‘My Errol Flynn’: How Ethne fell in love with a dead serviceman

Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.Ethne Rodgers had been married for 59 years, widowed for 11, had reared two adult sons and a daughter, and was sailing more or less contentedly into her tenth decade when, in 2021, she was introduced to a dashing Australian air force Lieutenant named Garth Clabburn. Garth was dead, but that didn’t matter; Rodgers fell in love with him all the same.

“But what I loved about Garth was his defiance,” says Rodgers. “He loved flying around the pyramids when he wasn’t supposed to.” There is an insatiable need for transcribers at the AWM, which, in addition to being a shrine and a museum, is also a library, with many millions of pages of wartime documents, including love letters, diaries, postcards and photos. The archive dates from the Crimean War , where Australians served under British command, to the most recent conflict in Afghanistan.Peter Tarasiuk

Rodgers’ first assignment, in 2021, was to transcribe the manifests of all the ships that came and went from Japan after World War II as part of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force. It was, she admits, pretty boring. And frustrating. “I had to put a spreadsheet together. I was hopeless with the computer. Sometimes I just wanted to put my foot through it.” But the jobs – and her IT skills – soon improved.

The work is eerily immersive. When Rodgers’ “boys” don’t have enough blankets, she feels their cold. When they’re short of food, she feels their hunger. When they get shot at, she winces in fear. “A lot of them loved going ashore and exploring,” she says. “They found old buildings, and you wander through, right there with them.”

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