Mutineers: A True Story of Heroes and Villians
Robert Hadler
Wilkinson Publishing, Melbourne, 2021 Paperback, $29.99
Michael English
This is a very interesting account of five young sailors, two of
whom were Rudd brothers, who in 1919, after five years at war,
returning to Australia on HMAS Australia, got drunk in Fremantle
and turned Bolshie when they got back to the ship. Fancy, sailors
getting drunk. The captain treated the matter with common
sense, but the ego of the Commodore was bruised. Commodore Dumaresq was described as a small man, didn’t smoke or drink, with unrelenting principles. He dug his toes in and pursued the matter all the way to a court martial with the resultthe five sailors spent time in Goulburn Gaol. With an election looming the Labor Party got involved and stirred up public support. Billy Hughes ordered they be released before the election. Dumaresq held his breath till he turned blue and Billy Hughes had to do some serious sucking up to him. There follows the argument of who makes decisions for Australian citizens, the elected parliament of the country or the British Admiralty who had borrowed HMAS Australia for the duration of the war?
The only thing that annoyed me about this book was the author’s device of putting the chief villain/hero, Dalmorton Rudd, in conversation with a friend telling him of his ordeal. The narrative would jump between Dal in his dinghy with his mate Morrie fishing off Woy Woy to pages, even chapters, of well researched material. The reader becomes totally engrossed in the emerging story, when suddenly it is back to Dal in the dinghy with Morrie. So disruptive.
The lives of the five men after their release is sufficiently well told, sometimes with a little irrelevant padding. Lenny Rudd joined the army in World War Two and continued the practice of going AWOL, drinking and getting docked three days’ pay. Dal Rudd had assault charges in the 1930s and joined an American Small Boats service in New Guinea. After the war he was perhaps slightly bigamist. Pitta Thompson ended up in Changi. Bill McIntosh became a small time criminal. Ken Paterson hanged himself. Were their lives ruined by the mutiny charge or were they always flawed characters?
There is a wonderful Yiddish word chutzpah, the explanation for which was once given as ‘a man murders both parents then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan’. Dal Rudd had chutzpah. In his twilight years he applied to the Navy for a pension. Thank God for badly kept naval records. They knew he had a DSM but had forgotten about the mutiny. He got the pension. In later years Dalmorton Rudd’s name was put up as a naval man who should get a VC because the Navy never got their quota, along with the usual other suspects like Simpson and his donkey.
You will have to read the book to fill in the interesting details.