So now we knew where Harry was, hiding out after he killed his father. Didn’t even know he had a father. He never said a word about his family, never said a word about anything. He was very slow and completely dumbstruck when I was around. Then he ran off with Bernadette. How much did he tell her?
I remembered those years after the war. The ‘reffos’, as we called them, streamed into the country from Europe. Pictures were all over the papers and newsreels in the cinemas —pale, starved, desperate people. We knew nothing of what they’d been through, the horror of it.
It wasn’t until much later, studying History at university, that I learnt something of what a bloodbath it had been. The Australian Government sent the poor blighters off to the big hydroelectricity schemes. They lived in bush
