Four thousand bowls of rice

Four Thousand Bowls of Rice tells how one prisoner of war prepared himself, mentally and physically, for his journey home after three and a half years of brutal captivity in Java, Burma and Thailand during World War II. Staff Sergeant Cecil Dickson was a member of the 2/2 Australian Pioneer Battalion, which was forced to surrender to the Japanese in March 1942. His engineering unit bore the heaviest work in constructing the Burma-Thailand Railway. Sergeant Dickson was also a journalist, and within days of his release in August 1945, he began writing a series of letters to his wife back in Melbourne, as he anxiously awaited final transport orders. Drawing on these letters, and her research with many surviving Pioneers, Linda Goetz Holmes paints a dramatic picture of prisoner of war life under the Japanese. Dickson's letters are yesterday's version of the 'live-remote' coverage one expects to find on today's newscast. Through his words, the reader discovers what it felt like to emerge abruptly from one day's starvation to the next day's air-drops, and from being in regimented captivity to being in charge of one's own time again. More significantly, Dickson's writings provide a unique glimpse of one man's determination to free his mind from continued captivity by replacing bitter memories with the sights and sounds of postwar Bangkok, and with tender thoughts of reunion with loved ones. . While Dickson's letters provide the sound track, it is the series of photographs, taken secretly by other Australian prisoners, which give shape to this vivid picture of POW life. Published here for the first time, these daring close-ups of gaunt faces and ravaged bodies leave the reader with an unforgettable personal statement of suffering - and triumph.