Fear Drive My Feet

Text Classics

PETER RYAN
was born at home in Glen Iris, Melbourne, in 1923. His parents worked
at the recently created Repatriation Commission. Ryan attended Malvern Grammar with
the aid of scholarships and, after matriculating, was a clerk at Commonwealth Railways
and the Crown Law Department.

In 1941 he enlisted voluntarily in the army, completed Basic Training and was sent
on active service to Port Moresby with an Anti-Aircraft Searchlight Company, part
of Moresby's base defences. For his intelligence work he received the Military Medal
and was mentioned in dispatches.

After returning to Australia, Ryan taught at Duntroon and joined the Directorate
of Research and Civil Affairs, then was a labourer in a bush sawmill. He gained a
degree in history while managing a publishing firm. After working for a decade in
advertising and public relations, he turned to journalism.

Fear Drive My Feet
, Ryan's acclaimed account of his wartime service, was published
in 1959 and has mostly been in print ever since. Sir Edward ‘Weary' Dunlop commended
it in a foreword to the 1992 edition.

In 1962 Ryan was appointed director of Melbourne University Press, a position he
held until 1988. For the following fifteen years he was secretary to the Supreme
Court of Victoria's Board of Examiners.

Ryan was a long-time
Age
contributor and since 1994 has written a monthly column
for
Quadrant
. His other books include
Brief Lives
(2004) and a memoir,
Final Proof
(2010).

Peter Ryan and his wife, Davey, live in Melbourne.

PETER PIERCE
is adjunct research professor in the School of Journalism, Australian
and Indigenous Studies at Monash University. He is the editor of
The Cambridge History
of Australian Literature
, the co-editor of
Vietnam Days: Australia and the Impact
of Vietnam
and
Clubbing of the Gunfire: 101 Australian War Poems
, and the author
of
The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety
and
Australian Melodramas:
Thomas Keneally's Fiction
. His reviews appear regularly in Australian newspapers.

ALSO BY PETER RYAN

Encyclopaedia of Papua and New Guinea
(editor)

Black Bonanza: A Landslide of Gold

Lines of Fire: Manning Clark and Other Writings

Brief Lives

Final Proof: Memoirs of a Publisher

It Strikes Me: Collected Essays 1994–2010

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Copyright © Peter Ryan 2001

Introduction copyright © Peter Pierce 2015

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of
this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
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recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner
and the publisher of this book.

First published by Angus & Robertson 1959

This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2015

Cover design by WH Chong

Original page design by Duffy & Snellgrove

Primary print ISBN: 9781925240054

Ebook ISBN: 9781925095876

Author: Ryan, Peter, 1923–

Title: Fear drive my feet / by Peter Ryan ; introduced by Peter Pierce

Series: Text classics.

Dewey Number: 940.548194

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Across the River; Into the Mountains
by Peter Pierce

Fear Drive My Feet

Across the River; Into the Mountains
by Peter Pierce

AUSTRALIA'S
campaigns in New Guinea from 1942 to 1945, which eventually defeated
the Japanese, generated remarkable poems by the RAAF pilot David Campbell—‘Men in
Green', ‘Pedrina'—and some of Kenneth Slessor's most vivid war correspondence (or
what survived his bitter battles with censors). James McAuley, who served there,
would experience religious conversion and write of this when he returned after the
war. A clutch of novels—tales of Japs and the Jungle, sometimes infected by racial
animus—were written by veterans. The best known of these used to be T. A. G. Hungerford's
The Ridge and the River
(1952),
The Last Blue Sea
(1959) by ‘David Forrest' and,
from the same year, Norman Bartlett's
Island Victory
. John Hepworth's novel
The Long
Green Shore
emerged in 1995,
after decades of lying in wait. Yet the most distinguished
and enduring of all the writing about this war that took place so close to Australia
was the youthful memoir—completed when the author was twenty-one, and dealing with
events of a couple of years earlier—
Fear Drive My Feet
.

As Peter Ryan recounts in the Preface to the 2001 edition, his book was written ‘when
the travels of 1942 and 1943 were like the day before yesterday'. Repatriated from
New Guinea, he had what he called ‘a soft job' teaching Tok Pisin, the pidgin English
used in New Guinea, to cadet patrol officers. In the unadorned, compelling style
that emerged fully formed in
Fear Drive My Feet
, Ryan reflected that ‘very few soldiers
of eighteen would have been sent out alone and untrained to operate for months as
best they could behind Japanese lines; that few indeed would have passed their nineteenth
and twentieth birthdays engaged in such a pursuit.' He wondered, with no affected
modesty, ‘Might this be an interesting topic?'

Public judgment, emphatically in agreement, had to wait until Ida Leeson, the former
Mitchell Librarian and a guest of Ryan's in 1958, read the manuscript without his
knowledge. Ten days later, Angus & Robertson agreed to publish a book that Leeson
and the firm's esteemed editor, Beatrice Davis, surely guessed would become a classic
of Australian literature of war. It was published the following year.

