Choi Sang-min(Goanna)—Darky Gardiner

Choi Sang-min, known as the Goanna, and Darky Gardiner are bound by a precarious exchange that offers neither safety nor solidarity. Gardiner can provide something the guard values, and the Goanna expects their mutual usefulness to continue; yet when Gardiner is ordered punished for an offence he did not commit, the arrangement offers no protection. Their relationship makes the camp’s violence especially stark: the Goanna can recognize Gardiner as useful and still take part in destroying him.

An Uneasy Practical Exchange

The Goanna’s view of Gardiner is not simply one of hostility. Gardiner sometimes annoys him by singing and whistling, but he is also useful. Only days before the punishment, Gardiner had obtained fresh beef for the non-commissioned officers, an exchange that matters to the guard. The Goanna consequently regards the charge against Gardiner as pointless, but not as a reason to defy the order. He assumes that after the beating Gardiner will still need him, just as he will still need Gardiner. Their connection is thus presented as transactional and recurring: each expects some continuing benefit from the other, without that dependence becoming trust or protection.

This expectation is bleakly practical rather than affectionate. The Goanna imagines that the arrangement will resume after punishment, as if the violence were another interruption in a relationship whose terms cannot be changed. His resignation treats the exchange as something that simply goes on. The story’s emphasis is not that Gardiner has earned the guard’s loyalty, but that usefulness can persist alongside abuse—and cannot prevent it.

A Brief Reprieve, Then a Reversal

Earlier, after the Goanna has kicked Gardiner, the guard orders him toward the camp hospital. Gardiner is so weakened and disoriented that he repeats the camp’s pidgin term for the hospital in disbelief. He crawls back toward camp, while the Goanna leaves to catch up with a visiting colonel. The direction to the hospital briefly interrupts the immediate threat, but it is not a promise of safety or a change in their relation.

The reprieve proves temporary. When the Goanna is later ordered to punish Gardiner, he has the prisoner found in the hospital, where he is unable to walk. He directs two guards to drag him to the parade ground. Gardiner’s earlier usefulness and his condition do not alter the order’s force. The reversal makes the hospital episode significant: the place that had seemed to offer a route back from danger becomes the place from which he is taken to face punishment.

Punishment in Public

The punishment is staged before a gathering of prisoners assembled on the parade ground in the monsoon rain. The group includes men returning from work on the railway, compelled by the guards to join the onlookers. The Goanna begins the beating; when he tires, two other guards continue. After a period, he orders the prisoners to move closer, making it harder for them to avoid witnessing what is happening. The gathering turns Gardiner’s punishment into a public demonstration of authority, while the prisoners’ enforced presence offers no means to intervene.

The order reaches beyond the Goanna’s personal relationship with Gardiner. Nakamura, having fallen and become conscious of the humiliation witnessed by prisoners, Koreans, and Japanese officers, takes up a pick handle and strikes the Goanna. He then returns to Dorrigo Evans, bows, and has Lieutenant Fukuhara explain that the guard has been punished for insolence toward the Australian colonel and that Gardiner’s punishment may continue. The intervention does not rescue Gardiner or cancel the sentence. The Goanna resumes his role, and the prisoner is again subjected to punishment. In this sequence, even the guard’s own punishment functions within the hierarchy rather than bringing that hierarchy to an end.

Dependence Overrun by the Camp

Dorrigo Evans protests that Gardiner is sick and that the punishment is wrong, but his objections do not stop it. He recognizes that Nakamura may be trying to help in practical ways, yet understands that the beating he ordered cannot now be undone by those gestures. The Goanna’s reliance on Gardiner is similarly powerless: their exchange continues to matter to the guard, but it cannot set the terms of what happens on the parade ground.

The narration widens the scene from two men to the assembled prisoners. Dorrigo sees hundreds watching and recognizes that they do nothing, including himself, who arrived too late and has done too little. That collective paralysis does not make the prisoners equal to the guards; they are under coercion and lack control over the punishment. It does show how the camp’s violence reaches its witnesses as well as its immediate targets, leaving Dorrigo with a sense of participation he cannot readily explain.

Narrative Significance

The Goanna and Gardiner’s connection exposes the limits of practical reciprocity under forced labour. Gardiner’s ability to secure beef for the non-commissioned officers gives him value to the guard, and the Goanna expects their mutual need to persist. But the camp can convert that same guard into Gardiner’s punisher, while the expectation of future exchange survives even as Gardiner is made to endure the consequences of an order he did not deserve.

The episode also connects their relationship to the novel’s recurring image of violence as a rhythm that individuals are drawn into and struggle to stop. The Goanna’s repeated return to his task, the prisoners’ enforced attention, and Dorrigo’s failure to intervene effectively make the relation more than a private antagonism. It becomes one instance of a system in which dependence does not temper coercion, and in which recognizing another person’s usefulness is not the same as recognizing an obligation to protect him.