JOHN ALFRED HEPWORTH was born in Pinjarra, Western Australia, in 1921 and attended Perth Modern School.
He served in the AIF in World War II, travelling to the Middle East, Ceylon and New Guinea. Australia’s year-long struggle to take the northern coast of New Guinea informed The Long Green Shore, which was commended in a 1949 Sydney Morning Herald literary competition and compared to Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead.
The manuscript was rejected by an English publisher who felt that there were too many war books. Hepworth turned to journalism, poetry and drama, though he occasionally tinkered with his novel.
In the 1960s a number of his plays were performed, and in the following decade he gained prominence through his ‘Outsight’ column in the Nation Review, a magazine he edited for several years. Hepworth then penned columns for the controversial Toorak Times.
From the early 1980s onwards he wrote many books, some with Bob Ellis and others illustrated by Michael Leunig.
For two decades Hepworth worked at the ABC, where he was chief subeditor on the Radio Australia news desk. He lived in Melbourne, and had a long relationship with the playwright Oriel Gray—the couple had two sons—and later with his wife Margaret.
John Hepworth died in 1995, soon after learning that The Long Green Shore would finally go into print. Ellis, who was instrumental in getting the book published, in an introduction put its closing soliloquy on par with the Gettysburg Address. Critics hailed it as a classic war novel, and for some time a film adaptation was to be Russell Crowe’s directorial debut.
LLOYD JONES lives in Wellington. His best-known works include Mister Pip, winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, The Book of Fame and Hand Me Down World. His acclaimed memoir A History of Silence was published in 2013.
ALSO BY JOHN HEPWORTH
Non-fiction
John Hepworth…His Book (edited by Morris Lurie, illustrated by Michael Leunig)
Boozing Out in Melbourne Pubs (with John Hindle, illustrated by Bloo Souter)
Around the Bend (with John Hindle, illustrated by Geoff Prior)
The Little Australian Library (illustrated by Keith Brown)
Colonial Capers series
Fiction
The Multitude of Tigers (illustrated by Michael Leunig)
For children
Top Kid (with Bob Ellis)
The Paper Boy (with Bob Ellis)
The Big Wish (with Steve J. Spears)
Looloobelle the Lizard (illustrated by Frank Hellard)
Hunting the Not Fair (illustrated by Nick Donkin)
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Copyright © The Estate of John Hepworth 1995
Introduction copyright © Lloyd Jones 2014
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
First published by Picador, Pan Macmillan Australia 1995
This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2014
Cover design by WH Chong
Page design by Text
Typeset by Midland Typesetters
Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004
Environmental Management System printer
Primary print ISBN: 9781922147820
Ebook ISBN: 9781922148810
Author: Hepworth, John, 1921– author.
Title: The long green shore / by John Hepworth; introduced by Lloyd Jones.
Series: Text classics.
Subjects: World War, 1939–1945—Campaigns—New Guinea—Fiction.
Other Authors/Contributors: Jones, Lloyd.
Dewey Number: A823.3
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Final Dispatches
by Lloyd Jones
The Long Green Shore
Final Dispatches
by Lloyd Jones
THE paths of two war novelists, John Hepworth and Norman Mailer, crossed in a geographical sense, as well as in literary fortune. Mailer spent a muggy Christmas Day in 1944 aboard an American troopship in Hollandia Bay, in Papua New Guinea. At the same time, Hepworth was ashore, dodging snipers, and wishing for a bath. Both Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and Hepworth’s The Long Green Shore begin in the hold of a troopship. In Hepworth’s account, ‘There is always a stench, a slave smell.’
Fresh from the war both Mailer and Hepworth are told by publishers that the last thing anyone wishes to read is a book about the war. Mailer persists, shopping his manuscript around until it finds a willing publisher. The Naked and the Dead will go on to occupy a spot on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly a year, and provide the young writer and his new wife with enough money to sail to Paris and live the expat life at a dollar a day while attending the Sorbonne on the GI Bill.
Hepworth, back in Australia, is less fortunate. It seems he accepted the verdict of the one publisher he sent the manuscript to, Macmillan in London, as the final word on the matter. He shoves his manuscript in the drawer, where, according to Bob Ellis, a friend and colleague of Hepworth, it will remain for many decades, until its eventual publication by Picador in 1995—not long after the author’s death.
In Ellis’s preface to the first edition we learn that the 28-year-old Hepworth wrote the novel in response to a literary competition run by the Sydney Morning Herald. (It was highly commended in 1949.) It is hard to believe that a competition could have provided singular motivation for such an assured debut.
Fifty years on from the 1948 release of The Naked and the Dead, writing in the preface to the anniversary edition, Mailer describes his novel as the work of an ‘amateur’. He also refers to himself in the third person, as I suppose one might view one’s callow youth from the distance of old age. But as Mailer notes, ‘the book had vigour. That is the felicity of good books by amateurs.’
