Risus sardonicus

Chapter 8 of The Survival Factor, by ex-POW medico Dr Rowley Richards recounts the sufferings of 'Anderson' and 'Williams' Forces on the Burma-Thai Railways during outbreaks of smallpox and cholera. Titled 'Rosis sardonicus', it takes as its theme the 'scornful smile' deriving from the Latin sardonicus, a fabled Sardinian herb which, if eaten, produced facial convulsions resembling horrible laughter. He noted the same smirking scowl on the lips of men who 'had learned to keep their hands at their sides when slapped or when watching a mate take a bashing'. Describing it as 'a faint shrug ... a carefully contrived mixture of apparent good humour with a slight curl of the upper lip that stopped just short of being a recognisable sneer', he interpreted it as the prisoners' last defiance and only defence against 'the steady piling up of misery, of mud and toil, bashings and starvation'. 'There was nothing to do but grin a bear it.' Although not the only kind of humour in Australian texts depicting captivity under the Japanese, the sardonic is both prominent and pervasive and aligns, moreover, with what some scholars have identified as the central national tradition, where 'irony predominates and individuals manipulated by circumstances or a destiny they are unable to control wryly resign themselves to their own powerlessness'.