YANKS IN DARWIN

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIII, Issue 126, 30 May 1942, Page 5

YANKS IN DARWIN

MUSICAL CONTRASTS

ABOS. AND DIVERSIONS

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In a clearing in the scrub here in the still of a .starlit i " sle n,»h,. U„ h American, sat in a circle jitterW nostalgically to the music of ! ln piece hrass jazz hand - three trumpeters, three °axonh en ~" tw«. trombones, the drums P^nJ? es ' brass horn. Some of these bovs h d , been to college together and th«i leader was their music fnstrn^ r back home. He leaned again"? a nearby tree as the boys swunc aiL on then- own and got the bugs 0 u? J their horns and grew warmantl i,? with ••Hoogly, Woogly P "Green Kves. "The Song of IndVV" "Whispering, "From Tan? tn leal'. Uleir them "' son'? lively as 'the hand'st!uck'"he 8 gr 0 0ve and sometimes broke into cheers It a black headed trumpeter rose to Dlav his solo licks or tile vocalist nut. down his saxophone to sins and Jitter in mnt of the band in the tropic night. "This is what the boys look forward to most ot anything" said in officer listening to the band "The only trouble is that it. makes them think of their girls back home." Until this band got out its horns the only swing music in the bic wild, swampy Darwin Peninsula was the tribal music of the natives of two tribes, the •'Dunkums" and the "A bos. i lie A bos recently held a drum and dance carnival in a nearby jungle for the ceremony of makins a boy member of the tribe a man Since then the "Abos" have been removed from the war zone, thoutrh occasionally they sneak back for a chance of getting a little tobacco. The Blacks as Trackers The contrast between a young American band and dark, primitive "Abos" swinging music in the same patch of isolated bushland may seem strange, but the "Abos" have proved valuable friends to the whites here and especially useful to the police at. various times as trackers. Literally, they are able to follow a clue of broken twigs and bent grass through unexplored country where Whites sometimes lose their wav.

One American sergeant and soldier hunting alligators optimistically with forty-fives were lost in the bush and swamps for three days. They found their own way out eventually, but only a step ahead of "Abos" trackers who started a day and a half later ■ml never missed a footprint. The morning after the band conCert we rose in the short-lived cool of dawn, combed the red dirt out of our hair by the spadefuls and chugged into town, gathering more red rlirt. in our hair from the "Burma Road" as we drove. In a shack containing a flat-bed printing press a young Australian soldier-editor showed us how he nuts out a single-sheet newspaper which feeds bulletins to the news hungry soldiers of this bombed but busy area. Lieutenant Bass, a former newspaperman and a veteran army editor by now, in the days before the bombing used to get out a bigger paper with race results and even selections. He once caused a sensation in the army by picking eight winners out of 11 races by the blindfold method. He showed us the "special extra" he published of Pearl Harbour from the first radio announcements. "A Very Sweet Memory" Here also your correspondent discovered the details of a game called "Ins and outs," a variation of the American game of house craps, popular with Australians with the gambling instinct, especially in the undisciplined town of Darwin before the Japanese came and war became real. Lieutenant Bass had collected a table layout of this game as a souvenir. The house pays odds on every combination of two dice—3o to one for ''snake eyes," "box cars," or any double; 10 to one for any 10 or four; five to one for anv six or eight, etc. ''The bank went busted with this table a couple of months ago," said the lieutenant. "That's a very sweet memory." By way of explanation your correspondent should mention that "ins jjnd outs" means odds and evens. The bank pays even money to a better who guesses correctly whether the dice will make an odd or even combination as with red and black in roulette. To round out a bombless, Jap-less day your correspondent salvaged a black dress tie from the bedroom in a now deserted Darwin hotel, but finally, with great reluctance, decided to reject the idea of dressing . ®y enin K mess.—Auckland Star and N.A.N.A.