From the opening paragraphs of “Camouflage,” in the story collection of the same title, by Murray Bail:
All things considered, piano-tuning is a harmless profession. Working by themselves in rooms filled with other people’s most intimate belongings, piano-tuners give the impression of wanting to be somewhere else. They’re known to jump at unexpected sounds. At the sight of blood they’d run a mile. And yet early in 1943 Eric Banerjee, along with some other able-bodied men, was called up by the army to defend his country. ‘Mr Banerjee wouldn’t hurt a fly’—that came from a widow who lived alone in the Adelaide foothills, where her Beale piano kept going out of tune.
It followed that, if a man as harmless as Eric Banerjee had been called up, the situation to the north was far more serious than the authorities were letting on.