The Drowning Dream

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William Webber simply wants to set the record straight. At ninety-six he has a rare medical ailment, suffers a recurring watery nightmare, and knows a thing or two about history. After all, he was there for a bit of it himself. Back in 1920, the young Webber finds himself in a boys’ own adventure story, far f rom home, on the trail of mystery and romance. The dangerous cut-throat world of pearling, a mad hermit in the mangroves, a voyage on a death boat — the stuff of a young man’s dreams. But nothing is as it seems, and in the real world there a re no simple answers, no untarnished heroes, and no neat endings. Not just a ripping yarn, The Dr o w n i n g D re a m is powerful and intelligent, an engaging novel about fathers, unfulfilled lives and culpability, memory and history.

P E T E R B U R K E was born in East Fremantle, We s t e r n Australia, in 1961. He is a doctor, specialising in the health of travellers. From 1989 to 1996 he worked as a general practitioner in the North-West of Australia. The Drowning Dream, his first novel, was written during this time and was inspired by his fascination with the history and the people of the North-West. The novel was shortlisted for the Australian/Vogel Literary Award in 1996, and for the Western Australian Premier’s Award in 1998.

Photograph by Paul Ricketts.

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First published 1998 by FREMANTLE ARTS CENTRE PRESS 25 Quarry Street, Fremantle PO Box 158, North Fremantle Western Australia 6159. www.facp.iinet.net.au Reprinted 2001. Copyright © Peter Burke, 1998. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. Consultant Editor B R Coffey. Designer Marion Duke. Production Coordinator Cate Sutherland. Typeset by Fremantle Arts Centre Press and printed by McPherson’s Printing Group, Victoria. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data: Burke, Peter, 1961 . The Drowning Dream. ISBN 1 86368 363 1. I. Title. A823.3 The State of Western Australia has made an investment in this project through ArtsWA.

Publication of this title was assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

To fathers, especially mine.

A c k n ow l e d ge me n ts The historical background and details r e g a rding the pearling industry have been gleaned from a wide range of reading over many years, as well as many trips to B roome. Two books I have frequently browsed and enjoyed, and which I would recommend to re a d e r s further interested in this fascinating part of Australia’s history are: Port of Pearls by Hugh Edwards, published by Hugh Edwards (originally by Rigby, 1985), and Full Fathom Five by Mary Albertus Bain, published by Artlook Books. Some biographical details r e g a rding Henry Rider Haggard came from a biography by his daughter, The Cloak That I Left by Lilias Rider Haggard, published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1951. The quote which Webber reads at Viney’s graveside is taken from Haggar d ’ s Ayesha: The Return Of She, as is the later reference to the crux ansata, the description of which is intended to be similar to Haggard’s.

Au th o r ’s No t e This is a work of fiction. However ... The convict Wildman did exist, and while held in prison in Fremantle did claim to have found vast gold deposits in the North-West. There was a Royal Navy diver named William Webber who died in suspicious circumstances while diving one hundred feet below the lugger Eurus off the Eighty Mile Beach, south of Broome, in 1912. The character of William Webber junior is fictional. Henry Rider Haggard did visit Western Australia about this time to take part in the Dominions Royal Commission in Perth. The pioneer aviators referred to were flying in Western Australia after the First World War. Brearley’s Western Australian Airlines commenced a regular Geraldton to Derby mail run in 1921, anticipating by one year the first regular service by Qantas. There were interracial riots in the town of Broome just before Christmas 1920, resulting in the deaths of several Japanese and ‘Koepangers’, as they were then known. Inspector Thomas did die of a heart attack after defusing the worst of the hostilities. Beyond this, any resemblance of any character to any person, living or dead, is not intentional.

T h e re is no human passion like the passion for the dead, none so awful, none so holy, none so changeless. For they have become eternal and our desire for them is sealed with the stamp of their eternity. Henry Rider Haggard, writing of his love for Lily, upon her death in 1909 (from The Cloak That I Left).

Map of Dampierland in North-West Australia Drawn by RJ Plewright, under instruction from Mr W Webber

Map showing Places of Origin of Inhabitants of Broome Drawn by RJ Plewright, under instruction from Mr W Webber

Nurse Rae Plewright waddles in, too-short arms at fortyfive degrees to her too-fat trunk. She’s huffing, as she does when I am in her bad books. The nurses allocated to the care of aged citizens such as myself come in only two sizes; too large (smell of perfumed soap so they don’t smell of sweat), and too skinny (smell of cigare t t e smoke). Rae Plewright is firmly in the former group. I usually cope with Rae Plewright by being deaf. I am deaf, mind you, because of the wax, but the severity can fluctuate. I am not so deaf for lovely Mary Belotti, for instance, but there are times when I am particularly deaf, such as when Rae Plewright sweeps in each morning with her Morning Bills. ‘Morning Bill! I said morning Bill!’ (False gaiety.) ‘Nggh.’ (Don’t answer to ‘Bill’. Except for Mary Belotti.)

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‘Morning teatime! Milo for you.’ (Plastic cup with invalid straw. Cold.) ‘That’s not right, love! Hot Milo. H o t ! Read what Mary’s written on my chart, she knows. Make With Hot M i l k, it says. And in a mug please. Just because old Baker’s had himself a stroke doesn’t mean I’m going to tip scalding Milo on myself does it. Hmm? They aren’t contagious are they, strokes?’ ‘Well, I’ll try to get it right tomorrow.’ (Fake smile.) ‘Very good, five minutes will be fine. Lovely and hot please.’ (Fake deafness.) She has left me the cold cup. She can fake a bit of deafness herself when she wants to. Probably she still has her nose out of joint after yesterday’s contretemps. ‘And don’t spill it over your lovely book, you don’t want to ruin all that effort,’ was her parting barb, referring to this one that I’m writing, you’re reading. Old man in a home, a battery box of unsorted memorabilia, page two of The Memoirs, death stalking the corridors, cold Milo, spurious presbyacusis — you know the story, so does she. Everyone’s a bloody expert nowadays, foremost among them being Nurse Rae Plewright. Yesterday I made the mistake of showing her page one of The Memoirs, and she conferred upon me several minutes worth of unsolicited and mostly unhelpful advice. You’ve written a few autobiographies yourself then, have you? I had to ask, before she took the hint. Still, I threw out yesterday’s efforts and I’m starting afresh today, just in case she was right. She can be as sullen as she wishes today but I won’t be showing her my writing for fear of further guidance. When I’ve finished, I may ask her about the maps though. I seem to

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remember she can draw at least. The task before me is daunting. I ask myself why I am bothering. The effort involved will most likely be the end of me, and I’m sure one thing the world doesn’t need is one more set of unfinished memoirs. I could say, like legless Lawrence Vesney (we will get to him in due course), what on earth else is there for me to do? But the main reason is simple and ageless — like all old men, I know my life is ending and I want to write it down first. Well, there is another reason I should admit to. Leon Viney. We will get to Leon in due course too, but as he has been waiting for the best part of a century, he can wait some more. It is strange that the years have sharpened, not dulled, my memories of Leon Viney. I cannot say precisely why I should feel it, but I have a sense of unpaid debt to him and, rather than being diminished by the years, it grows inexplicably stronger, gnawing at me. It has caused me to reflect on that eventful year of 1920, when I came to this country. It has made me want to write the story of those events. If it were not for Leon Viney, it is unlikely that I would have commenced these memoirs. I suppose I should have dedicated them to him. If he was a more worthy man, I would have. But Leon Viney, it has to be said, was not such a good man. You, gentle reader, would probably not have given him the time of day. Yes, I know about the convention regarding speaking ill of the dead, but it would be quite wrong of me to allow you to get the idea that there were any saintly qualities in the man. The reality is that, at the time I met him, Leon Viney was an inveterate dru n k living a not-completely hygienic life in a hermit’s camp on the edge of a mangrove swamp north of Broome. He

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had inflicted misery upon his son through his unrelenting malice and petty mindedness, and at the moment of his demise he was in unholy pursuit of the boy’s half-sister. It could not be said that his passing was greatly mourned. All right, the situation was this. Seventy-five years ago he entrusted his precious manuscript to me, and the next day he died, inelegantly, with his exotic clothing in disarray and a rather large dent in his head. Natural causes, mind. But given the immediate preceding circumstances I cannot help feeling, even now, a bit ... well, not guilty exactly, but that perhaps I’d contributed somewhat ... oh, Christ, all right, guilty. Guilty! Put him on the list with the other victims of the Webber magic. Mea culpa, your honour, but I’m ninety-six so what are you going to do exactly? Drag me screaming off the floor of the Permanent Care Unit, off to the Boot Camp? Do they have a Low Security Wing for Waxy Geriatrics? I suppose I am hoping to finally expiate this lingering sense of guilt about Leon Viney by aff o rding him an honourable mention in my memoirs, and by transcribing as large an excerpt of his original work as the modern discerning reader could be expected to tolerate. Which would not be much. But Leon Viney will keep. This was to be about me, not him. The Memoirs. To business.

My name is William Webber. I am ninety-six years old. I was born in Canterbury, England, when Victoria was on the throne, or in a sickbed quite close. My father was William Webber, the Royal Navy diver. He was famous

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enough in his day that I guess I would still be ‘William junior’ to this day in Canterbury, since I never returned as an adult to earn my seniority. I am now a long-term resident of the Onslow District Hospital Permanent Care Unit. A rare medical ailment is turning me into a human candle, starting with my tongue which is unnaturally large and full of wax, and when the process is complete I shall ask to be painted in festive colours and burned during the televised Carols by Candlelight concert, live f rom the Myer Musicbowl. I should like Miss Sigrid Thornton to ignite me as she is attractive yet dignified, and I have long considered her to be an underrated a c t ress. I have knocked about the North-West for seventy-five years, and in that time I have been, among many things, a barman who drank the profits, a fisherman who drank the profits, and an entirely unsuccessful teacher of English and geography. My life has, like most, been generally steady and unexciting but I have occasionally brushed with the extraordinary. To wit, I was present at the Broome Riots of Christmas 1920, and I believe I could have managed to single-handedly defuse them, but for the interference of the highly acclaimed Inspector Thomas who, in his infinite wisdom, saw fit to incarcerate me instead. How am I going in the credibility stakes? Most likely you lack the knowledge to judge. Go on, tell me, did Broome exist in 1920? Were there riots? That is the way now. One may write almost anything about Australia, any old bunk, and expect to get away with it. The Unknown is a scarce commodity in most places, but in Australia there is a surplus. This island continent fairly buzzes with The Unknown, especially its north-west corner whose history

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and geography is, for most, a blank page on which the author may write just about anything he pleases. I read a review in the B u l l e t i n last month. Some bloody idiot Californian woman, walking through the desert with the (Not Very) Real People, receiving intergalactic messages, sleeping in platypus-hide sleeping-bags. They must reach a good size, those desert platypi! Now, if the readership will buy that, it will buy anything. Disbelief has been suspended for so long in some circles that it has been more or less annihilated. On the other hand, people make certain presumptions when one is ninety-six, senility usually being the first. This is not always unfair, of course. One has only to cast an eye across to my unfortunate room-mate Baker, of the plastic straw. But you should rest assured, all I have in common with poor old Baker is this room. You will have noticed, I hope, that I keep up with things. I know about new books, for instance, though I no longer read them, just the reviews. Most often the review is a struggle enough. I’m sure the actual book would finish me off through either shock or boredom. I take the Weekend Australian, which arrives up here on a Monday and lasts me until Thursday, and the Bulletin, which arrives here Thursday and takes me through to Monday. I listen to the radio, ABC of course. I am familiar with terms such as information super highway, which produces images of dim people getting nowhere very quickly, and grunge, which I understand refers to a fashionable sloppiness in dress and manner, a quality which I believe abounds in my place of residence, and positively oozes from Nurse Rae Plewright. Two hundred and one pounds of grunge, that’s my little honey bun ...

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I would describe myself as mentally agile. The last locum (Dr S Goodall, I am reminded by my tr u s t y notebook) confirmed as much. He declared me, after formal examination, to be Not Cognitively Impaired. Rae Plewright had summoned him following a ‘complaint’ about my ‘behaviour’ which had somehow ‘alarmed’ the trainee nurse from The John Curtin University. A misunderstanding really. She was a sweet thing, but jumpy. Anyway, he (Dr S Goodall) complimented me on my c o r rect rendering of a two-dimensional house and a smiley face. He was not terribly artistic himself, and I told him so. On reflection, it was probably not the best time to seek his opinion on the Carols by Candlelight idea, for after this he seemed more suspicious of me, and put me on a half aspirin daily ‘just to be sure’. This apparently prevents stroke, a good thing in itself, but also prevents the brain being showered with a constant stream of microscopic clots, a cause of dementia. My room-mate Baker again comes to mind. The point is this, gentle reader. My faculties are intact. My memory is impeccable. Everything I tell you is as it happened. It is the truth. It’s an old-fashioned concept nowadays, tr u t h . Obsolete perhaps. I believe the latest neologism is ‘faction’. Half fact, half fiction. A slippery concept purveyed by slippery individuals, and an etymologically ignorant word for it. A quite redundant invention too; any Irishman could have supplied a dozen words for ‘the half-truth’, commencing with blarney at the couth end of the spectrum. And since when has truth been other than an absolute? Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, or a

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minimum of three-quarters of the truth, so help you God? Well, if it comes to that, I won’t be swearing to anything. This is the deal. I write it, you read it. Do with it what you will. I’m an old man, and old men don’t care what you think of them. I’ll be a giant candle by the time any arguments get going. Think of this, though. Why would an old man write, if not to set the record straight? I have no interest in big-noting myself. I am not in a position to benefit from the publicity, or notoriety. I am a waxy old man with no reason to lie to you, even though I expect you would be easy to lie to. So, should I pause while you check my credentials? Do you need to access the information superhighway? Or shall we simply proceed on trust? You can take all this with as large a grain of salt as you like. Reject it out of hand, call it a crock, or swallow it hook, line and sinker. It matters not to me. And that’s the truth.

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My story takes off in an aeroplane from the fields of The Esplanade in Perth, Western Australia, just after lunch in the beautiful spring of 1920. It was a Bristol Tourer I think ... or perhaps it was still the old Avro 504 at that time. Yes, the mists of time are clearing and I’m certain now, it was the Avro. And the pilot was Charles Kingsford Smith. What was that? Did I hear a soft, half-suppr e s s e d chortle when I mentioned Smithy? An impatient sniff? I know an incredulous readership when I hear it sniff. It is a sound known to any old person bold enough to tell his story. It is a sniff that says, not at the time in front of the old bloke, but in the car on the way home, He’s not lying of course, but, you know, he is ninety-six ... Don’t bother denying it, I can hear you. Look, it’s difficult to explain this to young people, but,

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let me tell you something about history, about people in history. They were real. You could touch them, eat with them, bed them, punch them if they annoyed you. You could certainly fly in their aeroplanes. I have met a few people that you may well call ‘famous’, though they may not have been famous at the time. I once helped John Curtin climb over a fence, and then he gave me a lift in his car. Not a big deal. He was real too, you see. It’s you lot in the bloody dream world, not me. They weren’t really made of celluloid, you fools. The famous were more accessible back then. Kingsford Smith wasn’t that hard to find. You went down to The Esplanade on a Sunday. There was a makeshift strip on the oval there. Half of Perth had flown joy-rides with him, or preferably with the then more famous Major Brearley. Smithy was only a year or two older than I, about twentythree. He’d come back from the war via America, where he did stunts for Hollywood movies, so he told me. He was quiet when you got him alone, when he wasn’t on show. He was only locally famous, and even locally he was in Major Brearley’s shadow. This was before all the a c ross-Australia, around-the word, lost-in-the-Bay-ofBengal stuff. He was just normal. He didn’t go black and melt if the lamp got too hot. Everyone at this time loved planes and aviators. That man could fly at all was a recent enough concept that just the f a c t of flight still seemed magical, and pilots seemed the keepers of the secret of the magic. Wizards. Gods. Flight records were front-page news. Aeroplanes had been used in war for the first time. To a twenty-one year old William Webber junior, freshly arrived fro m England, it made good sense to associate with the Royal

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Flying Corps pilots who had just arrived back, heroic, from Europe. I was a good-looking boy. I know everyone says that, but I really was. I could show you photos. I would allow my dark hair, rather too long and unkempt, to fall over my eyes in a way which I knew made the girls want to mother me, to make something of me. With my gentle Kentish manners, I was an immediate hit on the Perth social scene. Charles Kingsford Smith and myself, we were the ‘catches’. I had the looks, Smithy had the wings. We helped one another. Synergism I think it’s called. People, girls mostly, would often presume that I was one of the pilots, and I confess that I was often slow to disabuse them of that impression. Smithy didn’t seem to mind that. He benefited from my good looks, I suppose, so we both gained. He said I distracted attention from his gammy foot. But Major Brearley was more of a humourless bastard, and he did mind. He got very heated once, Br e a r l e y, and called me something very intemperate. A sponging little nancy, I think it was. The major had an irritable streak that I would come to know too well on our flight north. But I would let those sort of comments go through to the keeper. Rule number one, don’t upset the pilot. Not in the air anyway. If it was fine, and it almost always was during that spring of 1920, half the city would come down to the grassy strip between the town and the river to watch the aeroplanes. We would take off past a happy blur of hats, teeth and waving hands, and would be lifted off the ground by a chorus of cheers and smart-alec comments. See if the Governor has done his hedges yet! Can you loop-the-loop Mister Smith?

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Have a look if they’re catching anything in Crawley Bay, will you? Those on the ground vicariously shared the exhilaration of those in the air. We would bank sharply upwards to please those on the ground, then glide down over the beautiful Swan River, then clear Mount Eliza to wave to picnickers in Kings Park, then over the town, and circle the homes of the rich and influential in Adelaide Terrace before buzzing over the heads of those on The Esplanade, causing them to duck as one. There was a rejuvenated chorus to greet us. What d’ya see, Mister Smith? Lovely landing, Sir. You didn’t loop-the-loop, Mister Smith! So, any fish at Crawley? I fancy wetting a line. But mostly, Can I go, Mister Smith? Can I go next? Smithy and I would climb out in subdued fashion, with sober warnings about the dangers of touching things or standing too close. We made an impressive team. Goodlooking boys doing exciting, clever, dangerous things. My association with the aviators in Perth, and my persistence with Major Brearley despite his brusqueness, was to reap one significant dividend when Br e a r l e y eventually agreed to fly me to Broome. Smithy had told me that Brearley was planning a flight to the Kimberley to test the viability of his proposed Western Australian Airlines, which he hoped would commence a regular mail run from Geraldton to Derby. I asked Brearley if I could join him as a paying passenger. He was a bit reluctant to agree. Something about ‘stress’. I presumed he meant stress on the engine, with the extra passenger. But eventually he named a price

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which he probably expected me to balk at, and when I agreed he had little choice but to take me. He must have been consoled somewhat by the knowledge that this flight could now not merely assess the viability of his proposed airline, but go a good way to financing it too, courtesy of my pocket. Courtesy, in turn, of my mother’s. I was thus the first paying passenger on a long flight in the State of Western Australia, and probably the first in Australia to pay for a flight longer than a thousand miles. I made the papers. The privilege did not come cheaply. B rearley kept adding on ‘auxiliary charges’ as we p roceeded, then suddenly of f e red the whole lot reimbursed if I disembarked in Carnarvon! If you had seen Carnarvon in 1920, you would understand why I declined the offer. Brearley was a good enough sort of a pilot, but a businessman he was not, nor a diplomat. Our mechanic ended up making the papers too, about a year later. He was killed when the maiden We s t e r n Australian Airlines flight crashed, just north of Geraldton. An inauspicious start for Brearley’s venture. I’m glad I wasn’t there to be blamed for it. Tragedy was commonplace back then. It seemed most people I met in the North-West were struck by tragedy. For some, fate struck soon after I met them. I used once to joke about the ‘Webber magic’, but then I heard it repeated in seriousness or even with malice, so I stopped saying it. But it did seem true, as you will see. I suppose the mechanic was the first of many who would have p re f e r red I had not taken that historic flight north. Christ, Smithy too, I guess. Lost in the Bay of Bengal, 1935. It had never occurred to me until now. Delayed reaction or something.

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Still, I had no choice but to go. I was young and felt I had been charged with a mission ... Here we go. I have fossicked in my old battery box and here they are, exhibits A and B. Documentary evidence for the sceptics. The first is a letter I wrote to Mother after my arrival in Broome, describing the flight. I will transcribe it for you. You must forgive the naive enthusiasm of its tone, for I was a fresh-faced, pink-cheeked boy from Canterbury, full of the first thrill of serious purpose. I cannot say how it was that I never came to post it. Poor Mother, she would have been naturally worried about my wellbeing, and perhaps the anxiety led to her decline. I was not a great correspondent, and delays in delivery were long in any case, so she could not have received much word from me prior to her stroke. Afterwards there did not seem to be much point. She would have been heartened by this letter, I’m sure, had I sent it. The second is a photograph of myself with Charles K i n g s f o rd Smith. And here’s a chuckle. In Smithy’s spidery hand, I think, inscribed on the reverse, the words With Val Abbott. Now Val was a very good-looking boy too, great square jaw. Smithy has confused me for him. You see, there. Proof that even the famous Smithy could make a mistake.

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Mr William Webber jnr, c/- ‘Kimberley Gardens’ Streeter Place Broome, Western Australia 20th September 1920 Mrs William Webber The Oasthouse Mystole via Canterbury. Dearest Mother, Thank you for your last letter, which arrived in Perth before I, full as it was of questions that would take all of this letter and

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much of the next to answer in full. I shall have to give you the brief replies instead. They are, in order, ‘Yes. Yes. Unsure. Yes. Unlikely.’ I hope that puts your anxious mother’s mind at rest! As you can see from the address I am now in Broome, where Father died. It is very strange to be in a place which has existed as a concept in all of our minds for such a long time. Rather like visiting Neverland. In one respect it is anticlimactic, since reality cannot match the imagination, although the place is far from ordinary. But I am ahead of myself. The passage from Ceylon onwards was much less eventful than the first part of our voyage, which you know about from my first letter. I’m pleased to report no more mysterious corpses in the harbour, and no more fisticuffs between the cre w members! There was some commotion on the docks when we arrived at Fremantle (the port for Perth), which was blamed on ‘Bolsheviks’. That in itself was a rude awakening for me, as I had somehow expected Australia to be safely quarantined from those sorts of European illnesses. I liked Perth more the longer I stayed. It is very ‘new’, and needs to be lived in for another few hundred years to acquire some sense of itself. The town itself consists of rather mundane public buildings, but with some very nice homes along the terrace stretching down to the Swan River, which is beautiful. It is not so much the architecture which gives the town its charm, but its parks and gardens. I was warmly accepted into ‘respectable society’, and received many invitations to garden parties, tennis, picnics etc. It is very congenial there and I must say I was treated in princely fashion — I felt a bit like the big fish in the small pond. And I have to admit, I enjoyed it immensely! Manners here are rather relaxed, at least among the younger brigade. The older women, in particular, adopt a rather affected manner, and constantly seek one’s r e a s s u r a n c e

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regarding the politeness of their society! With your dislike of affectation, you would most likely detest them, Mother. While in Perth I attempted to locate documents relating to the Bamford Royal Commission which, as you know, touched on the circumstances of Father’s death. The local Civil Service seemed to view me suspiciously, appeared most unwilling to assist me, and informed me that ‘the documents you require, Sir, are stored in Melbourne’. It is reassuring to see the fine principles of our Civil Service have been transplanted unchanged to the antipodes! I was flown from Perth to Broome! This was over 1200 miles! An enormous stroke of fortune, really, that my travel plans coincided with those of one (Royal Flying Corps) Major B rearley (very famous locally), who took me as a paying p a s s e n g e r. I shall return to the ‘paying’ bit later, as the adventure did not come cheaply. Yes, Mother, tsk tsk, silly young boy; I can hear you already. This country is unfath omably vast. I couldn’t even begin to convey to you, sitting there in the greenery of Canterbury, how empty this land is. We flew for days over flats of scrubby nothing, hopping from one windswept hamlet half buried in sand, to the next. The further north we headed, the bleaker things seemed. I suppose the dismal scenery made me a little despondent, and I must admit I began to wonder about the wisdom of this journey. After a time I was probably not the ideal flying companion. I think Major Brearley became a little annoyed with me, and when we landed at Carnarvon, some 600 miles north of Perth, he offered to refund my fare if I disembarked. I declined. After that small crisis I stubbornly resolved to enjoy the flight, and, somewhat to my surprise, I did. Whether I started to discern the landscape through different eyes, or whether it actually changed for the better, I am not sure. There are no

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Constable landscapes to be viewed here, but there are enormous waterless lakes, claypans and snaking dry rivers lined by paperbark trees. Further north, and inland from the coast, we began to encounter some ranges of hills, strangely red and primitive-looking, fissured by deep gorges. We landed at Port Hedland, on the horseracing track. Theatrically, Major Brearley circled the town (a few miserable dwellings with corrugated tin roofs, on a spit of land on the sea), and brought the plane to a stop right on the finishing line, to the huge amusement and enjoyment of the small cro w d which had assembled. You could only understand the emotion brought on by the arrival of the plane if you could see the remoteness and squalor of such a town. The mail plane is a rare link to the outside world. A tough, leathery-looking ‘old bushie’ was almost in tears when I gave him his mail. Most others were grinning br o a d l y, clapping, slapping backs, giggling inanities (lots of poor jokes about ‘noses’, planes vs horses etc.); such was the excitement of the arrival of the ‘silver bird’. Everyone touched the wings of the plane, as if unbelieving that the technology which makes flight possible could exist in this ancient land. Major Brearley has plans for a regular service, and the prospect is greeted with tremendous enthusiasm — the locals must view the aeroplane as an archangel swooping from the heavens, such is their isolation. (You may well ask, why do those people live there, and I would have to answer ... I have no idea!) We overnighted in Port Hedland and received warm hospitality. Unhappily, one ‘old wag’ took the cue from my place of birth to launch into a recitation of Chaucer. I swear he knew all the Canterbury Tales, rote, and, alas, was able to improvise some bawdy ones of his own when he had exhausted his repertoire of Mr Chaucer’s. The next morning the mechanic

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Stan Harper was in a queer humour; a mixture of buoyant (for reasons a son cannot divulge, even to a ‘modern’ mother) and unwell (whisky hangover). The Major appeared disapproving, more so when Harper sang ‘Louise’, which he persisted in doing more or less continuously, for the rest of the day. A raw nerve was being tickled, I suspect. The country changed as we approached Broome along the coast, and somehow became full of portent (or perhaps this too was just my state of mind). The colours were now so vibrant they seemed impossible, as if from a child’s paintbox — the sea a miraculous milky green, rimmed by the rich greens and lemons of the foliage of the mangrove trees, and the earth bright red. As we came in low over the town, it seemed as if we had travelled to another country. Strange branchless bottle-shaped boab trees, and equally high red-orange ant mounds dotted the inland scrub. A dozen or so pearling luggers dotted the waters near and in the harbour; a couple were beached, resting at an angle; a grand-looking schooner; a steamship berthed at the mile-long jetty. The rooftops were mostly of shiny corrugated tin, some turned strangely upwards like Siamese pagodas. I know you think of me as undauntable, Mother, but the effect of finally arriving in this faraway place, which is so inextricably entwined with the memory of Father, together with the strangeness of the colours and landscape, and the unexpected heat and humidity on the ground — these things rather overwhelmed me, and so the first thing I did in Broome was to collapse! The Broome airstrip is really just a length of hardened marshland on the fringe of the town, and the pilot simply drives up to the back door of the general store, McClure and Mongers, to refuel. There, I managed to alight from the plane, although I felt somewhat light-headed. We were met, as arranged, by the

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robust Mr Howard Keeler, the pearl master who was good to Father while he was here. Mr Keeler is not as I had imagined from his letter to you. In life he is a stout gent who cuts a rather intimidating figure in his enormous white pearl master’s suit. He appeared at first not to have noticed me, and for some minutes I was left unintroduced while he spoke and laughed with Brearley. He then addressed me with an abrupt, ‘You must be Webber. You look like your father,’ to which I replied, ‘Thank you, Sir,’ to which he added, ‘Don’t thank me, son, he was an ugly b—, your father.’ Everyone laughed and (I’m ashamed to admit) I fainted on the spot. I suppose circumstances and the elements conspired against me. Anyway, things have improved since that rather inelegant entrance. For now, I am resting up at Mr Keeler’s comfortable house, which is set in lovely tropical gardens. His wife, Marta, is Dutch and very kind, and she has taken my recuperation on as ‘her project’. The Keelers lost two sons in the war. She is happy to have a young man in the house, I think, to nurse and dote on. I am inclined to take my time in recovering from that attack of the vapours! Of Broome, I shall write you later. I could not begin to write coherently of it yet, such a strange mix of things is here. I think that if I were to send you a photograph of it, and you were to ask your friends to guess where it was taken, you would get some amusing answers. Some would say Tokyo, some S i n g a p o re, or Burma, or Borneo, or the Pacific Islands, or perhaps even Kenya! None would guess Australia. In fact, in a way it is all of these in one, a hotchpotch of nationalities; Singhalese pearl cleaners, Afghan camel drivers, Chinese dhobi boys, sailmakers from Borneo etc. Mr Keeler claims there is a re p resentative from every nation on earth. (Yes, even an Eskimo, by the name of Klondike Tommy, or so he claims! One

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cannot always take Mr Keeler at face value.) I have not forgotten my purpose in coming, and I have the names of those few men whom Father mentioned in his corre spondence. I suppose most will since have left the town. One, the writer Viney, is now described as a hermit who claims to be the bastard son of Edgar Rice Burroughs! I shall need my strength! I suspect I will have to depend heavily on Mr Keeler’s assistance if I am to discover any information of value. Take care, Mother. I hope you have not been upset by my references to Father, or by my retelling of Mr Keeler’s cruel joke. (You must understand, manners are very different here.) I know that you prefer me to be frank, and to tell you exactly what I am thinking. And right now, being in Broome, I think of little else but Father. I expect it will be the same with you, once you have read this. They have closed the telegraph station in Broome, but if there is anything urgent you can still wire. Somehow the message gets here, apparently. Perhaps you could wire me one of your iced lemonades. It is really unbearably humid in this place! I have enclosed copies of the few documents I was allowed to v i e w. You will find, as I did, that they make unsatisfying reading and none pertain directly to Father’s death. But clearly there were some torrid battles going on at the time Father was here. Please store any documents I send on to you somewhere safe, Mother. I shall need them on my return, and they were very difficult to obtain. And I mean safe, Mother, you know how you lose things! Your loving son, William

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They will be the death of me, these memoirs. I hope you appreciate the effort. I’ve already had the doctor up this morning, if you could call him a doctor. More a pirate from the look of him. As it turned out it was just the drowning dream, but by the time I realised this the doc had already been called and we had to go through the motions. None of this would have happened if lovely Mary Belotti had been on duty. She would have settled things and not bothered the doctor. I had awoken suddenly and in a panic, with a choking pain in the upper chest and neck. I was certain I had drawn my last breath. Had I had five minutes to clear my head I would have recalled the dream, but instead I called out in alarm, not realising my cry would be answered by the jumpy young nurse from The John Curtin University. She exacerbated things with

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her line of questioning. Is it dull or sharp? ... Like a weight? ... My goodness, you are sweaty ... I’d better get the doctor up ... and suddenly it seemed I was having a heart attack. The new locum is Doctor Peter Pullman. He has been badly afflicted by grunge. Oversized T-shirt like a hippy, Indian-looking sandals, and in his ear, not just a little stud as you see these days in half the ears of the Australian Eleven, but a great gold ring perhaps an inch and a half across like a bloody pirate! Pirate Pete Pullman. Still, he was a nice chap, and very thorough. He or d e red a c a rdiograph, blood tests and a chest X-ray. All very reassuring, he proclaimed; it was just angina. I should live to a good age, he smiled to the nurses. A rather imprecise prognosis I would have thought, given my vintage. This is how I recorded the event in my trusty notebook. 28/1/95 Locum Pullman (pirate earring) ‘Angina‘ (drowning dream) You may have noticed, if you are one who reads rather than merely scans, my use of quotation marks around the good pirate’s diagnosis. Yes, I’m dubious. Had I not been worked into a panic by the young nurse, I would have recognised these symptoms for what they were. After all, I’ve been getting them off and on for eighty-three years. Not angina, just the drowning dream. I first had the dream when I was thirteen years old, soon after Father died. Yes, yes, you don’t have to be Carl Jung to work that one out. Thirteen years old and I started to piss the bed whenever I had the dream. It did not happen in Mother’s bed, but a boy cannot sleep there forever. For a while it seemed to have gone, but then it came one night, to my shame, when I was twenty-one

