It was at War Camp that I learned something about peace.
The Scouts versus the Venturers. The Venturers were older, stronger; we Scouts, more plentiful.
The setting was a plot of bushland. The hysterics of the kookaburra at dawn, the choir of stars, the occasional wallaby or sugar-glider. But no pleasure in Australia comes without price. Crisp, crackling, with prickles and biting blowflies and mosquitoes and crushing heat that burns your lungs. The dryness of the bush yearns for both healing water and cleansing fire, in equal measures. The bush loves little more than being reduced to grey ash.
The game went for forty-eight hours, and Ace explained the rules, after the flag raising. Ace was a Venturer with some kind of deformity – his face sagged to the left a little and he dragged his leg. Ace was short for Ace-metrical. “The rules,” he boomed, “are thus: each side has a camp about a kilometre-and-a-half from the other. All are armed with waterpistols. If one of us Venturers, say, squirts a Scout, then the Scout is imprisoned in the Venturer camp. The other Scouts can free him by tagging him, if they can avoid being squirted. The team able to imprison the entire other team, wins.”
The Venturers were older, more wily. Immediately after the starting bugle, they claimed the rainwater tank, the stagnant swimming pool, and the goat-tracks down to the creek. Suddenly we Scouts couldn’t resupply water pistol ammunition.
Proudly, we weren’t without our own cockroach cunning. After three hours of my arrival in that place, I was pissing into my waterpistol. After six hours, I didn’t even care if I got some on my hands.
The initial Venturer charge had claimed some of our troops. So we let our opponents know, full-well, that our pistols were full of urine. Even if they shot us first, imprisoning us, we squirted them with our piss out of spite. This knowledge made them very reluctant to break cover, and we easily re-claimed our prisoners of war.
The night passed with the Venturers claiming some more of us stalwart Scouts, due to their hold on the ammo dumps. Eventually they surrendered their claim on the watertank, to stop our dependence on piss-warfare. We’d still use piss, though, when we could, and so would they. They also had access to great quantities of slime from the swimming pool. So you would never know exactly with what you were being squirted – but by then, 18 hours in, you didn’t really care.
My recollection of little Johnny Nugus, after 24 hours at camp, hunkered down, shitting into a plastic bag and missing with some of it, is less one of horror and disgust, and more one of high comedy. I remember it being the colour of English mustard.
We charged a squad of Venturers.
Little Johnny Nugus, wreathed in a crawling halo of flies, stepped out from behind the silver gum. He let fly with the plastic bag. As it tipped, end over end, it broke into fragments and slammed into Ace.
Ace’s grunt, on impact, had a quizzical timbre.
On completion of our mission, we turned, we fled.
I wonder today, whether it was the smell of the shit, or its texture, which conveyed to Ace knowledge of its true substance. However it occurred, this realisation was followed with a bowel-loosening scream. It rang out among silhouettes of tree branches against the sky, and we bolted through the slashing lantana.
And it didn’t stop. He just kept screaming and screaming, until his howls staggered and collapsed over ragged vocal chords into cries, then sobs. What the sobs lacked in volume, they made up for in duration. Occasionally the sobs, emboldened by hatred, would swell again into cracked and wracked screams of rage and vengeance.
Ace’s scream tore apart any sense of fairness. That wail brought on the first true expression of barbarity, of anarchy. The scream was such that the imprisoned Scouts, against all rules of the game, broke rank. They fled the Venturers’ camp without having been tagged.
Little Johnny Nugus was like Cain, having introduced an act into the realm, for which there could be no forgiveness.
So we did what anyone would do. We started shitting in earnest. We shat into any vessel we could, cups and tupperware, plastic bags and purpose-built envelopes folded from porno mags. I remember Damien Bougore laying one out on Corn Flakes box, like a jeweller presenting a Rolex on his counter, to a prospective buyer. Fat Pat slashed the pucker of his sphincter on the torn aluminium half of a Coke can which he was trying to fill with diarhoea. We laid a few nuggets around the campsite, too, as landmines, and as a lure for blowflies. Tom fashioned a woomera, for extra range.
And we entrenched, awaiting the hearkening of Vengeance. We knew it wouldn’t be beneath the Venturers’ dignity to respond to like with like. There would be no mercy, no trust.
And no court in the country would convict them.
Night fell, on fear.
Fear smells, of course, like human shit wrapped up in plastic bags and newspaper. You had to keep your own turd close, not only for protection, but to overpower the scent of your neighbour’s.
Fear feels like a thousand biting and crawling insects, drawn to the cornucopia of excrement. Fear is dark – the fire made one too exposed, none would approach it. It burned out – fear tastes like cold tins of baked beans, and crispy biscuits of two-minute noodles.
Fear grows fat and paranoid on sound. Alert and coiled, our fear was, for the cadences of human voice, or for some rhythm in the constant sound of the bush which may mean footsteps. The ears created illusions for the delight of our fear, which cavorted.
At first the fear swirled in the sloppy recesses of my colon, like a lump in gravy. But the undulations of time acted on it, dulling it, making it sullen and hunched. We became rutted in our bolt-holes, and started to turn our fear into something we could use – hatred. And a lot of the hatred was directed at little Johnny Nugus, the harbinger of this new age.
The protractions of the night acted differently on him. He knew, we all knew, that if it came down to it, we would hand him over. This knowledge acted on his fear, like fire under a pot of water. He became manic, unsettled. He tried to convince us to raid the Venturers, deriding our cowardice. He became more and more alone, striking further and further afield, until he stopped even returning to our camp.
It was in that milky grey and blue hour, just before dawn, that hour claimed by kookaburras, sparrows’ farts and frightened worms, old people and joggers, and home-bound clubbers, that we heard commotion. Our arseholes cinched tight.
Little Johnny Nugus, shouted the password before belting into our camp. We brandished our turds, prepared for the inevitable.
“They ran,” he was victorious. “Soon as they saw me, they turned and ran.”
“What about you Johhny?” I could see that he was still armed with his three turd-bombs.
“I ran too – there were two of them. Let’s go back and get ‘em – they’re gay.”
“We’re not going to get them Johnny.” Nothing, not pride, not the petulant joy of throwing faeces at someone, was worth the risk of getting hit yourself.
And Johnny had just shown us that the Venturers felt no differently. We knew then, that they were afraid, they weren’t going to come. And it was thanks to little Johnny Nugus, our shithouse rat Messiah.
Over time we came back out of our tents and trenches. We even got the fire going again. When I heated up my pea and ham soup, what a joyous time. We always kept our turds close at hand out of instinct, and there were times, during gathering of firewood that we almost came in contact with our enemies, but both sides were careful, and stayed well away. And we all settled into our routines.
It was at War Camp that I learned something about peace.
honest dave
Not all of this story is true. But the part that you’d hope isn’t – ie, young kids flinging shite at one another – is.
Thanks to Gizmo for the recollection, and the inspiration, such as it was.