‘What a different world we have come to’, Sergeant Jack Craig remarked when his ship arrived in the Middle East, at Port Tewfik in Egypt. ‘It's unreal. The air smells differently & the feeling inside has changed.’ All found this a ‘different world’. How cerebral their reaction was varied between individuals. ‘It is quite strange to be in these foreign citys after Aussie’, wrote one, ‘for instance you get beer in cafes and not hotels and their [sic] is no such thing as after hours over here.’

The appeal of otherworldliness was one reason Australians enlisted in both world wars. In this war, as in the first, the Middle Eastern universe dominated the newcomers’ lives for a considerable time: two years for the 6th and 9th Divisions, and well over a year for the 7th. Between 100 000 and 130 000 Australian soldiers served in the Middle East.

They arrived with preconceptions, often supplied by their units’ officers and NCOs, who warned the men that the locals were disease-ridden thieves. For example, Jack Craig wrote that the ‘old hands’ from the previous war had told them that Egyptians would ‘thieve the eye from a needle’. No wonder the first Egyptians he saw, crewing the small vessels that took the Australians ashore from the Queen Mary, appeared to him to be ‘very dirty & villainous’.