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and sharing digs at university. It was that humiliating episode which convinced me that I had to come to B roome, to the source of the dream, to meet it and confront it and to evict it from my life. You can see from this morning’s effort how successful I was in that. In a way I suppose the drowning dream has shaped my life. If not for the dream, I would have stayed at home. It seems to have troubled me more lately, especially since I’ve had my nose in this battery box, stirring memories of Father and those early years. Last week it even appeared in the waking hours, a most unpleasant occurrence which left me clutching weakly at my throat thinking I had breathed my last until it passed. Strange, you may think, that a ninety-six year old man should still miss his father. Strange, and pathetic. I quite agree. But there you have it. I blame the maps for this latest one. I was up late last night redrawing them from memory, for your benefit. Father’s maps. On the night before he left Canterbury for what would be forever, Father gave me two parcels. One was oblong, one cylindrical, and both were wrapped in brown paper. The first was a book, old and enticingly well-thumbed. It was called A u s t r a l i n d, and the writer, an Englishman named Taunton, had spent time in the north-west of Australia in those earlier days of pearling when diving suits had only just begun to replace skindiving. The cylinder contained two beautifully drawn and handcoloured maps, one entitled Dampierland and the other The East Indies and Spice Islands. I came to know that book and those maps almost by heart, having studied them by candlelight in bed when I

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was supposed to be asleep. In my dreams, Ta u n t o n ’ s adventures would become my father’s adventures, in a watery world defined by the limits of the two maps. My father would fight off sharks and Frenchmen in the Indian Ocean. He would dive at depths never seen by man, find clusters of pearls worth a king’s ransom, have them stolen, and fight to recover them. Back then my father was the hero of every dream. L a t e r, when the news came (at school, from the headmaster, dispassionately) that he had died at sea, my watery eyes would search the featureless blue of the map, looking for a reason. Eighty Mile Beach; there it was, but t h e re seemed to be no hazards there. It did not seem possible. Before, in my dreams, he had been invincible, but now the dream changed. Sleep became something to be feared. For the next two years whenever I woke, I woke in fright. That those maps remain imprinted on my mind will be to your good fortune if Nurse Rae Plewright remains true to her word. She has promised to redraw them according to my instructions and in a steadier hand than mine. Rae Plewright has quite a neat hand, I will give her that, but she dented my optimism this morning by making the deft observation that many of the capes of Dampierland had ‘strange names’. ‘Perhaps they’re French,’ she suggested, as she squinted to make out my shaky lettering. Perhaps they’re French! Cape Leveque, Cape Bertholet, Cape Boileau, Cape Latreille, Gantheaume Point, Cape Villaret, Cape Latouche Treville, Bossut, Frezier, Jaubert, Missiessy ... I despair. Of course they are French, dear, legacies of mariners of the calibre of Baudin, Hamelin and de Freycinet, who were despatched to chart the enormous

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coastline of the western half of the continent in anticipation of French settlement. But for fluctuations in fortunes in the Napoleonic wars, Australia would have been another Canada, divided between the English and the French. The English, for their part, had been disinterested in the North-West ever since Dampier wrote so damningly of the place, ‘If it were not for the sort of pleasure that comes from the discovery even of the barrenest spot on the globe, this coast would not have cheered me much.’ The memories of Dampier and the Frenchmen are there for all to see, in the maps. I can look at maps for hours. You may learn a lot from maps, if you have patience and an active mind. Look closely at the map of Dampierland. As a thirteen-year-old boy perusing it by candlelight, it was the whiteness which struck me most. The whole of the interior was white. It was unknown and therefore, to me, intriguing. Only the coastal features had been given names, for this was a land known to the white man only from the sea. The interior was a blank, just a few nameless hills, and a creek that a p p e a red to come from nowhere and end nowhere. I remember wishing that I could see a black man’s map, imagining it would complete the picture, having names for all the features that the white man didn’t know or didn’t bother to name. Observe the town of Broome, how it seems to cling reluctantly to this continent, looking longingly across the seas to the islands. It was the men of these islands who gave Broome its soul. In a way, the map of the islands is another map of Broome. If you run your finger northwards from Broome to Honshu, each island which passes beneath your finger

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has a connection to Broome. Look, here, the island of Timor and the old Dutch administrative centre of Koepang. Nearby the little island of Roti, where mariners might take on supplies before heading south across the Timor Sea. Here Tanimbar Island, here Aru, here Ambon in the Banda Sea, and then the Moluccas, or Spice Islands, stretching away to the north. The Celebes and Halmahera seem like two brothers running in the clouds, one bigger, one smaller. And there, on the right foot of the bigger, the ancient port of Macassar, as romantic a name as Samarkand or Timbuktu. From here and the nearby islands of the Sunda Straits came the Macassarmen and Bugis seamen, who for generations had sailed their praus southwards to visit these southern shores to collect trepang, turtle and trochus shell. And stretching further north, the Malay archipelago and the islands of the Philippines. This one here, Jolo in the Sulu Sea, was the home of many good divers, and the cemetery there is home for many more. The Japanese divers in Broome all came from a few villages on the heel of Honshu. On the lugger, after the diving had finished for the day, Sunny used to tell me about the men from those villages. Taiji men were good, brave men, and the best divers. Those from Katsuura and Goza were cowards. Those from Miosaki, jokes. S u n n y, needless to say, was from Taiji. He had a girl awaiting his return, and he carried her photograph next to his heart when he dived. She must have cursed this far-off place called Broome when the news came. Just as I did. Japan’s elevated place on the map seems to reflect the social position of the Japanese at that time in

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B roome. Like England and the English, they were splendidly isolated, aloof. Japan would no sooner wish to drift south to join that dark throng than would England wish to join the continent. That map of the islands helps explain Broome as it was then; more Asian fishing port than English village, a hotchpotch of Koepangers, Macassarmen, Ta n i m b a r Islanders, Ambonese, Manilamen, Malays, Chinese, Japanese, as well as English, Scots and Irish, and even the odd white man who called himself Australian. I think of them all as a blur of industry against the stillness of the original inhabitants, who could only watch and wonder at these strangers who had come, each and every one, for the same reason. So, there, you can see, with an intelligent and enquiring mind, you can learn a lot from maps. I commend the practice to you, when Nurse Rae Plewright has completed her task. Without doubt, my nocturnal studies in cartography as a boy in Canterbury paid off. My knowledge thus gained placed me at a great advantage when I first came to this land, for it was a place I felt I already knew well. Had I not been so well informed, my journey to Dampierland would never have been the success it was.

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I shall make a point of being pleasant to Nurse Rae Plewright today. I shall congratulate her on her amateur cartography and pretend not to notice the missing peninsulas and spelling errors. I shall surprise her by not being so deaf. I shall thank her for her cold-Milo-indisabled-persons-cup. I suppose I am feeling a bit guilty as she spent her night off drawing the maps and I have had to send them back to her for corrections. Perhaps I was too abrupt. I wasn’t always that way. Read that lovely letter from a boy to his mother. I was a thoughtful sensitive boy. Of course it is impossible not to become less likeable as you get older. It is because of all the bastards that you meet as you go through life; their nastiness rubs off on you. Howard Keeler was one of those. He toughened me up

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by making me hate him. I was twenty-one, an age when, with the ignorance and arrogance of youth, one expects the impossible of one’s elders and despises them when they fall short. When I look back now I see a tough, proud man clinging to the vestiges of a life he had built, and I admire him for that. But still I can feel the gutburning hatred that I felt towards him then, and the jealousy that fuelled it. It was Mother who had determined that I should stay with Mr Keeler in Broome, and she had written to him and received his reluctant approval. Mother’s choice was based on a solitary line in one of the few letters Father had written from Broome, in which he said, ‘It seems the only pearler willing to help me is one Howard Keeler, and I may well take up his offer if things do not improve with Moss and Richardson.’ Apart from that, and his brief reply to Mother’s letter, I knew nothing about Howard Keeler before coming to Broome. Keeler was a big, big man. Marta was a small woman, and seemed to shrink even more in his presence. He had a thousand ways to needle her. He would, for instance, ask her to supply a detail or word from her ‘childhood in the Transvaal’, when, in fact, she grew up in Batavia. She would supply the answer, his answer, seeming to know from experience that this was the simplest way. Tell young Webber, what did you call them in South Africa, dear, the invaders? Marta would supply the word. Uitlanders. Ah, yes, Uitlanders. It means parasites, literally. Isn’t that right, dear? Ye s. Whatever meant less trouble was the right answer.

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I would ask her about him when he was away during the day, but she made excuses for him. It wasn’t him at all. It was because of the sons. Finances. Pearling. Drinking. The heat. There had been a time, once, when he had not been like this, and given her time and love, he would one day be like that again. I loved Marta, of course, in that confused way that young men love older women. Although she was close to my mother’s age, Marta was pretty and somehow girlish. As clear as day now, I can see the two of us on the verandah of Keeler’s house. Picture this. There is a pale convalescent English boy sitting in a cane chair on the wide timber verandah while a pretty Dutch woman in a floral dress fusses over him. The boy seems to glow like a young Christ. He glows because he is so good. Because he is a young man at the commencement of a noble mission in a remote land. He glows because he is in love with his nurse, who is old enough to be his mother, which is part of the reason he loves her. The iceman has just arrived, delivering iced lemonade in a marble-stoppered bottle, signalling morning tea on the verandah. She produces a sweet and crunchy Dutch something, still warm from the primus stove. Her husband will not return until evening. The house itself is typical of those nor ’ w e s t e r bungalows built for the pearl masters, magistrates, telegraph station employees and the like, in those better days before the war. It has been built to allow the cooling breezes to blow through the house; of weatherboard, with a high-pitched tin roof, overhanging eaves and huge shutters over the unglazed windows, to shut in case of cyclone. The exterior timbers, at some happier

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time, have been painted a frivolous lemon which now seem inappropriately gay. This is the age of healing by fresh air and sunlight, so it is natural that the verandah is the place to convalesce. This is enormously wide, wraps around three sides of the house and is enclosed by dilapidated lattice work dripping with bougainvillea in shades of burg u n d y, crimson and scarlet. In one corner it has billowed in through the lattice creating a treacherous red cloud of tangled thorns. Before the war, the boys used to play cricket down that western wing of the verandah, she tells him. The keeper would have stood in that spot there, now taken over by the garden. The grounds of the house tell a story of decay. The lawns have yellowed and gone to seed unmowed. Tall native grasses with vicious prickles have begun to take over. The hydrangeas are a clump of deadheads, wilted in the sun. The bougainvilleas are everywhere overgrown, wildly beautiful, threatening to envelope everything. There are honey-scented frangipanis, and shade from the mature poincianas, dripping with clusters of bladeshaped seed pods. There are two boab trees at the front. They appear to have been transplanted there, for they are precisely the same height and positioned symmetrically either side of the shell driveway. Knotted scars have formed over the two large letters gouged into each tree. PK and HK. The dead sons. So clearly do I see this scene that I could almost reach out and touch them as they sit there drinking lemonade, the sad Dutch woman and the pale English convalescent; Marta and I. I can feel even now the thrill of watching the

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fat man’s car pull away from the house each morning to leave me alone with her. I can see her sweet sad face and little red-painted mouth, smiling as she pats my knee, perhaps coquettishly, perhaps just as a mother would. I was her son for a week, for hers were gone. Mostly she talked about the good times, before the war. She had a small voice that made the listener smile — I won’t go substituting v’s for w’s for you but you can imagine for yourself her Dutch accent — and a shy smile, as if ashamed to recall this happiness. Parties! You would not believe me, William, really, if I were to tell you what used to go on. There was a time when I drank nothing but Krug and Epernay! We lived very well, you know. Life was good to us. She paused to survey the scene around us, to contrast it with the one she recalled. The inside of the house, while it lacked life, was at least still beautifully maintained. It was the outside of the house that betrayed the rot. We had staff then. We had John and Dora, an Aboriginal couple from Beagle Bay. They were properly married, Christians. John did the gardens, which were always immaculate, the best in Broome, while Dora did the house. They ended up ‘living in’, after a fashion. Howard and the boys helped John build a little house for them up the back. It’s still there, behind the mango trees. Now ... well, with just the two of us and things as they are in the pearling business, we could not justify the help. We rarely entertain now. She had an old bruise below her eye, which she had attempted to disguise with powder, and some bruising on the white of the eye which make-up could not disguise. She caught me looking, anticipated what I wanted to say and got in first so it couldn’t be said. I am not a weak woman, William. Never think that of me. I

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am a strong and determined woman. That is why I persist when a weak person would not. ‘In good times and in bad. For richer, for poorer.’ She touched the bruised cheekbone lightly. We were such a happy family, William, though it must be hard for you to imagine that now. Howard has taken it all terribly badly, but you should have seen him when the boys were here, when business was good. He was a different man — loving, happy, playful. It must be hard for you to imagine now, but it is true. It is our circumstances that have changed really, not us. Sometimes even now, I see a glimpse of the man I married and loved so much. And I will get my husband back, you see, like he was. The anger has to come out first. Since the war, every wife in the country faces this, you know. Only the widows are excepted. She smiled, tousled my hair, collected the empty lemonade bottles. The smile had a message. I was the little boy again, a house guest and that was all, not her husband’s rival, not her protector. ‘Till death do us part.’ I envy very much the woman you will one day say those words to, William. You are an honest boy, a sincere boy, and when you say these words you will mean them with all your heart. I did, on the day I said them to Howard. And I still do. It was all different when Keeler came home. The crunch of the Model T’s tyres on the white shell driveway, and the sputter of its engine as it gasped to a stop — these sounds signalled the end of our secret day together. Then Marta’s sweet smile faded, and she herself seemed to fade into the background, not even risking a secret smile between us. She became quietly industrious, as if she w e re the hired help, busying herself with various

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mysterious domestic apparatus. She lit the carbide lamps for the evening, pressed the clothes with the petr o l pressure iron, tinkered away in the kitchen. There was no refrigeration, no electricity. Everything was laborious and smelly and time-consuming, but perhaps she was thankful for these chores which allowed her to melt away. K e e l e r ’s bearing was that of a chronic unmitigated bully. I tried to imagine him in better times, as the gentle family man Marta described, but could not. Each time I d a red to ask him about Father, he brushed me of f . Eventually, like Marta, I learned to keep the peace and stopped asking. Ah, now, a forage in the battery box has made a liar of me. It seems Keeler wasn’t totally unforthcoming. I hold in my hand a newspaper clipping which he gave to me. Ah, yes, I remember it now. He thought it may interest me, he said, since it touched on the circumstances of Father’s death. I recall the boyish look on his round face as he removed it from a folder and handed it to me, asking me to hazard a guess as to the identity of the writer. The proud glow of his jowls gave the answer. Yes, ‘Crichton’, he happily confessed, was his nom de plume. I was effusive in my thanks for this offering, for it seemed he was at last prepared to help me. It was in my n a t u re then to presume the best of people. I did not suspect an ulterior motive. I read it then, as you might now, as the indignant outcry of a man who yearns for nothing more or less than the truth.

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(Broome Gazette and Pearling News, 8 Feb 1917.) ‘SORRY SIR, NO SPEAK ENGRISH, WHAT THIS DUMMY?’ ‘The Dummy Commissioner’ reports at last. Finally, by miracle of modern sea freight, and after delays so numerous as to have led most to have abandoned all interest, we have received a copy of the findings of the Bamford Royal Commission. Anybody sufficiently dim to have held his breath for this, would have expired some years ago. We live in an age of rapid intercontinental communications, but Royal Commissions (‘Royal’ anythings for that matter) still operate at the same leisurely pace that worked perfectly well in Victoria’s time.

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For those who have forgotten, the Dummy Commission, complete with Dummy Commissioner, was set up in 1912, not long after the catastrophe involving the Royal Navy divers. Now there had been one or two small changes since that time, of course, which may render the Commission’s findings a little ‘old hat’. Let’s see ... there is the small matter of The War in Europe ... the trifling problem of a small drop-off in the price of MOP from £440/ton to nil ... oh, and the fact that the town of Broome is deserted of able-bodied white men and half the fleet is out of commission ... but leaving those trivial factors aside, the Dummy Commissioner’s findings would have been of great interest and relevance, had all those appearing before it not lost their memories, or command of the English language, or both. Still, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Let me take you back in time. In 1908 the MacKay Royal Commission into the Queensland pearling industry had one special area of investigation; ‘the possibility of encouraging white divers with a view to their gradual substitution for aliens’. There was clear evidence at this time of ‘dummying licences’; white verandah pearlers accepting £10 per week to put their names to a licence in fact operated by an alien. Following this, it seemed the national government was inspired to return the industry to Australian hands, and this was in keeping with national policy of promoting white labour ahead of coloured. Hence the importance of the Royal Navy divers, the best white divers in the world. ‘Twelve good men and true’, chosen by Seibe Gorman to dive for shell off Broome in 1912, armed with the latest in equipment, and the Admiralty Tables to ensure that no diver could possible exceed the safety limits. There is nobody without a theory about the events that saw

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the demise of top diver Webber, or the paralysis of Nowry. But what is universally agreed is that there were plenty in town who would have been happy to see the experiment fail. To appreciate how few in Broome would have wished them success, one has only to consider the threat posed to the Japanese divers who had enjoyed a virtual monopoly for two decades, as well as to the fleet owners who, however keen they may be on the principle of a White Australia, would face a prohibitive twentyfold increase in wages for a white diver. If anyone knew of any foul play, however, they weren’t about to risk being dumped at sea by confessing their knowledge to the Dummy Commissioner. An epidemic of fuzzy memories and poor English put paid to any chance of clearing up that matter. Among so many halting voices who contributed so little due to amnesia, the voice of the paralysed John Nowry rings clear. ‘From the start, it was clear we had walked into a hostile camp when we landed in Broome. The pearlers and other divers resented our intrusion into their lucrative living. We were taken away from the other boats to work beds where there was no shell at all. The Japanese divers on the same boats collected no shell there either. Nobody seemed to want us to be successful.’ Nowry’s is the voice in the wilderness, however, for there was no one to corroborate his claims. On the subject of white divers vs Asiatics there is no decision made but, to anyone detached from things, it might appear that the Commissioner has accepted the theory that the Japanese diver possesses some natural advantage over the Euro p e a n when it comes to diving and finding shell. At least this commonly held myth is not explicitly debunked by the Commissioner. So, if we accept this ‘innate superiority’ of the Japanese diver, and add the reality that the white man has, through economic circumstances and the imperative of war,

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been relegated to the position of a mere observer with a small pecuniary interest in the activities of the pearling industry, then we have a recipe for an Australian pearling industry which is there for the taking. And take it the Asiatic has, and he will keep it as long as there is no will by a faraway Federal Government to intervene. One cannot but think that the Commissioner should at least have asked himself these two simple questions: Who is it that has gained most from the death of the diver W e b b e r, the paralysis of Nowry, and the ultimate failure of the experiment? Who is it that now takes the cream of the profits from the taking of Australian pearl and Australian shell from these, our sovereign waters? In failing to ask these questions, and to draw the natural conclusion that follows, this Royal Commissioner has indeed earned the title of ‘Dummy Commissioner’. Like MacKay before him, he has proven himself full of hot air and bluster. This report benefits no one but the Japanese who, in choosing to be unable to recall any information of relevance, and in pressuring others to do likewise, have ultimately benefited grandly from the Commission’s findings, or lack thereof. As they take their booty back home to Nippon, they must wonder at the gullibility and weakness of this nation of fools.

Crichton

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Tonight we shall have the last supper, Marta had announced. It was to be in honour of my imminent departure. She meant no irony. The biblical reference was unintentional, but as it turned out it seemed somehow apt, as the prevailing mood progressed from sombre to hostile. There had already been a resurrection of sorts; mine. A few days earlier I had been gravely ill with fever. It came at intervals. I would seem to respond to Marta’s tender attention, but then I would again r e l a p s e . Typhoid fever was mentioned. Eventually, with a reluctance that I would understand as soon as he stood close enough that I could smell his whisky breath, Marta agreed to call the doctor. By this time I was too exhausted to protest; I had fevers, shivers, and every joint ached. The skeletal old

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soak subjected me to a lengthy and rather unconventional physical examination, and then pronounced me to be s u ffering from ‘a typical case of tropical pyrexia’, a condition of which I have never heard before or since. Fortunately his panacea for this, and I suspect all other fevers, was Doctor McGlashan’s Patented Fever Mixture (With Quinine). The fortunate bit was the (With Quinine) for it was this ingredient, I feel sure, that cured me of my illness, namely malaria contracted in Ceylon. (I am certain of it, and could give you the name of a specialist who agrees with me.) After two weeks’ convalescence I was finally restored to health, and announced to the Keelers my intention to move on. This was greeted with thinly veiled relief, not only by Keeler himself, but, to my surprise, by Marta too. His relief, I knew, was at my leaving. Hers, I decided, was at my having made a full recovery. I was under no illusions as to Keeler’s opinion of me. He resented my presence in his house, and Marta’s affection for me. I was stirring dust which was better left settled. He no doubt considered me to be impertinent, prying, lazy, malingering. And I, in turn, had rapidly decided he was a fat bully in a white suit. Simple. The certainty of youth made such judgements easy. I was not interested in mitigating factors, not then. Oh, I knew from speaking with Marta that he had lost a lot. That he had once enjoyed a grand lifestyle, esteemed status, and a large circle of friends and admirers. That he had lost most of his fleet. That his business was now at risk of going under. That he had lost his sons. But Marta too had suffered all these losses, and when I saw the bruises on her face, that was evidence enough for

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me to sound the gavel and send him down, bang, guilty as charged. Keeler was late for the last supper. He claimed to have forgotten, and Marta reassured him that it did not matter, that it was nice to eat late. She had set the table beautifully with the good linen, silver, candles, goblets, much of which she had not used for years, she said. Keeler surveyed the setting with poorly concealed disgust. Perhaps he felt the occasion to be rather o v e rdone, given the generous hospitality alr e a d y extended me. He made his point by choosing an expensive bottle of wine from a severely depleted cellar and making a great show of opening it for me. ‘Since we are sparing no expense in entertaining our esteemed guest, let’s drink the last of this year’s profit, shall we?’ he said. The smile he shot me was saccharine and laced with poison. Marta did not sit with us for much of the meal; rather she waited on the two of us. Keeler did most of the talking. He had settled for a grandfatherly tone now, his earlier belligerence kept below the surface by the goodness of the wine. He opened a second bottle. His favourite topic was the weakness of Australians in dealing with outsiders, especially the Japanese. I knew of one reason for the depth of his feeling — Marta had let slip that he was heavily in debt to the Japanese money-lenders. ‘Now in Marta’s home country they have a simple and effective way with their Uitlanders. They simply shoot them. Well, we have our Uitlanders too. You have seen the town. We have jumped-up coolies of various shades, celestials of all breeds, even Arabs for God’s sake. But

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really it’s the sons of Nippon who are helping themselves to our wealth. They are our Uitlanders, but while Marta’s people would shoot them, we’re like a tart on her back with her legs akimbo. Eh? And we’re not even charging!’ He was greatly amused by this analogy, which was evidently a new thought on an old theme. He repeated it, this time letting out a hearty laugh, his mouth agape and full of half-chewed green beans. After this I preferred to let him talk, and dutifully watched my plate or watched Marta watching hers. Keeler lectured me as if from the pulpit, except that he gulped mouthfuls of food between proclamations, or, occasionally, during. When I thanked Marta at the end of the meal she a p p e a red uncomfortable with the attention. Keeler immediately deflected it from her in any case. ‘She’d prefer to be cooking good Voortrekker victuals, but I’m afraid my teeth aren’t up to salted antelope!’ He flicked a set of dentures up and down to prove his point, and in the resulting roar of laughter, all his, he gathered me up conspiratorially and escorted me to the open verandah, ‘for ports’. Only ‘the men’ went outside. The help had been wordlessly dismissed, but her sadness stayed like a sour odour. She reappeared briefly with a bottle of cognac and two balloons, which she settled on a small table next to Keeler without a word being exchanged. It was now early October, and the wet season, so Keeler said, was still many weeks away, but already the night air seemed sticky with the promise of summer rain. The g a rden was in darkness, but the shrill noise that emanated gave the impression of an army of strange native insects covering every leaf. Shrieks came fro m

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behind the house. Fruit bats, impatient for the mangoes to fruit, explained Keeler. We were both waiting for my question. ‘I am leaving tomorrow, Mr Keeler, and we have not yet really had a chance to talk about my father.’ ‘Have we not?’ He smiled indulgently. ‘Well, perhaps a little, but I don’t really feel any the wiser.’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘Mr Keeler, I have come a long way, and I feel I must ask, as much for Mother’s sake as my own. You see, we never really got a satisfactory explanation as to what happened to Father. It all seemed so faraway and confused. I was thirteen years old. It was as if he just disappeared into a dream and never came back.’ He nodded and smiled and murmured vague assent about ‘a bad business’ as he stripped off his great white jacket, placed it over the back of the chair, loosened his necktie. ‘Did you come to know Father well while he was in Broome?’ I tried. ‘Not that well, son.’ He half looked away. ‘He didn’t stay long, as you are aware.’ I did not return his smile. A tight knot of anger twisted in the pit of my stomach. He must have sensed it, for he let the grin drop and adopted a more serious and concerned demeanour. He hunched his round sweaty shoulders towards me and affected a thoughtful, mellow, grandfatherly expression. ‘Look, William,’ he said, using my Christian name for the first time, ‘your father was a good man, from what I knew of him. He fought the good fight, tried to strike a blow for the white man in this industry. I tried to assist

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him where I could. His heart was in the right place, and I can see that you are your father’s son. But ... let me give you some numbers: Japanese diver, £2 per month plus £3 lay per ton of shell. English diver, £50 per month plus £40 lay per ton. ‘Get it? It would have been beyond the economics of the fleet, as simple as that. All the small two-boat owners would have gone broke. The English divers were never meant to succeed.’ ‘But Father was an excellent diver,’ I protested, and saw his fingers tighten. ‘He was indeed, or so I’m told. But a reputation made in the shallows off Portsmouth with the Royal Navy and a team of doctors in attendance doesn’t count when you’re diving on the Banks or Musgrave Islands. Perhaps he could dive, but getting in the water is the easy part. Could he find shell? A pearl diver must be able to find shell, which lies covered in sand and weed, and collect it quickly. Your father had no experience in that aspect at all. Up here, your father was a novice, son. A try diver.’ The knot in my stomach pulled tighter. ‘He was not a novice in any waters, Mr Keeler. He was very experienced in all sorts of conditions from the North Sea to the tropics. And, above all, he was so cautious. He always followed the Admiralty Tables, always kept to the safe limits of depth and time. In fact, he helped write them! The calculations were based on his lungs! He had top equipment, a superior pump designed to make deeper dives safe ... ’ Keeler held up his hand to bid me stop. He smiled. ‘Yes, yes, everyone knew about their blessed safety. F rom what I was told, the Royal Navy divers were

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permitted to spend only a few minutes on the bottom. They would insist on dangling midway between the boat and the bottom for most of the dive, and there is no shell to be had there. Perhaps they were experts at diving, but in diving for shell they were not. ‘Look, every diver up here thinks he’s found a way to dive safely. They all think they can beat the odds. But do you have any idea how many divers have died up here in the last ten years? I was once out in The Graveyard near Cygnet Bay, and saw three luggers all flying the flag. And they were all good divers! All safe, all lucky. There are an awful lot of good divers at the bottom of these waters. This is the nature of things around here. This is a place for gamblers, risk takers. I gamble on the price of mother-ofpearl. I gamble on cyclones staying away. On the price the Jap divers will charge me for their services. On the interest the damned moneylenders will demand. And I do not always win. But the divers have higher stakes. They gamble on their lives, and they generally get rich or they get killed. Maybe the Royal Navy didn’t make your father aware of those stakes, but that’s how it was and that’s how it still is.’ He wanted the issue closed, I could see. ‘Father was a stickler for the rules. Safety was his obsession. He just did not make mistakes,’ I protested. ‘Nonetheless ... ,’ he shrugged, cutting me off, and in the resultant surge of adrenalin I forgot to be timid. ‘Nonetheless what, Mr Keeler? Something or somebody caused his death.’ I realised I had shouted at him, and was almost standing now, pointing at him. I had not intended to challenge him so abruptly, and we were both somewhat

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surprised by my tone. For the first time, he allowed his annoyance to be seen. ‘They were never meant to succeed,’ he r e p e a t e d s l o w l y. He poured two cognacs of disparate size, the much larger for him. His hand shook. He was making an effort to stay calm, I could see, but his dismissive manner angered me and I could not leave it. ‘ Well, what does that mean exactly, never meant to succeed? I have heard that before, but what is it meant to mean, that something supernatural intervened? That Father died because of a malign configuration of the stars?’ He didn’t like this. He didn’t appreciate my tone. Not in his house. Not under his roof. ‘I can’t help you, boy.’ There followed an angry impasse. The fruit bats still screeched, a nerve-jarring chorus, like long nails on a blackboard. Keeler’s fat fingers tightened on the large round goblet of golden liquid. It looked certain to break in his crushing grip. Then, slowly, one stubby, nicotined finger pointed hard at me. ‘Drop it, boy. Just drop it.’ ‘I’d like to see some justice, that’s all. You see, Mr Keeler, I told Mother I would try ... ’ The great bear fist came crashing down on the table with a shower of glass, cognac and blood. ‘Justice! Justice!’ he roared. He was on his feet now, towering over me, shaking. A change had come over him. He was mightily angry and suddenly anything seemed possible. For a few seconds he was quite frozen by anger, his red face inches above me. Then like steam, he hissed the words ‘oh, strike me’, and sat down, breathing away enough of his anger to permit speech.

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‘Listen, sonny, don’t look to me for pity. This is definitely, definitely the wrong place to look. Got it? Savvy? Your father was a good man and he’s dead. No justice. Well, there’s been a lot of it about, injustice, or have you not noticed? Open your fucking eyes, it’s everywhere! Don’t think you’re telling me anything. Jesus.’ I had a good idea what was coming, and now I had the sense to shut up. He leaned forward in his chair so that his cruel sweaty lips were inches from my face. He clasped his hands together and seemed not to notice the dripping of blood from his right hand onto the wooden decking. Disconcertingly, he smiled. ‘You’re interested in justice, boy, well explain this. British command sent five thousand of our boys to be killed or maimed in one day, one single day , at F romelles. July the bloody nineteenth 1916 ... five thousand good Australian boys in a swamp, cut down, helpless. Now, you seem to be the expert, so tell me, what’s just about some rum-soaked, cigar-toting, idiot British general ordering good boys to their deaths? Eh? There was mud everywhere, it was dark, it was futile. Those boys, my boys , had no chance.’ He looked upwards, trying to calm himself. ‘If you’re here to find some of that justice you speak of, get some for me. And not just for me. How many Australians do you think wept at those telegrams, with their embroidered lies concealing the real circumstances. Every boy was a bro t h e r, or an uncle, or husband, or father, or son to someone. Maybe a hundred thousand Australians suff e red the agony of losing a loved one because of that one day in a war that lasted five years. The same thing happened at Bullecourt for the sake of one tank

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to flatten the barbed wire. And so on and bloody so on.’ Each word was hurled at me like an accusation. It was an accusation. I was here and alive, his boys were dead. Now he sat back, attempting to recover his grandfatherly air. ‘So you see my point, son. Have I given you some perspective? You should understand, if it’s pity you’ve come looking for, you’ve come to the wrong place. I’m out, the whole country is out. If it’s information, I have no more than I’ve already told you. And if you are seriously looking for justice, well, by Jesus, you’re a bigger bloody fool than your father.’ There followed a guilty silence. Keeler cleaned up; he wasn’t badly cut. The bats still shrieked and flapped. Marta came to say goodnight. Without comment she c l e a red away the broken glass and then, not saying a w o rd, gave us each a stroke on the forehead, which seemed to say she understood the anger in both of us. Keeler’s great arm momentarily wrapped around her tiny waist in a fleeting show of affection, and I had a sudden, guilty, keen sense of understanding of Keeler’s anger. No doubt he had seen Marta’s affection for me, the affection of a mother for a son. There was still silence between us when Marta left, but it was a silence from which anger had been exhausted. ‘Look, William, I’m really very sorry about your father, but there is not much else I can tell you. I know how it is, you just want to get any information you can, just to get a picture in your mind of how things were. I’m like that too. If there has been anything written about that day at F romelles, I have read it, over and over. You hope to eventually make sense of it, but it doesn’t work. In the

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end, you can’t make sense of the senseless.’ He looked a spent force now. His crimson jowls puffed up and then, like a leaking air valve, he exhaled slowly and noisily through his pursed lips, which then formed a tired smile. ‘If we are to be on civil terms, there is one thing you must understand, and that is that I will not abide any criticism of my boys. They were not perfect, but they always did their very best. I will not have them criticised. Do you understand me?’ I hadn’t criticised the boys, I’d not even mentioned them. ‘Yes, of course, Mr Keeler. I’m sorry to have upset you. I just wanted to know what you know, that’s all.’ He paused, dabbed his forehead, appeared to gather his thoughts. ‘ Yes, well, now you know. I apologise that it is not much, and frankly I doubt that you will have much more luck elsewhere, but, son, of all people I do understand your wanting to ask anyway. Just don’t expect too much.’ I accepted the olive branch. We talked for a while about my immediate plans. I had none really. I asked about Leon Viney, whom father had mentioned in his few letters. On reflection, Keeler was p robably delighted that I sought Viney’s assistance; f i r s t l y, because he lived a long way from town, and secondly, because he was famously unhelpful. ‘Go and see the hermit, son. I would not get your hopes up too high, but he may amuse you at least. He’s an original character, Viney. Supposed to the bastard son of Edgar Rice Burroughs, or Conan Doyle, or some such!’ I thanked Keeler for his kindness, and expressed my

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regrets at having to move on in the morning. He did not attempt to change my mind. I slept poorly that night, thinking mostly about Marta and the strength of his rage. I could hear the two of them in the adjoining room, just a sheet of timber separating them from me. A thump on their side of it startled me from half sleep. I sat up. Her head, I thought, he’s beating her! Then came sobbing. But that thump had been his fist against the wall. The sobbing was a man’s. And when I heard her voice it was not upset but softly reassuring. When I left the Keelers standing on the steps of their house the next morning, his arm was tightly around her middle as together they waved me good luck. Howard and Marta Keeler looked like a studio portrait of the perfect couple.

