Patrick Lindsay

Patrick Lindsay’s Back from the Dead, one of the first books published on the Bali bombing, is primarily an evocation of the inferno and its aftermath, through the eyes of those who survived it. There is ‘Peter’s story’ (the author’s central focus), ‘Nashie’s story’, ‘Col’s story’ and so on, all interpolated with extensive quotes, mostly from the victims of the blast. Despite the painfully vernacular tone of the early chapters, this book is a good primer on the terrorist attack and its consequences.

Ninety years after the Great War, the bones of those who died are still rattling the consciences of succeeding generations. Two years ago, there were frantic diplomatic exchanges between Australia and Turkey as the possibility emerged that the remains of Anzacs may have been disturbed as a result of road widening – ironically, to enable contemporary pilgrims to ‘pay their respects’ to those very bones. A complex bureaucratic tug-of-war has also been simmering over the whereabouts of the bones of approximately 170 Australians who died behind German lines at the battle of Fromelles on 19–20 July 1916.

There is certainly a refreshing candour in My Story and a good deal of pleasant anecdote and humour, but, on the whole, not a lot of ferocity. Cosgrove is most at ease and most readable when he can be convincingly diffident, mocking his own pretensions or, more often, the embarrassing lack of them, as in his account of his arrival at Duntroon Military College. Just short of eighteen, with a ‘lot of growing up to do, both physically and emotionally’, coming off a modest performance in his second try at the Leaving Certificate, with a school track record of larrikin insouciance, the young Peter Cosgrove had every reason to feel nervous as he boarded the bus outside the Canberra station for the short trip to Duntroon. Finding he is sitting next to ‘a fellow who seemed about my age (although years more mature)’, Cosgrove decides to ‘break the ice’. As a result, he discovers that this young man is a product of one of Sydney’s most prestigious private schools, that he had been school captain, a senior cadet, captained the School XV and had been selected for the combined GPS rugby team. Despondently, Cosgrove asks about cricket, assessing himself as ‘no world beater [but] better [at cricket] than at rugby’. His delight in hearing that his companion never played the game is quickly snuffed out when the young man explains that, as stroke of the school eight when his school won the Head of the River, he had no time for cricket. ‘We sat in silence for a moment and then he turned to me and said, “What about you?” I said morosely, “I’m on the wrong bus!”’