Nature Note

U.S. soldiers found that their high-school books were right: Australia's fauna was indeed teeming with strange cases of arrested evolution. There, sure enough, were the duck-billed platypus, the kangaroo, the dingo dog. There was another one that the zoology writers had left out. He was the "wowser," strangest beastie of them all.

The wowser is human. The Australian slang dictionary defines him (or her) as "a puritanical enthusiast, a bluestocking, a drab-souled Philistine haunted by the mockery of others." What the U.S. soldiers and their Empire mates have to say about him would burn holes in a postman's sack.

The worst feature of the wowser is that he is not content to spend his Sundays drably in sedate strolls or in solemn indoor sportlessness. He wants everyone else to be Sunday-drab, too. And for soldiers who are working like horses six days a week to save the wowser and his friends from the Jap, that is something to howl about.

Thanks to the wowsers, Sunday in an Australian town, for soldiers who need recreation, is an exercise in breathing the dank air of a tomb. There are no movie shows, because places where people pay an admission fee are classed as "disorderly houses." There are no dances, few open restaurants where a man can buy himself and girl a cup of coffee, nothing but churches and sedate fun at home. Even window shopping is out. The windows are all sandbagged.

Against this situation, U.S. and Australian Army morale officers did their best, set up baseball games and other sports in camps and pleaded for open picture houses. The unions headed that off, refused to work on Sundays, refused the offer of the Army to furnish operators and ushers. The Australian press egged on the anti-Sabbatarians. Demanded the Sydney Daily Telegraph: "Are we assembling huge armies . . . to pave the way to heaven for wowsers?"

Last week the wowsers melted a little around the edges. They agreed that recreation buildings for soldiers might be opened on Sundays, say from 2:30 to 6 p.m. and from 8:15 to 10:30. (The rest of the day is for church.) But they raised a wowsing quibble. Since this vast breach in the law was for soldiers, they wondered whether it would be wowser-fair to let the soldiers' girls in. The girls are civilians.

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