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Leaving the Keelers gave me an unexpected frisson of excitement, for I now had the rare freedom of having no plans and no accommodation, just a small swag to carry, and a vague idea to try and locate the hermit Viney. I walked down to the Governor Broome Hotel, where the manager sold me some shepherd’s pie, a pint of Bass and a BSA Model E with solid rubber tyres. He must have, as they say, seen me coming. A motorcycle! The thought of such a thing would never have occurred to me, but he was a good talker. He even talked me into thinking I knew how to ride. I have never understood machines of any sort, and my ignorance must have shown on my face. No doubt the manager rubbed his hands together when he saw me come in.

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‘Are ye lookin’ for a motorcycle?’ he opened in a thick rolling Scots brogue. He was called Scotty, in the popular manner up here of stating the bleeding obvious. Irish Mick, Black Jimmy, Chinese Bob; Scotty. I didn’t answer, but obediently followed him outside. He laid it on thick. ‘This here is a beauty. Ye can call her Sally. Ye can park your buttocks on her now, see if she likes you, hee hee! Go on! There, ooh, she loves ye, she thinks you’re all right. Grip her with your knees, don’t be shy, she doesn’t mind it a wee bit rough, this girl. That’s it! For you, forty poonds.’ I had it, cash, though it didn’t leave me much. I didn’t even haggle. He included lunch in the price. ‘There’s a sidecar, across the road.’ He patted an Aboriginal boy on the head, and the boy raced off to get it. Why was it on the other side of the road? ‘Is it yours?’ I asked, too late for the deal was done. ‘Aye, it’s mine.’ ‘Why are you selling it?’ ‘Och, I’m off home. I’ve had enough of this life. Too much money, too much grog, too much shagging. I’m a young man but I’m starting to feel sixty. Go on, guess my age.’ He flashed a grin, as much gum as tooth, and I guessed fifty-two. ‘Jesus Christ, it i s time to leave. I’m forty-three ye cheeky bastard. Best get back home to the wife and bairn if they’ll have me.’ ‘Scotland?’ ‘Halls Creek. Well, between ye and me, I do believe I may have a wife in Glasgow, now that ye mention it, but

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no bairn there to my knowledge and, well, I’m certain she won’t have waited for me! Now Mary in Halls Creek is more your waiting type, that’s if she hasn’t moved camp, or gone pink-eye, or gone wild altogether!’ Over lunch it became clear that my visit had been expected. Scotty had kept the bike for me, or so he said, as he knew I would need it for my journey. Indeed, he seemed to know all about me. He knew I had been staying with Howard Keeler and that I was heading north to speak with the hermit Viney. ‘Is he really the son of the writer Burroughs?’ I asked. ‘I heard Kipling. Aye, whatever, I am sure it is true. And didn’t ye know I’m Sarah Bernhardt’s secret love child! Do ye not believe me? I’ve her missing leg under me bed to prove it!’ While we talked the boy had trotted off to fetch the sidecar and managed to re-attach it to the motorcycle, tightening the nuts with his fingers. He then moved all my gear into the sidecar and cemented himself onto the pillion seat. He too seemed to know where I wanted to go, even without my mentioning Viney’s name, and he claimed to know the way. It was disconcerting to have strangers anticipate my plans, but I was pleased to have a guide, and glad of the company. He seemd to have an intelligence about him, though he spoke so little it was hard to say for sure, and he was certainly better kempt than the other urchins hanging about. It should have felt like a glorious fulfillment of a childhood dream, this trip north from Broome. What adventure, to head north into that very white unknown of my father’s map, on a motorcycle no less, with an Aboriginal boy as guide. But if such a thrill came over me,

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I cannot recall it. What I recall was my anxiety over the state of the track and the uncertainty of our destination. To call it a track was to glorify it. Most people wishing to travel north of Broome, even the missionaries, would do so by sea. There was a rough track, but often it was just scrub, or else we would lose the track for a time, only to pick it up again later. It was not the red pindan we had flown over, it was grey-white dust. There were a couple of creek crossings, and here it turned to the consistency of putty, gripping the wheels of the motorcycle so we had to drag it. We saw a few car bodies. The boy did seem to know where to go. Occasionally he would tap me on the shoulder and point me back to the track. But as the hours passed and it began to grow dark, I lost all faith in him. The track was now even more rugged, the sidecar looked increasingly unstable, daylight was fading and the boy looked amazingly serene. Then, just as I was about to give in to despair, the sidecar fully detached itself from the motorcycle and rolled fifty yards, crashing into a great pile of whisky bottles. ‘It does that,’ offered the boy. It seemed we had arrived at the residence of Mister Leon Viney. Viney’s camp was a dump and I immediately regretted coming. It was a clearing on the edge of a mangro v e swamp, with a miserable corrugated tin and timber hut, the remnants of a camp fire, a half-completed wooden structure of some sort and a few scrawny chickens. I hated mangroves on first encounter, and I still do. They stink, are full of loathsome things concealed by mud, they teem with biting insects. They smell and look like an ancient soup, like a place the Brothers Grimm

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would create, where evil lurks. Do not believe the writers of adventure romances. They lie when they use exotic phrases like ‘The Tropics’, ‘The Goldfields’ or ‘The Orient’ to evoke romantic images. So it is with ‘Hermit’s Camp’. There is romance in the words, but the reality is dreary, squalid and insect-ridden. Viney himself was nowhere to be found, and the boy was no help in this regard. But he did seem to know his way about the camp well. He set to work breathing life back into the smoking remnants of the camp fire, then building it up, while I set off to retrieve the sidecar full of provisions from its resting place against the mountain of bottles. Every bottle bore the same label, Haig and Haig. I felt I was beginning to know the master of the house, even without meeting him. I suspected he took his dram without recourse to a drinking vessel. The boy was proving a surprise. He was probably not yet nine years old, but he quietly got on with things. He seemed used to fending for himself. By the time I came back with some supplies and a ground canvas, he had a supper of sorts prepared. Meat and egg stew cooked in the camp oven in the coals. The meat was tough as boot leather. The boy was cagey about its source. When Viney had not appeared by dinnertime, I presumed him to have left the camp. It seemed the trip had been wasted and we would have to return to Broome the following morning. When the boy was asleep, I lay on my back, my hands behind my head, and for a long time stared and listened. I had never slept under the stars before and I was amazed at their brightness. For a young man from tame Canterbury, it was quietly thrilling to feel the strangeness

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of these basic elements that surrounded me on all sides — earth, bush, stars. The noises too were strange. Insects, birds, mangrove creatures, all unfamiliar to my ears and in the darkness their forms only guessable; the fire, occasionally cracking explosively; the boy’s soft breathing and murmuring. Like many before and since, it occurred to me about then, to my great surprise, that a civilised man could grow to like this wildness. Firewood was collected from ’the school’ as the boy called the timber structure nearby. It had the appearance of an overly-ambitious project which was never completed, and was now being burned, log by log, night by night. That is where I was when I first became aware of activity in the hut behind me. There was light coming from under the door. Had he been in there all this time? There was certainly someone in there. Should I knock on the door? What is correct etiquette when arriving late and uninvited at a hermit’s place of residence? Initially my timidity won out and I waited for a long time for him to emerge. Finally, after an hour or so, when he still had not, curiosity prevailed and I walked up to his hut. There appeared to be two possible openings. The door was a rusty steel one hanging by only one hinge and secured with various latches. I decided on the hatch at the front, and knocked confidently. The ‘yes’ from within was a rather tired one; the gentleman of the house disturbed from his work. ‘Mr Viney?’ He opened the hatch. The whole effect was terribly surprising. He was clean-shaven, squat, blinking, bespectacled, mole-like. More Wind in the Willows than Robinson Crusoe. He could have been an accountant or a bank clerk,

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and this impression was reinforced by his being framed by the hatch, like a teller’s booth, and by the background of books. The light from a kerosene lamp fell upon rows and rows of books. One was open on his desk. I felt I should have made an appointment. Or waited until my name was called. Was my account overdrawn? ‘I imagine you purchased that heap of junk from Scotty M c C l u s k y.’ He nodded towards the bike. ‘The man is a ro g u e . ’ I smiled. It seemed that I wasn’t going to be yelled at, that was something. ‘Well it got us here,’ I smiled. ‘In several pieces, I noticed.’ ‘Oh, you saw us arrive then?’ ‘Oh yes. It’s not such a busy place that we miss new arrivals. And there was quite a lot of noise.’ ‘I’m sorry if we disturbed you, with the noise. Oh, and I’m sorry we didn’t offer you supper.’ ‘Supper?’ He smiled wearily. ‘We don’t keep the same hours. And I’ve been well catered for.’ There was a generous tumbler of spirits on his table. Not straight from the bottle then. I’d guessed that wrongly, too. ‘I’m sorry not to have introduced myself, Mr Viney. I’m William Webber.’ T h e re was no spark of recognition. He looked at me accusingly. ‘Vayber, you say.’ He pronounced it like that, Vayber. ‘A German name is it? Are you a friend of the Kaiser ’ s ? Should I turn you in, do you think?’ ‘Good heavens, no. It is English.’ ‘Very wise, very wise. A lot of Germans have done that,

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and it is very understandable. Even George V of course; he quietly got rid of the Saxe-Coburg during the war. It was a sensible change. He chose Windsor, after the castle. And you now prefer Webber, in Anglicised form. You could not be blamed for that. I understand, and approve.’ ‘With respect, Sir, it has always been Webber. My father had the same name. That’s why I have come. I believe you knew him. William Webber, the Royal Navy diver, eight years ago?’ There was a querulous upturning of the eyebrows, a bit too theatrical, too forced. He knew him, I could tell. ‘Webber, Webber,’ he repeated, absent-mindedly. He looked down, found something on the back cover of a book which required his close inspection. ‘He mentioned you in his letters, Sir. He wrote fondly of you and mentioned you as a friend. He said, I think, you were an associate of the writer Edgar Rice Burroughs ... ’ Even as I said it I saw his countenance change. ‘Not Burroughs, you ignoramus!’ He had bolted upright and suddenly the moleish appearance was gone, replaced by an altogether more threatening visage. ‘H a g g a r d. Henry Rider Haggard. You d o know of Haggard, I presume? You are not an illiterate, are you? Good heavens, B u r ro u g h s! An imposter, worse, an A m e r i c a n imposter! Who on earth told you it was Burroughs? Not your father, for he was a reader. It would have been that ignorant bastard, Keeler, I bet.’ He calmed himself, sniffed and twitched away the last of his anger. ‘It was Haggard, boy. Henry Rider Haggard was my ...’ he touched the glass thoughtfully. ‘It was Haggard.’

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‘I see. I’m sorry to have made the error. I assure you, I won’t make it again.’ ‘I’d be most grateful,’ he sniffed, mole-like again. ‘So, your father was William Webber, the diver ... I think ... yes, we read together sometimes ... he was quite well read, your father. I recall him. So, how is he? Still dead?’ He smiled a kind smile. I had come as close as I was going to, to actually liking Leon Viney.

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For the next few days I did not speak to Leon Viney at all. He had warned me on that first evening that we would not keep the same hours, and he was right. He seemed to be strictly nocturnal. It made me uncomfortable to have such limited contact with my host, but after a while I decided that hermits constituted a particular case in which the usual social mores could be dispensed with. He clearly had reached this conclusion long ago. The only time I saw him in daylight hours was when, after a prolonged and noisy battle with the latches and locks on the door to his hut, he emerged stark naked, urinated over the edge of his low verandah, scratched his balls at length and stared suspiciously at the world around him. Though I was just a few yards away from him, he seemed not to notice me.

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At the first rattle of the latch to the iron door of his hut, the boy had bolted. He seemed to fear Viney, and Viney in turn seemed simply not to notice the boy. And yet the boy had been keen to come up from Broome with me, and once here he seemed to know the camp, almost to be at home here. It appeared a strange situation. I began to wonder if the boy was in hiding, or on the run, for there seemed no other reason for him to come to a place like this. After a couple of mornings spent alone at the camp waiting in vain for Viney’s disposition to improve, I decided to take the boy’s lead when next the locks rattled, and follow him down to the mangrove. I loathed mangroves, but remaining in the camp was unthinkable. The boy’s name was Yerticle. That was about all he would tell me, but he was happy enough for me to follow him about as he picked his way through the mud and roots, stopping here and there to probe a likely hole for mud crabs. He had a twisted length of wire which he used as a hook, and he showed me how to use it. He was patient with me and resisted laughing when I lost my balance or dropped the crab for fear of its claw. Insects were everywhere, the midges and mosquitos seemingly drawn to my pale skin. My hands, legs and face were soon covered in welts. I scratched them raw, which attracted flies. Worse discomfort was to come. After a morning spent bent double over the reef collecting oysters, my shoulders were an excruciatingly tender scarlet, cobbled with blisters. The pain seemed designed to remind me that I was not at home here, but a soft Englishman in a hostile place. In my total ignorance of how to do anything useful, in my clumsiness of movement, I contrasted with Yerticle’s cleverness and

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elegance. He was the cat that walked by himself . H e needed no one’s help. By contrast, as if to confirm my foolishness, I almost drowned and he had to save me. Yerticle had taken me to a cove where there was soft sand, and a reef that fell away sharply to the beautifully clear milky green of the water. It was a perfect place to dive or bomb. I was not much of a swimmer. As a boy I had paddled around in the shallow water at the Margate pier, but no deeper than my waist. I would never allow my head to go below that murky water. But here the water was beautiful and the sea air sweet, and I felt no fear. I followed the boy in. I leaped high, yelled, and in that brief second before hitting my head on the edge of the reef, it occurred to me that the vast blueness before me was the very same blue I used to stare at on my maps, the same blue that Father had gone down into alive ... I wasn’t knocked out. I must have kept my eyes open for I can remember seeing first the bubbles as they came from my mouth, not in a scream but gently, for I still felt perfectly calm. I enjoyed the feel of them rippling against my cheeks. I was vaguely aware of danger but a warm peace had wrapped around me. Father was just a short distance ahead, in full dive costume just as I had dreamed him. I floated towards him and tried to signal to him, but he was half-turned away from me and preoccupied with his equipment. When I signalled again he looked towards me but seemed not to recognise me. It was then that I felt the tightening of my throat, tighter, tighter, until I could not breathe at all, not in, not out. This was the moment of the dream when I should awaken, but, with a sense of panic, I suddenly realised that I was awake and

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underwater. Then something grabbed me, lifting me, and I was on my back, staring at the sun, coughing and gasping, and Yerticle was leaning over me quite calmly. A f t e r w a rds, we both played the incident down, pretended that he hadn’t saved my life, but things were d i ff e rent. I was indebted to him, and this lowered his guard. After days of silence, Yerticle began to talk. He had a lot of questions saved up. He wanted to talk about everything, any subject, as long as he chose it, which meant any subject but himself. But surprisingly the two areas which concerned him most were books and Germans. It soon became clear that I had vastly underestimated Yerticle. The first inkling I had of this was his response when I suggested that I make him my Boy Friday. ‘ Ye a h , t h e n I ’ l l c a l l y o u R o b i n s o n C r u s o e , ’ h e smiled back. I gaped. ‘You know that book, Yerticle?’ ‘No. Not all of it. It’s too long. Treasure Island, that’s better,’ he grinned. Yerticle had read the same books I had at his age. His favourite writers were Stevenson, Kipling, Haggard. I tried to imagine how he understood these adventure books, written as they were for Europeans who may never have travelled beyond their own towns. When he read of the exploits of Kim the Bengali market thief, did he feel an affinity with him or was he, like a nine-year-old English boy, enthralled by the strangeness of these people in strange lands? Did he feel a kinship with Khiva the brave Zulu boy or ponder the queer workings of the native mind? He knew a lot about the world beyond Broome and

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Viney’s stinking camp, much of it seemingly gleaned from magazines and journals. His greatest interest was in Germans. Time and again he asked me about them. He wanted to know if the English hated them. ‘Well, yes, I suppose. But most Englishmen hated the war mainly. After a while it didn’t seem to matter that it was the Germans. It was the war which everyone hated.’ ‘But you don’t like ’em,’ he persisted. ‘No, not much.’ I was wary of the increasingly earnest expression on his face. ‘They tried to take your land, eh?’ ‘Well, not really. But they may well have, I imagine, if we hadn’t fought them.’ ‘Did they kill any of your people?’ ‘The Germans? Well, if you mean my family, no. They would have tried to shoot my father, because he was in the Royal Navy, but ... well, he was already dead before the war.’ I could see it sounded pretty limp, this German hating. But it was the truth. In the early days of the war, perhaps, passions were high. I could recall the depth of feeling among the people of Canterbury, especially the mothers. The town was well aware that the fighting was only a hundred miles away, across the Channel. Early on there was fear and hatred. But after years of a war that went nowhere, the tedium and futility of it had sapped people of the passion that is required to really hate an enemy. In the end, it was the waste that was hated. ‘If the Germans took over England, who would own this land here?’ He looked me in the eyes. This was not a casual question.

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‘Ah ... that is a good question, Yerticle. The Germans, I suppose.’ ‘Michael told me if they won, things would be better for the blackfellas.’ It was the first I had heard of Michael. He was cited as an authority, and I wasn’t keen to contradict him. ‘I don’t know, Yerticle. They might be better or they might be worse.’ I’d read once of a General who had ordered the extermination of an entire tribe in German South-West Africa. I thought it better not mention him. ‘Those Pallotine fellas, they’re German, eh?’ ‘Pallotines?’ ‘The fellas at Beagle Bay Mission. German Pallotines. The English hate Pallotines too?’ ‘Ah. They are priests, Yerticle. They are good men, priests, no matter where they come from.’ ‘That’s why no one shot them in the war.’ ‘I suppose so.’ For a while the boy was quiet. I was incre a s i n g l y g u a rded, for I was unsure where this cryptic line of questioning was headed, and he seemed to be placing great importance on my answers. ‘So what do you think then? Maybe I should go up there, live at the mission. With the Pallotines, at Beagle Bay. You reckon?’ Here was the crunch. He wanted me to tell him what to do. ‘Or I could go up to the mob at Swan Point, with Michael ... ’ He looked at me and I shrugged. ‘I’ve been up to Beagle Bay plenty of times. When the

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old man gets drunk, sometimes I go up for a while. I’ve even been to school there. I’m the smartest one there, most of ’em can’t read much. But mostly it’s just making bricks out of shells. We made a church out of shells. Ever seen one of them?’ ‘No. Not shells.’ ‘Not even in England?’ ‘No.’ He was happy about this. ‘Well, they got one now in Beagle Bay.’ He took a thoughtful piss into a rock pool. ‘One thing about the Pallotines, they don’t slice your cock open.’ He turned to face me, cock in hand, and made a sharp slash up the underside with an imagined knife. ‘That’s the tribal way,’ he said. ‘You ever seen that?’ We both looked down and imagined the gore. ‘I don’t like the sound of it,’ I admitted. ‘I don’t either,’ he agreed. ‘Maybe it’s not so bad as it sounds, now they got decent tools,’ he said, unconvinced. ‘They used to just use a sharp stone, but now they use a good sharp camping knife.’ ‘Well, that’s good.’ I tried to sound enthusiastic about this new technology, but the tone of my voice must have said otherwise. We r e g a rded each other momentarily with sad, dreadful eyes, and then Yerticle’s face broke into a broad grin. He screamed and, holding himself, fell to the ground in an exaggerated spiral. I collapsed on top of him, now hysterical with laughter, and it was then, between convulsions of laughter that I choked out the words that he would later repeat to me.

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‘Yerticle, I’ve decided! Go to the Germans, for God’s sake!’ It was never intended as serious advice.

Leon Viney appeared again the next night. He came down to the camp fire as if this was his regular custom, and appeared at first to be in good humour. More bookkeeper than ever in serge waistcoat, oiled hair, spectacles pincing the very tip of his nez, he was not recognisable as the irritable ball-scratching individual who had briefly graced his verandah by daylight. He came bearing a peaceo ffering in the form of a full bottle of whisky, which glowed deliciously amber in the firelight. He had thought to bring two glasses. He was making an effort, it seemed. The whisky was warming and friendly. I had never been a drinker of spirits, and its mellowing effect was potent. Viney lit himself a pipe of what he called ‘Malay’s tobacco’ which gave off a queer weedy aroma. He offered me a puff, and the calming effect of the spirit was multiplied. Yerticle had seemed to sense that it was safe to stay. Viney had brought down a book with him, a battered old copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which had once been covered in velvet. He gave it to Yerticle with a mumbled instruction, and the boy read from the book. Although it was dark, he did not hold the book to the fire, indeed he appeared to recite mostly from memory. He only stopped when, with a surprisingly gentle, almost tender stroke of the boy’s hair, Viney bade him stop. The boy sat at his feet. Viney was in a rare good mood and I would be able to

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quiz him tonight about Father, I thought. I was wrong. Like a spell broken, like a mirage, his good humour suddenly vanished when I spoke the boy’s name. ‘Yerticle, you surprise me more and more,’ I said. The boy turned away from me. ‘What did you call him?’ said Vi n e y, like a motor warming up. ‘ W h y, Yerticle. I am most impressed. He re a d s beautifully, better than many English boys, I would say.’ Viney placed one hand behind the boy’s neck. The boy grimaced. ‘Better than English boys?’ he sneered. He was squeezing with his thumb and the boy let out a small squeak of pain. Was I causing this? ‘ Well, I mean, I don’t know what I expected of an Aboriginal boy, but ... ’ Viney leapt to his feet, still holding the poor boy in his grip so that he was almost lifted off the ground by his neck. He breathed his anger right into my face. ‘Aboriginal boy, you say?’ he snarled. ‘Aboriginal boy? Does he appear to be a savage to you, my son? Eh? The boy is better read than you, it would seem. He is not a savage. Do you understand me, Webber?’ I nodded. Still the boy hung there, suspended by the nape like a tortured kitten. Viney seemed capable of anything. He had a bottle in his other hand and waved it towards me thr e a t e n i n g l y. He continued s l o w l y, as if lecturing. ‘The boy’s name, despite what nonsense he may have told you, is Harold. Harold Victor Vi n e y. His mother chose that name for him, right here, God rest her. That is how he was christened, that is how he has been raised,

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and that is the name that will appear on his grave. You’ve heard him read, well I taught him that. Don’t talk to me about English boys as if Harold is something less. I did not raise him to run around naked and spear fish at Swan Point. He is more than that, do you understand?’ I understood. He put the boy down but kept a possessive hand on his shoulder. He calmed himself. ‘Alice bled to death right here at the camp. I wouldn’t have believed so much blood could come from one person. She didn’t die until two days after, fr o m weakness. There was no time to get her down to Broome, and they would most likely have let her die there anyway. Just a bush gin, they would have said. But she was no bush gin, Alice. She was taught by the nuns. She loved to read. She wanted to start a school up here. It was Alice who named him Harold. Harold Victor Viney.’ He looked at me momentarily, then down at his feet as if ashamed of his outburst. ‘She would die a second death if I let him go wild.’ Then he grew quiet, staring at the fire and taking the occasional thirsty slug straight from the bottle. He seemed not to notice me when some time later I excused myself. The boy also managed to slink off unnoticed to the sidecar, in which he had taken to sleeping. But later that night I was again awoken by the voice of the old man. He had found the boy, shaken him awake, and was blasting him. The words nigger name shot like bolts through the sticky night air, and through me. ‘What’s your name, son?’ ‘Harold, sir.’ ‘What’s your name, son?’ ‘Harold, sir.’

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‘What’s your name, son?’ ‘Harold, sir.’ There was a dull thud, and a whimper. ‘A thick ear to make sure you don’t forget it.’

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The day before he died, Leon Viney seemed to be reformed. More than that; transformed. He appeare d b e f o re me that morning sober, shaved, groomed and dressed, and asked me to tea. Tea! Morning! He had been on a major bender, and for days before he had been irritable, bullying, loud, offensive, and cruel to the boy whenever the opportunity arose. I felt badly for Yerticle, and worse for knowing that my being there had somehow helped trigger Viney’s foul mood and drinking. So it was most surprising to be confronted by a gleaming Leon Viney that morning and overwhelming to be asked to ‘come up to the house for tea’. Up to the house!

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Frankly, I suspected a plot. A trap of some sort. He seemed capable of changing without warning from good humour to uncontrolled rage. I had seen him beat the boy, when he could catch him. This was to be my turn. I was taller than Viney by several inches, and he did not look overly fierce in this manifestation, shiny-faced and bespectacled, but still I feared his anger. I can recall the circumstances and the words of this encounter with unusual vividness, because fear sharpens the senses, and because, when Viney died the next day, the encounter took on, in retrospect, a greater significance. I felt I had been entrusted with a dead man’s secrets. ‘It’s locked up,’ said Vi n e y, as he fiddled with the latches and bolts which served the dubious role of protecting the entrance from intruders. ‘I don’t like natural light to come in. It ruins the books.’ The door, when opened, gave way to the left, supported as it was on only one hinge, but Viney, anticipating this dif f i c u l t y, waved regally past himself, ushering me in ahead of him. In that one second that I turned my back on him and entered the darkness, his darkness, I thought, he will murder me! Nonetheless (and curiously; I wonder how many victims go passively to their ends) I stepped blindly, obligingly, obediently, over the threshold, bracing myself in anticipation of a blow. Daylight was a brief, unwelcome intruder in this room, and was quickly evicted. The clanging metal door was secured behind us carefully, by means of a hook. I took note of the mechanism in case of needing to force an exit. But as my eyes adjusted to the dim light, the thing that surprised me was the neatness of it. Row upon row of his

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beloved books, many more than I had imagined from my glimpse through the hatch on that first night. The faded and peeling spines bore the names Kipling, Ballantyne, Buchan, Haggard. I was reassured by the familiarity of the titles. Boys’ books, mostly. On the desk (a beautiful mahogany writing desk, transported here God knows how), a single volume was open and the page marked. Unthinking, I placed my hand on the book and turned it around to face me in order to read the title. Adventures in the Rifle Brigade. Viney softly ahem’ed my hand away and asked me, with enough courtesy to make me wary, not to touch the books. Upon the sideboard he had placed a twee little English country cottage tea set. The tea was already bre w i n g . Alongside the tea set was his handwritten manuscript of Wildman’s Gold. His shiny face glowed rather proudly in the gas lamplight. It made him look childlike, and I felt foolish for my earlier suspicions. Viney appeared to have forgotten or forgiven my two p revious faux pas, and wishing to keep it that way I quietly resolved not to allow the names Burroughs or Yerticle to pass my lips. He sat me down, poured my tea, fussed. We made polite conversation, mainly about the goodness of the tea, and then tea making in general, like two old dears with not much to say. I wanted to ask about Father, but I didn’t wish to provoke him. Viney picked up the manuscript, handling it like a precious object, and then rather disconcertingly, as if he had read my mind like a book, answered my unasked question. ‘I liked your father, Webber. He was a keen reader, at least when his nose was not in his blessed Admiralty

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Tables. In hindsight, he should have spent more time on Kipling and less on his Admiralty Tables, for all the good they did the poor bugger in the end. Anyway, our tastes in literature were, as it happened, similar. We read together on the few nights he stayed here, when his lugger was being repaired at the creek. Alice liked him too.’ He fingered the binding of the manuscript ever so gently. He wanted to give it to me to read, I could see. He seemed nervous. Perhaps fearful of rejection. ‘When your father was here, I was writing this. He read a little of it, and made some suggestions, some of which I used. There is a place where the expedition leader is taken by a salty while riding on a donkey. That idea was your f a t h e r ’s. I would have liked him to have read the completed work, but by the time I had finished it he had been killed ...’ (been killed, he said, not died; he checked himself, looked up to see if I had noticed) ‘... so I never got the chance to show him.’ Again he looked as if he wanted to pass the manuscript to me, but then wavered and placed it on the writing desk. It was hard to reconcile this uncertain Viney with that of the previous few days. His anxiety made him look younger. I had come to think of him as an old man, but he was probably no more than forty-two. I tried to imagine him as the eager young man that my father must have met, when the mahogany desk had just arrived and a brilliant writing career beckoned, when Alice was alive and carried another life within her, before his dreams had soured. ‘You know, young Webber, it has occurred to me that we are very alike, you and I.’

