Actually, it's a pre-the-post-apocalyptic meat of the story soon arrival, and it doesn't actually have to come from California, and it doesn't have soldiers on it.

Sorry, being cagy because if I talk about a story too much I kill it.

It's full of children.

Maybe we should attack the question from the other way around. What do you want to find in Australia when you get here?

I mean, seriously, all our major cities are port cities. Unless you have it arriving in Alice Springs (which would be like having it pull up at the dockside in Tulsa or something), you can just pick and choose.

But a ship coming from the US would be unlikely to land in Adelaide or Perth. It would probably be somewhere on the east coast, ie Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane (in descending order of likeliness, all else being equal).

I got this before war started, I'm just slow putting things down. I don't even like that I have it, but it's biting me, so, there you go.

America is at war. Australia is treated very crappily by the U.S. and withdraws troop support. There is a seriously accepted threat of bombing the U.S., especially one of the coasts, leaning toward california because I won't have to work for that too hard. Think of the children! is the outcry. Australia offers to host children. Troop ships are loaded up with them, and they head there. They're put up in various municipal buildings emptied for the purpose.

The plan is to have the children cared for until the mighty U.S. kicks ass, but then they lose, or, while not exactly losing, are so desperately fragmented that, when they come back, they won't be the same country anymore -- Nuclear holocaust. Australia is actually harmed the least as the U.S. thinks of it as a recalcitrant ally that will come around and the enemy thinks of it as a new ally. Traditional bombs are, eventually, used on Australia, but nothing nuclear. Lots of lost life, lots of geophysical activity (the level of bombing may have to be tweaked to reach that point).

Where did the children go? Should there be more than one troop ship, or did the others go down? or was there only time for one?

Is it okay that I'm posting all of this in here? This isn't exactly a fic thread.

It would probably be somewhere on the east coast, ie Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane (in descending order of likeliness, all else being equal).

Brisbane would be the closest place to the US on that list, so if they were in a hurry, that would be it.

Thanks John and Angus, that's a big help. Don't suppose you guys could tell me what the US could do to really tick off the Australians, enough to withdraw troop support?

That's fine Deena. Actually, Australia did something very similar to this with some British children in WWII...it's now a very notorious episode because a lot of the children were housed in institutions run by the Catholic church and were horribly abused.

Don't suppose you guys could tell me what the US could do to really tick off the Australians, enough to withdraw troop support?

If there was such a thing, I wish to god we'd done it in the last few months...