Hepworth’s novel has none of the same defects; no lacing of nouns with adjectives, ‘none of the bestseller style’ that Mailer charges his own book with.
I think it is safe to say that neither novel would have been written without the authors’ respective war experiences. But by temperament and literary ambition the two works fly in different directions.
The ambition behind The Long Green Shore was never to ‘out-write’ others or to launch the author into the literary firmament. Hepworth’s project is more modest, but no less serious for it. His aim was to transcribe an experience as truthfully as possible. And perhaps it is true to say of soldier-novelists that they have two audiences—those of us content to read from the armchair at home and those they went to war with. The second audience is bound to have a chastening effect on any exuberance or over-egging of the realities of war.
The tone of the young Hepworth’s prose is entirely trustworthy. Undoubtedly some serious reading lies behind its understatedness. A hard-earned experience transcends its literary style. Hepworth’s task is to speak honestly about the manner of a soldier’s death: this often arrives without any warning, although the march along the long green shore might be regarded as one long rehearsal for such a moment; at times it is as though death already occupies a soldier’s soul and he is simply waiting on his final dispatch.
Fear sits differently in soldiers
. Hepworth seems well acquainted with its varying thresholds and black humour. Whispering John, one of the older characters, sniggers with satisfaction at his good luck to date. ‘The young blokes crack up and the old soldier keeps on going, eh?’ It is a false boast, as he well knows; his own end is simply forestalled.
Now and then the presiding eye of the narrative takes a step back, such as in the opening scene, declaring that this is no ordinary war novel.
We sailed that last night through the tail end of a hurricane sea. We came up and ran naked on the open canvas square of the battened hatches, standing taut and breathless against the ecstasy of cleanliness in the driving rain…There was a spirit of carnival, a revelry of cleanliness and nakedness in the rain, with the combed wind sweeping the open deck and voices shouting and laughing in the storm while the darkened ship plunged through the rolling seas.
Between moments of barbarity and banality are occasions of great beauty, and for much of the time The Long Green Shore is a young soldier’s paean to the puzzling thrill of being alive.
The most enduring novels about World War II turned out to be satirical—Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and, for capturing the vulgarity and absurdity of war, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 is in my view without peer.
The most talked-about war novel in recent times is Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers, which draws on his experience as a marine in Iraq. The reader walks in the combatant’s boots, and hears the dry rasp of his heart and mind. There is no attempt to draw big lessons. No geopolitical agenda, just one man’s experience of being cast like chaff into a horror zone. At times, Powers is guilty of prettifying the experience, which is as problematic as the poet who surrenders genuine grief to poetic form. Perversely, art ends up destroying that which it wished to preserve. In the case of the broken-hearted poet, why write a poem? Why not jump off a bridge?
The Long Green Shore is written from a different place. It is an act of remembering mates who died—and, as it happens, did so unnecessarily. The enemy which Command is so eager to engage with is less interested in the Australians. For all that the march mattered, the platoon might as well have found a place on the beach and played volleyball until the end of the war.
Towards the end of the novel, word of the catastrophic nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki filters down to this remote area of fighting in the South Pacific. The deaths of various mates and acquaintances have already been soberly accounted. The news from Japan creates a new frame for what we have learned so far.
It is a breathtaking moment in which the futility of everything the soldiers on the long green march have gone through is painfully clear. It is clear too that this novel has earned its place on the shelves. I hope it endures.
The Long Green Shore
AUTHOR’S NOTE
From the last Christmas of the Second World War, until that war ended, two brigades of the Sixth Australian Infantry Division fought an obscure but at times bitter and bloody campaign along the savage north coast of New Guinea.
When the war ended, and the snakeskin drums sounded the word through the mountains, they were within sight of the deathly valley of the Sepik.
This campaign from Aitape to Wewak was an unnecessary one. The Japanese army in the area was isolated from the rest of the Pacific. They occupied no strategically important ground: they showed no aggressive intent.
This campaign was war in its classic wastefulness. It was fought for no apparent reason, other than that Australia might claim another Division in action; and, perhaps, strengthen her voice with their bodies at the Peace table.
To that end, a few hundred men died.
I know it is not such a great number in the millions of the dead—but it is bitter that they might have died in a better cause.
The Long Green Shore is not, strictly, the story of this campaign. But I have chosen it as the framework because here the battle itself has no importance other than individual life and death, and this allows a sharper drawing of men’s awareness of life and death. The victory of the Desert, the defeat in Greece, the drowning, gaunt agony of the Kokoda Trail would not have allowed quite the same delineation.
This is essentially a true book, though many of the incidents did not happen in this piece of war, but to other men in other campaigns. The men are true men, but none is one man entire—each is a synthesis of half a dozen or more.
This is the Australian soldier as he is…with something about him essentially national; but, at the same time, basically the same man at war as the legionnaires who crossed the world with Alexander, or the commando who marched with Xenophon through Asia Minor.