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He smiled his kind smile, which it seemed he reserved for when he wished most to provoke. I must have blanched. ‘Oh, does that thought horrify you? Well then, perhaps I should put it this way. We have been treated similarly by fate. We both lost our fathers in this forsaken place in 1912. Did you realise that? I feel an affinity with you. Yours drowned, so at least that was simple enough. He at least had no choosing in it. It was worse for me, for Rider did not die. He simply rejected and abandoned me when I refused to leave Alice.’ ‘So Henry Rider Haggard was your father?’ I ventured, and immediately wished I hadn’t. Clearly he was annoyed by the interruption. ‘No, no, no. Of course not. Rider was tall. Long nose, crystal blue eyes. Is that me, do you think? Hmm?’ He let the rhetorical question hang, as if to emphasise my stupidity. ‘Are you a reader yourself, son? Do you not know of Rider Haggard?’ ‘Of course I do, Sir. Well, a little. I mean, like every boy I know, I enjoyed King Solomon’s Mines and She.’ He seemed moderately pleased with this answer. Nodded. ‘ Well then, you are not totally ignorant nor totally unappreciative, I am glad of that, Webber junior.’ He placed one hand on the manuscript, as if swearing on the Bible. ‘So, you wish to know about Rider Haggard ... ’ He paused, as if to summon a great effort of thought, and to let me know that in doing so he was granting me a great favour. ‘Rider Haggard was not my father, but I was his son, I

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was his right arm, through his most difficult as well as his most successful years. My mother, Lily, and I lived in Norfolk, close to Rider’s family home, Ditchingham House. I did not know my father, and so from a young age I attached myself to Rider. He was terribly fond of my mother; they had once been engaged, but did not marry because Rider went off to Africa. I’m sure he regretted it. It pleased me to notice how much more relaxed he was in my mother’s company than when he was with his rather staid wife, Louisa. I wished him into our house, indeed wished him my father, and while this boyish wish could never come true, we felt part of him was ours. Lily, I knew, owned a part of his heart, and I came to know his mind better than anyone. ‘We would plan the stories, Rider and I, while walking his estate. The land was Rider’s inspiration. First and foremost he was a farmer, and he loved the soil. He was never happier than when he was doing a rough, dirty job, draining a plot of marshland, getting soil under his nails. His forebears had become the soil, he would say. He was like the blackfellows in that respect. If he had stayed long enough in this place, instead of abandoning me here, he might have come to discover that. ‘“How shall we wescue poor Foulata fwom Gagool’s clutches, my boy?” he would ask me, as we traipsed through mud. He spoke like that, you see, but he was too impressive a man for it to matter. It was my idea that Quartermaine cause an eclipse of the sun to frighten the chiefs. “What hey!” Rider would say, delighted. “So be it!” and after our walk he would write it into the next chapter. ‘You recall the bit in King Solomon’s Mines when the

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chief is convinced that Captain Good’s false teeth are magic? That was my idea. “Unlimited Loo?” that was mine too. When Foulata falls in love with Captain Good’s beautiful white legs? One of mine. King Solomon’s Mines was full of our secret jokes.’ Viney’s eyes fixed mine fleetingly, searching for any signs of doubt. But I was prepared, and was sitting up, unblinking and attentive, cup and saucer held neatly and noiselessly. The overall effect must have satisfied him, for he continued. ‘You have read She, you say. Well, that book was our adventure. HH and LV, you see? Horace Holly and Leo Vincey were really us, Rider and me. When Rider has Horace say, “Well, I am Horace Holly and my companion, my beloved friend, my son in the spirit, whom I raised from infancy, is Leo Vincey”, those words were really written by Rider to me. As a boy, I lived that book. I really was seduced by Ayesha. I was captivated by She Who Must Be Obeyed, and would surely have been destroyed by her were it not for Sir Horace Holly. Just as Leo Vincey owed his life to Horace, I felt I owed my life to Rider Haggard. ‘My son in the spirit, that is how Rider thought of me. He had a real son, little Jock, but he was too young to walk with us, or too much of a nancy to want to come. He was a mummy’s boy in a sailor’s suit, so I had Rider to myself on our long walks. At times I used to wish the boy away altogether. And so, when Jock suddenly died, I was sure I had somehow caused it. ‘Rider was away when it happened, on another of his adventures, this one in search of Guatemoc’s treasure in Mexico. I remember the awful waiting for his return; I

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thought he might blame me for the death and banish me, but I was secretly thrilled by the prospect that he might instead take me as the boy’s surrogate. But everything seemed changed for the worse when he returned. Rider himself was quite changed by his grief. He was convinced that his absences and failings as a father had caused Jock’s death, and he was for a long time overwhelmed by a sense of guilt as well as heartbreak. He grew very melancholy. For a while we still took our walks, but they were not the same. Louisa would not allow me near the house, and if Rider was not about, she would spit a “get home to that mother of yours” to me. I suppose she could not bear to see me with him after they had buried Jock. ‘With time Rider appeased his conscience by throwing himself into his work, and, despite Louisa’s disapproval, I helped him more and more. He came to depend on me for all sorts of things. Rider was always busy at something. When not occupied with his writing he was a farmer, a l a w y e r, he ran for parliament, he sat on innumerable b o a rds and commissions, and each of these pursuits generated work for me, copying, transcribing, summarising, running messages, organising accommodation. I made myself indispensable to him. We travelled constantly. We crisscrossed Britain in a review of British agriculture. We went abroad to research his next book, and for Royal Commission hearings. They were exciting times, full of history and events and interesting people. Rider was friendly with Kipling, with Hardy, with Carl Jung, with Ted Roosevelt. He had to keep busy and useful. He was never idle. He was too frightened to be, after Jock’s death, lest he had time to think. ‘When I look back now, I think Rider was constantly

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seeking the approval of those he considered his betters, for even at the peak of his fame he was most unsure of his talents. He would sometimes become very gloomy, convinced he was a failure in all of his many pursuits. A failure as a father; Jock’s death proved that. As a lawyer, for his practice never amounted to much. As a politician, for he was never elected. And as a writer, for despite his huge popularity he received only begrudging re s p e c t from those whose opinions mattered most to him. When he was eventually knighted, his writing was not cited as a reason. Some said he was knighted despite his writing. He often felt an outsider, and always felt looked down upon when in the company of Oxbridge men. He told me once that he believed his father, the squire, had been right in declaring him the intellectual runt of the litter, and in not wasting his money on a public school education. Ipswich Grammar was, after all, all he deserved. ‘I recall the earnestness with which Rider once advised me, should I ever be blessed with a son, to make sure that I spent sufficient time with him, and to make sure I let him constantly know how clever I thought he was. As his own father had not. And as he himself had not ... ’ Viney’s voice tailed off and for a few pregnant seconds he stared at the toe of his boot as if he was deep in thought. He appeared to have forgotten momentarily that I was in the room, but then he gave a start, looked a b ruptly up at my face, searched it for signs, then returned his attention to the point of his boot. ‘Rider was in the blackest of moods when we arrived in Broome in 1912. We had come to Australia so he could take part in the Dominion Commission hearings to be held in Perth. True to form, rather than take the simple

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option of a steamer from Cape Town to Fremantle, Rider had wanted to visit Ceylon, the East Indies and the Philippines on the way. An ambitious itinerary, especially in 1912, which was a bad year for shipping, as you may be aware. The first part of the trip was exhausting enough for Rider, but it was the voyage from Manila which did him in. By necessity I had booked our passage on an old Australian cattle carrier, the Junee. It was a tub, carrying a dozen stinking Afghan camels which constantly brayed and snorted and shat at close quarters, and it very nearly sank when a cyclone struck in the Timor Sea. It was a rough trip. Even the camels were seasick. ‘Rider arrived in Broome, a tired, sick old man, to discover that his friend, who was to have been our host, was out of town, and not due to return for several weeks. Rider blamed me for this unforseeable circumstance; railed at me. He insisted he had had enough of rustic living, and that we should leave immediately for Perth and some cr e a t u re comforts. I had never seen Rider so miserable. ‘But this is where we diverged. The moment I set foot on Australian soil I felt exhilarated. I was re c h a rg e d . Broome seemed full of excitement. There seemed so much opportunity for a young man, so much optimism and prospect for wealth. I was disinclined to leave. ‘And then I met Alice, and that sealed it. She was a cook at the Governor Broome Hotel, where we were staying. She was reading a book, that’s what attracted me to her first. She was my first love, truth be told. I had always been too busy with arranging Rider’s affairs to have time for such matters. There was nothing tawdry in it. That was what so many ignorant minds in that town

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could not understand. If I had behaved like all the other gin jockeys in town, I would have been accepted. But I made it plain that I wished to spend the daylight hours with Alice, not just a few minutes in the cover of darkness like the cowards who stood about accusing me. ‘I was not pre p a red for Rider’s reaction. I actually expected he would approve, but he was ill and miserable and wanted nothing to delay our return to civilisation. I was stunned by the ferocity of his outburst. “This dalliance is deplawable, Leon,” he told me. “You have taken leave of your senses, boy! A native girl, your first week in the country, good Lord! You are not Captain Good, boy, and she is not Foulata. This is weal life! Now end it!” ‘He threatened to leave on the next steamer with or without me. I thought he was too dependent on me to seriously contemplate it. I underestimated his resolve. He left, I stayed, and that was that. Even then, I thought I — or maybe we — could somehow, once the dust settled, follow on after him. I never imagined it would be a permanent separation. ‘There was no way that we could have stayed in town, so we moved up here and started to build this camp. The first few months were the busiest and happiest of my life. I felt I had found my reason for living. We were creating something of great importance, it seemed. Not just for the two of us. There was to have been a lot more than this. Alice wanted to have a little school here eventually, so she could teach children ... but ... ’ Viney broke off. I knew the rest. Alice had bled to death in his arms after giving birth. Then it was just him and the boy in a camp on the edge of the mangroves.

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Viney picked up the manuscript. ‘When I wasn’t building, I was writing. This, Wildman’s Gold. It was intended as a love letter to Rider, really, when I think of it now. I wanted to write it in a style similar to Rider’s, to amuse him and flatter him. I wrote it quickly; I knew all his tricks, and I was inspired by the secrets of this new land. I was full of ideas. And not just mine. Alice’s too. And your father’s. We laughed away a couple of nights, inventing new disasters for my heroes to face. I was happy with it, at the time. ‘When it was complete I mailed it off to Rider in the eager expectation of his approval and forgiveness. I imagined him receiving it, and his face breaking into a broad grin for the first time in a long while. I imagined him arranging, as a surprise for me, to have it published in London. I had rather hoped one of the weekly journals might see fit to serialise it. But he sent it back.’ Here, Leon Viney faltered for the first time. He peered through his round lenses and flicked through the pages of the manuscript, and, finding the particular page he wanted, turned the book around and rested it on my knee so that I could read it. Beside Viney’s neat, faultless copperplate, there were various comments scrawled in an angry hand, and there were in many places, rough underlinings, or accusing exclamation marks. I noticed for the first time that Viney’s hand was shaking as he indicated one comment. You have stolen Ayesha! ‘Stolen her!’ He spoke in an angry whisper now. His previous calm had dissolved, and the tremble in his voice hinted at past rages. ‘How could I have stolen her? Ayesha did not belong to Rider alone. She was ours, we dreamed her in those early

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days while walking the fields at Ditchingham.’ He thumped twice at the offending comment with outstretched finger, so firmly the first time that it hurt my thigh on which the manuscript rested, and so wildly the second time that he sent a country cottage teacup crashing to the floor. ‘This was a betrayal. He betrayed me viciously, and I never attempted to make contact with him again, nor to write.’ These last few words were squeezed out of a dry, tight throat, then Viney fell silent. He had talked for an hour, and now looked exhausted. If the words had flowed e a s i l y, I suspected it was not from their having been spoken many times before. There would have been few a round here willing to listen to the ravings of a mad hermit. He had been laughed out of Broome twice, once with his lubra bride, and later with his ridiculous claims about his famous associates. But the words must have been there, unspoken, for years. He stood. His hands still shook. ‘Enough tea,’ he said. He reached to the top shelf for a bottle of whisky and a glass for himself. He did not enquire whether I would care to join him for a drink. He tilted the bottle accusingly towards the manuscript. ‘I would have liked your father to have read it, but since his best reading days are behind him, you will do. Take it, and look after it for me. Maybe you can get it published for me when you get back to London. Better late than never. I could use the royalties. This place could do with some renovations.’ After that, he did not look at me. The bottle of whisky had his full attention. For a full minute he fingered the lid

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of the bottle, then polished the glass on his shirt sleeve, as if trying to talk himself out of it. Then, his resolve broken, he broke the seal and poured a very large whisky, the loklok-lok music to his ears as the glass filled with the spirit, shimmering a magical golden-brown in the lamplight. His hairy moleish nostrils sucked hungrily at the familiar aroma, and he closed his eyes to concentrate, as if trying to account for every olfactory nuance. The Scottish mist, smoke, kelp ... Soon he would be drunk, and useless for information. ‘Mr Viney, if you knew anything, you would tell me, wouldn’t you?’ He looked up, startled for a second. ‘You’re still here, Webber. Your father, you mean? Don’t kid yourself, boy. That is not what you are here for, is it?’ ‘Of course it is.’ ‘So you have come to ask a mad hermit who has never taken part in any capacity in any of the business of pearling?’ ‘Well, you did know him ... ’ ‘Yes, but as I recall he was still alive at that point, so he could hardly have given me a hint as to his killer, could he?’ I had been optimistic to even ask. ‘You must have heard something, after it happened. Rumours ... ’ ‘Not up here. Look, son, your father was no doubt a man of honour, but he was among men who were not. He expected Marquess of Queensberry rules from stre e t brawlers. There was not one man in town who would have wanted the Royal Navy divers to succeed. Half the town would happily have done the deed, while the other half would have turned their backs. You could walk

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down Dampier Terrace, point your finger at the first man you see, and call him your papa’s killer if you like, and most likely you would be right, in some way or other. He came to the wrong place, son, and once he got here, he didn’t see it coming. In that respect, he was a fool. But he has plenty of us for company.’ He looked at me, then looked longingly at the large glass of spirits before him. I rose and, taking me by the shoulder, he escorted me the three steps to the door. ‘Now, if you will excuse me, I have a little reading to catch up on.’ He unlocked the door, and the light that flooded in was unfamiliar and blinding. I was holding his manuscript carefully, and he glanced down at it, perhaps concerned that the light may damage it. ‘I have begun each chapter with a synopsis of foregoing chapters. In the event of a journal wishing to serialise it, you understand. When you return to England, you might show it around to one or two of the better publishing houses, if you deem it worthy ... ’ I promised him I would. He smiled awkwardly and, with the final ounce of courtesy he could summons, he helped me over the threshold, mumbled something in the way of a farewell and bolted the door behind me. His hand was shaking; his stubby knuckles rattled on the tin as he fiddled the bolt into position, securing him from sunlight and other intrusions. I heard three rapid footsteps from within, the distance from the doorway to his glass of whisky. Thus, I was the last person to see Leon Viney sober.

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Wi l d m a n ’s Gold by Leon Viney Dedicated to Sir Harry Huxtable My late leader, comrade-inarms and fellow slave to that accursedly cruel mistress, Greed. She took only my legs. He was not so lucky. L.V.

Foreword My name is Lawrence Vesney. My associate — that is to say the leader of our ill-fated expedition until his awful demise at

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Gajawarra Gorge — is, nay was, Sir Harry Huxtable. You will not have heard our names, unless you are a keen reader of the social pages of a certain newspaper, for until this expedition we had a mutual distaste for adventures of the dangerous kind, p referring garden parties with the British expatriates in Singapore. The greatest danger one might face there was from of the angry father of a pretty girl. Indeed, neither of us would have had any intention of so much as visiting Western Australia had we not on the one hand had such financial difficulties (unfortunate investments, though some had unkindly called us squanderers of our families’ money); and on the other hand, heard of the existence of Wildman’s Gold. That I write this legless from my wheelchair is testament to the unhappy reality that our endeavours were not singularly successful. That Sir Harry is no longer with us is convincing evidence of the unsatisfactory nature of the enterprise from his perspective. So why do I bother to write? There are two reasons. The first is obvious — what on earth else is there for a cripple to do but write? Writing has long been the last refuge for the u n h e a l t h y, hence the long list of bronchitic, consumptive, rachitic and insane authors. The second is that this is a strange tale which takes place in a land of which you, the reader, will know nothing. I mean no offence in this, for it can only be true, as there has been nothing yet written of it. You may know of the western part of Australia, though there is little enough written of the fledgling town of Perth or the few farming towns of the South-West. You may have heard sporadic reports of gold from The Pilbarra, of pearls from Broome, of farms the size of English counties. But you will never have heard of that land known to the local tribes people as Kajunuwurra.

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‘What?’ you say, ‘Australia has been settled for one and a half centuries; do you mean to say there are parts yet undiscov ered?’ Indeed, there are! There may be no mystery left in Africa now that the source of the Nile is known, the jungles cleared for agriculture, the secret recesses of the pyramids flooded with sunlight, and the pilfered contents of the pharaohs’ tombs put in glass cabinets for all to see who pay their 6d. South America, once a place of mystery, may now be merely an enormous cattle farm. But in this most remote part of Australia is to be found a commodity which probably even now no longer exists on this much-explored globe. The Unknown. Now you may never have experienced, and may never experience, The Unknown. I had never done so before Kajunuwurra and my accursed wheelchair will ensure I never shall again. But I can tell you this; to enter such a place as this without the forewarning of previous visitors’ accounts; without a map to give one the comfort of knowing longitude, latitude, altitude, whereabouts, destination; without a guidebook to consult; to enter such a dangerous place feeling so naked and ill-equipped is an experience at once so thrilling and so terrifying that words can but suggest at the intensity. Magnify this further by the factor of greed, caused by the prospect of reaching one’s dream of wealth beyond measure, and one might imagine that the pen and paper are weapons unworthy of the battle. If, however, in spite of my shortcomings with pen and ink, I can manage to instil in the reader even one-tenth of that intensity of feeling which Kajunuwurra imbued in me, then my efforts, and I hope those of the reader, will have been rewarded.

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The day after our tea party, my life took a detour and Viney’s came to an abrupt halt. On reflection, it seems it was the arrival of Polly and the incident down at the creek, that tipped the scales. Polly was Yerticle’s half-sister, I think, but Ye r t i c l e appeared pale beside her. She was rather odd-looking. Her round, coarse-featured face, while certainly not beautiful in any conventional sense, beamed a sort of blithe beauty when she smiled, which was when she was amused, which, it seemed, was always. She had come up from Broome on the back of the Malay trader’s truck. Their arrival, early in the morning, was heralded by a prolonged scream from Polly which sounded murderous, but turned out to be one of delight at seeing Yerticle, who was asleep in the sidecar. Polly

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leapt off the still-moving truck and ran the few yards to the motorcycle, and sat on his chest. His startled expression redoubled her laughter. She seemed a breath of fresh air for the camp, and especially for Yerticle. He was delighted to see her. He seemed altered by her. He smiled. He joked with her. For a short while he seemed to be carefree, as a child should be. Midmorning, I was helping the Malay unload some w a res from the truck, stepping over the wriggling, giggling forms of Yerticle and Polly who were wrestling with mock ferocity, when the unexpected rasp of metal on metal came from behind us. It was the time of day which made it unexpected, for when he had been drinking Viney rarely surfaced before noon. Yerticle looked up once, the broad grin on his face frozen there momentarily, and then with a quick sniff, like an animal in danger, his demeanour changed entirely, and any childishness was banished. Viney was drunk and in a foul mood. He was barefooted, bare-chested, and wore only a length of batik fabric wrapped carelessly about his waist. He had heard the truck, and the truck had whisky. The Malay trader appeared to know his market well. He drove his seemingly indestructible old truck up the coast each month, bringing goods at extortionate prices to the few settlements north of Broome. The largest, Beagle Bay, brought in most of its own supplies by sea, so his was a specialty market. Hard-to-get or indispensable goods at premium prices. In my case, fuel for the bike. For Viney; bacon, corned beef, two crates of Haig and Haig whisky, kerosene for his ever-burning lamp and a block of ‘Malay tobacco’. The transaction was protracted and conducted in an atmosphere of mutual mistrust, but eventually Viney

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retreated to his hut and paid the Malay with two new notes which he had retrieved from some secret hiding place within. It was Yerticle’s idea, not mine, for the three of us to ride to the creek. He wanted to get away from Viney, and even more so to get Polly away from him. While Viney was disputing the price of his purchases, Yerticle siphoned a can of fuel from the Malay’s forty-four gallon drum, filled the tank and managed to kick the bike back into life. Polly squealed her delight at the sound, and with Yerticle in the sidecar and giggling Polly riding pillion, we daringly c i rcled the truck twice, covering both vendor and purchaser in dust, mounted a sandbank we could just as easily have gone around, and took off for the creek. Everything changed after this. It seemed to trigger the events that came after. I would not have gone in the first place if I had known about Polly. At first it was nice down there at the creek, just the three of us, Yerticle, Polly and I. It was cooler, with some shady cadjebuts and long green grass. Then Yerticle went off up the creek bed, looking for something or other in the pools. She didn’t make any fuss of it, just smiled and lay back on the grass, hitched up her flowery dress and let her skinny little knees fall apart. I swear all I did was to touch her, once, barely brushed her thigh, and that only out of disbelief, or maybe curiosity. Regardless of what followed, I am sure that was all I would have done. But then it happened. The first clue was her smile which twisted strangely and then seemed to contort all the muscles of her face. Then suddenly she let out an odd moan and lifted her skinny bottom off the grass so she balanced only on the back of her head and her heels. I

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stood up, stepped back, not sure what this meant. It seemed alarming, but perhaps it was normal. I had no experience to compare it with. But then a jet of warm piss shot at me, and her eyes rolled back, and her tongue lolled out, and she frothed at the mouth, and she started to jerk. Not normal. Her head was going thud thud thud against the earth. Fear transfixed me so I could only stand and watch. I was certain she was going to die. A rhythm was established between head and limbs, like a perverse waltz, rapid at first, then slowing. Twitch thud thud. Twitch thud thud. I watched and willed it to stop, and eventually it did; and still I stood there, not quite believing it, willing normality on Polly’s now limp body. There came a yell from behind us, in the direction of the creek bed, and when Yerticle appeared he was like a real person entering a dream. He nudged me aside to get to Polly, who seemed lifeless. He showed no sign of panic. He had seen this before. That was it then. She took fits. It wasn’t me. It was in her nature. He cupped his hands under the back of her head, pulled her dress back down over her knees and in doing so, looked up at me. There was an intensity in his eyes which was difficult to read. There was disappointment and anger in that look. Accusation. ‘I didn’t do anything to her,’ I pleaded weakly. He now looked viciously at me. I recognised the meaning in those eyes. I had seen him look at Vi n e y this way. ‘You had fucking better not either. She’s my sister. She’s

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not right in the head, but she’s my sister. I’d fucking kill you, I swear it.’ His eyes confirmed it. It chilled me to see the boy look at me that way. I had done nothing that should make him despise me. Polly moaned softly, and, reassuringly, rolled onto her side. She was going to be all right. Yerticle squatted over her, and when I came close he positioned himself between his sister and me, glancing a warning over his shoulder. We stayed with her, down by the creek, until she came good. Yerticle knew what to do. She had bitten her tongue, but not too badly. Her head was all right; the ground was thankfully quite soft near the creek and there had been grass to cushion it. Her dress needed a clean. He sent me off while he fixed that. I brought back a blanket from the bike. I wanted to help, couldn’t do enough to be of assistance, to restore myself in his eyes. She just needed to sleep a while, Yerticle said, so the best thing I could do would be to stay clear. By the time we got back to camp it was almost dusk. Polly was back to normal, but Yerticle had had the whole afternoon to brood and he was edgy. He gathered up one of the scrawny camp chickens and almost absentmindedly wrung its squawking neck in one motion, all but decapitating it. He tossed the bird at my feet. I shrugged and gathered it up. With fresh supplies from the Malay we had plenty of meat, but it would keep. Usually when Viney had been drinking, Yerticle made himself scarce, but this time the boy sat right in front of him, playing with a knife. He risked a sharp kick to the kidneys in that position, or perhaps he was braced for one, hoping for an opportunity to let his long-suppressed

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anger explode. That the evening would end in disaster was probably, even now, fated. The Malay had provided excellent food, and we had eaten together, the five of us, about the fire, but it had been a tense and joyless meal. I was still feeling ashamed about the business at the creek, and anxious to do something to restore myself in Yerticle’s eyes. The boy himself was, I could see, growing steadily more quiet and m o re angry as the night pro g ressed, especially when Viney turned his attentions to Polly. Viney had become quite buoyant during the course of the evening, especially after he and the Malay had shared a pipe. What initially had passed for paternal cuddles were now something more than that. Polly had not seemed to mind or notice as his stubby hand stroked her hair, her cheek, her back. Now she was asleep, her head on his lap. And all the time Viney talked. The Malay’s wares had given his tongue new life. He held forth on any and every topic which leapt to mind. The Future Of The Aboriginal Race. The Science Of Eugenics And How It Proved Him Right. And, in amusing manner, My Father’s Death. I could not see the humour in it, but the Malay could. I did not like him. He had a look in his eyes which said something bad; that he knew too much, or could not be trusted, or would sell his sister. After he had smoked he covered it less well. He was bolder. While Viney talked of my father the Malay stared straight at me with glazed and untrustworthy eyes, and grinned openly. He gave the impression of having some secret knowledge which made my investigations a source of amusement to him. My father’s death was a joke. ‘I sincerely hope your obstacles do not prove too great

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for you,’ he grinned, and waggled his head. ‘Like trying to find cockroach shit in black pepper,’ proclaimed Viney, to their shared amusement. Then he lifted the sleeping girl’s head off his lap and stood up for the last time. His batik skirt could not conceal a prominent erection, and he seemed not to care. He adjusted himself, scratched his balls, then, shaking Polly awake, looked at me. ‘Myself, I could never understand why the likes of your dear father would risk their lives for the white pearl. To me they are like so many pale marbles. Now, the black pearl, that’s the one!’ He laughed loudly, patted Polly on the head, Come on g i r l y, let’s go and get some wood . He started off, with Polly trotting behind him, still half asleep, but then he stopped before her bro t h e r. He had seen insolence in the boy’s eyes. ‘What are you looking at?’ Yerticle looked straight ahead, eyes burning. Vi n e y swung a drunken kick at him, which the boy avoided without deigning to unfold his arms. I could see in the f i relight the muscles of his young shoulders, tense as fence wire. The old man had the presence of mind not to take a second swing. ‘You can get that fire going for one thing, you lazy little black bastard,’ he sang back over his shoulder, his last words to his son. Viney and Polly disappeared into the dark in the direction of the school. I could not allow Polly to be hurt. I still felt distraught about the incident at the creek. She could take another fit, and this time she could die. The boy was burning, but he could do nothing. I could not bring myself to look at his

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eyes, for I knew the anger that would be in them, and I knew part of that anger would be for me. It was I who had set Viney off on this latest drinking binge, I who had upset the balance, and I who had caused the girl to take the fit; that would be the way the boy saw it. And now as I sat there doing nothing while Viney took Polly off, I felt his disappointment and anger grow greater still. He looked up for a second, his eyes demanding action from me, then he ran off, angrily, into the darkness. After that there was a confusion of happenings. The Malay had fallen asleep, I recall, still wearing his provocative Cheshire-cat grin. Yerticle had disappeared, and I was unable to abide any longer the sounds of the old man’s grunting and snorting, the girl’s little sobs. Then there was a loud scream from Polly which seemed to go on forever, and when we got to the school, Yerticle and I, there he was, slumped against one of the uprights. A bit of a dent in his head, a small trickle of blood from his nose. Inspector Thomas explained later that he must have knocked his head against the pole as the heart attack struck. He had seen similar cases. Odd circumstances, he granted, but nothing to bother the coroner with. Leon Viney was declared dead from natural causes.

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Wi l d m a n ’s Gold by Leon Viney Chapter 31 (final) ‘Glory Bound’

Synopsis of Foregoing Chapters: Having each spent his inherited fortune on gay living in Singapore and facing the grim prospect of having to return to England to work, Lawrence Vesney and Sir Harry Huxtable are excited to hear the story recounted by Te r rence ‘The Fox’

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B u r roughs, recently returned from Western Australia, of Wildman’s Gold. Wildman, so The Fox told them, had been a convicted forger who had claimed, fifty years before, to have d i s c o v e red a hill of gold nuggets in the remotest part of Australia’s north-west. Successive forays into the area known as Kajunuwurra had all met with death and disaster, but one survivor staggered to safety, struck dumb and painted in gold dust. Vesney and Sir Harry made a deal with The Fox whereby they would use the last of their family fortunes to finance an expedition, and he would supply the only known copy of Wi l d m a n ’s map, together with the tracking skills and bushmanship which would be required. On arriving in the port of Broome, Vesney and Sir Harry are surprised to learn that local fortune-hunters appear not to have heard of the legend, and they grow increasingly suspicious of The Fox, so as a precaution make secret arrangements for a ketch to meet them at Camden Harbour in exactly one month. They then make provisions, purchase a mule team, and the three men head off to Mount Blair Station, the furthest outpost of civilisation on the continent, in the shadow of the ominous Blackrock Cliffs which mark the start of Kajunuwurra. T h e re t h e y m e e t T o m m y M a n n , a w i r y A b o r i g i n a l stockman of immense skill and athleticism. When told of the nature of their quest, Tommy looks mortified. ‘No boss, no cross ’em those hills, Djakuwa will get you.’ The fear in the black man’s eyes tells Vesney and Sir Harry that they are certainly onto something. They ask about gold and Tommy shakes his head. The gold is a trap, he tells them. With much persuasion, he offers to take them only as far as Purnullunu, The Warning Cave. An immense wind threatens to blow them off the Blackrock Cliffs, but the sure-footed mules prove a good choice of

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transport, restoring Vesney and Sir Harry’s faith in The Fox’s judgement. They reach The Warning Cave, where the walls are covered in mysterious and ominous paintings, fearsome images featuring mouthless men who appear to glow. These images are of the Watjika, warn Tommy; men who in ancient times had crossed the hill into Kajunuwurra, only to return with golden skin and unable to speak. For generations, no man fro m the tribe had dared to cross into the land of the fear e d spirit Djakuwa. While Tommy prepares to leave, a bag strapped to one of the mules is seen to move. The Fox almost shoots blindly at it, but Tommy cuts open the bag to reveal his beloved, the beautiful Kyla, who has stowed away to join him, fearing he would go to his death and leave her alone. Kyla convinces Tommy to accompany the white men on their dangerous journey, for without his bush skills they would surely perish, and to allow her to stay with him even unto death. They compare Wildman’s map with one on the wall of The Warning Cave, and find they match precisely. Kyla sings a haunting song to protect them from danger before they head down into the valley. The five face many dangers in the Kajunuwurra Va l l e y. First, a violent willy-willy and then a landslide threaten them as they enter the massive Gajawarra Gorge. They see small figures of men scurry behind an outcrop — they are covered in red ochre, carry short spears with iron spearheads, and Sir Harry glimpses a golden bracelet on the arm of one. The party bathes in the cold waters of Gajawarra Gorge at dusk, and suddenly the waters turn scarlet. They look upward to see a terrifying light they know could only be Djakuwa. Her image is too bright to look upon dire c t l y, but they can all glimpse her awful face. Her voice however is sweet and seductive, and she invites the men by name ‘to sup at my table,

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to drink from my cup, to rest upon my breast.’ So terrified is Kyla by the display that she panics and almost falls from a ledge, and the heroic Tommy leaps to save her, but in doing so he falls to his death. Kyla falls into Vesney’s arms and from that time on, believing To m m y ’s spirit to have transferred to Vesney, she attaches herself to him. The Fox calculates the site of Wildman’s Gold, from the map, to be three miles up the Gajawarra Gorge, which has sheer walls along which many more small figures can be glimpsed as they dart from rock to rock. The water in the gorge is shallow enough for the mules to pick their way along, but as they approach the sea it grows saltier and The Fox becomes concerned about the possibility of crocodiles. No sooner has he said this than Sir Harry dies a horrible death, caught astride a mule as a mighty croc takes off each of the beast’s legs, then takes the panicstricken knight under water. The three continue on foot, excitement mounting as they recognise gold sediment in the riverbed, then small nuggets, then rocks of gold! But they are unprepared for the riches which meet their eyes when they enter a magnificent cave made entirely of gold. They are unchallenged, but then comes the sweet voice of their tormentor, Djakuwa. Vesney and Kyla are terrified, but The Fox begins to remove his shirt saying, ‘Let us hope that Mr Wildman was a good forger, friends, or we shall all surely die.’ He reveals tattooed crests on his back and chest, which match precisely the crest on the golden walls of the cave. It is, The Fox tells them, the Crest of the Protector of Colchis, who in ancient days had attempted to repel Jason and his fifty raiding Argonauts! Djakuwa fills the cave with her red light, and her sweet voice now trembles with rage. She is sworn to protect the wearer of the Crest, yet she knows this wearer to be a thief, with no right

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to wear it. To destroy the Crest would be to destroy herself, she knows, but her rage is too great. Her sweet voice is suddenly thunderous. ‘Burn imposter, thou shall not take the riches of Colchis.’ At which the tattoo upon The Fox’s chest glows red hot, gives off smoke and the terrible smell of burning flesh, and he dies screaming in agony. This act of treachery against the Crest spells the end of Djakuwa. The cave fills with her sad pleadings, then her curses, flashes of crimson light, then a terrible howling which shakes the cave, which seems ready to collapse. Vesney hurriedly collects some trinkets and makes for the mouth, Kyla following. They look back once to see the wizened shape of a black-cloaked bag of bones, its awful jawbone agape in a silent scream. Then they step out into the sunlight. Ahead of them is the most dreadful vision. The tiny men who had guarded Djakuwa’s cave have been transformed. No longer covered in red ochre, there they stand, row upon row, mouthless and golden-skinned like the Watjika men in The Cave of Warning. They stand like sentries and make no attempt to prevent the two moving but, incredibly, part down the middle to allow passage. There is not a sound to be heard. The two negotiate the silent throng unharmed, to arrive at the shore. To Vesney’s joy, moored offshore, as planned, is the ketch. Fate, he thinks, has finally delivered them to safety ... until he calls out to the ketch and there is no answer. Now read on.

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The burial was a rushed affair because, by the time Inspector Thomas arrived, Viney had been five days in the tropical heat and needed burying, quickly. The three of us had already dug the hole. Yerticle had dug like a man possessed; I had to tell him to stop. He seemed to view the chore as some form of penance. Polly dug some dirt out aimlessly, then sprinkled it back in. The Malay o ff e red no assistance. He was busy sorting thr o u g h Viney’s belongings, and made frequent furtive excursions between Viney’s hut and his truck. We made Leon’s corpse look decent. I put a new pair of trousers on him, and made sure the belt was well buckled up. Yerticle gave him a shave. Polly polished up his black shoes so she could see her wide eyes in their reflection. The Malay insisted it was a waste to bury them. Spectacles

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completed the effect; Leon Viney, quiet lover of books, gone peacefully to his maker. I placed his copy of She re v e rentially on his chest. He looked serene, almost beatific. I had an idea to cross his hands over the book as if he held it to his heart, so he could have Ay e s h a eternally in his embrace, but the elbows would not bend. We decided against the Malay’s offer to break them. Leon Viney was provided more dignity in departing this world than he demonstrated while inhabiting it. It was a secular funeral, but he would not have minded that, being no great Christian. We lowered him down elegantly enough. Inspector Thomas made a few solemn comments in his official capacity, which seemed to give proceedings a sense of gravity. Then Yerticle spoke a few words in a voice which surprised me by being so loud and resonant with feeling. God please rest his soul and judge him kindly. And forgive me for ... if I wasn’t always a good son to ’im. Then I read a passage from Ayesha: The Return of She, which I had borrowed from Viney’s collection. It was Leo Vincey’s death scene. It had a solemn, dramatic, yet poetic feeling to it, and seemed just right for the occasion. I dedicated it to the memory of Leon’s beloved Alice. Go thou down the dark paths of Death, and, since even my thoughts may not reach to where he sleeps tonight, search out my lord and say to him that the feet of his spouse Ayesha are following fast. Bid him have no fear for me who by this last s o r row have atoned my crimes and am in his embrace regenerate. Tell him that thus it was appointed, and thus is best, since now for him also mortality is left behind and true life begins. Command him that he await me in the Gate of Death! Then we filled him in.

