one game against the 7th Division at Dumpu, he also notes a score of 52 with ‘7 sixers’.
Yet occasionally, just very occasionally, Jack’s enthusiasms—the abiding one of spinning spheres, the recent one of cricket—began to intersect. Exactly why is not immediately clear. Jack himself left behind two explanations. One, contained in an interview he granted Bert Oldfield for the great keeper’s 1953 textbook The Rattle of the Stumps, was laziness:
I stuck at the fast bowling until the heat became enough ‘to make your bloomin’ eyebrows crawl’, as Kipling poetically put it. And being an Aussie and not averse to a bit of ‘bludging’ if it came my way, I looked around for a more comfortable means of delivering the ball.
It was then I made what proved to be a rather lucky decision. Remembering the odd ways I used to kill time by flicking oddities about, I tried the grip on the cricket ball in a match against an Artillery regiment. For that over, our wicketkeeper became a mere spectator. My first delivery was hit out of sight and the ball lost in the jungle grass. This cavalier treatment continued, and the fieldsmen had leather-hunting enough to last the innings. Tropical heat, perspiration and leg weariness prompted the captain to bellow: ‘For Pete’s sake, bowl the ball! We’ve enough runs to chase as it is!’ This should have been the end of the experiment. But I still got too hot when fast bowling, and to cool off would revert to the two-finger exercise.
This is a delightful passage. Although Oldfield probably added a few of the more ornate flourishes, there is a tang of Jack in it, the snatch of Kipling perhaps a remnant of that Geelong College education. But the implication that Jack’s ‘lucky decision’ was purely adventitious smacks of undue modesty. Jack had always loved spinning a ball. He had belatedly come to a pleasure in cricket. That they should have combined would, one must suspect, have been a more conscious decision.
As it happens, Jack had already let slip an alternative explanation, almost entre nous, in his aforementioned 1950 interview with Whitington. The writer narrated his own version of that very first delivery that was deposited in the kunai grass:
His army team captain, Sergeant [sic] Steve Henderson, of Melbourne, became rather terse at the time. ‘Stick to your fast-mediums,’ he told Iverson. ‘We’ll have quite enough runs to get even then.’
Iverson says: ‘I suppose I have always been a bit of a rebel though and I used to send down one of the specials once in a while.’
The content of the two explanations is obviously quite different, and so, more subtly, is the voice. Talking to Oldfield, Jack sounds more ingenuous, even sympathetic with his long-suffering skipper thinking of the runs being surrendered. He describes his new-style deliveries as ‘oddities’; no wonder, really, that the skipper was distrustful.
In his conversation with Whitington, by contrast, Iverson sets up a situation with slightly more feeling, and ascribes to Henderson a slightly crueller comment. His new toy is called the ‘special’, and his persistence with it in the face of his captain’s sarcasm related with a childlike delight.
The accuracy of Jack’s paraphrase is unimportant: Henderson probably made neither of the remarks attributed to him. The significant element is what registered in Jack’s mind’s ear, and how it altered. There is an obvious explanation for the variation. Oldfield dates his talk with Jack as ‘some time after the 1950-1951 season’. By that time, he had scaled cricket’s heights, starred in an Ashes series, and a certain sporting sardonicism probably seemed in order. The Whitington interview predates that same Ashes series, a time when Jack would still have felt protective of his ‘special’, and when Jack might also have sensed doubters of whom he made Henderson an epitome.
The comments to Whitington, therefore, seem to reflect more truly Jack’s feelings at the time of his exploratory efforts. Only one aspect jars: Jack’s description of himself as ‘always a bit of a rebel’. A rebel? Jack? The real estate agent’s son, the reserved boarding-school boy, the likeable young jackaroo, the methodical soldier? I paused over this stray remark when I read it the first time, and many times after. Jack could hardly be said to have struck anyone as ‘a bit of a rebel’ in his travels. Yet was it the way Jack perceived himself?