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Army, the Regio Esercito, and the Air Force, the Regia Aeronautica, against a disorganised rabble of tribal warriors armed with a few antique artillery pieces and three ancient biplanes.
    At the League of Nations in Geneva, statesmen and diplomats spouted fine phrases dripping with good intentions, but the League proved powerless to act. Mussolini flung defiance in its face, and conquest in North Africa did not sate his appetite; it whetted it. The League’s failure to move against Italy over Abyssinia was the green light for yet another lunge for territory. On 7 April 1939, Mussolini turned his gaze east across the Adriatic Sea to invade the small Balkan kingdom of Albania. Again, victory was easily won. It was over in less than a month. Bestriding the eternal city of Rome like a new colossus, Il Duce beheld a world, he thought, that lay supine at his polished jackboots. Italy had an army of otto millioni di baionette , of eight million bayonets, he boasted.
    The partnership forged by Hitler and Mussolini, the Axis, would change forever the lives of the young men who had sailed to bring HMAS Perth home to Australia.
    In the Tasman Sea, the Autolycus wallowed south towardsHobart. So far, the weather had been kind enough, which was a mercy, for life on board the old freighter was rough and ready. the for’ard hold and ’tween decks, where the men ate at wooden tables and slung their hammocks at night, still reeked of the horses that had been there before them, despite attempts to scrub away the smell. Senior ratings – the chief petty officers and petty officers – did a little better, in temporary accommodation knocked together on the upper deck, where there were also some extra heads (toilets) and showers. The six RAN officers taking passage on board shared the few cabins the ship could offer and ate in the saloon apart from the men. Three of those officers – one of them a doctor, Surgeon Commander Charles Downward – were also on their way to commission HMAS Perth .
    Despite the primitive conditions, spirits were high. After a few days at sea, the youngsters and first-timers began to find their sea legs and to put the miseries of seasickness behind them. It was an adventure, almost a holiday, with little or no work to be done and, as yet, no enforcement of the daily naval routine. They stripped to their shorts and sunbaked on deck. In the evenings, there might be a boisterous sing-song or, more furtively, a school playing Crown and Anchor, a gambling game banned in the navy but which might just win you a few quid for a run ashore. Thoughts of a new war were far away.
    The navy they had joined was barely a quarter of a century old. Yet its foundations were laid in the origins of the nation itself. When the weary ships of the First Fleet at last dropped their anchors at Port Jackson in January 1788, the new governor, Captain Arthur Phillip RN, saw before him ‘the finest harbour in the world, in which a thousand sail of the line may ride in the most perfect security’. 6 In the century that followed, the Australian colonies whose seed Phillip had planted grew and flourished, their security guaranteed by the ‘wooden walls’ of the Royal Navy. British warships came and went from their ports. British admirals, each more grand than the last, added a salty glitter to colonial society in thecolonnaded sandstone splendour of Sydney’s Admiralty House. It was all very reassuring.
    But it was one thing to plant the British flag among the gum trees. It was very much another to keep it flying. Any new sail in the offing might be a foreign foe ready to descend with guns blazing. Every so often, fears ran wild. The wicked French, everyone knew, were a perpetual menace. So too were the ambitious Dutch, with their colonial empire in the Spice Islands to the north. In 1854, with Queen Victoria at war with the Tsar in the Crimea, the Argus newspaper terrified the good citizens of Melbourne by