Within Our Gates

Amid the burnished mahogany and brass of Melbourne’s Commonwealth Defence Offices, a whisper of betrayal threads itself through the corridors: an Australian clerk—his cradle rocked by the anthems of two warring empires—stands at the crossroads of bloodline and birthplace. Herr Henschell, a silk-hatted merchant whose ledger columns mask a clandestine empire, lures the young man into a velvet trap of gambling IOUs and attic transmitters. Above their heads, copper aerials hum lullabies to the Reich while Anzac transports steam toward the Dardanelles like steel leviathans. Yet the spy’s adopted daughter—her eyes the colour of eucalyptus sap—smuggles love letters to the War Minister’s son, only to stumble across ciphered cables that taste of iron. One midnight, silk kimono flapping like a wounded flag, she sprints through the Fitzroy Gardens to the telephone exchange; switchboards ignite, rifles rattle across Port Melbourne wharves, and soon the same camera that caressed ballroom waltzes now recoils from shell-blasts on Gallipoli’s razorback ridges. Soldiers who once drilled beside the Yarra surge up shelled gullies, their shadows cruciform against the ochre dust, while Turkish machine-guns stitch death into the air like black confetti. In the final flicker, the wireless attic is stormed, the traitor’s cufflinks scatter like spent cartridges, and a girl’s trembling finger points to the horizon where transports dissolve into a blood-red dawn.