Digger's saga

Dinkum Digger's saga

When he picks up a book with a hackneyed title like Saga of a Sig, with a dustjacket design that’s pain ful, and an imprint that suggests it’s been privately published by the author, no reviewer hopes for much.

In this case he’d be wrong.

Ken Clift, today a Sydney insurance salesman, enlisted as a signaller with the Australian 6th Division after the outbreak of war in 1939, and fought, drank and cursed his way through campaigns at Bardia, Tobruk, Greece, Crete, Syria and New Guinea—being one of only a few hundred originals to survive six years of warfare with the 16th Brigade.

He was an inspiration to his mates in battle and the desperation of his officers out of it—a wild bloke with a soft heart who won the DCM at Tobruk and took on every “provost pooftah bastard” from there to Mel bourne and back, in between shooting at Italians, Germans and Japs.

Ken Clift has written and published his book like he went to war—with driving enthusiasm, undoubted courage, scant regard for the forma lities of life or language, a rough sense of humour, an observant eye and an urge to be involved with the human race. He knows a lot about people, and the sheer verve of this unpolished account of his experiences carries you with him. Although he may be no great shakes as a writer, he has brought to life in this auto biography the “typical Digger” that was in danger of becoming merely an Australian battle myth.

So it’s not really surprising that Ken Clift’s first edition of 3,000 copies was sold out in 10 days, pre sumably through the RSL clubs, and that he’s had to have an urgent re print. It’s a Diggers’ book, filled with Digger language.

The New Guinea chapters take him over the Kokoda Trail (or track) and on to Sanananda. It was a tough war. On one occasion he and his mate Tubby are jumped by “a skinny nttle Jap with a bayonet”, but Tubby, before Clift could get in with a shot, put in the golden slipper and kicked the unfortunate Jap to death with his heavy Army boots”. Clift refuses to dig a hole and bury one of the Aus tralian dead when he discovers he was a provost corporal, but “Punchy barbery came to the fore and shamed me - ‘Kenny, he’s some mother’s son —III bury him,’ he said. So be it.

Punchy always did have a heart of gold.”

On another engagement on the Kokoda Trail, with dead and wounded from both sides all over the place, Clift recalls that the experienced battalion medical officers “knew exactly who of the wounded were likely to survive, putting the ones they believed likely to die to one side . . . enemy wounded were shot on the spot after our own wounded were evacuated, these shootings being carried out by Field Security troops”.

He tells, in passing, the story of how they found on the Trail that “off the thighs of some dead Diggers, strips of meat had been cut and were in Jap mess tins, ready to be cooked with canned heat”. He adds, “The Japs weren’t sadists—they were just hungry, and determined to keep up their strength to hold their positions.

I must admit the enemy had my grudging admiration. They were even shorter of rations than we were. We certainly did not condemn them on this cannibalism.”

All-in-all, Clift’s book is a surpri sing late addition to Australian battle

stories.

SI.

THE SAGA OF A SIG. By Ken Clift.

Published by KCD Publications, 1 Avoca St, Randwick, 2031, Australia. $6.80).