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| SS Ceramic in dazzle camouflage |
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George Henry Johnston, My Brother Jack. North Ryde, New South Wales: Angus and Robertson, 1990, pp. 3-4—
One recollects something of this later phase [of World War I] in a series of vivid little vignettes that are incomplete and scattered, but bright enough, like the fragments of spilt color I remember strewn on the hall carpet all around the artificial limbs and crutches when the front door slammed in a gusty wind one day and shattered the decorative lead light side panels of red and green and blue and amber glass.
Almost the earliest and yet the clearest of these images is of the troopship Ceramic, with her four rakish masts and her tall tilted smokestack, coming home to the flags and the festoons of garlands and the triumphal arches and the bands playing Sousa marches on the pier at Port Melbourne. The blue-grey abstract dazzle of the camouflage-painting on the steamer's incredibly long, lean hull, although spectacular, came as no surprise to me, but I do remember being astonished by the bright daubs of red lead and the more sanguinary streams of rust streaking down from ports and hawse-hole and scuppers, because I had only visualized the ship before in the gray monotone of a mounted photograph which was kept on top of the piano, together with a hard army biscuit on which was drawn with Indian ink a sketch of a camel and the Sphinx and a palm-tree and the Pyramids and the legend Australian Imperial Forces Cairo New Year 1915. There was no coincidence in the photograph being there on the piano; the Ceramic was the transport that had taken Mother away; the coincidence was that it was the same ship that brought Dad home. Even so, I had not expected the vivid redness of the rust and the red lead, which to my awed childish imagination looked like blood pouring down the ship's side. Perhaps it had been.
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