Taz, Frankie and Richard stood in line under the blisteringly hot Queensland sun. It was their final parade in khaki, almost a year since they’d helped salvage Mephisto. When the ship carrying the men of the 26th Battalion had arrived in Brisbane, the troops encountered a setback. Spanish Influenza was ravaging the globe, killing millions, and the returning troops were sent into quarantine on the off chance they had brought the virus with them from Europe.

For three weeks, Taz, Frankie and Richard kicked their heels around the Lytton Quarantine Station. Sitting at the mouth of the Brisbane River, just to the south of Fort Lytton, the station was a maze of wooden huts with corrugated iron roofs, all sitting on low concrete stumps. At least the camp’s huts were an improvement on trenches on the Somme.

The men of the entire disbanded 26th Battalion now stood waiting for permission to walk out the quarantine station’s closed gates and leave the AIF behind. Beyond those gates and the high wire fences on the three landward sides of the station, hundreds of men, women and children were gathered. The troops could hear their excited chatter.

Battalion commander Rocks Robinson, now a lieutenant-colonel, remained true to his nickname of Old Uniformity, prescribing an orderly process by which the men would be demobbed today. Family members waiting outside had been required to register their names. Company sergeant-majors ranged along the lines of men, lists in hand, reading out batches of names in strict alphabetical order. The named men stepped forward and were then dismissed.

‘It’s like we’re being let out of jail,’ Frankie whispered to Taz as their ranks thinned.

‘In a way, we are,’ said Taz, smiling.

Frankie didn’t expect anyone from his family to be outside. He hadn’t written to them in the end. Although, urged by Taz, he had decided to go home to Gympie and try to make amends with his father. As for Taz, he planned to go home to his family in Tasmania, and Richard had accepted an invitation to accompany him. If he could find work in Tasmania, Richard planned to save for a few years and then perhaps return to New York City. The three of them were resigned to waiting until the last Queensland family reunions had taken place beyond the wire. Only then would those men with no one waiting for them be permitted to depart.

But two-thirds of the way through this process, the trio received a surprise.

‘Archibald Browning Rait,’ called C Company’s acting sergeant-major, who happened to be the promoted Frank Hanson.

Taz, Frankie and Richard looked at each other in alarm.

Hanson came to stand in front of Richard. ‘Come on, Rait. One step forward, man!’ he commanded.

‘But there must be some mistake, Sergeant-Major,’ Richard returned, not budging.

‘You’re Rait, aren’t you?’ said Hanson. ‘You haven’t changed your name since the last time I saw you, have you?’

Richard’s face flushed red. ‘No, Sergeant-Major. But I have no family here. There is no one who knows me.’

‘Well, this bit of paper says different,’ Hanson retorted, crossing the name of Rait off his list. ‘One step forward!’

Reluctantly, Richard lifted up his kitbag and took a pace forward.

‘Dismissed!’ Hanson barked. When Richard failed to move, the sergeant-major snapped. ‘Move it, Rait! Out that gate you go! Someone out there’s panting to see you.’

Anxiously glancing back at Taz and Frankie, Richard slowly began to make for the gate.

‘Thanks for the school lessons, mate,’ Frankie called after him.

‘See you outside, Archie,’ called Taz.

Richard nodded and kept going. The gate was opened by a corporal, and Richard walked out into Australian civilian life. Even though a number of men had already departed with their loved ones, and the crowd had reduced, Richard was still confronted by hundreds of people who stared at him intently as they tried to determine whether he belonged to them.

‘What’s your name?’ asked the corporal at the gate, when no one rushed to welcome Richard.

‘Rait. Archibald Rait.’

‘Archibald Rait!’ the corporal yelled. ‘Anyone for Archibald Rait?’

A woman now made her way to the front of the crowd. Middle-aged, her hair greying, and well dressed, she looked Richard up and down with a severe expression on her face. ‘Archibald Rait?’ she asked.

‘Yes, I am Archibald Rait,’ Richard replied with a gulp.

‘Archibald Browning Rait?’

‘Yes.’

The pensive look on the woman’s face gave way to a wide smile, as if she had come to a realisation. ‘Archie, darling! How wonderful to see you!’

Richard, dumbfounded, stood there as the woman hurried forward and embraced him. From what Taz and Frankie had told him, he looked nothing like the real Archibald Rait.

The woman took a step back. ‘Don’t you recognise your Aunt Bess, dear?’ she said, holding him by the shoulders.

‘I . . . I . . .’

‘I know, dear,’ she said, smiling again. ‘It has been a long time since we last saw each other.’ She put an arm around him and, smiling in the direction of the corporal at the gate, said, ‘Come along, Archie, I’ll take you home to your Uncle Erich.’

As the woman steered him away through the crowd, Richard looked back to try to catch sight of Taz and Frankie, but he couldn’t make them out in the remaining ranks of the 26th.

‘We’ll catch a bus and then take the train to Toowoomba,’ Aunt Bess informed him.

