Hobart, Tasmania

Hobart, Tasmania links the prisoners’ memories of life before captivity to the unsettled years after their return. For Darky Gardiner, the city is bound to his work as a wharfie and to visits with Edie to Nikitaris’s Fish Shop; for the veterans who later gather there, it is also the setting for recollection, grief, and an uneasy attempt to respond to what the war has done to them. The city’s significance lies less in a description of its streets than in the lives and memories attached to a shop, a pub, and the people who return to them.

Home remembered from captivity

Darky’s connection to Hobart emerges through specific recollections rather than a broad account of his earlier life. Before the war, he would take Edie to Nikitaris’s Fish Shop after they had been to the cinema on a Saturday. There they ate fish and chips and watched the fish in the shop’s tank. Edie had thought about the fish as captives, taken from the sea and held until they were sold. Darky later recalls that thought while lying in the jungle during captivity, recognizing an unsettling likeness between the fish’s enclosure and the prisoners’ camp. The memory makes a familiar Hobart outing newly significant: a scene of ordinary companionship becomes a way for him to understand confinement.

The recollection is not simply a reference to food or to an earlier routine. Darky remembers the kinds of fish in the tank, including mullet, cocky salmon, and flatties, and recalls that Edie had felt sorry for them. His own response has changed by the time he tells the story to his comrades. What had once been a detail of an evening out now brings the prisoners’ circumstances into focus. The remembered shop carries home into the camp, but the comparison also makes home itself newly legible: the people who once watched the fish from outside have become prisoners too.

His occupation gives the city another personal anchor. Darky is described as a Hobart wharfie, in contrast to men whose experience of bush life had better prepared them for going without boots. His feet are vulnerable to the conditions of forced work, and that vulnerability marks the difference between his former working life and the terrain he must now cross. The contrast does not make Hobart a refuge he can return to in the moment; it makes the bodily demands of the jungle harder to separate from his remembered identity and home.

The fish shop as a place of return

After the war, Nikitaris’s Fish Shop becomes a destination for a gathering of former prisoners. At the Hope and Anchor, the veterans remember those who died, and Darky’s name leads Gallipoli von Kessler to mention the shop. Near midnight, after the men have been turned out of the pub, they walk up Elizabeth Street to it. They arrive expecting, or imagining, something like the remembered place of their wartime stories, but the actual shop does not match that shared picture. The distance between the imagined scene and the place before them exposes how memory has shaped their expectations.

The next night, the men return to the subject at the Hope and Anchor. Jimmy Bigelow says they should see Nikitaris and make amends for the broken shop window. The shop window has already been replaced, though it has not yet been painted. The account of the previous night is retold with enthusiasm but also with increasing shame. The proposed visit therefore carries more than the practical question of repairing damage: it is a small effort by the veterans to face a civilian they have affected. The excerpt establishes the intention to put things right and the men’s visit, without making the gesture a simple cure for their wider difficulties.

Veterans, memory, and aftermath

The pub gathering shows how the former prisoners use Hobart as a place to come together, while also revealing how partial and strained that reunion is. They have not all met since demobilization. They recall the dead—among them Lizard Brancussi, Wat Cooney, Yabby Burrows, Jack Rainbow, and Tiny Middleton—and even remember Rooster MacNeice, whose presence among the survivors complicates the roll call of loss. Their shared recollections make the absent men part of the gathering, but remembrance does not erase what has happened to those who returned.

Jimmy Bigelow’s circumstances give that aftermath a particular shape. At the reunion he says little; his marriage is no longer what it was before the war, and his hopes of becoming a musician have not been realized. He works as a storeman at the zinc works, while the big-band music he loved has fallen out of fashion and the newer music feels alien to him. He wishes he could set things right with his wife and his life, but believes that cannot be done. The veterans’ night together offers a temporary sense of being whole, yet Jimmy’s account shows how sharply that feeling contrasts with the life waiting beyond the pub.

The gathering’s laughter and drinking likewise coexist with losses and unresolved pain. The men remember their dead with affection, but some have disappeared from their former companions’ lives, and one veteran’s wife had not known for years that he had served as a soldier. The veterans have been told not to talk about their experience; when it is described among themselves, it is not treated as a conventional heroic story. Hobart’s meeting places allow the memories to surface, but they do not ensure that those memories can be comfortably shared or integrated into civilian life.

A setting for imperfect repair

Hobart also brings Dorrigo Evans and John Menadue together after the war. Some months after returning from his honeymoon, Dorrigo takes a flight to Hobart after receiving a letter from Bonox Baker. The letter reports that no one appears to have visited Jack Rainbow’s widow and that Menadue has Jack’s medals but has not delivered them. Dorrigo finds Menadue in a pub two doors from Nikitaris’s Fish Shop. The location connects another neglected obligation to the same neighborhood in which the veterans have revisited their wartime memories.

Menadue’s account of himself is marked by the difference between the leader he had been taught he was and the man he discovered himself to be on The Line. He had been told that his schooling, character, and background made leadership his natural destiny. In the jungle, he came to understand that his primary concern had been saving his own life rather than helping others. His meeting with Dorrigo takes place against the concrete matter of Jack Rainbow’s medals, but the surrounding history gives that task moral weight: it concerns the care owed to the dead and to the people left behind.

Hobart thus serves as a remembered home and as a postwar landscape of return, but not as a place where the past can simply be left behind. The fish shop brings Darky’s former life into the prisoners’ experience of captivity; later, the same shop and nearby pub become landmarks in the veterans’ efforts to remember their comrades and answer for their actions. The city’s ordinary places hold these different times together, making both the persistence of memory and the limits of repair visible.