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Inspector Thomas seemed somewhat mistrustful of me, which quietly offended me at the time, for this was the first time I had met him and so I had not yet come to understand the man’s lack of judgement. I often caught him out of the corner of my eye, looking me over for signs of ... what? He was a naturally suspicious man, which may be a good enough thing in a law officer, but not if combined with an inability to judge human c h a r a c t e r. Fortunately, he was in a rush to return to Broome, and so with a little reluctance agreed to delegate to me the responsibility for the children’s delivery into care. He gave me very specific instructions, and made it clear that these instructions were given by the authority of the Protector of Aborigines, and that any deviation f rom them could cause me to face pr o s e c u t i o n . Prosecution, for assisting him! That was an indication of the way the man thought, and, had I thought about it, should have served as a warning to me not to offer my assistance to him again. Yerticle was to go to the mission at Beagle Bay. Polly was to go back home to Swan Point. So the Inspector departed, and the three of us prepared to head north. Only the Malay was staying behind at the camp. He had negotiated some arrangement with Inspector Thomas to ‘clean up’. I overheard part of the negotiations, which appeared to involve the delivery of a ‘surplus’ crate of Viney’s whisky to the inspector ’ s residence. The law in these parts had long arms, it seemed, and sticky fingers. As we left, the Malay was standing at the doorway to Viney’s hut. He had removed the door from its one hinge and discarded it to one side, and was contemplating the dimensions and weight of the

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mahogany writing desk, and the suspension of his truck. It was a grand thing to leave that bloody camp. Out of respect to Vi n e y, we kept a respectful silence as we bumped past the mound of freshly dug soil with a rough cross atop it, but that gravity soon was overwhelmed by the exhilaration that came from our escape. Soon we were three kids skiving off from school, intoxicated by the thrill of our emancipation, revved up by the noise of the motorcycle, amused by every bump, loving the wind in our hair and dust in our teeth and sun on our faces. We had been reborn, forgiven, heading north to the land of milk and honey with new unblemished souls, leaving the past behind us in the murky south. This is how I recall it. Three kids on a black motorcycle, the boy riding pillion, the girl in the sidecar, tearing noisily through the grey dust and scrub of Dampierland, all screaming and laughing, even the dark boy who had not laughed like this for a long time. And then the girl standing in the sidecar, holding a blanket above her so it trailed behind her and flapped like a spinnaker, and crying out, I’m flyin, hooeee! I had made a mistake in packing all the gear around Polly in the sidecar, for most of it was gone by the time we stopped to make camp. Some things had fallen out by accident, or smashed when we hit a bump, but many items she simply threw over the side in her enthusiasm. Her attempts to fly had lost us a blanket and a canvas tarpaulin. Had we tried, we could easily have made Beagle Bay before dark, but something compelled me to set up camp, though it was still the middle of the day. I felt in no rush to get there; I had an instinctive feeling that we should

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take our time. They would probably not yet be expecting us and, besides, I was not ready to let the boy go. I had even begun to fear for his happiness at the mission. I had a vision of him in a stiff-collared shirt, looking miserable. While we collected firewood, I asked him what he thought when the Inspector told him he was to go to Beagle Bay. ‘I thought, well it looks like I’m goin’ to Beagle Bay.’ ‘That’s all?’ ‘That’s all.’ ‘Are you happy about it?’ ‘If I’m happy about it, I go; if I’m not happy, I still go. What’s the difference?’ ‘Well, if you were not happy, perhaps I could speak to the Inspector and ask ... ’ ‘I already spoke to ’im. He asked me where I wanted to be sent. I told him the same as what you said.’ ‘What I said?’ ‘You said Go to the Germans for God’s sake. Remember? So that’s what I said to him. I’ll go to the Germans, for God’s sake.’ I must have looked stunned. The boy glanced at me and almost smiled. ‘Ah, he was going to send me there anyway. I thought I might as well pick the right answer. Makes no difference what I say. If I’d said, all right Inspector, I’ll go to Timbuktu, he still would have sent me to Beagle Bay.’ ‘And what about Polly. Did he ask her too?’ ‘About Beagle Bay? No, she’s not allowed there. They wouldn’t let her near. She’s too black.’ He almost smiled. ‘And anyway, Father chased her off last time for playin’ with the boys. Said she’s bad.’

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‘But, if you’re not happy ... ’ I started pleadingly. ‘If I’m not happy then what, you’ll turn me into a little gudia boy will you, so I’ll have some say in it? You can do that, can you?’ He looked down, mumbled a curse, kicked a rotten stump and stooped down to inspect the remnants. It had been hollowed out by a million termites. ‘ You’ve been readin’ too many of the old man’s adventure books, I reckon, if you think you can turn me into a gudia boy.’ He rubbed the rotten wood between his hands, let termite dust sprinkle through his fingers to the ground. I started to speak but he cut me off. ‘Just don’t bother tellin’ me any more of these things that you’re goin’ to do for me. You’ve done enough already.’ He left me with a glance that fleetingly recalled the way he used to look at Viney. I was starting to get an idea of the thanklessness of parenthood. I had done a lot for him, but there was not a sign of gratitude. It stung me to be likened to Viney. Viney himself had said the same thing, that he felt we were similar, and I was aghast. I had thought my moral superiority was obvious. But the events of the last few days seemed to have muddied the waters. Since the incident with Polly at the creek, Yerticle no longer afforded me quite the respect or even friendship that he had earlier, and there seemed to be nothing I could do to redeem myself. Perhaps I had changed. But if I had changed, it was for the better. I had grown in maturity and responsibility. This was quite the opposite direction from Viney, who always avoided responsibility. I had immediately taken

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the younger ones into my care, where he had left them to fend for themselves. Where he wallowed in his grief, I had taken mine on by coming to the place where Father died. It was most unfair to compare us. The activity of setting up camp seemed to dissipate Yerticle’s anger. He and Polly pre p a red an enormous stew made from provisions stolen from the Malay’s truck, and as night fell a kind of peace had settled on the camp. In the end, it was a sublime night under the stars in the heart of Dampierland. For Yerticle this was to be a rare night of freedom. The following day I was to deliver him to Beagle Bay, as Harold, but all he talked about that night was ‘the mob at Swan Point’. He talked about ‘cousins’ and ‘brothers’ and mostly about Michael. Michael, said Yerticle, knew everything. If anyone knew the truth about my father, Michael would. I did not really believe this, but I was grateful for it. It gave me a reason to continue north. In truth, my reasons for travelling now seemed to have less to do with Father and more to do with me. I wanted to move on, and it did not seem to matter too much where so long as it was some place new. I simply wanted to get away. I had begun to understand what it is that motivates those who travel endlessly, just for the sake of it. My father was such a person. I had often enough heard adults, friends of my mother’s, compare me unfavourably with my father. I had heard him say it himself; only once, when I should have been asleep, not to me but to my mother. He’s growing up soft, don’t make a girl of him. I was a mummy’s boy, I suppose, and this was a disappointment to him. He was an adventurer, though not a risk taker. For

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him, adventure meant to confront risk and overcome it by meticulous application of scientific principles. I could never understand how he could leave us alone in pursuit of so selfish an ideal. But now, I thought, I felt the stirrings of something similar inside me. The prospect of returning to the safety of Canterbury felt stifling and depressing. Perhaps that is how Father had felt, at the thought of coming home to us. Three times that night Yerticle asked me to reassure Michael that he would be all right at the mission. I knew that once the boy had been taken into the mission, there would be no more trips up to Swan Point to see Michael. And though he looked to the ground, not wanting me to see his eyes, I recognised that look, the aching for a father lost.

The following morning I stood alongside Yerticle, who watched my face as I looked for the first time upon the Shell Church of Beagle Bay which rose, incongruously sheer and the colour of fresh cream, from the surrounding dirt and scrub. A belltower stood a full thirty feet above the arched doorway, and atop the tower was a steeple and four little turrets redolent of a Bavarian schloss. It was without question the most impressive structure I had seen since leaving Perth. Here, in the bush, it seemed a miracle. It shimmered in the early morning heat and I half expected it would burst like a bubble, leaving just the squalid collection of huts that I had expected. Yerticle was watching my face because he was worried that I might not be impressed, that I might have seen a more impressive church of shell in England. I grinned my

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approval to him. It was wondrous, I said. He beamed back, reassured. We had arrived, noisily, on Sunday morning as the children of the mission — neatly dressed, hair-combed, face-scrubbed children — were filing into the church. Polly raced over and disappeared inside, hand in hand with a pale boy. The spectacle and noise of our arrival proved too great for a few of the bolder ones, who broke ranks and made a bolt for the motorcycle. They were caught within a few yards, ear-twisted and napesmacked back into line, and they filed reluctantly into c h u rch, casting furtive glances back at us over their skinny shoulders to reassure themselves that we would not disappear. We had also attracted the attention of the priest who, clearly annoyed by our noisy intrusion, waved an irritated arm in our direction, semaphoring the message ‘turn that bloody contraption off!’ His initial appearance was formidable. He seemed ancient, Teutonic and humourless. His black robes hung loosely from his gaunt frame. His scrutinising eyes made me suddenly conscious of my own appearance. I had not shaved for weeks. I must have looked an unlikely sort of legal guardian. But when the priest cast eyes on Yerticle, his countenance quite changed. He squinted to make sure that his eyes had not deceived him, then beamed and called out and came over to us. ‘Harold, you have come back to see us. I am delighted!’ He embraced the boy, who all but disappeared into a dark fold of his robes. He smiled cheerily at me, and I saw now that my first impressions were wrong. His face was weather-beaten but kind. I explained myself and the boy’s

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c i rcumstances, and on hearing the tragedy of Vi n e y ’ s passing his face grew happier still. ‘So now you will stay with us, Harold! This is wonderful!’ The boy was still half lost in the priest’s robes, like a small girl in her mother’s skirts. He seemed unusually childlike, as I had not seen him before. ‘Harold is a wonderfully bright boy,’ the old man told me. His accent was thick and an occasional syllable exploded from his lips in alarming fashion. ‘He has stayed with us several times when his father has been, well, indisposed. And each time I have been most upset to let him go. But now, you can stay and learn properly, Mister Harold. Less of your adventure stories I hope, and more of the Holy Bible, eh? Maybe, please God, one day, our first priest? Mmm? Perhaps, one day, Father Harold?’ He stroked the boy’s head. ‘We have talked about this before. Now we will have time to talk about it again, lots of time.’ All of this was a great surprise to me. Yerticle had always seemed to me to be quite independent and in need of no one’s approval, yet here he obviously enjoyed the priest’s special attention. I began to understand his curiosity about the Germans, and I wished I had been more circumspect in my answers. The priesthood! Father Harold! He had told me nothing of these prospects. I told the priest that I thought his church magnificent. ‘We are very proud of it,’ he nodded. ‘Completely made of shell! Every brick! The whole structure has been lifted out of the sea. Sink of it! The great pity was that Father Thomas died just before the last brick was laid, so he never got to see this.’

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To build this in the middle of the scrub was an achievement to rival the pyramids, I suggested. ‘Oh, maybe not so grand as that,’ he protested, ‘but in our own way we all worked perhaps like Egyptians.’ A dissenting voice came from within his cassock. ‘The Egyptians didn’t build them pyramids, Father. The Hebrews did. They had ’em as slaves.’ The priest flashed some nicotined teeth at me, appearing to enjoy the boy’s provocation. ‘So, Harold, you are suggesting that I am a slavedriver now, is that it? Well, well. And who is to be Moses then, Harold. Is it you? Perhaps I shall change my mind and let you stay with your adventure books, after all. Even when you read the Bible you get too many ideas!’ The priest’s indulgence of the boy surprised me. He rolled his eyes and of f e red me a look of mock exasperation. ‘I am very glad that you admire the church, Mr Vayber.’ He pronounced it as Viney had, but unlike Viney it seemed not to be from a desire to provoke. ‘You must come inside and see, for you will see it is not a mere tomb for the dead, as were the pyramids, but a place for all the people to come and worship Our Lord. That is something worth giving one’s labours to, I hope you will agree, even if young Harold is not so sure.’ I did have to agree. A pearly Aladdin’s cave, that was the inside of his church. Everything was newly finished and shone like buttons. The altar was made from motherof-pearl shell and gleamed with lustrous soft pinks and yellows. Much of the patterning seemed quite frivolous, as if Antonio Gaudí had been given creative license with a crate of pearl shell. Some symbols were re c o g n i s a b l y

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Catholic; a lamb carrying a crusader’s flag, pearly chalices filled with nacreous hosts, a crucifix with the pearly inscription, J.H.S. Dominus meus et Deus meus. Among these familiar images were the symbols of the local tribes, the Yaoro, Djugun, Ngombal, and so on. And then there were various pearly animals, pearly daisies, and such a startling variety of other pearly designs that it was clear that in the end artistic freedom had triumphed over religious convention. The boy was taken to face the congregation, and the priest called him Harold and told everyone that he would be helping him with the service each week. None of this seemed unexpected to the boy. He was given a white cassock, and he appeared comfortable in it. When the priest raised his head the response was so startling that I jumped. All the children rose as one and sang in an alarming high-pitched vibrato such that I thought we were being attacked. When it tailed off , uncertainly like a swarm passing, the priest started his monotonous discord which, being partly in accented English and partly in accented Latin, must have been quite unintelligible to those gathered. The boy rang the altar bell precisely on cue, and assisted with Holy Communion. He had done this many times before. After Mass, the congregation hurtled out as one, and by the time I got outside the motorcycle seethed with little b rown bodies. Sunday was a day off, Yerticle said, it wasn’t like this on other days. A group of young women sat in a circle in the shade, talking and sewing and laughing and polishing cutlery. Yerticle played marbles with a couple of older boys and soon collected a goodsized purse full. Polly was chasing the boys, and was

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faster than any of them. I spent the morning taking five at a time for a ride around the mission. The priest offered us morning tea in the presbytery. He knew my father’s name and said he had ‘only ever heard good spoken of him’. At one time he seemed to suggest that Father had died because of the greed of others, but when I showed interest, he denied any specific knowledge. I gave him one bottle of Viney’s whisky, keeping the other for myself. He gave me some fuel for the bike. ‘It is not often that I meet someone who has come to this place without wishing to profit for themselves,’ he said. ‘Thank you for bringing Harold to me. It is a happy day for us all.’ I liked the priest. Any disquiet I had felt the night before had now gone. The boy would be cared for here, I could see that now. He would be given a chance. He would have a future. Our departure was delayed while we waited for Polly, who had disappeared. By the time she strolled back, a large group had gathered around the motorcycle. She s a u n t e red past them coolly and leapfrogged onto the pillion seat. She tried to suppress a grin, amused by the fuss. She had been dancing, she explained, when pressed by the priest, and a few of the boys laughed. The priest’s hand was on Yerticle’s shoulder as we left. ‘Good luck, Yerticle,’ I said. ‘You got to call me Harold now,’ he replied. ‘I will tell Michael you are being looked after. I’m sure he will come and visit.’ He looked uncomfortable. ‘Just tell him I’ll be all right,’ he said.

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Harold tried to wrestle Polly into the sidecar, but she wriggled in behind me, arms about my waist. The boy looked at me earnestly and told me to look after her. It was an instruction, not a request. I had seen those eyes before and I knew the meaning in them. I promised him I would, and Polly giggled, pushing her skinny knees into my sides. A chorus of high-pitched warbling saw us off, almost drowning the noise of the bike. ‘Goodbye, Mister Va y b e r, and God bless you,’ conducted the priest. ‘Goodbye. God bless y o u ! ’ e c h o e d h i s u n r u l y congregation. The older kids raced the bike a good way up the rough track, and even as they ran they still chanted, ‘God bless you,’ though they could scarcely be seen in the cloud of grey dust.

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God bless you. It’s not fashionable any longer, to say that. It was commonplace once, as a farewell, or by way of thanks, or often for no reason at all. If you sneezed on the bus you would be blessed from all directions. Its use has shrunk away to the elderly and the Irish. Mary Belotti uses it from time to time; to Baker, but not to me. She knows I’m not the religious sort, I suppose. Are you interested in an old man’s view of religion? Being ninety-six years old is different to what you might expect. You expect to become religious towards the end. This is how I stand on the issue of God. There is no bearded God in the heavens, we all know that now. But now that we have all stopped saying ‘God bless you’ to one another (because we don’t want to be thought

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ignorant, or elderly, or Irish), we have lost some common bond that was once there. We say instead ‘See you’. What does that mean? Nothing. We have grown more distant because we don’t say ‘God bless you’ to one another. So that one might look back at those silly folk who believed in b e a rded men in the sky and feel a bit jealous of their closeness to each other, their goodness to each other. It’s not scientific. It’s like ‘Open Sesame’. You just say it and it works. Mind you, this is just my theory, not my practice. I am not known for my religious leanings. On the contrary, if lovely Mary Belotti were to read these musings she would be startled. If Nurse Rae Plewright saw them, she would have Pirate Pete Pullman up here in a shot and he would probably double the aspirin dose. Still it rings in my ears, that shrill chorus of God bless you’s that saw us off from Beagle Bay and trailed behind us as we headed off into the scrubby interior of Dampierland. It was a sound of happiness, even joy, but tinged with a poignancy that troubles me even now. I had d e l i v e red Yerticle into the joint trust of God and the German Pallotines. He was now reborn as Harold and, with Viney gone, there could be no going back. A mile down the track I yelled back to him, knowing it would be lost in the wind and dust and the noise of the engine, God bless you too, Father Harold. I was uncomfortably aware that things may have gone another way for Yerticle had I never come to Vi n e y ’ s camp. I could scarcely claim that the boy had benefited from my being there. Polly’s fit, Viney’s demise ... I had not caused these things, of course, but Yerticle’s accusing eyes that day at the creek told me that I was not c o n s i d e red entirely innocent either. He had looked

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betrayed, as if he felt foolish for ever having expected better of me. Perhaps I saw the act of taking his Polly back home to Swan Point as part of my penance. I told myself it fitted in with ‘my plans’; I could meet the much-vaunted Michael who, according to Yerticle, might have known my father. It suited me for now to believe this, though I knew the boy’s opinion of Michael was so high that if my father was Teddy Roosevelt he would have said the same. As far as Yerticle was concerned, Michael knew everything and everyone. In truth, I had no ‘plans’ and I was growing less sure what it was that I was aiming to do. Father ’s death was only a part of it now, but it provided a noble reason for me to move on, and north was a direction that had always seemed to me a purposeful one. We had set off from Beagle Bay late in the afternoon. That was one mistake. I had presumed Polly to have Yerticle’s instinctive knowledge of direction, and that was another. She would just say, ‘Bit more yet’ and giggle. It was soon clear she didn’t care where we were going. I had hoped to make another mission, Lombadina, by nightfall, but we ended up camping under the stars somewhere in the middle of Dampierland. I have had better nights. Polly was in a silly mood. Since the night Viney died, she had been even more wild than she was befor e . Tonight, she wanted to dance. She wanted to walk to Swan Point in the darkness. She had plenty of ideas, all of them highly unacceptable. And yet, in Yerticle’s absence I felt very protective of her. Once before he had left her in my care and I had proved myself unworthy of the task. I was determined to make amends.

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Polly fell asleep next to the camp fire. I decided to sleep a safe distance from her. About fifty yards away I found a soft sandy bed and shrewdly, or so I thought, swagged down under a long-leafed bush so the early morning sun wouldn’t waken me. I checked the ground by the kero lamp for ant holes, and there were none. I congratulated myself on my bushmanship, learned from the boy. I was still near enough to listen for that awful sound, the thud thud, the thought of which sent a shiver down my spine. But it if came, this time I could not be the cause. And if it happened, I vowed, this time I would not freeze, I would cup my hands under her head as I had seen Yerticle do. I would protect her. For hours I must have lain there, my back comfortable against the warm earth, glimpsing now-familiar constellations through the foliage, and listening in the darkness to the sounds of Polly sleeping. She was a reassuringly noisy sleeper; each grunt, each cough, each stirring told me that all was well. One time, she called out quite clearly the words Where you gone? but then there was nothing, as if she had called out in her sleep. Some time later I heard a soft rustle of leaves, and was startled to look up to see her standing, skinny-legged over me in just an oversized shirt and with an expression, if anything, of pity. ‘What you doin’ under there?’ she demanded. I didn’t really have an answer. ‘You meant to be lookin’ after me, not leave me out there to the ngaari.’ I apologised. She asked me if I was scared of girls. I told her she could come and sleep near me if she wanted. ‘I’m not sleepin’ under there,’ she said, scratching

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sleepily at her thigh and casting disapproving eyes over the leafy canopy above me. She looked at me quizzically. ‘You like havin’ them things all over you?’ She clicked her tongue and was gone before I could work out her meaning. Twice, I almost went over to her. To check on her. To protect her. For Yerticle. But she was once more making her noisy sleeping sounds, so I left her alone. What things all over me? ... I must have slept fitfully for I recall dreaming of premature burial, of being eaten by worms, and when I awoke, head baked in the early morning sun, I knew that I had lost my mind. The dream had persisted into wakefulness. I could feel them. My flesh was aquiver on my bones. What sort of punishment was this? They had eaten my muscles. They were at the corner of my mouth, down my neck. Dear Jesus, I was paralysed. Worms filed up the leg of my pants, tickled my scrotum, climbed out of my arse. If I were to open my sightless eyes they would climb out the empty sockets. I breathed once, to see if I could. A wriggler shot up my nose and I choked on it, forcing me to sit up, cough, open my eyes. There were thousands of them. I was just a lump in a blanket of wriggly larvae. Thousands of disgusting green bulbous heads nodded at me. They looped along, quivered, shot out jets of green shit. Endless reinforcements parachuted down from the overlying, now leafless, branches on sticky webs. I spat out a live globule and ran clear. I shook them from hair, pulled them from earholes, stripped off my pants and plucked them from arsehole. I slapped them from my flesh, all the time making a throaty grunting

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noise, too preoccupied and worried to scream out loud. Polly had been standing there, probably for minutes, with a huge grin concealed by a hushing hand. Only when I looked up to see her did she take her hand away to let the scream of laughter out. It had taken some holding back. She danced around me, hysterical with laughter. She stopped in front of me, transfixing me with her grin while her skinny fingers peeled a straggler from my unexpecting penis, raised it up, and dropped it wriggling onto her big pink tongue, and with a thop it disappeared. She dropped another on my tongue and, startled, I dutifully swallowed it. Then with a huge grin, she popped out a pink tongue with her worm still sitting t h e re, then spat it out. ‘Don’t eat ’em!’ she scre a m e d , sending herself back into hysterics. That was it. I grabbed my trousers and walked, with as much dignity as the circumstances permitted, back towards the camp to give them a good shake out. Behind me she was still cackling. She did stop occasionally to shout out, ‘You look like you got the ngaari in you!’ or ‘You like eatin’ them little fellas?’ or ‘You still got one worm there, Mister. I seen it, long skinny white one!’ and this would just set her off worse than ever. The girl continued to giggle for the rest of the day, f rom a position three inches behind my left ear. Each time, she would tickle my ribs where her fingers held on, so even if I could not hear her, which was a rare mercy, I could still sense her amusement. I ended up tossing her in the sidecar, it was so irritating. Then she tried to look very grown up and serious again, to please me, but burst into uncontrolled tears of laughter after a couple of minutes of trying.

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I gave up asking Polly for her advice on directions, which was simply to invite another bout of giggling. Finally, a post proclaimed the word ‘Lombadina’, but we didn’t take that track. We headed due east instead, towards King Sound and, hopefully, Swan Point. Polly’s directions were unreliable. Sometimes she said, ‘You goin’ the wrong way, silly bugger,’ and giggled, and sometimes she said, ‘Little bit more yet,’ and giggled, so she was no use at all. I had almost despaired of ever reaching Swan Point when we saw the Malay’s truck coming towards us. He looked knowingly from me to Polly and back. He had just left Swan Point, he said, and Polly giggled. ‘See, I told you,’ she said. Not far along the track there came into view first the milky green sea, then the attractive promontory that was Swan Point itself, and then a small settlement comprising a cluster of huts and a grove of trees, including some sickly fruit trees. ‘Here’s Swan Point,’ exclaimed Polly, uncharacteristically direct and accurate on a point of geography. The first to greet us was Topsy. She came charging out like a she-elephant in a bright floral cotton dress, and screaming in a similar manner. It seemed the scream was one of delight. It was a great mercy for me to see Polly swooped up in Topsy’s great arms and taken to her enormous bosom. I had delivered Polly safely, and now, thank God, she was someone else’s responsibility. Topsy was the mothering sort. She gave me a big kiss on the forehead, almost suffocating me in her enthusiasm. She was a really big woman. I stood there wax-like as she and Polly pinched me and pushed me, all the time exchanging identical grins and giggles. A small crowd of

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women and children soon gathered, all smiling this same smile, while Polly regaled them with a jabbered version, it was clear, of that morning’s humiliating worm attack. Shrill laughter erupted as she recreated her trick with the worm on the tongue, which was even funnier in the retelling, apparently. I tried to smile pleasantly through this latest humiliation, thankful at least that it seemed goodn a t u red, and that there was, as yet, no evidence of h o s t i l i t y. I looked at those gathered about me and suddenly felt very white and conspicuous and vulnerable. There was a row of men sitting against the back of one of the huts a good distance away. They looked a serious lot, most of them wearing br o a d brimmed stockmen’s hats. They could not have missed our noisy arrival, and yet had deigned only to look a c ross at the squawking women and children. Their coolness bothered me. What would they say when they discovered that Yerticle wasn’t with me? That he wasn’t coming back. That I had taken him away. After a time, three of the men wandered across to investigate. By now the women and children were all staring at my crutch, a sea of shiny toothsome faces trying to imagine the scene currently being described by Polly. Unable to imagine an acceptable explanation for my role in the scene she portrayed, I thought it best to excuse myself. Polly and Topsy’s cackling floated behind me, seeming to mock me, as I walked (affecting a stride that I hoped would look confident without being threatening) to join the men who had now gathered around the motorcycle. I need not have worried about an inquisition from them, for they appeared interested only in the bike.

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They were, all three, tall and somehow wise-looking men, and well-muscled. Their attire — big hats, big boots, huge belt buckles — spoke of hard work with white men, but on their upper chests and forearms were shiny tribal scars. Their greeting could have not been less like the boisterous one from the women. I thought them at first to be surly, for I had not yet become familiar with their sort of shy deference. We stood around and looked at the m o t o rcycle, the men keeping their eyes to themselves beneath the broad brims of their hats, giving nothing away. At intervals we each had to chase flies away from our faces, so there was a general communal waving of limbs which seemed to suggest a common bond, and which compensated somewhat for the lack of formal greeting. A gentle-looking chap in a red flannel shirt showed particular interest in the bike. He had eased himself into a position with one hand on the handlebar and one leg over the seat before he looked up at me with a nod and a smile, to which my only possible response was a nod and a smile. He climbed on, got the feel of the seat, investigated further. ‘Where’s Yerticle? Is he stopping at the mission?’ I looked up. It was the tallest one, who had seemed the natural leader. ‘Yes. I dropped him at Beagle Bay.’ He nodded sagely, digesting this information. This had to be Michael. ‘The old man got killed, eh?’ he asked, as if about the weather. ‘Viney? Well, he’s dead, yes. Heart attack.’ He looked me directly in the eyes for the first time and almost seemed amused.

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‘Oh, that’s all right then. I thought his head was smashed in. Long as the boy’s not in trouble.’ His eyes were full of answers, not questions. He was amused by my coyness. ‘So you want to go out on the lugger next trip, eh?’ The lugger? I returned his smile, which he took as assent. It seemed wherever I went, strangers knew my intentions better than I did myself. The cowboy on the bike looked up again and I nodded back again. The unasked question this time must have been can I take it for a spin? Without signal the third man hopped on behind him, and they took off up the track, lost in a cloud of dust and children, leaving only me and ... ‘Are you Michael?’ ‘Are you police?’ ‘No!’ ‘Yeah, I’m Michael,’ he grinned. His front teeth were missing. ‘He’s my boy, Yerticle. He’s a good boy. He likes you, you looked after him, eh?’ ‘Well ... I tried,’ I said weakly. I searched his face for signs of condemnation but there seemed none. ‘Well, you can come out on the boat with me then,’ he said, as if arrangements had already been made. ‘Should be here in a couple of days. You want to go diving?’ The words startled me. ‘I’m not too keen on diving. I don’t think I’d be much good at it.’ ‘That’s good!’ he said, eyes wide. ‘It’s safer that way! You don’t want to get too good, or you’ll upset the Jap divers. You should know what they’re like!’ Why should I know? Was he referring to Father?

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Bug-eyed, he made a slash across his throat, making a coarse noise at the back of his throat, kkkrrr. ‘Finished,’ he grinned. ‘So you better leave some shell for them!’ He started to walk off, then stopped. ‘You can stop here for a couple of days, Webber, then I’ll take you pearling,’ he added. I hadn’t even needed to tell him my name.

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It was not always easy to know how to take Michael. Sometimes he would appear to make fun of the tribal ways of the people here, and I would begin to think of him as an outsider like me, but then he would occasionally seem quite mysterious and tribal, and at such times he would take offence at innocent remarks of mine. I always felt a little uncertain with Michael. Consider the story he told me that sunset on the beach at Swan Point. The Day The Sky Turned Red, you might call it. See what you make of it. I remember it well because I know my history and geography, and I recognised its significance straightaway. You may dismiss it as a mere legend, but you would do so out of ignorance. Michael would have been four or five years old in 1883, which, I feel sure, is the year this happened. Vivid sunsets

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were noted the world over that year. I recall as a boy reading all about it. In Poughkeepsie, New York, the local fire brigade was repeatedly called out to attend phantom distant fires. Eventually the cause was identified, thousands of miles away, west of far-off Java. Volcanic ash in the atmosphere, you see, reflects the sun’s rays. Michael told the story on the beach, about dusk. We — that is Michael and I, together with all the children of Swan Point — had gathered to sort and clean the day’s catch. It was clear that the kids had heard it many times b e f o re, for, even though he spoke in English for my benefit, the little ones seemed to anticipate much of it with their wide eyes and gasps and giggles. Occasionally he would offer them an aside that I could not understand, and they would look at me and laugh. The sunset we saw before us, Michael told us, was nothing compared with that sky of his childhood. That time it was not just the western sky, but the whole sky that turned red. And not just a soft red like this night; blood red. And not just at night, but by day too. The moon appeared bright blue as if scorched by the night s k y. These signs seemed to be full of portent. All the adults seemed afraid for no one had seen this before, not even Michael’s father, who had always seemed to know all and fear nothing. Everyone hoped that each new night would see things return to normal; sweet blackness and a starry sky. But it did not, and each night they would all lie, frightened and wondering what it was they had done to cause the bloodied sky. Then the signs grew worse. The seas became angry. There was a violent crashing of waves like no one had seen before. Great pieces of coral from distant islands

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were tossed up on the beach. Pieces of cut timber, a mast f rom a sailing vessel. Somewhere a land was being d e s t royed and its remnants piled high on the shore s before them as a warning that they might be next. But they were not. With time, it all settled down, and everything appeared to go back to normal. But a little time later something happened which seemed to explain the terrible warning. It was Michael’s father who saw it first. A terrible sight, a little way up the coast. I remember how Michael’s countenance then changed, as if bedevilled, as he delivered the tale’s climax. He stared past me as if in a trance, eyes wide with fright and teeth bared in mock horror, and he let the single word fall from his mouth. Gudia. The white man! All eyes turned to me. Michael spoke again, this time his voice trembling as he pointed at me. The gudia was coming! The laughter started then and continued in paroxysms through the night. The apparent cause was the thought that the punchline was ... me. Pale and puny, I was clearly deemed unworthy of a scarlet sky. I had no option but to ignore the taunts and giggles of the little ones, and just as Polly’s tale about the worm had gained me acceptance with the women of Swan Point, so it was that after this latest humiliation I at least felt I was accepted, even if the little ones came to view me as a kind of comic scarecrow. One could not believe all Michael had to say. Much of what he said to me was, I think, just for effect, to disarm me, or to tease. But mostly Michael was kind to me. He seemed at least not to blame me for taking Yerticle to the mission. Perhaps he knew the decision had not been mine

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to make, that I was, after all, under orders from Inspector Thomas. Perhaps he even felt that the mission was the best opportunity for the boy. Michael was in a unique position to judge, since he seemed to have a foot in both the white man’s world and his own. I could see now why the boy admired Michael so much. I learned a lot from him, and if he treated me at times like a child, I took no offence for in this strange environment I felt quite useless. Besides, like Yerticle, I had had too little of a father’s attention to ever be annoyed by it. Each day we would lead a trail of giggling children along the beach and onto the reef, as he pointed things out, explaining the obvious to my untrained eyes. Barnanga was food. The water, oola. The beach was jala. Mananya, the reef, and the waves, algoorooloo. That says something for my memory, I would say. I would have not said these words for seventy-five years. But they are still there, just as Michael told them to me. Seagulls, alorgi. Crabs were laraloo. The little audience of excited kids would laugh with delight at my pronunciation. To them it seemed hilarious that an adult should need to have a seagull explained to him. More so an adult with long white legs. William Dampier was wrong. This was a striking place, in watercolour pinks and blues. Sculpted sandstone cliffs dropped sheer to the soft pink of the beach sands which, held wetly in your hand, proved to be coarse grains of red, white and brown; not sand at all but remnants of

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coral and shell, pulverised by an eternity of pounding surf. There were jagged reefs which stretched away northwards as far as Sunday Island in the middle of the mouth of King Sound. Daily the largest tides in the world flowed in past Sunday Island to fill the Sound, then swept out again towards the Timor Sea, revealing once more the reefs and the fringe of mangrove forests and mudflats. Life at Swan Point centred on the reef and its rhythm followed that of the tides. This daily cycle was the work of the ancestral spirits that lived in the waters of the Sound, Michael said. Each fresh tide replenished, and then receded to expose the reef’s new bounty. In this way those who had gone before ensured the survival and wellbeing of those who remained at Swan Point, and this is how it had always been. At low tide the stick-legged boys stripped bare and picked their way across the reef. They made it look e a s y, but the reef was sharp and the tides tre a c h e ro u s . I defied their laughter at the stark whiteness of my legs and tenderness of my feet, and wore boots and rolled-up trouser legs. Thanks to Yerticle’s tuition, I was quite skilled in collecting oysters, or so I thought, but I was off e red plenty of tips by the four- y e a r- o l d who had attached herself to me, and when I came back to camp with my small offering, Polly peer e d d i s a p p rovingly in the pail and said something that made all the women laugh. The older boys would stand, metal-barbed spears at shoulder height, each on his favourite spot on the edge of the reef, motionless for minutes, and with a keen eye and lightning flick of the wrist occasionally one of them would pull in a flapping silver reef fish. One afternoon

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the men went out in the dinghy and came back on the tide with a turtle, which put everyone in good spirits for an evening around the fire. None of this was how it should have been, if the school textbooks of a million children of the Empire had been right, and it was not at all what I had expected. The Australian Aborigine was ‘A Dying Race’, or at least, that is what the caption in my high school reader had insisted. There was a fuzzy photograph which seemed to p rove it; a skinny, scarred, loinclothed desert nomad, spear in hand, standing on one foot with the other tucked behind the opposite knee. To a class of nine-yearold boys in Canterbury it seemed beyond dispute that he was ill-equipped for survival in the twentieth century, and none of us doubted that he and his kind would fall victim to those natural processes which ensured only the fittest survive. The white man’s role, we understood, was to treat the hapless blackfellow with kindness. There was some expression about smoothing the pillows of the dying man. But here about me at Swan Point nobody seemed to need their pillows smoothed. The chattering kids doing handstands on the pink sands of the beach; the giggling semicircle of women; the well-built stockman running back to fetch his hat which blew off when he was riding my motorcycle; this mob of good-looking, grinning specimens, well-fed from an abundant sea on fish and turtle and dugong and oysters, just as their pare n t s w e re, and their parents’ parents — this was a dying people? Here, it seemed to me, was a sticking point. A flaw in the theory. Our school textbooks had not contained photographs

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of the likes of Topsy. How risible it would have been to see the caption, ‘A Dying Race’ below an image of her well-fed frame. Nor were we shown images of the likes of the self-sufficient Michael, nor the sea of happy faces of the children of Swan Point. We only saw pictures of those who looked close to death, and none of us ever doubted that it was the same for them all. If I had come here first, I may not have been so certain that it was the right thing to leave Yerticle at the mission. Now I could imagine him happy here, wrestling with his cousins on the beach. The longer I stayed the more that thought gnawed at me.

And the length of my stay, it appeared, was going to be more than the ‘few days’ Michael had promised. Those few days had become a week, almost two, and still no sign, not even talk, of a boat. The delay gave me too much time to think — about Yerticle at the mission, about Polly (who had become rather possessive of me, as if I were an exotic but defenceless stray whom she had taken home), and most of all about going to sea. I started to think that it had been a mistake to come here, and that it would be a much bigger one to go to sea, on a lugger, as Father had. I hated the sea. In fact, I might well have returned to Broome by land, were it not for Viney’s last remaining bottle of whisky, which I drank alone on the beach on the night before the boat came. This night was a milestone in my life, the first time — first of many, I regret to say — that I ever got drunk alone. There had been dancing, singing and wrestling at the

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camp, with a sort of farewell party going on. The men from the stations were to return to work the next day, so spirits were high, which only made me feel more m o rose. Viney’s last bottle was still in the sidecar, wrapped in a blanket marked AIF. Warmth for inside and out. I grabbed them both and headed off alone, down to the beach. I found a perfect place, protected by a recess in the sandstone cliff. It was a warm, humid November night and one could almost smell the rains coming. Before me was a picture postcard full-moon-on-water. A couple of times I saw a flash of silver, perhaps a dolphin or a stingray caught momentarily in the moonlight and then gone. I held the bottle up to the moonlight, admiring its alluring iridescence just as I had seen Viney do, and drank from it. The liquor filled my throat with a delightful warmth and I gave myself over to it, allowing thoughts to come that I had always repelled. I was alone and by the sea, so tears were of no importance. I shed some for Mother, who would be worried that she would lose me, too, to Broome; and Mother made me think of Marta and her dead boys; and that made me think of Viney and the dent in his head; and that made me think of Yerticle, who was with the German Pallotines, but who really should have been here because his family was here and his ancestors were in the water, the cold water that was starting to lick at my feet. Later, with the bottle almost empty, a sense of calm came over me. It was nice lying there on the cold wet sand of the beach, away from the others. A cloudless night; it felt like my sky. And my sand, my moon, my

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sea. Strange, that a twenty-one year old Englishman in the wrong hemisphere should feel so much at home. I patted the sand with my feet, sending splashy morsecoded messages down through the earth, under the reef, out to sea. Out to Father. There, the reason I should feel at home here. I too had ancestral spirits in this water. Somewhere out in the waters before me, Father had gone down, and was brought up dead, from these very same waters that now lapped around my waist. Later, as the tide receded, it could take me out to him. I knew the direction, from the maps he gave me, and I could float out, peacefully, under a magical red sky, to that spot seventy miles out to sea, north-west of the Eighty Mile Beach, and then go down ten, twenty feet; down, down to the murkier depths of n i n e t y, one hundred feet, and there he would be, as usual, checking and rechecking his equipment and seeming not to notice me ... or perhaps this time he would raise his head, see me and smile, beckoning me to come over to him ... ‘You goin’ drown, Mister!’ It was Polly’s voice. I must look after Polly, above all else. For Yerticle. I owe him that. ‘You bin drinkin’ too much, you silly bugger!’ She gave me a kick in the ribs, shook me awake. Her grin flashed teeth and eyes that seemed an unnatural blue-white in the moonlight. She took the last couple of mouthfuls from the bottle, tossed it away, then helped me to my feet. I was wet to the waist. She cajoled me up the beach away from the advancing tide, and when I glanced behind me I saw small waves crashing against the

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sandstone cliff where I had been propped. ‘You’re lucky I found you,’ she said, as she mothered over me, wringing out my trousers, wrapping me up in the blanket. She had given up on trying to walk me all the way back to camp and settled for a dry, protected spot to lay me down. She bundled me up as she might a child, kissed me sweetly, and stayed with me, her skinny limbs wrapped around me to stop me shivering.

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The next morning Michael kicked me awake saying, ‘The boat’s comin’ in an hour, you better get movin’, if you’re still comin’.’ He seemed displeased with me for some reason. The boat was coming, is that what he’d said? Jesus. I was in a sheltered place on the sandstone cliff, far above the beach. By the time I was fully awake, Michael had disappeared. My head pounded, I felt ill, and when I squinted my eyes open the brightness stung them. I tried to recount the events of the previous night that had got me to this place. Polly had helped me. I looked for her, but she had disappeared, and with her, my trousers. Feeling rough and draped in just a blanket, I w a n d e red back to the camp, where I found my pants drying on the bough of the tree which overhung my

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motorbike. Nearby a few women and children had gathered, seemingly awaiting my return. There were the usual giggles as I dressed, but I had by now become almost immune to the effect of that female laughter. One of the stockmen hovered nearby, the one who had been so keen to ride the bike on my first day here. I knew his name to be Ivan, but he was quiet and I had not spoken with him before. Today he seemed to have something to say to me, which made me anxious. He was not a man I would wish trouble from, especially seeing him now in his full stockman’s attire; sturd y black boots, trousers worn shiny by the saddle and secured by a huge silver belt buckle embossed with a bucking bull, a red flannel shirt with the long sleeves rolled back to reveal well-muscled forearms and scarred tough hands, and all topped off with a broad-brimmed black felt hat. He was tall, tough and sinewy, and you could bet his reflexes were sharp as a tack if he was given reason to move. If I were a calf, I’d be down, tied, bound and branded in seconds. I need not have worried. It wasn’t me he was interested in, it was the motorcycle, though he took his time to get to the point. He was very softly spoken; you might say shy, but not weak. He did not look at me as he talked, but at the ground in front of him, sometimes pulling a piece of bark off the tree to inspect or a leaf to chew. ‘You know Liveringa Station?’ he asked. His English was perfect, surprising me, as I had presumed from his quietness up to now that he spoke none. ‘No, I don’t. I’ve only been up here for a short while.’ ‘I’m going back there now, least for a few weeks till the Wet comes. I’m boss stockman there. I get everything

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organised. The boss tells me what needs doing. I get the boys to do it. You know how many cattle we branded this year? Four thousand.’ ‘That sounds like a lot of work. Is he a good boss?’ ‘Yeah, he’s good enough. Pays up all right, that’s better than some round here. That means I can look after this mob back here. There’s my boys, these two.’ He pointed in the direction of two sets of shiny teeth. I knew one of them well enough. Little Sir Echo. He had followed me around for a week imitating my voice and mannerisms. A good little mimic, but a pest. ‘Yeah,’ Ivan continued, ‘I’m gone for ten months of the year. Mainly just come back here when the rains come. Not this time, this was just family business. I got to go back, finish up at Liveringa till the rains come. You can’t do much work in the Wet, so then the boss says, “Okay, you fellows can go pink-eye now, come back in February. You go off walkabout.” I say to him, “Bugger walkabout boss, I got three hundred miles to go, how ’bout you lend me a horse so I can go ride-about!” But no way is he going to let me take a horse off the property unless I buy it first. “Three hundred miles is nothing for you blackfellas, you used to walk that, you’re just gettin’ fat and lazy. The walk won’t hurt you,” he says. Thre e hundred miles! This time I was lucky and got a lift with the padre.’ He stooped down and used a piece of bark to draw mysterious lines in the dirt. Perhaps it was a rough map of sorts. I was starting to sense the rub of this. ‘That was lucky, getting a lift.’ ‘Yeah. Just gettin’ back now, that’s the problem,’ said Ivan. He stood up, sifting some dirt through his fingers,

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and strolled over to the motorbike. He placed one hand on it, almost r e v e re n t i a l l y. He patted the fuel tank. ‘You got no juice in her. I had to push it back home last night. I can put some more in for you. We got some, for the dinghy.’ ‘Well, if you can spare it. As you know, I’m going with Michael on the lugger today, so I won’t be needing it for a while ... ’ He feigned surprise. ‘Oh. You’re going to sea, eh? Well, you’ll need someone to run that bike down to Broome for you.’ ‘Yeah. All right.’ Suddenly there were smiles and callings-out and backslaps as he and one of the other stockmen removed my gear from the sidecar and put in theirs. ‘You won’t need that old blanket now you got your trousers on,’ Ivan told me, and I didn’t bother objecting as he stowed it a w a y. They refuelled and generally fussed over the machine in a knowledgeable fashion. It was clear they had been hatching this idea for a while. ‘This will scare the shit out of the cattle,’ said Ivan. Cattle? The deal had been for him to take it to Broome. I conceded defeat. ‘Ivan, look after the bike for me, all right? If I need it back I’ll let you know.’ Ivan shook my hand, a happy man. I could imagine the impact of their arrival back at Liveringa! Down at the beach Michael was waiting. About him was the usual assembly of adoring kids, trying to form human towers, climbing on one another’s shoulders, then crashing in a laughing heap. Little Sir Echo was doing

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some impersonations for the women; mostly me, trousers were part of it. I paid no attention. Michael still seemed out of sorts, and now Polly was looking at me oddly. I felt very ill from Viney’s whisky. Not far from here were the tidal creeks where some of the pearling luggers laid up for repairs, or during the layup in the Wet, when cyclones made pearling too dangerous. Michael was expecting the dinghy from one of the luggers to come and collect us soon. How he had obtained this knowledge was beyond me, and I hoped he was wrong, just this once. The anticipation made my stomach worse. He heard the motor minutes before I could. There were two men in the small boat, scr u ffy sorts from first impressions. With some alarm I realised that I was going to sea with these wretches. Up until now the idea of going to sea in a pearling lugger had been a fanciful one. Even when I was heading to Swan Point, I had thought it unlikely that Michael would be there — or if he was there, that he would be unwilling to let me go to sea with him — or if he was willing, that for some reason or other, it would not eventuate. Frankly, I now had cold feet. If I had really wanted to join a pearling lugger I could easily have signed up on my first day in Broome. But, at this point, there seemed no choice. Michael was already disappointed enough with me, so it seemed. My motorcycle had just gone roaring off in a southerly direction. There was no fighting it; though my head and stomach said no, I was going to sea. The two salty dogs turned out to be a Koepanger called Dollop, whom I at first presumed to be an Aborigine from another tribe, and a consumptive bag-of-

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bones Irishman named Jim Troy whose first words were, ‘Who’s the white boong!’ He seemed familiar with the place. He patted Polly on the head, gave Topsy a big hug and called her his mother-in-law. Jim Troy, I learned to my disquiet, was the skipper. He was anxious about the turning tide and advised us all there was ‘No time for standing about chewing the fat.’ Michael threw a few last-minute items into his hessian bag — gloves, a flask and small tin, all appearing from nowhere in various helping hands — and we pushed off. Polly was very sweet and seemed genuinely sad I was going. I kissed her cheek, which made the little ones laugh, but Michael roughly steered me away from her and into the dinghy. Michael, I noticed, was the last to get in, the Irishman surprising me by steadying the dinghy for him. The chorus of goodbyes faded away as we motored along quietly, heading north to the mouth of King Sound. No one had much to say. Michael and the Irishman kept watch ahead of the dinghy, anxiously it seemed. ‘Reef, whirlpools, just about anything,’ offered Jim Troy when pressed. ‘This Sound is nothing but bad news. You can never get out too quickly.’ We passed Sunday Island where a settlement could be seen, a queer hotchpotch of huts, goats, banana trees. A mission island, Jim Troy told me, run by a disreputable sort named Hadley. Jim Troy said he was a slavedriver. Michael said he was no worse than most. Jim snorted a protest, and they fell silent again. The absence of talk left each man to his own thoughts, which unhappily gave me a lot of time to think about the wisdom of this venture. I was not my father. I really hated the sea. I had prepared for this trip as a child would. I had

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thought about it only in a detached way, my thinking largely coloured by the romantic images of Taunton’s adventures. I had even prepared a notebook, intending it to be used as a daily journal of my nautical adventures, and pencilled on the front a picture of a sailing ship reminiscent of that on the cover of my old copy of Australind. What I had failed to consider was the proximity to water. On a steamer one can put the water out of mind, and after a time if one perfects the self-deceit, one can almost forget the sea altogether. But I was heading out now on a small dinghy to join the crew of a pearling lugger which would stay out to sea until the hold was full of shell, and a rising sense of panic began to well inside me at the prospect. I looked at the faces of the three others for signs of sympathy, but Michael had a look of perfect equanimity, the Irishman was rolling a c i g a rette and Dollop the Koepanger busied himself repairing a small mechanical part from something on the lugger. Behind us and to either side of us the shoreline was mud and mangroves. It was too late now. I cursed the writers of romantic adventure stories, with their embroidered and seductive lies. My feeling of dread grew as the bigger vessel at last came into view and loomed steadily larger. I had come to associate this shape, the silhouette of a lugger, with Father’s death. It was quite motionless, and in its silence and its stillness it seemed to me like a ghost ship. We came alongside the lugger and my disquiet grew worse as I read the peeling letters painted on her side. LUP–S. Lupus? The Seawolf? No, not an L, an E. Not a P, an R.

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EUR–S. My God. Eurus. It was one hundred feet below this very lugger that my father had died.

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November 30, 1920 King Sound. On Board Eurus. Very unwell and feeling ‘green’ in all senses of the word. Spent afternoon offering my morning meal to fish, to gr e a t amusement of crew since we have not yet weighed anchor and there is little movement of boat. Stomach has been overwhelmed by conspiring forces of i) whisky hangover, ii) stink of rotting oyster flesh and whatever awful food concoctions the Malays cook up & iii) the anxiety of knowing Father’s last steps were upon these decks. Yet again I seem a source of general amusement. I suppose I should be glad to give so many people such pleasure; first native women, then groups of giggling children and now a motley bunch of stinking Asiatics. I smile wanly, lacking the strength to fight it today. Nausea is the most wretched sensation in the world. Give me pain over nausea. I

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do, quite honestly, feel like death. The very thought that the lugger might soon weigh anchor and head for the open sea fills me with dread. It angers me that I have managed to contrive for myself this awful predicament. I have no option but to remain on this poxy hulk, for the nearest civilisation is perhaps fifty miles through mangroves. I did seriously contemplate taking this latter option until Michael (who has been kind and seems to have forgiven me, for what transgression I’m not sure) pointed out two saltwater crocodiles basking on the far shore, and a third, fully ten feet in length, lying motionless in the water, like a log, not fifty yards from us. Never again shall I find Captain Hook’s predicament funny. Everyone else on board busying themselves with their assigned jobs, equipment etc. I have no idea what I am to do and frankly don’t care. My guts are in turmoil and I just wish I wasn’t here. I grimly recall what John Nowry told the Bamford Royal Commission about Father’s crew. ‘It was stated that this man was brought up from below dead, but it was possible that he might have been killed, as the crew with whom he had been working consisted entirely of black men.’ Looking around, I wonder if I can trust these black men. If I didn’t feel so bloody sick, I would perhaps be fearful. I wonder why there was never an inquest into Father’s death.

Dec 2, 1920, Timor Sea, heading north for the ‘Holutharia Banks’ or possibly the ‘Ashmore Reefs’, depending on whom one asks. Jim Troy cheerfully mentions (as Irishmen will with bad news) that we are in cyclone season now, and most other luggers have laid up. Further, that this being an even-numbered year, it is

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expected that there will be ‘a bad blow’. 1908, he says, the whole fleet was wiped out off Eighty Mile Beach, two hundred dead, and every two years since then. 1910, 1912 ... except 1914, ‘Ah, but now, we had the Great War that year instead.’ Michael must have seen I was starting to look pale, and reassured me that it is too early in the season to worry. He has lived through some terrible storms at sea, he says, mostly back in the skindiving days when the law only permitted the fleets to operate during the ‘warm water’ months of September to April. Michael has a fascinating story to tell, but he only offers it in small portions. He was ‘blackbirded’ to the Lacapedes at age thirteen or so, and forced to dive for shell. It was not unusual for children that young to be forced into service, he says. Even pregnant women were considered fair game; in fact it seems they w e re prized for their extra lung capacity. This was before modern diving suits were in use; you just jumped in as you were or, more usually, were pushed. It taught him two things, he says, ‘To speak English, and to leave the f—ing diving to the Japs!’ Michael has a timeless dignity about him. I can imagine him commanding respect whether he’d been born into a tribe of New Guinea headhunters or into London society. I like him more and more, and admire him, and I can see the other men do too, especially Jim Troy. Jim Troy is a laissez-faire skipper, you might say. He seems to sleep most of the day, and I’ve never seen him show any interest in navigation etc. The Japanese, especially the two older divers, are the de facto chefs-de-mission. All the others (except perhaps Dollop) seem to defer to the Japs, but there seems no great fondness there. Guts have settled, thank God. Setting sail was good for them, and the wind means the stink is not so bad. I’m not really sure where we are headed, the two destinations I have recorded are simply names I have heard mentioned. No one has asked me to

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do any work yet, and I’m happy to wait until asked. I am not my father. I possess no special skills or knowledge which could possibly be of use on a pearling lugger!

Dec 3, 1920 Timor Sea ... west of Adele Islands. Feeling much better. A little exhilarated in fact. Sea air! It has occurred to me perhaps Jim Troy is a Fabian, running his ship along socialist lines! He certainly appears not to want to impose his will, the usual pre rogative of the skipper. He defers all responsibility either to the Japanese or to the Koepanger Dollop, who alone seems prepared to stand up to their browbeating. Jim Troy has only one rule: ‘No Jabbering.’ This means that instruc tions are to be infrequent, not too loud and in English, or an approximation thereof. Any transgressions ‘give him a bad head’. So, he lies in the shade as the number one diver (Japanese) sings instructions to the crew (Malays & Michael), while occasionally Dollop counters with a conflicting instruction. The result, especially when between them they tried to manoeuvre the vessel over a reef in readiness for a dive, is a cacophony in a language no one seems to fully understand, a sort of nautical Esperanto. ‘Lower fores’ls! Make fast! You take her too far upwind! Make fast, you idiot! Down stays’l! Too far upwind! Make fast, you’ll take her onto the rocks, you black monkey!‘ ... and so on, reaching a crescendo until interrupted by an angry volley from slumbering Jim Troy in a gruff Irish brogue, ‘Stop your bloody jabbering and just sail the f—ing boat, would you!’ which quietens them down for a short while. Once, during a trade of ripe insults between Dollop and the Japanese, Jim Troy roused sufficiently to shout, ‘Would you all shut up, or I’ll be forced to take over myself,’ which amused

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Michael no end. It did seem a rather idle threat from Jim Troy; a man of few words but even less action! I have been assigned a job, at last. Tender’s Assistant, you might say. ‘You’d best help Dollop,’ said Jim Troy. That’s all the instruction I’ve received to date, and the Koepanger looks none too happy for my assistance. He is in charge of the air c o m p ressor and was busying himself tinkering with it, in anticipation of the first dive. At least I know a little about compressors, through Father. When the Royal Navy divers came to Broome in 1912, they brought new Heinke kerosene engine-driven compressors, which could give the diver a much greater supply of air than the old hand pumps, so allowing divers to reach previously unheard of depths. The potential was obvious; the chance of collecting hitherto unreachable shell. Even the best Japanese diver had never collected shell at 170 feet, and the damage to his reputation if an English diver were to bring up treasure from that depth would have been immense and permanent. But it did not happen that way. Father’s friend, John Nowry, dived at 170 feet, but came up paralysed. Father died at 100 feet. The unit on this lugger is modern, certainly not the same one that Father had installed eight years ago. It has condensers to filter and clean the air, and a pipe pressure gauge. Dollop is jealously protective of his equipment, and I am not to touch it! He finally gave me a rag and told me with a dismissive sweep of his arm to ‘go rub down the handrails’. When once I touched the compressor, he seized my wrist, glared at me, and pushed me back on deck. I can understand his desire to prevent anyone ‘tinkering’ with this vital equipment; my father liked to say that a well-maintained compressor and a good tender is the diver’s life insurance policy. But there is something in Dollop’s manner which suggests something more than attention to

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duty. I am sure he doesn’t want me on the boat. As it turned out, the two older Jap divers disliked something to do with the first location so, after much arguing and pointing over the side, we set sail again. So I am yet to see a dive and the compressor is yet to be fired, (although I think the Tender’s Assistant has been!). Watching Dollop’s performance, and seeing how anxiously the Jap divers watch him, has brought home to me how utterly the diver depends on the tender to do his job well. A few seconds lost concentration could be disastrous for the diver. For the first time I can appreciate how vulnerable Father would have been to sabotage. The diver’s airline is literally a lifeline, just as the umbilical cord is for the child in the waters of its mother’s womb. Should the airline be cut, or the air supply turned off, the diver, 100 feet below, would be helpless. I look at Dollop now (he is, as I write, on all fours ‘praying to Mecca’; the direction of which is apparently always aft!), and can’t help but wonder how it would feel to have my life in his hands. I’m not about to do it, but tomorrow the Japanese divers will. The two older divers are rather unapproachable, but the third diver is just a skinny boy, a few years younger than me, I would say. The ‘try diver’, Jim Troy calls him. We have exchanged smiles. Sunny is his name. NB. We had understood that Father was meant to be diving with Moss and Richardson, but Jim Troy let it slip that the Eurus was not in that company’s fleet. Jim Troy says he thinks it has been in the same hands ‘for years’. Other than that, he is not of much assistance. In common with many, he is not keen on answering questions, especially if one shows the least bit of interest in what the answer might be. ‘Perhaps he went out for a run with another company, to test his luck,’ he suggested. ‘Who knows. It was a long time ago.’

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Dec 4, 1920 First day of diving. Very exciting, also very busy. Heavy work and tiring. Michael ‘showing me the ropes’. First shell in hold now. No pearls yet, these are apparently much rarer than I had thought. Boat starting to stink of oyster flesh again as the Malays open the shells, under vigilant gaze of Japanese. They dry the flesh and cook it in their obnoxious soups. Bleh! I do like the Malays, however, especially the one called Sam who has an infectious smile. Most unlike the trader from Viney’s camp; these are very open and friendly. They add colour with their batik skirts and headscarves. The three of them are as thick as thieves, and they gamble endlessly. Happy boys, all with rather silly moustaches, and they will unashamedly hold hands affec tionately; I could never imagine Englishmen doing that! Sam invited me to join in their gambling games but I declined as they appear practiced, and Jim Troy says ‘they’re not just thick as thieves, they are thieves’. All dives must be completed by dusk, so the sunset is doubly attractive for signalling the end of a day’s work. I am left with only enough energy tonight to lie back and watch the brilliant setting of the sun, and on the horizon the silhouettes of other luggers and one beautiful schooner, black against the red, like a sea butterfly. Michael and Jim Troy are trading stories. Speaking within earshot of the Malays (and for their benefit, I suspect) Michael told us what his ancestors at Swan Point used to do to Malay poachers, insisting that his father came to prefer the taste of Malay to dugong! Jim Troy countered with an even less likely tale of his great-grandfather who, he alleges, was ‘The Giant of Kerry’! These two men bring out each other’s stories. They share a link to their ancestors which appears to be innate. I seem

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to have none of it. It seems at times that I know nothing even of my own father, and beyond that, less than nothing. Maybe Michael is the ‘Black Irish’ one hears talk of. He has the Irish sweet melancholy, and leg-pulling humour, and dislike of pomposity. They seem also to share a common dislike of the English, which is frequently directed at me, as sole representa tive of my country on board. The more I think about this concept, the more I am convinced! Swan Point could have been an Irish village; the children, the shenanigans, the singing, the women who really ran the place ... Black Irish! And the name certainly fits, Michael. No wonder the two seem such kindred spirits. I suspect Michael’s story was directed at the Malays to warn them to be honest in their dealings. As shell openers, temptation must present itself from time to time. Jim said something about ‘snide pearls’. In any case, I am finally beginning to enjoy this adventure, in the manner that, as a thirteen-year-old boy reading Henry Taunton’s adventures by torchlight, I expected to. Pearling in the Southern Seas! A motley crew of all shades! Intrigue! I have taken time to warm to it, but perhaps I do have some of the stuff of an Alan Quartermaine, after all. NB. On reflection, I feel I should have said ‘the stuff of a William Webber senior’. I have begun to appreciate, as I never have before, that he was every bit the adventurer and risk taker that any of those concocted characters were. As I lie on the deck of the Eurus, amongst life-toughened men, I feel honoured to bear his name, though in this company I am a pretender. As a Navy man, father was accustomed to working among men, and to living with risk. It is different for me. I am with these men, but I am not really one of them, nor could I ever be.

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Dec 7, 1920 At last, the Japanese divers seem happy! They do insist on things being ‘just so’, but after three days of fruitful and largely uneventful diving, with a hold starting to fill with shell, they at last appear content. The number one diver even slapped Dollop on the back and grinned in a chummy way after the last dive today, so there seems to have been a truce of sorts there. Still, the divers rarely emerge after dark from the ‘rat’s hole’, as their cabin is known. Jim Troy advised me to leave them alone in their cabin as the diving makes them bad-tempered, and they are best left undisturbed. All sorts of secret things appear to go on in there — always a flame, the smell of strange things burning, and sometimes humming. The Mysterious East, it seems, in miniature — but Sunny’s explanation makes it seem not so inscrutable. It seems they burn pith balls, take cadjebut oil and use exotic liniments to massage away their ‘rheumatism’ at the end of a day’s diving. Sunny is sixteen. He is from the village of Taiji where, he says, all the best divers come from. He will work for six years, until he is twenty-two, when he will return to Taiji to ‘pay off’ the parents of his betrothed. He keeps a tiny yellowed photograph in a small metal case on a chain round his neck, so she lies next to his heart when he dives. She looks a very young child, but the picture is probably not recent. In Taiji there are forests! In Taiji there are hills, cliffs, waterfalls! In Taiji the men catch whales from small boats a short distance off the beach! (All this without any common language, but with much gestic ulating, head nodding and reassuring smiles.) It is hard to reconcile the image of this shy boy with that of the pearl diver into which he transforms five or six times a day. The metamorphosis is fascinating. First, he sits quietly by

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himself, a wet skinny eight-stone boy, just in his thick woollen underwear, fingering a rice-paper charm around his neck; eyes closed, head nodding and lips moving noiselessly. I imagine this to be a form of prayer. Perhaps it is a plea to the spirits of his dead Taiji ancestors for protection under the sea. Or perhaps it is less mystic, simply contemplation of the task ahead. Whatever it is, a certain change takes place and he will not reply when I speak to him. There is no trace of the shy boy, no smiling, and no fear either, just apparent calm and concentration. After a time, he stands and begins to ready himself for the dive, in unhurried manner, every movement deliberate and elegant, as if full of a special significance. He soaps his hands, then passes them through the rubber cuffs and pulls on the canvas dress. Dollop assists him in this, fussing like a bride’s dressmaker, and with the same attention to detail. His boots are pulled on for him, great heavy lead boots to keep him upright in the water. The effect at this point is comic, with just Sunny’s tiny girlish hands and head poking through, and his torso and limbs looking ridiculously swollen due to the padding. Next, Dollop places the heavy metal corselet on his shoulders, securing it to the padded collar. This forms the base for the helmet, onto which the metal dome is secured with a half twist. A lead breast weight is attached. Then the round glass face piece is screwed into position. Now Sunny is locked away from us, his face impassive behind the glass. Mine would show terror, revealing my fear of what would happen if the glass broke, or steamed up so I could not see, or if water leaked in. But Sunny appears fearless, and all sense of the ridiculous vanishes once he dons the huge metal dome. Two lines attach the diver to the lugger, and both are life lines, of different sorts. The first is of heavy, hairy manila rope, which physically secures him, and which is also the diver’s

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‘voice’ to the tender. A code of tugs can say ‘go port’, ‘go starboard’, ‘more line’, ‘more bags’, ‘more air’, ‘pull me up’ ... tug tug tug tug tug means ‘disaster’. The second line is the airline — a spiralling red rubber hose which connects behind the helmet, where there is a valve which the diver may use to control his buoyancy. Too much and he might shoot to the surface, bursting his lungs. Too little and he would drift ever downwards until crushed by the weight of the sea. Sunny must know all this, but his face in the round glass is always calm and unblinking. He must have known other divers who have died, and must have seen luggers flying the black flag, and must know the awful number of ways it may happen. It could be the bends, causing the diver to take a fit and die before reaching the surface. Or sharks. Or torn airlines. Divers have died trapped on coral outcrops and simply unable to fre e themselves. They have fallen into underwater caverns. Sunny must know all this and yet he shows no fear. He seems able to sweep fear from his mind. I could not do that. (I wonder how Father was before a dive. Was he able to sweep his fear away in this manner? To whom was he more similar in this respect — Sunny, or me?) Once Dollop connects the air hose, Sunny is no longer part of our world. He does not breathe from our atmosphere. He is dependent on the compressor, and that depends on Dollop. He positions himself in the water by the side of the lugger, steadies himself once more and then, holding the rope, slips quietly under the water feet first, his face, as ever, staring through the porthole, the lines trailing above him like twin umbilical cords leading to the surface. His life is now entirely in Dollop’s hands. It seems some of the conflict between the divers and the Koepanger is just play. Sunny says Dollop is a good tender

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really, but the older divers feel they must keep him alert so he does not start to become lazy, as they believe all black men are apt to do. If they really did not trust him, Sunny said, the number one diver would have him thrown off the boat. I presume this was meant in the metaphorical sense! I know Dollop has a great fear of water. He almost slipped in today and his eyes filled with terror. He mumbled something incompre hensible, but no doubt unpleasant, to me as he picked himself off the deck.

Dec 8, 1920 The tension between the Japs and Dollop has worsened again and I suppose I am in a way responsible. Whether I should feel good or bad about that I’m not sure. First Michael and, just now, Jim Troy have quietly but firmly suggested I ‘keep my nose out of things’. So, should I have failed to alert anyone of the t e n d e r’s error? He had recorded ‘22 minutes’ for a dive of Sunny’s which had in fact taken 27. My father would never have excused such an error, and nor could I, for Sunny’s sake. So, should I have told Dollop himself? He would have flown into one of his rages; he resents my presence enough already. No, it was better that I tell the number one diver, I reasoned, and I did this as discreetly as I could. How could I have known he would explode with rage? He confronted Dollop, accused him of trying to kill Sunny, and threatened to ‘throw the blackman to the sharks!’ Now the divers have taken to watching Dollop’s every move with suspicion, and stand by his shoulder as he records the times and depths of their dives. Even I had begun to feel sorry for Dollop, such were his protestations of an innocent mistake,

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until I heard him protest that he had never been treated like this in ten years as tender on this lugger. Ten years! Dollop, then, was the tender on this lugger when Father died. He must have been Father’s tender! Suddenly, some pieces seem to have fallen into place. I begin to see why he so resents my presence here. And I can see clearly how vulnerable Father was, as the only Englishman on the boat. The Japanese are too smart for that. There is always one below, two on deck to supervise the tender. Father’s naval background would have led him to expect discipline and attention to detail from the crew, and especially from his tender. But how could he rely on Dollop, who probably didn’t understand the importance of the Admiralty Tables, nor perhaps care. Or maybe (is this unfair of me to conjecture? I can see it vividly in my mind) when the desperate tug tug tug tug tug came; maybe Dollop simply smirked a guilty smirk and looked the other way. Maybe he went off to smoke one of his clove cigarettes and think about how he might spend his ill-gotten reward. Oh, he would be capable of some cowardly treachery, I feel sure, if his palm was crossed with gold. Or pearls. But he would have had no interest himself in the success or otherwise of the Englishmen. As tender, he would not care if the diver below was Japanese, English or from Tierra del Fuego. So long as divers needed air, he had a job. So, the next question is, who was Dollop’s paymaster for this ‘special job’ he took on? It is hard to fathom Father’s naivety in failing to have another Navy man on board. His undoing was in presuming the other chaps were boxing Marquess of Queensberry rules. Viney was dead right in that. The Japanese seem happy with me for exposing Dollop’s error today. They even gave me a bowl of rice topped with sliced tuna in some awful fishy sauce. It was impossible to refuse. I

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bypassed the human part of the food chain and gave it straight back to the fish. Sunny, however, looked worried for the first time tonight. He feels we have been too harsh on Dollop, and is worried it may upset the Koepanger tomorrow and perhaps cause him to make mistakes. I almost countered by telling Sunny of my suspicions regarding Dollop’s role in Father’s death, but decided I should be more circumspect. I said this instead: ‘If you really wish to see Taiji again, Sunny, I would keep watching him like a hawk. You have seen the cemetery in Broome, full of Japanese divers, young men like you who thought they too would soon be heading home to marry their new wives. Don’t drop your guard Sunny, for your sake and for hers. Picture her as you descend tomorrow and then you will agree. Dollop should be watched!’ The boy looks up to me I think, and he appeared to take my counsel to heart. Perhaps too well. He did look very anxious and he left me to return to the others, and they seem to be speaking in agitated tones even now as I write. I mean to confront the Koepanger on the matter of Father, but I had best heed the advice I have been given and let the dust settle on this matter first.

Dec 9, 1920 Dollop testy all day and making all manner of errors. Sunny, too, not himself, seeming to tremble as he got in his suit, his eyes not staring ahead unblinking, as usual, but darting about nervously. He actually got into the water and was about to submerge when it was realised his glass face mask was not screwed on!! Tensions are high, and it seems the more tension, the more mistakes, a vicious cycle. Next, the number one diver

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complained he’d had engine fumes in his airline and accused Dollop of trying to poison him. Jim Troy eventually (wisely) put an early end to day’s diving, and fighters have retired to neutral corners. In any case, the hold is about full with shell and, please God, we shall be heading back to Broome soon. The hostilities have almost become too much to bear. P.S. Five things the romance books ( Pearlers of the Southern Seas and ilk) don’t tell you about pearling luggers: i) ii) iii) iv) v)

They stink (bilge, rotting oyster flesh, Asiatic cooking), and you do not become accustomed. Cockroaches, which are everywhere and nibble your toes at night. Food is evil. Every small wound turns septic. I am a mass of sea boils. It is dangerous.

On this last point, Jim Troy feels there may be a storm coming. I hope to God it misses us.

Dec 10, 1920 Last day diving. All parties politely civil. I asked Jim Troy about money. He said, ‘I didn’t ask you, boy, you asked yourself. Maybe we should charge you tourist rates!’ I will ask when we arrive in Broome, hopefully in two days. I am sick of this. The sea is ugly and endless here, and I feel filthy. There is little wind about though, for the first time since we put to sea. I hope this is not the ‘calm before the storm’ of which you hear!

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Dec 11, 1920 Dear God, all hell broke loose today. I decided to confro n t Dollop about Father, and he became very upset and pushed me. Sunny came to my aid and was punched in the face, then the other Japanese divers went crazy. They were in a rage, grabbed the Koepanger, and the Japanese keelhauled poor Dollop (a rope around his neck). He’s dead (rope tangled under keel). Everyone is confined to separate areas, things are very tense and anything could happen. I feel as sick as the day this awful trip started, sick to the stomach at the sight of poor Dollop’s swollen face. I can’t look at him without feeling in a small way responsible. Jim Troy is now skippering and we are making good speed. He seems upset with me. Hopefully reach Broome by morning.

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Well, so much for the much-vaunted protective powers of aspirin. I’ve had a stroke. Or more correctly a ‘transient attack’ according to Dr Basheh, as if that improves things. It must have started in my sleep. I had the dream again, which was no doubt responsible, and when I awoke in the usual sweat there was the added twist of finding my left arm had gone to sleep. That’s all right, I thought, not to panic, I’ll give it a rub. But half an hour later it was still numb, and my mouth had gone funny, and when I tried to get up, bang! I hit the deck, and did my back in just to cap off a productive morning. All this before six o’clock. The doctor was called, not Pirate Pete Pullman this time but a new locum Dr M (Mohammed I pr e s u m e ) Basheh. Egyptian! He is well dressed at least, which is a relief after Pirate Pete. Long-sleeved crisp white shirt

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with a tie, gold cufflinks and gold watch. And no earring, for which I am grateful. I suggested to Dr Basheh that the alleged powers of aspirin may have been exaggerated by the pharmaceutical companies for reasons clear to both of us. But he told me to consider myself lucky as I have only had a transient attack and could expect a full recovery, and, besides, it had ‘only affected the right side of my brain’, as if one had a half to spare and wouldn’t miss it. Had I not been on aspirin, the consequences may have been dire. ‘How d i re?’ I couldn’t help asking, and he nodded in the direction of pathetic Baker. Point taken. I have jotted Dr M Basheh in my notebook, with some mixed comments alongside. Locum Number Twelve, but certainly my first Egyptian. He qualified at the University of Zagazig, no less, and received special registration to work in ‘an area of unmet need’ such as this outpost is considered to be. He didn’t seem to mind me asking, so I asked him my usual questions about the wax and he quoted Harrison’s Textbook of Medicine back to me, quite excited to have the opportunity I think. He has been studying for the Australian medical examination, he said, so he is ‘up on these things’, which is reassuring. He was right, too, about the ‘transient’ bit. I had regained full use of my arm by lunch, but the whole thing was bloody frightening just the same. The only problems I am now experiencing are a lower lip that won’t do as it’s told (Nurse Rae Plewright triumphantly presented me with the invalid-cup-with-straw with the instru c t i o n s ‘doctor has suggested it’) and a bad pain in my back, for which I am to receive hydro t h e r a p y. I’m joining an exclusive club. Baker has hydr o t h e r a p y. I see him

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wheeled down twice a week by the physiotherapist. Simon, his name is; a pretty boy and I’m not too sure I want to be floating about under his gaze. My God, I presume one wears trunks! I keep touching my lip to check it’s still there, which reminds me of last night’s dream, which reminds me of those fat purple lips of poor Dollop. I’ve never seen lips like them, his whole face really, swollen up like a ripe aubergine. The rope had cut into the flesh of his neck. You think you’ve put these images out of your mind forever, but then you read something which jolts your memory and voila! There it is, as fresh and awful as the first time. Sometimes I think I am cursed by the lucidity of my memory. A bit of Alzheimer’s would be a mercy. I presume, gentle reader, that you have no knowledge of the mercifully now-defunct practice of keelhauling. Why should you? I didn’t, before I saw it. Nor, alas for Dollop, did the Japanese divers. I believe that, when done proficiently, the victim is merely dragged behind the boat for some distance, and then hauled up, suitably chastened by the fearful experience. I believe the Japanese made several errors of judgement in Dollop’s case. They tied the rope around his neck. They threw him over the side rather than aft, allowing the rope to become entangled under the hull. And they perhaps underestimated his famous fear of water, which would have caused him to panic as soon as he went under. Even as the Japanese caught him and bound him he was screaming, half in terror and half in rage. As I watched it happen, I was mortified, frozen to the spot. It had started off as my fight, but I wanted no part of this.

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Michael’s attempt to free the rope and save him was valiant, but we all knew that he would bring up a corpse. For minutes we had stood, transfixed by the growing awfulness of it all, listening to the muffled sound of Dollop thumping on the keel, and feeling it in our bones, through bare feet on the decking. Thump thump thump, furiously at first, then weakening; then nothing. By the time Michael had stripped off and dived under, we all knew that he would bring up Dollop’s body, for we could hear it bumping, gently now, in time with the rocking of the now-stilled lugger. The Japanese looked bravely upon Dollop’s body. With perfect equanimity they removed the incriminating rope which had cut into his neck, and then all three retreated into the rat hole. Sunny was less able to feign the impassive expression of his elders. He was quiet and purse-lipped like a brave boy wrongly accused of a misdemeanour. He looked for a moment as if he might cry. God knows what their intention had been, but I don’t believe it had been to kill Dollop. They had knives, if that was their intention. Most likely they had just wanted to show him who was boss, teach him a lesson. It was the end of the season, the start of the lay-up. This was like a schoolboy’s end-of-year prank gone wrong. That’s what I think, although of course I did not ask them. They were Japanese, they were angry, and they had knives. Better they were allowed to sulk than to risk provoking them in any way. Even I was beginning to learn this. Don’t stick your nose in ... The newspapers afterwards claimed that the Japanese had threatened to dump at sea any crew member who talked. Not true; they never said anything. The reason we

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didn’t take Dollop back to Broome with us was that we simply couldn’t stand the sight and smell of him after a while. He had started to fill with gas, and the smell was attracting the cockroaches, so Jim Troy becalmed the boat and without ceremony, we sent him over the side. There was no intrigue in that, it simply had to be done, and no one argued against it. It was only after he was gone, and the decks were washed down, and everyone had had a smoke and the Malays had gone back to gambling, that minds began to tick over ... did anyone really h a v e t o know about this? It would just mean more trouble. But how to explain his disappearance? A diver was easy — a diver can die in a dozen ways. But a tender, especially one whose fear of water was legendary, a standing joke in Broome; how to explain his death? But it was individual minds that turned these questions over. There was never, as the newspapers would later have had it, a conspiracy of silence, or a collective decision to deceive. Michael wasn’t talking much, but he must have felt compelled to offer me this advice. ‘When we get to shore, just collect your pay and get away quick. Don’t hang around and don’t do any more of your talking. Let the skipper do the talking.’ With Jim Troy at last skippering the vessel, we made fast time ahead of some heavy winds. He was worried about the barometer, which was dropping, and every so often called out for Michael to ‘check the aneroid’. Every o rder was suddenly tersely delivered and instantly followed. Jim Troy had sailed a boat before. As Dampier Creek came into view I was suddenly very glad that we did not have the strangled corpse of a black man on deck.

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I could even now describe this scene in precise detail, down to the numbers of luggers and their positions on the beach. It is for me one of life’s images which imprints itself upon the human memory, as if etched in copper, and as surely. But to say ‘an etching’ is not quite right, for the image I hold is in vivid colour. There were the milky greens of the shallow waters wrapping around the jade green of the mangroves, and then the grey-white strip of beach and scrubby dune. And everywhere across this landscape were dotted man-made structures. There were two higgledy-piggledy rows of beached luggers, bare masted and resting at whatever angle to the vertical the receding tide had left them. Further down the creek, a small fleet of a dozen or so prettily rigged luggers, newly arrived and guarded by an elegant one hundred and fifty ton schooner, to all appearances the mother hen watching over its brood. A sprawl of ramshackle tin sheds strayed along the sandy foreshore in no particular order. A couple of rows of rickety sorting tables here, and an upturned dinghy there. All around there was movement and the noise of industry. Dark men clambered over the beached vessels, inspecting, cleaning, repairing, painting, swatting at cockroaches with wooden paddles. Men with spectacles and absurd topis handled shell and made thoughtful notes in books. Men of various shades moved up and down the fore s h o re, appearing out of doorways and disappearing into others, or else they stood and frowned at the darkening sky, or remonstrated with each other, perhaps arguing over payment. This was not the carefully ordered industry of the Englishman, nor the regimented kind of the Japanese, but nor was it totally chaotic.

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Then I thought of Dollop, and of what these men might do when they found out. Anything seemed possible. For the first time ever, I began to fear for my life. I could now understand Michael’s advice. I didn’t want to linger here. I was glad Dollop wasn’t here to incriminate us with his swollen lips and bloated body. Jim Troy moored a mile or so further down the creek, away from the other fleets, and especially away from the Koepangers’ foreshore camp. ‘We don’t want a blessed team of loblolly boys coming around asking impertinent questions,’ he said. We moored, waded ashore with our belongings and headed back to the foreshore camp. Jim Troy’s advice was to take everything we had. ‘If you don’t get it now, lads, you can kiss it goodbye, you won’t be coming back for it.’ I didn’t then fully understand the portent of these words, but it was clear he was worried and he was not a man given to worrying. Jim, Michael and I headed off while the Malays began to unload the shell in the hold. The Japanese lingered behind, then took the dinghy across to join another lugger. Soon others would know what had happened ... and then, what? Jim led us to a corrugated tin shed, entirely unremarkable except for the lettering above the door. In flaking paint, Keeler and Sons Pearling Company. And sure enough, we were soon joined by the fat man himself, resplendent in white suit. Jim Troy and Howard Keeler immediately launched into an exchange which seemed a familiar one. ‘Jaysus, Howard, you’ve come down to see what the poor workers are doing. That’s a rare one! To what do we owe the privilege? Don’t tell me, you’re cutting my pay in half.’

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‘If you were paid pro rata for the work you put in, Jim, you’d be down to a quarter.’ ‘Well, thanks very much. I’ll pay heed to that, coming as it does from a man who knows a lot about work.’ ‘Ah now, Jim, don’t come over all bolshevik. You know full well there are those of us born to lead and those born to serve. It’s the natural way of things.’ ‘Get fucked, Howard.’ Howard Keeler was in Great White Pearl Master mode: chest puffed out, resplendent in yards of white linen, Chinaman-sharp creases — he cut an imposing figure, and he knew it. He was enjoying this banter. The dark men who popped in to deliver things, or who hovered at doorways waiting to ask a question, accentuated the image of white master, which was no doubt the desired effect. Tuan, master or boss; these were the names he liked to be called. He was in his element. I was beginning to understand the Howard Keeler I had met in his home; here was a man used to receiving respect. Keeler had not yet noticed me, or seemed not to. I was reminded of my first meeting with him when I was left to stand unnoticed while he gasbagged with the pilot; unnoticed, that was, until I fell on my face. I presumed he was ignoring me for some purpose. But I was wrong. I had forgotten how much my appearance had changed. I was unshaven and covered in sea boils. He had genuinely not recognised me at first, and when at last he did he appeared quite astonished. ‘My God, it’s young Webber! Look at you! Jim Troy, what have you done to the rosy-cheeked boy who, barely a month ago, was sitting on my verandah wooing my wife? He looks in worse shape than you, which is saying

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something, since you have been in decline for so long.’ He was looking me over distastefully, and addressing the Irishman, not me. It was as if I were a slave at market, and a defective one at that. ‘Dear God, have you fed him on nothing but gin? That’s all right for an Irish bag of bones like you, but an English boy needs feeding! Dear me. Since when did you take to blackbirding white boys, you scoundrel?’ ‘He came along with Michael, from Swan Point,’ protested Jim Troy. ‘The Colonial Experience, I think.’ He looked at me rather coldly and added, ‘He promised to be no trouble.’ Perhaps there was some irony in it, but he was too dry to be sure. ‘Ah. So, how should we categorise him, Jim, for the purpose of remuneration? Do we pay him for his labour, or charge him for his passage?’ It was only now that the obvious occurred to me. Keeler was the paymaster. I had been on Keeler’s lugger. Keeler knew Father. Father had been on the same lugger. T h e re were implications in all this, but I was too befuddled and exhausted to contemplate them. And a type of fear was starting to take me over. Jim Troy said to Keeler, ‘The boy got involved in some strife on board,’ and he took Keeler by the shoulder away from me to discuss it in guilty, quiet tones. Every so often, one or other would look up at me, initially with the look of an exasperated parent, but then I heard the word ‘dead’, and Keeler shot a murderous glance at me, then looked a w a y, inhaling deeply through flared nostrils. His fat fingers clenched and then he held his fist against his forehead. I expected he would then explode with anger at me, but he exhaled slowly, nodded thanks to Jim, and

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trotted over to retrieve the cash box. He counted out three pound notes and placed them in my hand, with a generous smile. I protested weakly but he mumbled ‘take it’ and I didn’t dare defy him. I knew this veneer of civility. It was a thin one, and I didn’t want to scratch it now. Perhaps later, when I’d had time to think, I would, but not now. ‘Marta and I would be insulted if you didn’t stay with us, Webber. Why don’t you take the motor car right now and surprise Marta. It’s parked up the track.’ ‘Shouldn’t I stay and help unload?’ He smiled indulgently. ‘That’s a kind offer, Webber, but the Malays will do that. You have been of enormous assistance to Jim already. But do go now. It’s possible there will be some t rouble down here. It wouldn’t be of any particular assistance for you to be here. Marta would love you to surprise her, so go to her now. You might tell her I shall be detained a while.’ I left. Everything seemed changed. Over the sea the sky had blackened and from time to time, like cracking slate, a fork of lightning broke it in two. It was difficult not to imagine angry gods. On the foreshore, men were standing in small groups, few were working. I carried my few belongings up the track. I recognised Keeler’s car but decided against his offer to take it. Already I had accepted his hospitality and now his money, which made me more indebted to him than I wished to be. I tramped on up the gravelly track, away from the buzz of the foreshore camp, looking down to my boots and hoping to have to talk to no one. ‘What boat you from?’ sang a brown voice in my ear. I

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stepped past it but was grabbed by the shoulder. ‘You come off Eurus?’ I looked up. A Malay, with a cheerful face, smiling. I nodded. ‘You know the one they call Sam?’ ‘Yes. Yes, I know him.’ ‘He’s my brother.’ He searched my face for news and his smile dropped away. Thunder rumbled over us from the direction of the sea. ‘What’s the matter? Is he all right?’ I must have looked like death. ‘Something happen to Sam?’ He went rigid in anticipation of my reply. I strained to smile. ‘No, no, he’s fine. He’s down there, cleaning out the hold.’ He at last drew breath and visibly relaxed. He smiled and let me pass, but with a last quizzical look. A few yards behind me, he sang back. ‘My goodness, there is going to be a big storm.’ I had the same feeling.

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It was now the lay-up season, and the Broome I walked into that night was hard to recognise as the quiet town I had left a few weeks before. Now everyone was ashore, and men had money in their pockets, beer in their bellies, and the time and inclination to sort out animosities which had festered at sea. It was hot and steamy and the rains were due. It seemed any push could be met by a shove, and then anything could happen. Dizzy from the events on board the Eurus, frightened of the possible consequences, and having no idea what to do next, I walked into Broome that night as if drifting into a strange and dangerous dream. The first sight that greeted me was a line of black men in chains outside the Broome police station. It didn’t seem possible. It could have been Zanzibar or the Guinea

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Coast, centuries earlier. But there they were, sitting on the ground, each with a heavy metal collar about his neck, and with a length of chain connecting each man’s collar to the next. They were eating, and were so preoccupied with their bowls of beans that they appeared unaware of their plight. The youngest looked fifteen. He glanced up once at me, with little interest, but the others ignored me altogether. They were thin men with scars, and seemed to have harsher features than the well-fed Swan Point mob, but they were not fierce looking. I had the impression that, if the chains were removed, they would finish their meals and give their necks a good rub before wandering off. There was a guard, a good distance away, lying in a hammock, his back to his charges. He too had a bowl of beans, but his meal was washed down with a bottle of beer. They were ‘bush blackfellows’, the guard told me, being taken from Derby to the prison island down south, but the steamer had engine troubles and had been held up for two weeks. The prisoners had become a local attraction. It was getting rare to see men on the chain nowadays. There had even been a photographer from the National Geographic magazine. It had got too hot and sticky in the compound, so he had allowed the prisoners out under the shade where they could at least get some fresh air. The guard didn’t know what the three had been convicted for. ‘Poor buggers hardly speak English so God knows what happened in the courtroom. They’re probably guilty of looking the wrong way at the magistrate, or nodding at the wrong time. They’ll go down to the island, get pneumonia and die.’

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He shook his head resignedly, emptied the bottle and tossed it next to another empty. ‘How about a blanket, boss,’ called out a voice. It was the oldest man. A stockman once, judging from his belt buckle, but he was a scarecrow now, tatty trousers and a red flannel shirt hanging off him. He didn’t look up at me when I tossed it to him, just wrapped it round his shoulders, displaying the letters AIF over his back. ‘Thanks, matey,’ said the guard. ‘Saved me getting up. They’re like kids, this lot, always something else they need.’ He gave me a beer and I sat with him for a while, until dark. For a short while he left me alone with the prisoners, and a passerby, taking me to be the guard , asked me about my charges. I answered, playing the role, and it felt strangely normal. I could do this job if I had to, I thought; sending men to their deaths in a quiet and detached manner. I could probably do it better than he, because of my convivial nature. I could perform the task effectively while maintaining cordial relations with the condemned men. As if to prove the point, as I left one of the prisoners bid me ‘Night boss’. It was the scarecrow, I think. Night had come early because of the cloud cover. It was a starless, moonless night and the darkness was total as I walked up to the town. I could hear the screeching of a h u n d red bats in the trees above me, but couldn’t see them. On the outskirts of town there was a camp fire. Well before I reached it, I knew it was the Malays gambling away their season’s earnings. There was a cycle of noise and silence. First the volley of excited voices as bets were laid, a shout, a tense silence ... one, two, three ... erupting in

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an explosion of laughter and cheering. One could imagine the tiny tinkle of falling dice during those three seconds. The Malays were all too engaged in proceedings, and full of arak probably, to notice me passing. They all looked cheerful, even the losers, who made such a great show of losing that they appeared to enjoy even that. The main streets of Broome were lit by kerosene lamps and, further up the road, Chinese lanterns, which made it a confusion of light, shadow and darkness. A million insects danced in the light. Figures seemed to appear from nowhere, and I was knocked to the ground once before my eyes adjusted. The streets were abuzz with men of every colour, and not a petticoat to be seen. A weedy drunk was pushed out of a doorway, landing at my feet, and there he stayed, curled up and sobbing. The voice that came after him had a familiar Scots brogue. ‘Ye will be welcomed back with open arms when ye have learned to control your bladder, ye great pisspot.’ Scotty was looking at me and for a second was motionless, trying to recall my face. I must have changed a lot. I helped him. ‘The finest motorcycle I’ve ever owned.’ ‘My God, can that be Webber junior! A r u s t i c a t e d version yet. Look at ye, all pox and stubble! Christ, ye look a sight. Wouldn’t your mammy be proud of ye now! Come on in for a lager, son, that’s definitely what ye need.’ He seemed genuinely pleased to see me, ushering me in and steering me to a group of men, introducing me as my father’s son, ‘God rest him.’ I was eyed suspiciously. The other men wore collars, I was in salt-stained moleskins and an almost-buttonless shirt. But after a pint

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of Bass ale it appeared not to matter, and I began to enjoy the warm flow of conversation and good humour. I n t roductions over, they ignored me, and I was quite happy to let their conversation wash over me while Scotty kept my glass filled, ‘on the house, lad.’ Two of the men were Australians, returned servicemen, and there was an Englishman, a tall genteel Canadian, and a darker man who spoke with an Italian or Spanish accent and stared at me unblinking. These men were optimists. Their talk was of money, of those who had made it, and of their own plans for making it. Their faces gleamed as they fed each other tales of wealth, the more improbable the better. They talked about diamonds and Barney Barnato, the penniless cockney who became governor of De Beers. They talked of George Harrison, who sold the Witwatersrand for ten pounds; and of gold strikes in A rgentina, Ballarat and Kalgoorlie, and of nuggets shaped like birds and bats and stars. But most of all they talked of pearls, and the huge prices paid by buyers with exotic names like Sussman and Zoumeroff and Rosenthal and Kornitzer, from Vienna, Paris, London, New York. Of the dream pearls, all found in extraordinary circ u mstances, and sold amidst intrigue and deception. When they spoke the names of these pearls it was with hushed voices, as if they were speaking of hallowed objects. The Southern Cross, a perfect crucifix, found by Tommy Clarke, a mere boy of fifteen. Eacott’s Large Drop, the size of a sparrow’s egg. Bardwell’s Double Button. The Rodriguez Perfect Round, which sold for four thousand pounds. One such pearl in a man’s hand, just one, would change his luck forever, and the look in every

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eye told that each man believed there was one more such stone waiting for him on the ocean floor. Scotty kept the beer flowing while the voices of the optimists droned on. There was talk of oil, of cattle, even a whisper of opium. But it was all wishful thinking. Close inspection showed that these men were not rich, just hopeful. The Englishman had a crumpled jacket and a hole in one boot. The Spaniard had a crack in the glass of his spectacles. They were not as they had at first seemed. They were desperate men dreaming of riches; and therefore dangerous. Father must have sat among men such as these, I imagined, and heard the same talk. Perhaps he sat in this very place. One of the men would have been Howard Keeler. The stakes were higher back then, when prices w e re soaring high. It would have been Epernay and Krug, not Bass; the wealth then was real and tangible, not just imagined. I wondered, when Father saw those eyes, did he recognise the greed in them, and the desperation? Did he even understand the danger such men posed to him? Probably he did not. It occurred to me that Father was as much an outsider then as I was now. There were no riches in it for him, and that alone would have set him apart from every man in Broome. He was simply there to do a job, and that job was to prove white divers the equal of the Japanese. He would have seen it as a simple c o n t rolled trial, just like Professor Haldane’s diving experiments. He was a Navy man, accustomed to order. He probably had no idea of how much other men may have feared his success and how far they might have gone to prevent it.

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I had worked out one thing about Broome that Father may never have discovered. The glue that held the town together was the fact that each and every man in the town dreamed of growing rich. That was the one thing this diverse group of men shared, and the devil take anyone who should come between a man and his dream. What was it Viney had said? ... Walk down Dampier Terrace and point your finger at the first man you see and you can call him your papa’s killer ... It seems the dreams of the men about me put me to sleep, and when Scotty nudged me awake I was in a sea of empty glasses and the dreamers had departed. He had woken me to give me a last drink. He offered me a room. I declined. ‘You’re staying with my good friend Howard Keeler, then?’ he asked. I didn’t say I wasn’t. ‘By the way, Webber, if you need that motorcycle back I can help you. That thieving bastard rode it without oil for two hundred miles. He was easy fixed, but the machine was not so easy, I’m afraid. It will cost you a few bob for repairs.’ ‘I’ll have a look in the morning,’ I promised, knowing I never would. I emptied the glass, grabbed my swag and, still half asleep, I stepped out of the hotel and into the strange Broome night. The streets seemed more than ever like a carnival, with a series of bizarre sideshows, and the same air of i l l e g a l i t y. My nose led me towards Chinatown. The aromas that hung in the moist night air were not those of a European town, but the smells of a human multitude. It was an olfactory League of Nations. The sweet smell of Malay satay intermingled with Indian curries and

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Japanese raw fish and Moluccan spices. The aroma of the Malays’ clove cigarettes swirled together with Indian hemp and American tobacco. The smell of beer swill mixed with piss. The narrow crooked lanes of Chinatown might have been anywhere in Asia, the colourful banners and hoardings adorning the stalls and shops bearing strange lettering and bad English translations. A Chinaman, the front of his head shaved, the back half like a skullcap of coconut hair and trailing a yard-long pigtail, noisily p ressed upon me a freshly killed hen, and when I declined, pulled at my swag and insisted he be allowed to do my laundry. There was a Malay selling satay sticks, which he served on a tiny straw mat, with an array of sauces. He pointed me over to a lively show across the road, which turned out to be another gambling den, with money and alcohol flying furiously as before. This seemed a more permanent arrangement. A police officer was just leaving, briskly, hand in pocket. Next to the Japanese Club in Napier Terrace, a big audience had gathered around the sumo wrestling pit, ringed off by sandbags. Two solidly built Japanese, in ridiculously inadequate garb, grunted and strutted to the drumbeat of the ‘referee’ in ceremonial silk robes. The audience was mostly Japanese, it seemed, but of two sorts. There were the divers, pearl masters and the like, who were immaculate in appearance, and a ro u g h e r looking bunch who seemed ready for trouble. There seemed the occasional niggling between the two groups, and at one stage a second fight looked set to eru p t amongst the onlookers, but the main show prevailed.

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I asked a Japanese youth about a bed, for I’d been told the Japanese boarding houses were somewhere beyond here. He led me down Sheba Lane, then down increasingly narrow, increasingly tawdry and darkly suspicious alleyways, and deposited me alone in a courtyard in front of a row of tiny booths, which were lit from within by lanterns. A bent old woman was frying noodles in an enormous conical pan over fierce flames which at times enveloped the pan. She toothlessly smiled her enjoyment at each flare-up. I was tapped on the shoulder and led to a desk. There were two men, perhaps brothers, beefy for Japanese and not friendly in demeanour. Both had pockmarked faces. One asked for a pound, which seemed a great amount for a bed, but I was too tired to argue. ‘All night special, one pound,’ he said, and snatched the note from me before I’d offered it. Both brothers were missing a finger. I thought it best not to ask the circumstances. They pushed me down a narrow corridor and kicked a door open. Suddenly things added up. I had heard of the b u r a k u m i n in the Japanese brothels at the end of Chinatown. My all-night special was young, ugly and mercifully asleep. There was a wash bowl, kettle and a small mirror. I searched through my swag and found my blade. Now, I could at least have a wash and a shave. The face that stared back at me looked pale and haunted. I hoped that a hot blade would strip away the scruffy ginger beard to reveal the eager, pink-cheeked, clever boy who had looked back at me last time I had used a mirror. But he was gone. The clean-jowled version looked every bit as haunted, but worse, for the gaunt hollows under the cheekbones gave the face a look of despair, and

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the eyes that stared back seemed to be the eyes of a stranger. I tried to blink the image away. I had drunk too much, I was exhausted, and the brain plays tricks. I tossed the mirror on the end of the bed. I had to sleep. The Japanese girl had not stirre d . Certainly she was not pretty, but she was young. The sheet on top of her was stained and I pulled it back. She was naked, with pale skin like butter. She was curled up like a child, with her knees under her chin, facing away from me. She was so thin I could count the ridges on her backbone. But she was soft to touch. I stripped off and lay behind her. She wriggled into the concavity of my body and after that did not stir. I must have slept long enough to dream, for it was this night that I had the most vivid dream ever. It remained when I awoke, as dreams do when they are bro k e n suddenly. The girl had heard my choking and probably thought I was dying. She screamed, and seconds later one of the fingerless brothers kicked in the door, seized the girl, inspected her for damage, then wrapped her in the top sheet and escorted her out. I was left naked and dumbstruck on the bunk. ‘All-night special finish now. You go,’ he commanded. The memory of that night’s dream is there still. It had been a twist on the usual one. My mind’s eye had been educated by my time on the Eurus, so this one was frighteningly real. My father’s face stared at me through the round face glass, just as Sunny’s had done, impassively at first, then contorting with pain, then expanding into the great helmet, eyes bulging then protruding beyond their sockets, lips purple and swollen like Dollop’s, then opening in a scream, and the glass filled with blood and

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water. The disconnected air hose snaked wildly, spraying bubbles in all directions and they shot up along the air tube towards the surface, where the tender, who could be seen now through the watery shimmer, was laughing so much his great white belly shook. Then from somewhere came a banshee scream which jolted me awake, wet with sweat, choking, heart thumping on the inside of my ribs like a man trapped in a bamboo cage. I knew now for certain. This time I had seen him.

