Hope and Anchor

The Hope and Anchor is a Hobart pub that becomes a gathering place for former POWs after the war. Its importance lies not in a formal act of remembrance but in the unstable, ordinary rituals of reunion: drinking, telling stories, naming the dead, and singing. Around its fire, the men can feel briefly whole, even as their accounts of captivity remain difficult to speak about and the past keeps breaking into their present.

Setting and Reunion

The men meet at the Hope and Anchor after demobilization, and the gathering described in the novel is the first time they have all been together since returning from service. The pub offers shelter and warmth on a cold Hobart spring night; outside, sleet lashes windows and tin roofs, while snow falls on the mountain and the harbour is rough. Inside, the former soldiers stand around the fire until the backs of their trousers grow too hot, then move forward to drink another beer. The small physical comforts matter: for men whose recent lives were marked by forced labour, hunger, disease, and death, being warm together is a fact of immediate consequence, not a grand restoration.

The group includes Jimmy Bigelow, Gallipoli von Kessler, Sheephead Morton, and Rooster MacNeice. Lizard Brancussi, Wat Cooney, Yabby Burrows, Jack Rainbow, Tiny Middleton, and Darky Gardiner are absent because they are dead. Their names enter the room through the living men’s conversation, so that reunion is at once a meeting of survivors and an encounter with those who did not return.

Drinking, Silence, and the War

The Hope and Anchor is also where the men’s difficulty in speaking about captivity becomes visible. Army doctors had advised them and their families not to talk about what had happened, and the former POWs did not see their experience as the kind of heroic military story publicly associated with campaigns such as Kokoda, the bombing of Germany, Tobruk, or Colditz. Chum Fahey gives their situation a blunt description: they had been slaves. Sheephead Morton recognizes that this was not an experience to boast about. The pub gathering does not remove that shame or produce a complete account of the war; instead, it gives the men a place to be together despite the silence imposed around their experience.

They drink heavily, yet cannot get drunk. For that night, drinking makes them feel as they imagine they ought to feel when sober: ferocious, whole, and not yet undone. Laughter briefly transforms the dead into a living presence within the group, but it does not erase the violence that made them absent. The speed with which the men reach for another drink suggests how precarious this reprieve is: the past surges into feeling, and alcohol becomes a way to slow it again.

Stories, Song, and the Dead

During the gathering, Gallipoli von Kessler mentions Darky Gardiner, and Jimmy begins singing a song about things getting a little better each day. The moment binds individual memory to a shared performance. Jimmy’s song does not establish that life has improved; its hopeful refrain sits beside his quietness and the damage that remains in the men’s lives. His marriage has changed, his hopes of becoming a musician have failed, and he works as a storeman at the zinc works. At the pub, however, he sings among comrades who know the names and histories that ordinary public life may leave unspoken.

The next night, the men return to the Hope and Anchor and tell the story of what followed with gusto, though shame increasingly shadows their account. Jimmy eventually says they should visit Nikitaris at his fish shop and make things right with him. The account then moves from the pub to Nikitaris’s Fish Shop, making the Hope and Anchor the point from which their remembered episode is retold and their next action begins. The pub thus supports not only recollection but a limited form of response: the men can decide together to face someone their earlier conduct affected.

Memory and Public Commemoration

The pub’s informal remembrance contrasts with the official commemorative setting of the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. There, steam locomotive C 5631 is displayed, while a plaque does not mention the horror of building the Death Railway or name the hundreds of thousands who died in its construction. The Hope and Anchor is no comprehensive memorial either, but its conversation preserves particular comrades as people rather than as an anonymous total. The men speak of Darky Gardiner and the other dead, and their gathering gives those names a temporary, communal life.

The novel places this kind of remembering beside competing impulses to forget. Elsewhere, Dorrigo Evans tells Bonox Baker that everything is forgotten in the end and that it is better to live now; the Hope and Anchor scene shows another possibility, in which fellowship depends on allowing the dead to return in stories, jokes, and song. Neither remembrance nor forgetting settles the meaning of the war. The pub matters because it holds both at once: the men’s effort to live beyond their captivity, and the past that remains among them whenever they gather.