It is a long time ago, as our time goes. We who were young begin to grow old.
They have carried the dead out of the green and drifting sea of the rainforest and planted them row by row in domestic earth.
The world is not at peace. But it will be. Surely it will be. One day.
J. H.
1
We sailed that last night through the tail end of a hurricane sea. We came up and ran naked on the open canvas square of the battened hatches, standing taut and breathless against the ecstasy of cleanliness in the driving rain.
We scooped water from the pools that gathered in the folds of canvas and lathered the fresh foam of soap on our salt-dry bodies. We lined up for the plunge under the showers where the rain guttered off the gun platforms and deck housing in fat shuddering streams.
It was the first freshwater bath we had had for a week. There was a spirit of carnival, a revelry of cleanliness and nakedness in the rain, with the combed wind sweeping the open deck and voices shouting and laughing in the storm while the darkened ship plunged through the rolling seas.
*
Pez and Janos came in naked from the rain bath on the deck, blundering through the double blackout curtains in the roll of the ship, and climbed gingerly down the thin steel stairway into the moist stench of the hold.
There is always a stench, a slave smell, in the hold of a troopship. The stink clings to your clothes and skin long after you climb up into the fresh air.
They picked their way through the crowded well of the hold, dodging the bawdy salutes of their mates to their nakedness, and entered into the maze of bunks massed in double tiers five high.
As they dried themselves on greasy towels in the cramped alleyway between the bunks, Janos wrinkled his nose: ‘I can’t stand this stink—you could cut it with a spoon.’
Janos was a tall, lean lad from the rich and rugged floodlands of the New South Wales north coast. He had a strong, bony face, a wry mouth and clear grey eyes. His nose was broken and crooked in a way that sundry women had found intriguing.
‘Broke her that many times playing football,’ he’d tell you, ‘decided last time to let her stay broke and I’ve never had any trouble with her since.’
He came from Grafton where jacaranda blooms and strange tales are told of what happens when the blue flower bursts.
‘It’s the fever,’ he said, ‘the jacaranda fever. You can see it in the wenches when they walk the street—the way they swing their hips and carry their breasts proud and look sideways at you with that summer look in their eyes. You’ve got to step careful at night in the long grass down by the river. It’s a great thing to be young and have your strength and be in Grafton when the jacaranda blooms.
‘And there is a legend that any wench whose head you tilt to kiss beneath a jacaranda tree, who does not have the same colour shining in her eyes, then she, poor girl, will die a virgin.’ He grins: ‘The legend has been proved in part—concerning those whose eyes do shine.’
As Janos dragged his jungle green shirt off the bed, the leather wallet fell out and dropped open on the floor. Pez picked it up and handed it back to him, glancing as he did so at the photo framed in the celluloid panel.
‘Janice on top tonight,’ he observed. ‘Is little Mary out of favour?’
‘No,’ said Janos, ‘Janice is on view tonight in memory of things lost but not forgotte
n. She was a sweet little thing and accommodating too, and it is my great regret that she had a husband.’
Janice had been a part of the jacaranda fever. A buxom lass, she was—a rich northern dish of milk and honey. That night he was in her room at the pub and her husband came home unexpectedly—well, maybe a husband wouldn’t appreciate a perfectly reasonable explanation concerning the aphrodisiac effect of the blooming of a blue flower, so Janos went out the window—taking most of his clothes with him, but forgetting his hat. For weeks afterwards a brawny citizen haunted the pubs, tenderly enquiring if any of the AIF boys had lost a hat.
‘Hell, that reminds me,’ said Pez. ‘I should write to Helen tonight—haven’t written since we left Cairns.’
‘Write tomorrow when we get ashore—she’ll get it just as soon.’
‘Yeah, tomorrow we’re ashore,’ said Pez, ‘and maybe soon it won’t matter whether I wrote or not.’
‘Cheerful bastard, aren’t you?’ grinned Janos. ‘I can’t stand this stink—I’m going to sleep up on deck, rain or no rain.’
‘I’ll take a wander round and see what the troops are doing first,’ said Pez. ‘I’ll be with you later.’
All the card players were gathered at the tables or on blankets spread in the open space in the well of the hold. Those who had money still played poker. Those who were broke, watched, or played bridge and five hundred. A few were already half-asleep on their bunks, the sweat streaming from them. Others, where the lights on their beds were good enough, read or wrote. Not many were writing letters—there was nothing much to say—but there was plenty of literature available.
We had received a comforts parcel the day before—you remember those parcels that a benevolent nation distributed for your cultural relaxation and entertainment on shipboard. There were a great number of inspired novelettes in gaudy paper covers with such titles as The Corpse on Fifth Avenue and The Corpse with the Missing Face and Gunfire at Rustlers Gulch. And they tried to tell us there was a paper shortage back home.
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