Then we drove up Mt Clarence to see the Desert Corps Memorial, the Anzac statue which had originally stood in Port Said but had taken a hammering in the Suez riots of 1956. Half-way up Mt Clarence there is an avenue of trees, each one dedicated to an Australian soldier who had fallen in World War I, World War II, or Korea. I wondered whether there was a Jacobson tree. I didn’t really hold out any hope of finding one but I felt it was my duty to look. Not many Jacobsons would come this way. And it was such a foolish, uncommunicative, made-up name, a mere convenience for harassed immigration officials who couldn’t get anything else out of the yammering escapees from the pogroms except that they were so-and-so and so-and-so son of Abraham or Isaac or Jacob. Even if you weren’t family you had to stick together with people who had trodden that route. So I went looking for my namesake’s tree and I eventually came upon it. A small plaque carried the words Private F. Jacobson – Killed in Action in France. His tree had a commanding view back over the white sands of Middleton Beach where Ros and I had just scampered barefoot. Nice for him. I was upset and pleased, all at once.

From the top of the mountain we could see the whole expanse of King George’s Sound. It was there, below us, that the Anzacs had gathered in their troopships, waiting to be delivered to Gallipoli. Altogether it was a good site for such an event – stern and magnificent and cruelly beautiful; grander than Sydney Harbour, more exhilarating and more fatally melancholy. But Albany itself could not be compared to Sydney. It was overpowered by its own panorama; a stone less precious than its setting.

Up here, with the wind blowing and the spectacle of the island-dotted waters far below, the Anzac statue – a bronze extravaganza of strong-jawed Aussies and rearing horses – could not fail to work its tawdry magic. They are great fraudulent faits accomplis, these memorials to fallen soldiers. Whatever the cause they fell in, whatever the politics of their commemoration, fall they did, and they are owed a tear out of the most primitive humanity. And so loyalty is forged and patriotism redoubled by means of a simple trespass on your decency. The paraphernalia of remembrance had its way with me, anyway, this afternoon, weakened as I already was by finding Private F. Jacobson’s tree in the Avenue of Honour.

In the toilets at the bottom of the steps leading to the statue, I found the following graffito:

Skipping through the jungle

With my M-16

I’m a mean mudda-fucker

I’m a U.S. marine

Only someone had tried to obliterate the last line and substitute it with,

I’m a typical dumbshit –

which, if it had the merit of pacificism, lacked the virtue of rhyme.