Saturday, May 2, 2015

Forbidden Stories of Australian Savagery

Australians were every bit as savage as Americans. I do not know the truth of these specific stories, though in broad strokes this is a face of Australia that is preferred forgotten:
"I stood beside a bed in hospital. On it lay a girl, unconscious, her long, black hair in wild tumult on the pillow. A doctor and two nurses were working to revive her. An hour before she had been raped by 20 soldiers. We found her where they had left her, on a piece of waste land. The hospital was in Hiroshima. The girl was Japanese. The soldiers were Australians."

"The moaning and wailing had ceased and she was quiet now. The tortured tension on her face had slipped away, and the soft brown skin was smooth and unwrinkled, stained with tears like the face of a child that has cried herself to sleep."


No comments: