As evidence of the Allies’ slowly developing plan to kill the Axis by smothering them under a mountain of manufactured goods, there’s this one pier in Sydney Harbor that is piled high with wooden crates and steel barrels: stuff that has been disgorged from the holds of ships from America, Britain, India and just left to sit there because Australia doesn’t know how to digest it yet. It is not the only pier in Sydney that is choked with stuff. But because this pier isn’t good for much else, it is mounded higher and the stuff is older, rustier, more infested with rats, more rimed with salt, more thickly frosted and flagrantly streaked with gull shit.