Interspersed between this account and, giving it meaning, is the story of an Australia between the wars, a betrayed generation seeking its political and social identity. The unspoken trust in the old world (Britain) and the new world (America) has been shattered. Australia must forge meaning out of its innocence, recognise and give credence to its culture. The outside world with its devious sophistication must be watched and kept at bay. This story of Australia in the twenties and thirties and the fictitious happenings of 1943 are brought together in the character of Geoffrey Sawtell, whose life spans the’ history of the novel.

Geoffrey Sawtell is the embodiment of this betrayed generation. He is the veteran, scarred by war into on-going soldierism, “the doer not the thinker” – the man who cannot not act – whilst apparently resenting his lack of choice in the matter. He is puzzled and confused by the Great War – by the political war machine itself; by the men who escaped his fate – yet it’s clear that this experience has given meaning to his life.

He is a man who sees himself to be betrayed by women by the women in floating white dresses holding posies lining the pier as the soldiers return in 1917; by his mother who cannot or will not understand – the woman who prefers to pull down the shades on it all and live the illusion of a pre-war past; by his wife Marcia, the political animal who fights for peace and in so doing dismisses his raison d’etre in her pursuit of the future (she literally bounds away from him on the one occasion he felt capable of explaining himself to her); and finally, in the ultimate betrayal of trust by leaving him.

He is betrayed by religion – “My God, my God, look upon me; why hast thou forsaken me?” – yet shackled by it. A man who carries his crucifix and prayer book into the wilderness twenty odd years after declaring his lack of belief (even though he never prays and uses his prayer book as papers for his ‘roll yer own’). He is a man who carries the rhetoric and symbolism of belief around him like a cross.

He is a man betrayed by the country itself. He fights it with the same ruthless doggedness that has enabled him to survive the war, the depression, and the loss of his wife. Yet, eventually, it is the country itself and his underestimation of the aborigines, not the Japanese, to which he falls prey.

Finally Hooker presents a man who mostly betrays himself. He tells Marcia, “the war buggered me up”, but never seems interested to explore why. His experience remains a great muddy secret, like the mystery of the trout stream to which he returns again and again. We are left therefore to contemplate a man unable to reflect upon his past and with no vision for the future. At the end of the day he is a man playing toy soldiers in the bush with real bullets. Marcia does not understand what has happened to her husband but she does know the need to fight for a saner future. Sawtell eternally remembers, but maintains control by refusing to think it all out. For him, time has stood still. colonials like you.” He is a fine man – resourceful, steadfast, tough and a formidable fighter. He is a born leader – the man who earns the unqualified respect of his fellow men – even, albeit grudgingly, of the British veterans – who also recognise his essential limitations. He is also the celebration of the Australian mateship ethos. He loves the non-judgemental camaraderie of the Australian workers at the Mountain View pub whom he recognises as being “veterans of a sort”. He loves his father Angus “because he listened, stayed silent and understood”. And he loves the men in the trenches who sang and marched with him, who carried him into battle, consoled him and who, too, stayed silent and understood.

This book is also, and most powerfully, a novel of the Australian outback. Its horizons are limitless; its secrets unfathomable. The actions of this small group seem appallingly futile when pitted against the hugeness of the landscape. The killings appear irrelevant; the blasting of the mine an absurd gesture of defiance, rather than an effective military manoeuvre. So, why do they do it all? “Where were the Japanese. Did they ever exist?’ asks the dying Sawtell. The answer is the core of the novel:

All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don’t know by what you do.

Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington.

These men for all their differences in country, upbringing, class, education and belief have two things in common: the fact that they have nothing and nobody to return to, and the fact of soldiering. As the padre says, it’s “because we are soldiers”; because it “excites” them, and because it is the only thing they know how to do well.

The Bush Soldiers is more than a ‘rattling good yarn’. It’s a well organised book and the Australia and the Australians Hooker chooses to show us are keenly observed, with the possible exception of Marcia who comes across as a pen portrait of an alternative vision rather than as a fully realized woman. The novel’s great achievement is the skilfully woven myth and rhetoric that moves in and out of the action giving a dreamlike quality to the harsh reality of war. It informs us about the nature of the ‘disease’ these men have incurred and the inevitable isolation that attends it.

The focus of attention is on the essence of the committed soldier but it is not, after all, a celebration of him. If anything, Bush Soldiers, even in its self-mocking title, is a plea for pacifism or, at the least, recognition of the need to search for a new way.

Margaret Johns is an expatriate Australian living in London, currently engaged in exploring the secrets of childhood.