Prisoners release the fish from Nikitaris’s fish shop

The fish-release episode carries a promise from captivity into postwar Hobart, where Jimmy Bigelow and other former prisoners break into Nikitaris’s Fish Shop, take the fish from its tank, and release them at Constitution Dock. The act is at once a fulfillment of Darky Gardiner’s earlier wish and a disorderly response to the men’s own diminished lives: it grants the fish the freedom they had imagined for themselves, but neither repairs the damage of the war nor leaves the participants free of doubt about what they have done.

The promise formed in captivity

During the prisoners’ captivity, Darky spoke of the fish in Nikitaris’s tank as fellow POWs. He imagined returning to the shop, getting the fish out, and putting them back in the sea. The wish joined an ordinary fish tank to the prisoners’ circumstances: to Darky, the fish were confined creatures who did not belong behind glass. His plan was therefore not simply to take something from a shop; it was to restore the fish to the element he believed they belonged in.

That imagined rescue arose amid the forced railway labour that shaped the men’s lives in captivity. They had been transported from Singapore in overcrowded, closed railway wagons, and later the Speedo brought higher work quotas, longer shifts, and the loss of rest days. Prisoners were driven to clear jungle, break rock, and move earth for the railway, while food grew scarcer and sickness and exhaustion spread. In that setting, Darky’s attention to the fish offered a small but persistent idea of release. His promise survived as a story among the prisoners, even though he was not present when the later act was carried out.

The late-night decision

After the war, Jimmy Bigelow’s hopes of becoming a musician had not come to fruition. He worked as a storeman at the zinc works, and the musical world he had loved seemed to be disappearing. He felt detached from his life and wished he could set things right, but the outing to the fish shop did not begin as a considered attempt to put the past right. The men had left a pub near midnight, drunk and turned out, with no better plan for the rest of the night.

They walked up Elizabeth Street in Hobart, Tasmania, following Gallipoli von Kessler. The shop was shut. Its lit tank stood out behind the darkened premises, and the street was otherwise empty. The men saw several kinds of fish swimming there: flatheads, a trumpeter, two silver trevally, and a leatherjacket. Their circumstances differed sharply from the camp vision they had carried with them. There was no crowd gathered around the shop and no welcoming scene waiting to receive them; there was only the closed storefront and the fish visible through its window. The gap between expectation and reality left the men to decide, together and on the spot, what to do.

Breaking the window and releasing the fish

Jimmy picked up a rock and rolled it in his palm before throwing it at the shop window. The glass cracked gradually, and the others then joined in, breaking the window open. The act was not a careful rescue arranged in advance: the fish had to be collected with what the men could improvise. Gallipoli von Kessler used a chip fryer to scoop them from the tank, and after some mishaps the group placed them in two mop buckets.

They carried the buckets down to Constitution Dock, trying not to spill the water as they walked. Sheephead Morton addressed the fish as free and tipped a bucket; the fish entered the harbour water. The release completed the central action of Darky’s old plan—getting the fish out of the tank and returning them to the sea—but the means were distinctly the men’s own. What had once been Darky’s declaration of intent became a collective, late-night deed undertaken in his absence.

Aftermath and significance

The following night, the men retold the episode at the Hope and Anchor with enthusiasm, but their excitement was accompanied by increasing shame. Jimmy said they should visit Nikitaris and pay for the broken window. The shop window had already been replaced when they returned, although it had not yet been painted. Their decision to make amends complicates any simple reading of the act as either pure generosity or mere destruction: they had freed the fish, but they also recognized that they had damaged someone else’s property and proposed to take responsibility for it.

The episode places a modest act of release beside the former prisoners’ difficulty in finding a settled postwar life. For Jimmy, the night does not restore the future he had hoped for or resolve his trouble feeling at home in his own life. Instead, a remembered promise gives the group a concrete action to perform, and the fish’s passage from tank to harbour briefly makes freedom visible. The subsequent shame and offer to pay keep that gesture from becoming a clean triumph. The men act on Darky’s compassion for captive creatures, but they do so impulsively and must reckon with the consequences of their own act.