Training, unrest among the Australians, and a panic in Syria

General Morshead wanted to train his Australians. When 20th Brigade was available with no other distractions, they turned to training. They were involved with battalion and brigade-level "field exercises". You can tell that this was necessary for the 20th Brigade had never had any training since the brigade had been formed 22 months earlier.
There were reports of "unrest" among the Australians. Partly, this was due to their employment in Syria while men were defending Australia at home. No mail from Australia simply aggravated the problem, because no one knew anything about what was really happening in Australia. The men were stuck in the Middle East while their wives and girlfriends were in Australia, possibly meeting American men.
The typical reaction to this sort of thing was almost a parody. They sent the A.I.F. Entertainment Unit to Syria and Lebanon. The review opened in Beirut on 10 March 1941 and played to a VIP audience, including "General Maitland Wilson, General Morshead, the President of Lebanon, the American Counsel-General (Mr. C. van Engert) and other notabilities". The show was called "All in Fun". They eventually played to all the Australian venues in Syria. They also tried showing movies almost nightly for each Australian brigade. They kept someone busy planning events to entertain the troops. They had trips to where there was snow and visited "places of historic interest". Men were allowed to take leave in Beirut and Tripoli. They did things which seem familiar, even thirty years later such as "table-tennis, chess, draughts, boxing tournaments and euchre parties".
The food situation in Syria improved since there had been a "bumper grain crop". Typically, they did not trust the local people to handle distribution, because they assumed that there would be profiteering. The military was to supervise the harvest. We see a warning, that the 9th Australian Division would be gone from Syria before the harvest happened. We suspect that was because the situation in the Western Desert was collapsing.
The cause of panic in late May 1942 was over a report of warships and large transports on the coast when there was no notice of a British convoy. The panic ensued over what was eventually acknowledged as a British convoy sailing north along the Syrian coast. No reason for panic, but they panicked over lack of information. This is based on the account in Vol.III of the Australian Official History.