NAME: C.C. Bingham, Through magazine

DATE: 1941

UNIT: Signals 8th Australian Division

LOCATION: Singapore

Impressions! I was all impressions. I could not think. I was the victim of a transposition of the senses. Smells were hot, the heat was glaring and simmering, and everything was colour. I can still see the jungle as it flashed past us in that crazy little train.

Impressions! What would you, what could you think when the lights of Jahore flash past you with all their magic loveliness, and then you see tall timbers, dark and unknown against the skies.

Perhaps we were rookies. To us the trees held strange animals and birds, and the cicada laden jungles, mysteries we might never know.

Soon a year will have passed and we still will not know Malaya. Yes we know it is a land of vivid colours and varying smells and strange sights and customs. All this we know and yet we shall never know the silent impenetrable Malaya where silence broods like some jealous god.

We shall tear past kampong and town in our trucks. We shall see people and know them, rivers and cross them, hills and climb them, but we shall never know the real Malaya. We are Australians, and we know only the call of the plaint or sturdy gums.

It is because of this we shall only see jungle and rubber trees, always rubber trees.

C.C. Bingham

Published in the first edition of Through, the official journal of Signals 8th Australian Division in Singapore, December 1941.

The material for this article was supplied by Mrs E.A. Quick of South Australia

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