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Seeing them together is like watching a ventriloquist and his dummy: one tall, handsome
and rather stiffly formal, the other small, a bit grotesquely shaped, witty and moody, which
leads Wally O’Sullivan to name them ‘Sir Guy and the Black Dwarf’ (YLD, 43). Koch
repeatedly likens Billy to a puppet, giving him a ‘waxen, fixed face’ (YLD, 234), and describes
him as a doll or child, as when Hamilton surprises Billy alone in the locked ABS offices:
‘Without a word, Billy threw himself into the chair, and lay like a broken doll, shoulders
hunched to his ears. He blinked at Hamilton expressionlessly, utterly attentive: an obedient
Chinese child’ (YLD, 32). These are Orientalist clichés, but Koch is using them much as
d’Alpuget does, drawing the reader into the stereotypes of the Asian-Australian Billy Kwan
and the colonial-sentimentalist, Anglo-Saxon Guy Hamilton, then, like a dalang finessing the
shadows on the wayang kulit screen, blending, combining, and finally reversing their
chimerical personalities.
They are a team with their obligatory, standard comic lines, like the glib dialogue
whenever they set out after a story:
‘Is all the sound equipment in the boot?’
‘Yes—and no one helped me to put it there.’
‘What about the old Bell and Howell? Is he loaded?’
‘On the front seat, old man.’
‘Any hairs on the lens?’
‘You worry about the words, Hamilton.’ (YLD, 74)
It is the time-honoured routine of confusing which of the two is the dummy which is most
richly developed, notably marking Hamilton as the one dwarfed by atrophied emotions,
ridiculed for his inability to assess the rules of his new professional and personal situation, and
mocked by his colleagues. Billy meanwhile assumes the roles—all variations on the puppeteer
theme—of the dalang puppet master, impersonator of President/God-king Sukarno, and
incarnation of Vishnu. This is part theatrics, but surpassing the mundane is a quotidian affair
for Kwan, and much about him defies explanation, including his extraordinary personal
contacts and the insider’s access to certain prominent figures, which enables him to bestow on
the earnest but green Hamilton the career-making interview that the other correspondents can
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