In his preface, Ryan recalls thinking during his time in New Guinea of how—if he
survived exhaustion, solitude, exposure, disease, mortal peril—he would never travel
anywhere again. Hunted for a week by Japanese
soldiers with tracker dogs, he ‘sought
refuge by climbing a stupendous dry cascade of huge boulders, as it ascended ever
higher up a mountainside'. For weeks at a stretch, he would try to sleep ‘with the
lively expectation of being dead by dawn'. Thus it was, he declared at seventy-seven,
‘I have never been to England, Europe or America, and have never wanted to go.' However,
since the end of the war he has returned twenty-eight times to the country of his
exciting and enervating trials; edited and published the
Encyclopaedia of Papua
and New Guinea
(1972), while he was director of Melbourne University Press; and written
Black Bonanza
(1991), an account of the Mount Kare gold rush; besides wisely and
humorously counselling many travellers to Australia's nearest, if scantly known,
neighbour.

Fear Drive My Feet
is a strange and striking account of an education, a non-fiction
Bildungsroman
. For Ryan, this does not involve the distractions of schooling or first
love, a literal or sentimental education, but service with Kanga Force, whose ‘fantastic
campaign of patrolling and harassing the enemy from behind both Lae and Salamaua'
he salutes. The courageous motley band that he joins was formed in April 1942, when
the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles were supplemented by Independent Companies of the
Australian Imperial Force. Its objective is to screen Japanese movements west across
New Guinea. Reconnaissance has to be as close (and hence as dangerous) as possible.
In one of the pivotal moments of his narrative, the young Warrant Officer Ryan crosses
the Markham River and begins his adventures in ‘the savage country of the Lae–Salamaua
area'. To the east are thousands of Japanese troops; to the
north, the Saruwaged
Mountains, ‘so high that you can't see the tops for clouds'. And here he is, ‘sent
wandering through the jungles of the largest island on earth with one partly trained
police recruit'.

Yet he is not altogether unprepared. In the Boy Scouts he had been an enthusiastic
participant in bushcraft, map-reading, prismatic-compass work, first aid (particularly
wound dressing) and hygiene. Nor is he without some knowledge of New Guinea. Ryan's
father, Ted, fought there in the Great War, taking part in the capture of Rabaul
and rising to lieutenant in the military government of Australia's new ex-German
territories. He may have settled there for good, except that severe malaria forced
his return to Australia. The family home in Glen Iris, in Melbourne's eastern suburbs,
was full of New Guinea artefacts, mementoes and photographs. Moreover, Ryan's father
taught him to speak Tok Pisin, a deal of which he remembered when his assignment
began and its use was essential.

Vital to his operations, intelligence gathering and survival is sustaining bonds
with not only those natives employed to assist him (for whom he holds deep respect
and affection) but the people of remote villages and perhaps doubtful loyalty, on
whom he depends for supplies. In exchange for fresh food, Ryan can offer ‘Trade tobacco,
sheets of newspapers [for rolling cigarettes], coarse salt, and New Guinea shilling-pieces!
Strange currency, I thought.' The authors of
The Oxford Companion to Australian Military
History
wryly agree. The New Guinea campaign, they write, was ‘fought on a logistic
shoestring'. Burdened with his miscellaneous cargo (even that begrudged by the ‘base
bludgers' away from the front line, whom he has cause to execrate), Ryan heads north:
‘In this line of mountains, like gates in a wall, were the dark gashes of the valleys
of the three main tributary streams on the north side of the Markham—the Leron, the
Irumu, and the Erap.' This is a visceral but also an expressionistic journey—into
a landscape of terror and exhilaration.

Ryan moves through country rocked by earth tremors, roamed by shit-eating pigs, within
earshot of Allied bombs falling on the Japanese base at Lae, though it is days' trek
distant. His little party sometimes presses on through deep fog: ‘it was unnerving
to walk into the valley as the unseen stream roared below, or to make what seemed
to be an endless ascent into space.' All the time, as the tension steadily increases,
the enemy remains unseen, if present in rumour. Are they sticking to the coast or
‘now warily extending patrols up the valleys'?

In the climactic sequence of
Fear Drive My Feet
, Ryan is sent back into action in
the company of Captain Les Howlett, an experienced New Guinea patrol officer. Once
again the Markham has to be traversed: ‘All the hazards of a sea voyage were to be
had in a trip across this incredible stream—reefs, islands, currents, waves, and
sand-banks—any one of which might have wrecked us.' This ordeal convinces Ryan that
the Markham is the very ‘boundary of creation'.

Now there are clear signs of a Japanese presence and native collaboration: a new
rest-house has been built, and bridges constructed across streams. It seems to Ryan
that the villagers ‘were concealing what they knew: either lying
to us or keeping
silent'. He discovers that the Japanese know of the hazardous trip that he made to
seek information from Chinese prisoners outside Lae, and there is now a price on
his head, dead or alive—two cases of meat and five Australian pounds. This is mentioned
stoically, but in good humour.

Ryan's youthful spirit is tested relentlessly: he has to judge whom to trust, what
path to follow, where danger might lie. Few narratives of growing up involve ordeals
so arduous, whether monotonous or deadly. Ryan knows the measure of what is taken
from him: ‘All sense of adventure and excitement had long since vanished from this
patrol, leaving behind an empty flatness that was only one degree removed from despair.'