Richard, rather than deny he was Archibald Rait, for fear of being thrown into an Australian prison, decided that, for the moment at least, he would play along with this strange woman.

 

They sat on hard wooden railway carriage seats, the only occupants of a small side-door compartment on a train heading for Toowoomba. Aunt Bess, sitting beside him, had not spoken a word since they’d boarded the train, and Richard had spent the time gazing out the carriage window at the unfamiliar dry Australian landscape. He felt Aunt Bess move closer to him, and tensed as she took his arm.

‘You know, dear,’ she began, ‘there’s no need to be afraid. I know your secret and it’s safe with me.’

Richard’s face paled. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he protested.

She smiled. ‘Now, we both know that you aren’t Archie Rait. You look nothing like him, and nothing like his mother or father. Besides, you’re too young to be Archie.’

‘But . . .’

‘No use denying it. I don’t care who you are . . . or were.’

Realising that it was pointless trying to keep up the pretence, Richard decided that he was now reliant on Aunt Bess’ mercy. ‘Please, do not tell the police,’ he implored. ‘I will be locked away. Perhaps I will be shot as a spy! I am German. My good Australian friends Taz and Frankie saved my life and helped me come to Australia . . .’

‘German?’ She nodded. ‘When I heard you speak, I suspected as much.’

‘Taz and Frankie and myself, we told everyone that I was Dutch.’

‘You can be Martian for all I care, dear. But the fact that you are German is perhaps a blessing.’

Richard frowned. ‘How so? I do not understand. I was told that Archibald Rait had no family.’

‘Is he dead?’ she asked. ‘The real Archie?’

He nodded. ‘I am sorry, yes. Killed on the Somme. He –’

She put up a hand to stop him. ‘I don’t want to know the details, dear. The real Archie came to stay with Erich and myself once, but the two of them didn’t get along. Archie was really not a very nice boy. I had hoped the war might have changed him, made him more agreeable. You see, my husband and I have no children. And when I read that Queensland soldiers were being demobilised at Lytton Quarantine Station, I checked with the authorities to see if Archie was among them. And sure enough, there was his name on the list. But instead of Archie, I found you. And something about you touched my heart. I couldn’t turn my back on you. Where are your parents, dear? In Germany?’

‘No, they died some years ago in America.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. But then perhaps this was all meant to be.’ Aunt Bess paused for a moment, casting her mind back to her past. ‘When Archie’s mother – my sister – was alive, my husband would not allow her into our house or into our lives. She had her child, Archie, out of wedlock, you see. And Erich von Hippel is a devout man – and a stubborn one.’

‘Von Hippel?’ Richard exclaimed. ‘Your husband is German?’

Aunt Bess smiled. ‘You can now see the serendipity of our meeting today? You know, it’s wonderful how fate sometimes changes the way we see life. My husband is the local doctor in the small town outside Toowoomba where we live. He is a very good doctor and was spared internment when many other Germans in Australia were locked away at the start of the war. For two decades, he was well liked and trusted by the local people. But then the war came and many people who had been his patients for years would not see him because he was German. Some even refused a ride when he offered it. And we could not get anyone to help me about the house. One horrible man even spat on Erich. Two years before, my husband had saved the life of that man’s wife.’

‘That is terrible! How can people be so ungrateful?’

She shrugged helplessly. ‘The war changed people. It changed my husband. He confessed to me only recently that he regrets never having had a child.’ She smiled at Richard. ‘So will you come and work for Dr von Hippel and myself? Chopping wood, looking after my husband’s two fine horses, the chickens, the pigs . . .?’

Richard broached a faint smile. ‘Pigs? I know quite a lot about pig farming.’

‘Well then, you will fit right in.’

Richard grew thoughtful. ‘I was hoping to study.’

‘Oh? Study what?’

‘Science. Chemistry, perhaps.’

‘Well, anything is possible, dear,’ said Aunt Bess, impressed by his ambition. ‘Come and stay with us. If you don’t like it at our place, you are free to go. Whatever happens, I will keep your secret. I promise.’

And so Richard Rix, alias Archie Rait, went home with Aunt Bess to tell Dr Erich von Hippel his secret. And to start a new life.

 

No one recognised Taz as he walked down Weld Street, Beaconsfield’s main street. Soldiers had been coming home from the war for many months, and the novelty of seeing returning AIF heroes in khaki and slouch hats had faded. Besides, the Tasman Dutton who was returning was very different from the youth who had departed two years before. He had the worn face of a middle-aged man.

Turning up a cross-street, he walked to the neat cottage in the shadow of Cabbage Tree Hill where he had grown up. Through the wooden gate he passed, and along the path down the side of the house. In a strong breeze, washing flapped on a rope strung between posts in the backyard. It was Tuesday, and Taz knew that on this day of the week his mother always brought in the washing to iron by the kitchen fire. Beneath hanging bedsheets, he saw the legs of a woman.

‘Mum?’

An attractive, greying woman appeared from around the washing, a wicker basket cradled against her side. ‘Taz!’

The basket fell to the ground as mother and son rushed to wrap themselves in each other’s arms.