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type of man who ‘walks a stage, followed always by eyes: admiring or wistful or resentful
eyes, as the case may be’ (YLD, 65).
The sometimes adversarial, other times disciplined father-son relationship with
Colonel Henderson explains many of the riddles in Hamilton’s personality to Cookie, who, like
most others, finds the British Security Officer to be dislikeable, cold, patronising, and a
‘subject for satire’ (YLD, 62). Hamilton admits that Henderson is a ‘real pukka sahib’ and an
anachronism in the new post-colonial world, but betrays his own Orientalist hankerings when
he regrets not having been born in Henderson’s era of real heroes and men. Cookie believes
the respect Hamilton shows Henderson goes beyond the resemblance Hamilton sees with his
father who disappeared into the Japanese death camps in W.W.II. Hamilton exhibits ‘an old-
fashioned quality entirely out of kilter with the impression he gave of being an ambitious and
pragmatic loner. He had certain sentimentalities; an almost Edwardian strain of romanticism’
which he finds ‘touching: the secret vulnerability of the invulnerable’ (YLD, 64). In
Henderson, Helen Tiffin points out, Hamilton is searching for a false illusion much in the same
way that Robert O’Brien was searching in Ilsa Kalnins for the European experience he felt he
lacked. Hamilton ‘learns through his experience with Henderson just what cold comfort
England can offer’ (Tiffin, 1982, 333). In addition, while Henderson probably saves his life,
his refusal of Henderson’s symbolic saving of his wounded eye indicates how Hamilton has
learned how post-colonial Asia is more his world than either England or empire, and that living
culture is more important than cultural or genetic ancestry.
Cookie notices a ‘sort of aura’ about Hamilton, who always seems on the verge of
having something happen around him. This would describe the ideal newsman, but Cookie
says it goes farther than that, in a description foreshadowing the hero of Highways to a War:
‘He was one of those people who are secretly waiting for something more: that vast and
glorious happening, delicious as speed, bathing everything in gold, which perhaps never comes
at all’ (YLD, 65). This seems to be precisely Koch’s attitude towards his white Australian
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