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during his time in New Guinea – possibly during his work for the ABC. Dudley would spend the next 16 months in hospital. The once superbly fit athlete became paralysed and could no longer walk. He then underwent fever therapy, where his body temperature was raised in steam baths in an effort to combat the symptoms. A diagnosis of meningitis was confirmed and in 1945 he also contracted tuberculosis.
    Dudley’s wife Dawn was looking after their three children, Lorelei, Dudley and Robin, but she took him out of the hospital to care for him at home, where he underwent a slow rehabilitation. He was a big man, just over six-feet tall, and it was a painful process as he forced his body to move again after the long months in hospital. His children remember their father careening around the house on crutches as he willed himself to become mobile.
    Dudley’s determined battle with illness ended in a truce of sorts. He remained partially paralysed and would never walk again without the aid of crutches, but with Dawn’s help he was no longer an invalid and could even drive a modified car using hand controls instead of pedals. He returned to full-time work at the ABC, as the manager in charge of ABC sporting broadcasts, and later travelled overseas to manage ABC test cricket broadcasts in England. But his partial recovery was justa temporary reprieve. Dudley died from his illness in 1949, less than four years after the end of the war. He was 38 years old.
Bill Marien
    Bill Marien returned to Sydney from New Guinea in mid-1944 having battled with Army public relations over his independence as an ABC war correspondent and in defence of his own reporting. His temper may have frayed but his record as a correspondent was intact. He now moved from News to the Talks department, using the voice-reporting skills he had developed in the field, and he compiled a major radio documentary program called Five Years of War . However, he seemed unsatisfied by the work now ahead of him at the ABC. Fellow war correspondent, John Hinde, believed that some ABC correspondents, like Marien, felt that their experiences counted for little once they were back home. ‘Bill simply resigned in disgust because he seemed to be covering school breakups and women’s parties and things.’ 14 It was a fact of life that few jobs back home could compare with the consuming challenges and achievements of war reporting, and while Marien wanted to return to the field, he had found it difficult to work within the constraints of the ABC’s relationship with Army public relations.
    In September, once he had completed his radio war documentary, Marien resigned from the ABC to become a war correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald . As a correspondent for the Herald in the last year of the war, Marien sailed with the US Third Fleet during the American campaign to re-take the Philippines, covered the landings on Okinawa and Iwo Jima and the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay.
    In the post-war years, he became public relations officerfor the Chamber of Manufactures in Sydney, and he and Peg eventually had four children: Elizabeth, Frank, Merrick and Moira. Marien sometimes appeared as a panellist on television discussion programs and he found more outlets for his loquacious love of words and writing – he had a weekend radio session helping people to do their crosswords, and on Fridays he had a book review segment on Gwen Plumb’s program on the Sydney station, 2GB.
    Bill was only 43 when he died of a heart attack in 1959. Away from the chaos of the war years and his time as a war correspondent, his passions were for his rugby team, Randwick, and for gardening. The family had just moved to a new home in the green garden suburb of Lindfield on Sydney’s north shore the week before he died. When he left the ABC he had departed with its thanks for his service as a war correspondent – ‘the dark, fattish chap’ with the Italian-Irish