Bert Kelly, “Weary Dunlop,” Quadrant, May 1987, pp. 76-77.

I kept a diary most of the time I was in Parliament and I sometimes omitted to write it up after a busy day, excusing my lapses because I was too tired to tell my day’s doings into a dictaphone for my secretary to later lick into shape. One of the many reasons for admiring The War Diaries of Weary Dunlop (published by Thomas Nelson) is the indefatigable sense of duty which must have driven him each night to record on toilet paper, or other scraps of paper, each day’s doings when often sick with malaria or malnutrition, and always burdened with a feeling that he was responsible for the welfare of his men.

There are many other reasons for regarding the diaries as outstanding. One, of course, is the stories of bravery and endurance which they unfold. But I will not dwell on them now because they have been told many times before, though Dunlop’s pictures are stark indeed. But he had many other problems: administering his hospitals, trying to extract small but vital medical supplies from this air, buying eggs on the black market with money collected from officers and men, or helping to dig latrines for his men while they were away constructing the railway for the Japs.

I am told that administering a hospital in peacetime is not easy; just imagine what it must have been like with dirt, sickness and death all around you, with Japanese guards looking over your shoulder as you wrote up your case notes after an operation conducted in a leaky tent, lit by candles and kerosene lamps and with hardly any medicinal drugs. If the diary had not been written each night, it would have hardly been credible. However, diaries are not written with hindsight, which is what makes them so powerful.

Yet Dunlop does not only record bravery and endurance. Just listen to the entry of April 4, 1943:

The weather is fine again and the jungle is assuming a new coat of multitudinous shades of tender green. The atmosphere appears to have been washed ineffably clean and pure by the rains so that the sky is a serene, fathomless blue and everything assumes a marvellously clear outline. The light of great cumulus clouds appearing over the clear rim of mountain world is most startling — I cannot recall ever seeing anything so radiantly white. It is as though everything had been washed utterly clean. The morning and evening sometime positively hurt with their beauty, especially the lovely quarter hour before dawn when the whole sky is aglow with brilliant crimson bands showing through the clearly etched foliage in a brilliant atmosphere and the softest of pale blue.

Vividness and colours everywhere. Butterflies of every size and shade — predominantly white and yellow — fly in their scores in long chains or come to rest in little pools of mixed colours, the faint sway of their wings recalling a mass of yachts swayed by a slight breeze on a still lake. Staghorn ferns are extravagantly luxurious everywhere. Monkeys in a great troop swing carelessly across the face of our Western cliff on the great trees whose foliage is agitated as though by a storm.

Just think of writing like that on toilet paper with your comrades dying around you!

That remarkable man, Colonel Sir Laurens van der Post, has written a foreword to the Diaries. I will quote two passages from it. The first to make me, and others of my ilk, feel ashamed. At the Bandoeng POW camp in Java, before the prisoners were sent to the Burma-Siam railway, conditions were not quite so bad. One thing they did was to arrange a mock parliament. Sir Laurens says:

The minutes and reports of the proceedings of this parliament, faithfully kept on the precious lavatory paper with which the Japanese provided the camp in strange and uncharacteristic abundance, unfortunately were lost. I say unfortunately, because they were of such a quality, keenness of thought and width of vision that I believe they would be a source of healthy shame to the British and Commonwealth governments who today are betraying the values fought for in the War as well as the precious breathing space of peace gained by the sacrifice of so many millions of young lives.

Anyone who still listens to Parliamentary broadcasts will understand what he means.

The second quotation describes how Sir Laurens felt as he walked to the prison gate with Weary to say farewell when he was marked out en route to the Buram-Siam railway. He writes:

Whenever I think back to that walk and that moment when Weary, undismayed, and even at so gloomy an hour, extracting a laugh from his overburdened men, met us at the great gate, all the adjectives personified in the Pilgrim’s Progress and so unfashionable today occur to me as the only ones precise enough for the occasion; adjectives like “valiant”, “standfast”, “tell-true”, “great-heart” and so on, but also joined to those some not found in Bunyan’s vocabulary, like weary’s unfailing sense of humour and his light and classical use of irony as a means of reducing the intrusions of fate in the life of himself and of those under his command to bearable proportions.

Read the book yourself. You will never be quite the same again. And you will never again be really sorry for yourself either.