Shugs

Shugs is an older, taciturn former trapper whose life in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp is defined less by speech than by what he does for Darky Gardiner. When illness leaves Darky collapsed and unable to make his own way, Shugs gets him to shelter, cleans him, and stays with him. Their later laughter over a remembered meal briefly restores a piece of the world beyond the camp.

Identity and Background

Before the war, Shugs had been a trapper and a nomad of the Tasmanian high country. He carried almost nothing, not even a kitbag, and was perhaps close to thirty—older than most of the other prisoners. His ashtray-like eyes and taciturn manner led some men to suspect that he was not quite right, but the story repeatedly tests such judgments against his actions.

Army life had seemed luxurious by comparison with his earlier existence. He had not worn underwear before enlisting, and he treasured the recipe book he won in a game of pontoon in Java. In the camp, he still thought about one of its recipes, Mrs Beeton’s pork roulade, while looking for another kerosene tin to fit into a broken still. His search for food scraps and equipment belongs to the prisoners’ daily improvisation: even a recipe book and a makeshift boiler retain value amid scarcity.

Life in the Camp

Shugs lives within a system that steadily narrows the prisoners’ choices. As the monsoon arrives, food diminishes and the Speedo removes rest days, raises work quotas, and lengthens shifts until men are driven through consecutive day and night labor. The distinction between the fit and the sick gives way to one between the sick and the dying. In this setting, the prisoners work with simple tools and their own bodies to clear jungle, break rock, and move earth for the railway; hunger and exhaustion make food and rest their most immediate concerns.

Against that pressure, small acts and shared resources acquire unusual weight. A duck egg, a little palm sugar, and a repeatedly told joke can help sustain the prisoners. Shugs’s efforts to find supplies for the still, and his practical attention to Darky when he comes across him, belong to this informal work of keeping one another alive. His care is not presented as a cure for the camp’s conditions: it can secure Darky a chance to rest, but Shugs knows that medicine and food are scarce.

Finding and Caring for Darky Gardiner

Shugs finds Darky collapsed in the parade ground after Darky has struggled back along the Dolly. Darky is feverish and profoundly weak. Shugs later recounts that he first thought him dead, then realized he was breathing. Concerned that a Japanese guard might see Darky away from the sick lists and treat him as shirking, Shugs gets him out of sight and supports him toward the bamboo showers.

There, Shugs washes Darky and cleans him as best he can. The other prisoners do not witness every detail directly; they hear Shugs’s account and imagine the two exhausted men leaning against each other under water carried from the creek. Shugs’s simple reassurance that it is good to be clean, and his insistence that Darky should get the stink off him, become part of the story the prisoners tell themselves. They recognize that the task must have been awkward and demanding, and wonder whether any of them possess as much decency as the foul-mouthed, half-mad man they had underestimated.

When Squizzy Taylor arrives, Darky is able to tell him that a Japanese officer had moved to behead him but did not, and that the Goanna then sent him back. Shugs’s account connects Darky’s immediate survival to a wider sequence of violence, but its focus remains on the care that follows: Squizzy examines Darky and arranges for what treatment can be found. He tells Shugs privately that there is no quinine, no emetine, and almost no food, but that Darky can at least rest. Shugs’s earlier actions have brought him to that limited refuge.

Memory, Humor, and Narrative Role

As Darky recovers enough to speak, his attention turns from the camp to Nikitaris’s Fish Shop in North Hobart, where he once went with his wife. He remembers the fish in the shop-window tank, including flathead, mullet, and blackback salmon. Squizzy continues examining him while Darky talks, bringing the roles of medical care and comradeship together in a moment that offers no medicine but still gives Darky room to remember.

Darky’s recollection settles on a meal of couta, battered scallops, and buttered bread. Shugs repeats the order to Squizzy, and all three men begin laughing together in the mud. The laughter does not change the shortage of food or restore the life Darky remembers, but for a moment the remembered meal gives the men something to share beyond their immediate hardship. Shugs, who had been dreaming of a recipe from his own book, joins Darky in holding on to food through memory rather than possession.

Shugs’s character is therefore disclosed through a contrast between reputation and conduct. Others may read his silence and odd manner as signs of deficiency; when Darky needs help, however, Shugs acts with attention and tenderness, without ceremony. His later place in the prisoners’ retelling also matters: his account makes the rescue memorable to the group and turns a private act of care into evidence of the decency they fear they may lack. The scene gives neither Shugs nor the prisoners an escape from the camp, but it shows how assistance, recollection, and shared laughter can briefly preserve human connection within it.