Dorrigo's final call with Amy before deployment

Dorrigo Evans’s final call with Amy Mulvaney before his wartime deployment turns a moment of hoped-for reunion into a separation without a settled future. Learning that Keith Mulvaney knows about the affair, Dorrigo expects Amy to leave her husband and begin a life with him. Instead, Amy tells him to go back to Ella Lansbury. Dorrigo promises that he will return and marry Amy, then learns that his unit is leaving that evening. The call ends with his private attachment to Amy intact and the chance of seeing her again suddenly uncertain.

The urgent call

On Monday morning, Dorrigo is preparing to lead a route march into the Adelaide Hills when he is summoned to regimental administration to take an urgent call from his family. The call comes through a wall-mounted telephone in a crowded Nissen hut. Its poor privacy matters: Dorrigo speaks in broken phrases so the duty officer behind him will not understand what he is saying. With a Bakelite earpiece pressed to his ear, he coughs to signal that he is there; after a pause, he recognizes Amy’s voice.

Amy’s first news is that Keith knows. The revelation alters the call before either of them can discuss what comes next. Dorrigo understands that the secret relationship is no longer concealed from her husband, but he does not yet know what Amy intends to do. The interruption reaches him while he is still subject to military routines and surrounded by other officers, leaving him to absorb a private crisis in a public workplace.

The expected reunion refused

Dorrigo imagines that Amy will say she is leaving Keith, or that Keith has sent her away. In either case, he expects them to start a life together. He also knows what he would answer: he would leave Ella and make arrangements for himself and Amy to become a couple. In his expectation, the choice appears immediate and inevitable; the call seems to open a path from secrecy toward a shared future.

Amy gives him the opposite instruction. She tells him to go back to Ella, and then makes clear that this is what she means: he must return to her. Her direction conflicts with what Dorrigo wants and with the future he has already begun to imagine. He struggles to understand why Amy is pushing him away. The scene’s central reversal is not that the affair is exposed, but that exposure does not lead to the reunion he expects.

Amy says that she can hear Keith coming and that she has to end the call. She tells Dorrigo he will be happy. He experiences an unexpected relief at the prospect of leaving the confusion of the affair behind and living honestly with Ella. Yet the relief does not resolve his attachment to Amy. As the call closes, he tells her that he will return when the war is over and that they will marry. He means the promise, although Amy may not have heard it: the earpiece slips away, and he realizes only afterward that she has hung up.

Deployment and separation

After the call, Dorrigo is still thinking about how he might leave Warradale without permission, find a vehicle, and arrange a private meeting with Amy. Before he can act on that plan, a staff officer tells him that the 2/7th Casualty Clearing Station is catching a train to Sydney that night. The unit will learn which ship it is taking on arrival, and its final destination will be announced somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. Dorrigo is ordered to cancel his plans and be ready to leave at 1700.

The timetable overturns his immediate hope of seeing Amy. He had thought departure would be on Wednesday; now he has five hours or less. The revised order does not merely interrupt a planned meeting: it makes him recognize that he may never see Amy again. He must continue working, sleep and rise, and go wherever the war takes him without another person knowing what he carries most deeply. The promise he has just made is therefore attached to an uncertain return, not an imminent reunion.

Significance of the call

The call brings private choice and military circumstance into direct collision. Dorrigo moves from imagining a life with Amy, to being told to return to Ella, to pledging himself to Amy anyway; then the deployment order removes the time in which he hoped to speak with her face to face. His words do not settle the contradiction between the two women or provide a practical plan. They preserve a future in language precisely when the war makes that future inaccessible.

The scene also establishes the emotional condition of his departure: Dorrigo leaves with the possibility of a last meeting denied and with no certainty that Amy heard his promise. The call’s ending is both an intimate rupture and a forced separation. What he carries away is not a resolved choice but a declaration whose fulfillment will depend on survival, return, and circumstances neither he nor Amy controls.