Chapter 37

Is there some sort of dehumanising disease that people are exposed to when they first get to Canberra? They arrive with the best of intentions as normal caring individuals, but then go through a strange transformation where their ego inflates and their self-importance readings go through the roof. They arrive professing to know very little and suddenly they seem to know everything about everything. They arrive with a selfless attitude and within days they are horse-trading and saying, "What's in it for me?" Canberra is a very dangerous place. Perhaps the people there should be quarantined in case the dehumanising virus is contagious. It didn’t seem that some vaccine would be found soon.

These were my thoughts as I tendered my resignation from the army. I had stayed on after my visit to the Group Captain although I technically didn’t re-enlist. My National Service time was up and with it my agreed time in the regular army, but I’d stayed on another six months. I wasn’t sure why I did at the time. It would have been great to head home to help Dad and to see Tom and Mum, but I just kinda hung around Canberra. The reasons were a mix and very confusing to someone about to turn twenty-one. I wanted to do the job that I originally thought I was supposed to do. I wanted to see what happened up front and close when there was a change of government in Canberra as everyone predicted. I hadn’t heard from Jean and no-one at home knew where she was. I was tempted to use the JIO resources to track her down but wondered whether she wanted to be found anyway, least of all by me.

As it was, I didn’t get to see what happened in Canberra as I had hoped. Just before the election I was given emergency leave. Dad had had a turn as Mum described it between sobs on the phone. He was in Cairns hospital and had been airlifted there after she had discovered him up in the machinery shed. He was lucky he wasn’t burnt as well. He was using the oxy-acetylene torch when it happened and must have felt it coming on. He had thrown the torch away as he collapsed and it had lit a small tuft of grass outside the shed. Mum, hanging out the clothes, has spotted the smoke and raced up there. She said that she put the fire out, turned the torch off and applied CPR on Dad. I didn’t know that she knew CPR. He came around and she raced for the phone. Within hours he was in Cairns.

December and early January were a blur. Tom and I ran the farm as best we could and the neighbours were sensational. Tom got his final marks at high school and like me qualified for uni. Somewhere in all the chaos I turned twenty-one but there were things to do and it sort of got missed. Finally, Dad was let out of hospital and was given a strict regimen of diet and activity. More decisions had to be made, but the most important one I had already made. Late January 1973 I flew down to Canberra to officially resign from the army. The Group Captain, whom I had seen as a mentor from the first day I had met him, had been encouraging me to stay on and said that the army would pay me to do a degree in whatever I chose to do, although he strongly hinted that telecommunications was the way to go.

I called in and sat at my desk to write my letter of resignation. A second lieutenant had been filling in for me while I was on leave and had taken over my desk. He apologised when I turned up. He quickly vacated it and started to pack up the files. I told him that I was resigning and that I needed to grab my personal stuff and write a letter. I suggested that he just move the files to one side and to give me about half an hour and he could have the desk possibly permanently. I wrote in triplicate as I had been trained to. One was for the files, one for the Colonel, my immediate boss and one for the Group Captain. I was at a loss as to what to say. Did I go into the whys and wherefores? I stared around the tiny office and realised that it was about the size of a prison cell. That made me think of Atkinson, Allbright and Donaldson. I wondered where they were now. Still stuck for words I glanced across at the folders on my desk. Intrigued by one marked “For the eyes of Group Captain Bramstoke only”, I flicked through the contents. As I suspected there was a transcript of a conversation, but what I didn’t suspect was the nature and indeed the participants of the conversation. Those participants weren’t named. Numbers were given to each of the people. They weren’t defence force personnel based on what was being said. I read and reread the words. I realised I had seen those speech patterns before. Even without the tape to back up my gut feeling I was confident that the voices wore no uniform and were ones I had listened to the previous year on tapes of leading members of the then Opposition.

I closed the file and then like some automaton wrote my letter of resignation and placed the original and the copies in separate envelopes. Picking up the folder containing the transcript, I walked out of my office for the last time, leaving behind the keepsakes I had come for. At my boss’s secretary’s desk, I placed one envelope in the tray marked ‘for permanent filing’. I knocked on the Colonel’s door and entered. I saluted and stood at attention after he had invited me in. He read my letter without comment and then when I half expected him to say that resigning was against regulations, he reached across his desk and shook my hand. He wished me all the best and then stood to attention and saluted me. I returned the salute and turned on my heel and marched out as I had been initially trained to do.

The lift up to the top floor seemed to travel very slowly. I walked right by the Group Captain’s secretary, knocked on the door and went straight in. I offered no salute to the surprised man sitting at his desk speaking on the phone. He immediately told the person on the other end of the line that he would call him back. I threw the folder on his desk. He looked down at it and then up at me. He quickly scanned the contents and began an explanation that I didn’t want to hear, “The defence force needs to know what the politicians are thinking so we can plan ahead and…….” His voice trailed off when I threw my resignation letter on his desk as well. He opened it, read it and then looked up at me.

I hadn’t uttered a word up until that point. There was no need to. I had rehearsed what I was going to say. I was prepared to ignore my father’s advice to not do what he did. My father’s words of resignation were repeated again to a senior officer some twenty-seven years later.