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account of the frangipani ordeal. By the following day, however, he began to feel he must have been imagining the whole thing and referred to it as a terrible nightmare.
    His return to sanity didn’t last long. Further violent psychotic episodes—more smashed furniture, more attacks on army personnel—followed. Then he disappeared for three days and was found in a public area with bruises all over his body at the bottom of eighty or ninety steps, without any recollection of what had occurred. Did he fall? Was he pushed? Did it cause brain damage? The incident is barely mentioned in his military record.
    During his confinement the resident psychiatrists and medical staff discovered a history of mental instability in his family (already quietly preparing a Departmental defence against liability). A maternal grandfather and an uncle had suffered mental illness. And Denny had shown neurotic traits ever since a fall from a tram in childhood. He had suffered blackouts, dizzy turns, and amnesic attacks, where he would wander and have no recollection of what had happened for an hour or more. He told doctors that since his arrival in Japan he had been extremely anxious and depressed. The doctors concluded that he had experienced a psychotic episode. He was diagnosed schizophrenic.
    Eventually he recovered sufficiently to be discharged but was still suffering from anxiety. His army doctor, who considered his psychiatric condition ‘constitutional’, recommended he be reclassified as unfit for military duties and repatriated to Australia to avoid an inevitable relapse.
    The definitive diagnosis was ‘psychopathic personality with emotional instability’. It was written across his military file and appeared on the majority of his Repatriation Department medical reports over the next few decades, as if it were immutable. But the degree of disability was deemed ‘negligible’.
    Did he reveal what had happened to him in Japan to the apparition on the swing bridge?
    Six months after his discharge, he was in the icy water of the South Esk River in Launceston, below the rapids where it reached the Tamar. He was clad in army issue fatigues, heavy boots, and a trench coat whose pockets were full of stones. There was a police launch nearby and a hefty hand grasping his collar. He wished the law would leave him alone. He was furious with its lightning response, furious he hadn’t yet sunk beyond its reach. The anger only made him feel more impotent.

    Denny had been discharged from the army in late October 1946, but within weeks was seeing a psychiatrist, who worked for the Repatriation Department in Launceston. He told the doctor he was unable to concentrate, his ears buzzed and at times there were clicking sounds in his head. Then there were his blackouts of five minutes duration, which occurred about every eight to fifteen days. He also said he suffered from insomnia due to an overactive mind.
    His inability to concentrate meant he had been unable to work since his discharge, which increased his anxiety and depression. He had been taught the importance of work growing up, and wanted to return to the trade he learnt before he enlisted. His family had always valued hard work. His father was a plasterer, a mean, overbearing figure who expected his three sons to follow in his footsteps, into the family business, which was built upon canniness and toil.
    The doctor reported that his patient felt he was controlled by some outside agency, often experiencing a sense of unreality, as if he were watching himself acting on a screen. The doctor noted ‘depersonalisation’ . Denny fidgeted. As he sat, his legs moved constantly. His eyes darted around the room. He said he often felt as if something supernatural was happening. Hallucinatory voices commanded him to do violent things. These voices appeared to come from the back of his head. Sometimes they were vague and sometimes quite distinct. Startling the