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(Extracted from The Pearlmasters of Australia’s NorthWest. Published by V.K. Jones & Co, Hay St, Perth, 1914.) 12. HOWARD CHARLES KEELER was born in North Staffordshire, England, on Nov 11, 1870, the eldest son of the late John William Keeler, a merchant. He received his education by private tuition and at age 14 moved with his family to Capetown, South Africa, where he learned from his father how to run a business. When his father died in 1890, Mr Keeler took over and successfully ran the family importation business before selling it when the harder economic times of the early 1890s struck. He was enticed by the stories of those who had made their fortunes on the Western Australian Goldfields so, after sending his mother and sisters home to England, he set off for Australia

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to ‘strike it rich’ himself. He did indeed ‘strike it rich’ in Kalgoorlie, but not in the usual way. He ran a successful business supplying the miners with tools and equipment of all sorts, including some innovative equipment manufactured on his behalf by an engineering firm in Victoria. In 1895 he left the Goldfields and was able to settle in Perth in circumstances far more comfortable than those enjoyed by the majority of those to whom he had sold tools. In 1897 he moved north, intending to work The Pilbarra goldfields, but settling instead in Broome as a shell opener for the Baroque Shell and Pearl Co. He then took up an offer to join a Dutch concern operating pearling luggers out of Koepang, Timor, where he lived for two years. During this time he met and married Marta van der Plaat, eldest daughter of the Dutch Administrator in Koepang. Mr Keeler returned with his wife to Broome where he was involved in a number of companies, before forming his own company, Keeler Pearling Coy, in 1907 (later Keeler and Sons). He was one of the pioneers of the modern approach to pearling, and has always been among the first to implement new innovations on his luggers. He was the first to decide that a ‘mother ship’ schooner would no longer be re q u i red if all luggers were equipped with engines. He was one of the first to embrace the engine-driven air compressor, and the principles of staged diving and the Admiralty Tables. He offered financial and moral assistance to the Royal Navy divers in their ill-fated experiments off the Broome coast in 1912. Despite the failure of that enterprise, he has insisted that his divers continue those practices introduced by the Royal Navy divers. The tenders must record the duration and depth of each dive, and, conse quently, attacks of the ‘bends’ are said to be almost unknown in his divers.

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Mr Keeler ’s reputation for concern for the safety of his crew has been well-earned over many years. He was, for instance, one of the few to lose no vessels in the 1910 cyclone, having taken the advice of his coloured crew that conditions appeared dangerous. (He did, however, lose his house when the hurricane hit town, and had to rebuild from scratch!) He now owns and operates four luggers bearing the romantic names of Clio, Eurus, Terpsichore and Erato. He employs forty coloured men, one-third Japanese (mainly divers) and two-thirds Malay, Javanese and Koepangers. His crew have a remarkable loyalty to him and some have been in his employ for almost a decade. Mr Keeler has two sons, Peter aged 16 and Hugh aged 15. Both are already accomplished seamen and have begun to skipper the luggers. They may be expected to continue the family business into the next generation. The Keeler name is already an institution in Broome. A prosperous future can safely be predicted for Keeler and Sons Pearling Coy.

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Dr Basheh has paid a visit to certify my erstwhile roommate, Baker the butcher. ‘Life extinct’ was the way Dr Basheh put it. After a long time on the endangered list, I suggested, to silence. Death is one of the few medical catastrophes considered significant enough to warrant summoning the doctor to the Permanent Care Unit, which is curious when you think of it. The one time Baker doesn’t need a doctor is now. It is the first time I have seen all this happen. Every so often one of the residents drops off, but it has never before happened in my room. You might be excused for finding that surprising, what with the ‘Webber magic’ and all that. You may have gained the impression that those around me are constantly falling to the ground, dead. You would do well to remember that all memoirs

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a re highly selective, and it is the mundane which is expurgated first. I have had seven decades of it, but I wouldn’t burden you with the details. I know for a fact that Baker was not taking aspirin. Only one week ago I pointed out this omission to Dr Basheh, who claimed the old man couldn’t take them ‘because of ulcers’. I expect he is feeling a bit sheepish now as he replaces the hospital sheet over poor Baker’s face. My faith in the preventative powers of aspirin has been restored. I imagine (and don’t worry, this is fanciful of course) the Grim Reaper entering the ward in the early hours of this morning, choosing this room, and then p e rusing our respective medication charts before choosing ... Baker, not me! I should count myself lucky, and I do. I tried to mention this to Dr Basheh as he passed, and he was rather abrupt. Rude, in fact; ‘Please Mr Webber, don’t start on me today.’ There’s empathy for you. You might expect a doctor, even an Egyptian one, would treat the elderly in a sensitive manner when death is about. I am, after all, bereaved in a way. I shall miss Baker. I wonder whom they will move in next. Not another gurgler, I hope. A fully-conscious room-mate would make for a nice change. My recovery from the transient attack has been complete, but in the fall I cracked the (excuse me while I consult my notebook) transverse process of the twelfth thoracic vertebra. Sounds worse than it is, which is my sort of malady. Seven words for a sore back, whereas Baker only got one for stroke. Only one for dead. Simon, the pretty physiotherapist, has taken me for hydrotherapy twice now. It was very pleasant, in fact; nice

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warm water and a bit of a float. And thankfully one is permitted, in fact expected, to wear trunks. I find it relaxing, and a good opportunity to have a long chat with a young person, although increasingly Simon finds a need to ‘pop outside for a short while’. The ‘short whiles’ are getting longer too, and this is worrisome. I may have the strength in my arms to pull myself up using the rails, but what if it were someone who doesn’t have my strength? If pretty Simon were a true professional he would stay by my side, watchful, until I’m out of the water. He is my tender.

Every December in the north people become impatient for the rains. When they come it is bad, as buildings are washed away, roads made impassable and airstrips unserviceable, but not having the rain is worse, for a long wait always sends a few men mad. The Wet came late in 1920. Time and again the skies would blacken with false promise, but not a drop came to cool men’s tempers and cleanse the town of its sins. ‘ T h e re will be bloodshed or rain, whichever comes first,’ declared Scotty. ‘I just hope neither is in my pub.’ Ever since the Eurus had returned there had been palpable tension between the Koepangers and the Japanese. The news of Dollop’s death at sea was now widely known, and the official version of events, put about, I suspect, by Keeler and Jim Troy, went like this: Dollop had fallen overboard in the rough weather on our last day at sea. He couldn’t swim and his famous terror of the water overcame him, so that by the time the lugger was brought around, there was no sign of him. Michael had dived in after him but had to climb out

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when the fins started circling. When a man’s foot was seen to come to the surface, a prayer was said, and no further search was made. Certainly not everyone believed this story, least of all the Koepangers, but thus far none of the crew from the E u r u s had seen any reason to dispute this version of events. Keeler was content with it, for it meant his boat hadn’t yet been burned to the waterline. The Japanese were happy with it, for it meant they would receive no retribution. And for the rest of us it meant no trouble, and this, for now, overcame the dissatisfaction of knowing the Japanese divers would go unpunished. For my part, I did not feel entirely guiltless in the matter, so I was quite happy to let the blame rest with the noahs. The Regatta Festival of 1920 was very nearly cancelled. It was always held over two days in the week before Christmas. Most years there was some unhappy incident. The second day was traditionally a day of competitions between the various nationalities — swimming, diving, running, wrestling, boat racing, camel racing, and so on. In some years the competitions had become too earnest, and many were concerned that given the simmering hostilities in the town, they should not be held this year. The prevailing view, however, was that the festival would be a distraction from hostilities, and so it was decided to proceed. Inspector Thomas addressed the crowd assembled for the opening of the Regatta Festival, imploring all those g a t h e red ‘To ensure that a spirit of goodwill and camaraderie prevails between all men, of all nationalities, throughout the events of the festival.’ It was a proposition met with polite applause and ‘hear hear’s’ from the

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responsible citizenry, and polite silence from the rest. At first it appeared Inspector Thomas’ plea would be heeded. The streets of Broome were transformed by a colourful display of Malay sarongs, Japanese kimonos and Javanese kabyas, like the billowing flags of many nations. There were plenty of tourists, for the departure of the State Steamship Koolinda had been delayed especially for the festival. They were buying up curios; turtle shells, mother-of-pearl shells engraved with the name of the festival, trinkets made from blister pearls, scrimshaw, boab nuts carved with intricate designs. They took camel rides, and picnicked on boiled crab and exotic foods washed down with Mrs Ellie’s Famous Lemonade. All seemed well until the second day, when proceedings moved down to the foreshore, starting in the morning with novelty events. Michael easily won the greasy pole climbing competition. He was nimbler than the boys half his age, and had great strength in his arms. The representative of Heinke & Co. presented him with a medallion and a pound of tobacco, which he waved over his head jubilantly. When I went over to shake his greasy hand, his face dropped. He appeared angry with me again. ‘Great work, Michael.’ I smiled, but he didn’t. ‘Yeah, well, you know. We’re like monkeys, us black blokes.’ He was bare chested and sweating after the race, all muscle and sinew. His heaving chest seemed vaguely t h reatening. He stuffed the wad of tobacco into his trousers pocket. ‘Are you going to keep that all to yourself?’ ‘No. No, I reckon I’ll get out to that ship, give it to my cousin.’

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‘That’s good of you. Going south is he, your cousin?’ ‘Yeah, that’s right. What’s it called, a pleasure cruise isn’t it? Governor’s pleasure, not his.’ He was difficult to read, Michael, when he was like this. Obtuse. You just had to try your best to keep it friendly. ‘Lucky him,’ I said. ‘ Yeah, lucky him. Eh, We b b e r, next time you’re thinkin’ of lending someone something, do me a favour and don’t choose me, eh? I don’t need a metal collar round me neck.’ He motioned to leave, but I caught his bare shoulder. There was something I needed to ask him. ‘Michael, there’s something about Dollop ... ’ Michael cursed and looked around nervously. A couple of heads had turned at the mention of the dead Koepanger’s name. I drew him close. ‘No, no, not about that. It’s about back when Father was diving. I thought before that Dollop must have been the t e n d e r, but now I’m not so sure ... I just thought you might know something ...’ He looked increasingly uncomfortable. I had not seen him like this. He pulled me close to him and spoke softly, urgently. ‘I thought you said you had finished sticking your fucking nose in. Look, Dollop wasn’t allowed on the boat. You don’t think your daddy would let a black man go tender for him, do you? Eh? You mustn’t have known him too well if you think he’d let a black monkey touch that equipment. That’s a white man’s job, he reckoned.’ He delivered these last words fiercely, staring into my eyes, but I could not back off now. ‘So you were on the boat, Michael?’

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‘Yeah, I was there, doin’ what I was allowed to do. A bit of scrubbing, pickin’ up stray shells. Important jobs for a blackfella.’ ‘But if Dollop wasn’t on board, who was the tender? Was Keeler there?’ ‘Oh, he was there all right, him and his two boys. Of course he was. He wasn’t lettin’ that new equipment out of his sights. Big adventure for the three of ’em. Not so good for your daddy though. They should have kept Dollop. He was the best tender around, but they just didn’t trust him. Same as you, eh? I didn’t think so before, but now I can see it.’ He shrugged my hand from his shoulder, and was about to leave, but then stopped, fixing me in his sights. ‘Another thing, you’re not welcome at Swan Point, got it? And don’t ever let me catch you near my little girl again, all right?’ I nodded, and he stormed off. A bit arch, that, but I wasn’t about to provoke him further. I had seen those forearms in action. So Yerticle had been right after all. Michael could have been of help. If he had told me all this on the Eurus, I would not have been suspicious of Dollop, and the trip would have been smoother, especially for Dollop. I felt badly about that, but Michael was equally to blame. He could have told me, and should have, earlier. Except when he was angry, trying to get information out of him was like pulling teeth. It w a s K e e l e r, I was sure of it now. I had sensed something the very first night under his roof, but now it was not mere instinct. He had lied to me. He had no idea of the circumstances, he had said. And yet the Eurus was

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Howard Keeler’s lugger and he was the tender! The next time I saw Keeler, I would confront him with this new knowledge and his face would tell me the answer. I knew that he was around somewhere on the foreshore, among the dignitaries. I had seen him earlier with his good friend Inspector Thomas, and both had looked past me, rather superiorly. I would set them back on their heels when I saw them next. Later. Right now, a drink. Scotty had cannily set up a tent on the foreshore. He had whisky, Viney’s brand, and a good stock of it. ‘From sources unknown,’ he winked, ‘but it pays to stay on the right side of the law.’ The first was on the house. I paid for the second. I had begun to admire Viney’s taste in spirits. The dinghy races were about to start on the Dampier Creek foreshore, and a large crowd had assembled. The Malays saw an opportunity to gamble. Sam, the shell opener from the Eurus, was running a book just in front of Scotty’s tent. He had marked the Japanese as slight favourites over the Koepangers, and money was flying. And not just money; I thought I saw two small pearls in his hand, but when I looked again they had disappeared in a secret fold of his sarong. He avoided my gaze. The start of the race was delayed by the self-congratulatory speech from the representative from Heinke & Co., who had donated the cup. He was pleased to be able to announce that since Heinke had donated the decompression chamber to the Broome Hospital two years ago, deaths from the bends had fallen dramatically. There had been only one in 1918, three in 1919. This year there had been four deaths, but two of those were due to burst air hoses so were unavoidable, and Heinke & Co. were

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gratified to have played a significant role ... The speech went on a bit, and there was time for another couple of whiskies. Away from the more genteel champagne-sipping official groups, manners were slipping. Scotty was doing a brisk trade, and a few of the white men were already embarrassingly drunk. A toothless old lecher outside the tent was slavering over a skinny dark girl, his pawing hands pulling her off towards the scrubby sand dunes behind us. Scotty winked at me and nodded in the the direction of the dunes. ‘She’s been hanging around town for a couple of weeks. God knows how old she is but by Christ she likes white men. Every hour on the hour she disappears up there with another one. They say she’s up the duff and you’re guaranteed a dose of clap, but it would take more than that to put some of these off.’ There was silence now from the foreshore, and cutting t h rough it, from the direction of the dunes, was her giggle. I knew that giggle only too well. The anger I had seen earlier in Michael’s eyes, and his warning to me about the girl, suddenly made some sense. But it was Yerticle I thought of. I had promised him I would take care of her. I had taken only two or three steps towards the dunes when I froze at the sound of a gunshot. For a second I thought Michael had got there first. But the report was followed by a loud cheer from the direction of the foreshore. It was the start of the boat race. All of Broome, it seemed, was standing shoeless on the waterline, each screaming for his team. Someone put another glass in my hand. I had lost the moment. Glancing back over my shoulder, I joined the excited crowd on the beach.

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The boat race was the most fiercely competed event of the Regatta Festival. There were four rowers to a dinghy. One mile out to the marker, one mile back, and then the dinghy had to be dragged onto the beach. The bookmaker was right. The Malays and Manilamen were quickly left behind, and then it was a race in two. The Japanese crew rounded the marker first, and there seemed to be a clash as the Koepangers came up behind them at the turn. Halfway back to shore the Japanese, all fit-looking divers, had opened a lead of several lengths and looked comfortable winners. But the Koepangers were being urged on by their supporters on the beach, who became louder as the boats neared. Twenty yards from shore the Koepangers drew level. Both crews leapt out in waistdeep water to drag their dinghies the last few yards up onto the beach. I don’t know if anybody else saw it, as I did. Most just saw the Japanese bowman fall to give the Koepangers an advantage. But I saw why he fell. The man at the stern had pulled hard backwards. It was Sunny. Even his teammates hadn’t noticed, they blamed the bowman for falling. The Koepangers were triumphant, and in a magnanimous show the Japanese smilingly shook their hands and slapped their backs. It seemed to all watching that this moment had seen a crisis averted, and there appeared to be an instant tangible lowering of tensions. It appeared to be a triumph for those who had insisted that the Festival proceed. I confess I drank too much that afternoon, but I was not alone in that. There was dancing on the beach, and champagne, beer or spirits depending on your station. I wanted to speak to Sunny, to let him know I alone shared

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his secret, and admired him for his noble gesture. I found him outside one of the quarters. We exchanged bows and I waved my whisky bottle with a flourish. ‘Bad luck in the race, Sunny,’ I slurred cheerfully. He cocked his head, smiling an oriental c’est la vie. I wasn’t fooled. ‘I saw what you did there at the end. It was very selfless of you.’ The words weren’t coming out easily. Perhaps I said shellfish. He looked blank, acting the innocent. ‘I saw you pull back, to let the Koepangers win.’ I smiled. Now he looked over his shoulder nervously. The Malays had taken bets on the race, so perhaps he was concerned about trouble from them. There were two older Japanese men at the doorway now, just curious, not threatening. Sunny was nodding furiously. Thank you, now please go away, it probably meant, on reflection, but I had drunk too much to notice. I was determined to tell him how much I admired his gesture. ‘What you did today took courage, Sunny. The business with poor Dollop on the boat ... I know you couldn’t stop things then, none of us could ... it was out of your control, it was the others, not you ... but today, well, you took a risk doing what you did in that race. I want you to know, I admire you for it. Really I do.’ That came out as raladoo. It was hard to find the right words, and just as hard to speak them. Sunny’s legs were trying to back away into the darkness of the hut while politeness obliged his head to remain, nodding away until I paused for breath. The two older Japanese were now glowering at me from the doorway. I was vaguely

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a w a re of a presence behind me, too, light padding footsteps which had come to a stop. Sunny’s eyes darted in that direction, then back to me, imploringly. Instinct belatedly began to tell me I’d better move on. ‘You’ve helped put it right now, what the divers did to Dollop. That’s all I wanted to say.’ The high-pitched whoop f rom behind me almost knocked me over. Two Koepanger boys, no older than ten. They yelled out excitedly, calling out in the direction of Sewell’s shed, seemingly beckoning someone. I heard Dollop’s name. They were pointing, not at me it seemed, but at Sunny. An older Koepanger had started to walk across towards us, cautiously, reluctantly. He didn’t want t rouble from the Japanese, it was clear, but the boys’ excited calls were too much to ignore. Sunny said something to the boys and had seemed to calm them, when suddenly the two other Japanese burst out and attempted to grab them. They were too skinny and too slippery, and bolted for the sand dunes with all t h ree Japanese in pursuit. In minutes, the sheds had emptied and groups of excited men amassed on the f o re s h o re, looking in the direction of the sand dunes, talking excitedly in half-a-dozen different tongues. A couple of older Koepanger men ran off to check on the boys. Four Japanese followed at a jog-trot to check on them. Another couple of Koepangers emerged from the huts, carrying rowing oars, but by now a few of the white men, including Keeler and Inspector Thomas, had arrived and removed the weapons from them. A few word s dispersed the crowds, but there was still a menacing buzz f rom the men as they were shepherded back to their respective sheds.

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Keeler and Inspector Thomas eyed me suspiciously. They stood, one either side of me, arms folded, surveying the dunes unhappily, and berated me in tandem. ‘I trust you’ve nothing to do with this one, son.’ ‘You’ve had too much to drink, boy. You’d best leave the foreshore, sharpish.’ ‘We didn’t need this, you know. Things had just about blown over.’ ‘ You’d best pray that this lot blows over too, that nothing comes of it.’ Occasionally someone would come back from the dunes with a confused report of what was unfolding. A Koepanger boy had been found dead, said one. Not dead, just knocked out, said the next. Not a boy, not even a Koepanger, said the next. A girl. Polly. She had taken a fit. She was the first casualty to be carried back, but there were more to come. Soon after, one of the Koepanger boys was led back past us, blood streaming from his nose, t h rough his fingers, dripping on the beach sand. The other boy was not yet to be seen. Two pairs of eyes turned threateningly back to me. ‘Jesus. If you’ve had a role in this, you’d better pray hard, Webber,’ said one. ‘Go on boy, make yourself scarce.’

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(Nor’west Tribune, Christmas Edition, 1920.) JAPS MASSACRE KOEPANGERS IN ‘BATTLE OF BROOME’ From ‘Crichton’, our special correspondent in besieged Broome. If there still exists in this country any man who would support the further influx of cheap Asian labour to this country, let him visit Broome right away. The town is still reeling from the shock of three days of savage riots which cost the lives of not only four Koepangers and two Japanese, but tragically that also of Police Inspector Thomas. Blood has flowed down Dampier Terrace, not for the first time and, we fear, not for the last. After three anxious days there now exists an uneasy truce, but Christmas

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Day will see Christian families in the town too frightened to leave their homes for fear of encountering blade- or clubwielding Asiatics on the rampage. Fighting broke out between the Japanese and Koepanger g roups on the morning of 20th December, at Mackay’s foreshore camp at Dampier Creek, when a Jap pearl diver and two accomplices chased two Koepangers along the beach and gave them a beating. Such events are not rare at the end of the season, and most often they blow over, but this time the spark found a powder keg of Koepanger grievances against the Japanese. The Koepangers had already been fuming over the death of one of their kind last week on a lugger owned by respected pearl master Howard Keeler. Mr Keeler had given r e p e a t e d assurances that there had been no foul play and acted as an impartial arbiter in the dispute, but despite his best efforts as p e a c e m a k e r, the ‘loblolly boys’ had become convinced their tender must have been murdered by the Japanese on board. The incident at Mackay’s camp that morning was enough to tip them over into violence, and an angry mob of perhaps 300 Koepangers gathered on the foreshore about nightfall. That evening the decent folk of Broome were at the Sun P i c t u re Theatre, enjoying a showing of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Broome’s Chinatown is a rowdy venue any evening in the lay-up season, and as the picture theatre is open to the stars, theatregoers are accustomed to minor disturbances. They were able to ignore the noise of the 300 Koepangers who came swarming up Napier Terrace from the foreshore, howling and baying for Jap blood, but then there came a point in the film when Mary Pickford, startled by something, opened her mouth widely as if to scream and, to the great shock of those watching t h e re came, off-stage as it were, a real-life blood-curdling

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scream, accompanied by howls like that of a pack of wolves, and the banging of clubs against the corrugated iron sheeting. A cry went up: ‘The Koepangers are slaughtering the Japanese!’ The first victim had been the young Jap ‘try-diver’ Sonuke ‘Sunny’ Kusano, who it seems was running late for a family meeting, and had walked inadvertently into the alleyway in which the mob had grouped. He was set upon, stabbed and clubbed. After this, merry hell broke loose. The subsequent scenes have a l ready been compared in ferocity to the worst scenes of Peking’s Boxer rebellion. Japanese soon appeared, running from the foreshore camps, from Sheba Lane, from all directions in groups of ten to fifty armed with improvised weapons of all sorts — mangrove sticks, rocks, lengths of timber with blades protruding, half-inch water piping, clubs made from wooden oars, as well as swords and hatchets. It was soon obvious that the Japanese outnumbered the Koepangers by four to one, and were better armed and better organised. The little wiry-haired Koepangers were put to flight. Some made back for their foreshore camp, barricading themselves in Sewell’s shed, while some made for the darkness of the scrub country, or the lugger depot at Barred Creek. Every so often through that first terrible night, a howl would go up and the Japanese mob would rush to the sound and, if it was a Koepanger in hiding, beset upon him with all their weapons. When the mob at last swarmed away f rom the town, they left the bodies of the dead, dying and unconscious strewn along Dampier Terrace. It had been predicted that tensions were so high in Broome, that only the arrival of the monsoonal rains could cool men’s heads sufficiently to prevent bloodshed. More than one prophet had predicted ‘blood or rain’. Alas, the monsoon season was late in arriving this year. All-out war may well have erupted that night were it not for

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some cool heads, and these seemed to reside exclusively on white shoulders. Foremost among these was Inspector Thomas. His personal intervention prevented the death by hanging of two terrified Koepangers, one of whom was led back to the guardhouse with a noose still knotted around his neck. F u r t h e r m o re, Inspector Thomas was quick to realise the potential for the troubles to escalate, and instituted measures to prevent this occurring, for which the people of Broome will be eternally grateful. It was known that the Malays and Ambonese would have taken little encouragement to join in the fray on behalf of the Koepangers, and the prospect of several hundred Malays attacking the Japanese with their lethal kris blades would strike terror in the heart of the bravest man. Inspector Thomas was successful in convincing the Malays to remain uninvolved, but this success was dependent on his ability to immediately restrain the rioting Japanese. To do this, he immediately swore in two hundred white men — mostly returned soldiers, veterans of the War in Europe — as special constables. He had the Japanese ringleaders rounded up and imprisoned. He quarantined the Koepangers in the railway yard, and placed guards on the compound. The Japanese were confined to an area to the north of a neutral zone dividing the town. A curfew was imposed. The Riot Act was read twice by Magistrate Gray, in front of the Japanese Club. By morning, a measure of control had been obtained. Nonetheless, over the next two days, the Japanese continued to pose a threat, undergoing military-style drill on the foreshore, and producing more weapons, including revolvers. They directly challenged the authority of the Police Inspector, at one time storming into the Continental and Roebuck Hotels, looking for Koepangers. This was a most dangerous time, as the possibility loomed of Europeans becoming embroiled by having

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to forcefully restrain, incarcerate or even kill the marauding Japanese. This fear seemed about to be realised when armed Japanese approached the guardhouse, apparently of a mind to free the Jap ringleaders. The guards were actually kneeling and poised to shoot, but thankfully the mob backed off and disaster was narrowly averted. Calls were made to the navy to urgently despatch a warship to Broome. (This would have taken a fortnight, a reassuring thought in the event of this country ever being attacked from the north!) It is believed that, on being informed of the precarious situation of the white residents, the Premier applied immediately to London for assistance. But, such is the town’s geographic isolation that its residents have always known that in such a crisis they would be alone, and this knowledge has created such capable and self-reliant men as Inspector Thomas. It was a great tragedy that, having been successful in containing the violence and achieving an uneasy peace, his brave heart then gave in under the overwhelming duress of the effort, and he collapsed and died. At this time, Inspector Thomas remains the only white victim of these latest interracial riots in Broome. If Christians were involved, then perhaps we could hope that invoking the healing spirit of Christmas might see an end to hostilities. Alas, these protagonists are unlikely to be susceptible to such invocations, and indeed most are likely as not unaware of the birth of Christ, their Saviour. Such is the nature of these men, whom some among us would attract to our shores in great numbers, to exploit their cheap labour. The question for us all to ponder this Christmas is — what would have been the result of the events of this week in Broome, had there not been present the civilising and moderating influence of sufficient numbers of white men? Bear your answer

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in mind when next you hear the spurious arguments of those who wish to fill this country with cheap Asiatic labour. __________________

The Editor and Staff of the Nor’west Tribune wish to extend particularly warm compliments of the season to the embattled good people of Broome. We wish you continued stre n g t h tempered by wisdom and restraint in your current adversity. May the coming year of 1921 AD be a happy, safe and peaceful one for you all. —‘PEACE ON EARTH AND GOODWILL TO ALL MEN’ —

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Don’t believe what you read in the newspapers. That same Inspector Thomas who showed such excellent wisdom and judgement according to this report, had me thrown in the Broome guardhouse. My crime was to offer my assistance. You will have recognised Special Corr e s p o n d e n t ‘Crichton’, of course, and his distinctively inflammatory style. He gives himself an admirable role as an ‘impartial arbiter’. He elevates Inspector Thomas to martyrdom. And he makes it clear what the moral of the story should be. Never mind that respectable Japanese society had much to lose from the riots and worked hard to stop them. By the time the so-called ‘Jap Riots’ story reached the rabid presses of Sydney and Melboune, time and prejudice had spun it into a morality tale about the innate

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treachery and wickedness of the coloured man, and a timely warning of the moral degradation that the rest of Australia could face. Inspector Thomas was, in reality, far from a calming influence. Far from being in control of things, he was apt to become enraged when his orders were so much as queried. He refused to swear me in as a special constable, citing ‘lack of judgement’. I offered instead my services as an intermediary between the warring parties, a function I felt uniquely suited for in light of my recent involvement with both camps, and his rejection of my proposal was couched in lewd terms. A calming influence, this? When I persisted, he declared the lockup to be the the ideal location for such negotiations, and had me taken there. He concocted a story that I had taken a swing at him, contrary to my pacifist character. He made some thinly veiled threats r e g a rding the circumstances of Leon Viney’s death. Frankly, I think the pr e s s u re of the situation caused his thinking to become deluded. So it was that I spent the greatest part of the Broome Riots in prison. There were six Japanese in one cell, two Koepangers in the other. Defying orders, thank goodness, the guards opted to keep me within their sight in the duty room, rather than lock me in with the others. It was Keeler himself who came down to the guardhouse to secure my release. He took his time over it, too, maximising the fuss and thereby my humiliation. Like a disgraced son, I sat in the dark corner of the tiny duty room, on the floor, while outside in the warm sunlight he joked with the guards. Through the crack between the door hinges I glimpsed his white belly shaking with laughter, and I saw him retrieve a bottle of

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whisky from inside his jacket and hand it over. ‘You will need it my boys, it could be a long wait.’ ‘You’re a gentleman, Howard, very kind.’ They were all enjoying playing their respective roles. Keeler played the indulgent father of an errant son. The guards got to shoulder arms again in a noble cause, on their native soil, and without those many things they had despised in France — mud, wet boots, endless waiting, body lice, British command. There was serious talk, men’s talk, at length and in hushed tones about the prospects of further insurrection. There was much in the way of arm waving and horizon gazing and knowledgeable head nodding. Occasionally, one of them shot a half glance in my direction. Was I really a potential troublemaker? Keeler obviously reassured them — more laughter, backslapping. E v e n t u a l l y, ignominiously, I was released into his custody. None of the men spoke directly to me in the process, as if I had become invisible to them. It was just as it had been with the guard of the men on the chain. They were just doing a job. It was nothing personal. Wo rd l e s s l y, Keeler drove me home in his For d . Inspector Thomas’ curfew was still in effect and the streets were strangely deserted. As we sputtered past the pub, an unmistakable Scots burr sang out teasingly, ‘Watch out he doesn’t take a swing at ye, Howard!’ Keeler laughed out loud as if I was not there. We motored past a small well-dressed crowd which had gathered on the lawn outside the Magistrate’s Residence. At the centre of it was the old white-haired, d a r k - robed priest, and next to him, almost comic in contrast, was his small, dark-faced, white-robed novice. It

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appeared to be a vigil to pray for an end to hostilities. I could not hear the priest’s words above the sputter of the Ford’s engine, but he waved his arms towards the town as he spoke, and heads were bowed in prayer. As we passed, they started to sing a barely recognisable version of ‘Silent Night’. The novice looked up momentarily, as if startled by the noise of the engine and I thought I had caught his eye, but he immediately returned his attention to those gathered. He was in Father Harold mode. ‘Rather wishful thinking, that!’ said Keeler to the steering wheel. ‘A silent night!’ I was not taken in by his displays of apparent good humour. I recognised the edginess behind it, and I knew his temper. We continued on in silence. Yet again I was going to arrive at the Keelers with a sense of indebtedness, which was precisely what I did not want. I had wanted to confront him with what I knew about Father, but could not very well do that when feeling a debt of gratitude. As we pulled up to the house, he wished me Happy Christmas. I had quite forgotten the occasion. He told me cheerfully that it had not been his idea to collect me, but Marta’s, and that he would have been quite happy to have left me in the lockup. He expected I would at least show myself worthy of her having intervened on my behalf, for it had taken courage for her to do so. He helped me with my few possessions up the three wooden steps to his house. ‘By the way,’ he added, ‘they t o rched the E u r u s last night, and since it was the last remaining vessel registered in the name of Keeler and Sons Pearling Company, the company is finished.’ I wished him Happy Christmas all the same. Inside, Marta was setting a magnificent table — linen,

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silver, candelabras, crystal goblets. Lunch was going to be a special event it seemed. But this time it was not in my honour, I could see that. Even Marta appeared to have gone cold on me. The sweetness had gone out of her accented English. ‘It is good to see you, William. You will need a wash. The towels are fresh. You may take the suit which I have hung on the back of the door. You will have to excuse me, I am sorry. I have so much to prepare. Oh, and Happy Christmas, William.’ There was a kiss on my cheek but there seemed no warmth in it. I had expected that she would be upset by my rather haunted appearance, that she would be worried about my treatment in the lockup, that she would squeeze and pat my hand, that she would look up at my eyes until I agreed to smile. But there was none of that. She had grown colder in my absence, I thought. Keeler brushed past me on the way to the drinks cabinet, mumbling something about guests for lunch. He looked worried, or perhaps angry. He fixed himself a stiff whisky, which he poured like a man on the edge, and presented Marta with a sweet sherry, which she accepted, protesting, ‘I shall be drunken by the time lunch comes!’ I was not offered a drink. I washed, dressed and sat out on the verandah, alone. My favourite cane chair had been moved so it now no longer faced the gardens. I turned it back around as I preferred it. The garden had been partly revived and someone had c l e a red away the tangle of bougainvillea which had threatened to take over the verandah. The lawn had been mowed, but it needed watering. The first rains would fix it. It could be today, for the skies were threatening, but so they

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had many times, falsely. It was horribly hot and humid. Already my clothes stuck to me uncomfortably. The suit I wore could only have belonged to one of the sons. My place at the table for Christmas dinner should rightly have been for one of the boys. Keeler had great plans for them once. Theirs was going to be a mighty family business. That, I could now see, had been the motive for what he did. The arrival of the Royal Navy divers must have seemed to Keeler a great opportunity to realise his lofty ambitions. Here was a competitive edge which he could use to blow the opposition out of the water. The new compressors, together with the new knowledge of how to avoid decompression sickness, would allow his divers to safely collect shell in deeper water, from hitherto untouched reef. Father had been diving for Moss and Richardson, and the last letter we received told of how unhappy he was with the reefs he had been taken to. He thought he was being starved of shell and longed to be taken to a bed which had not been thoroughly picked over. He referred to Keeler as ‘the only person willing to help me’. Keeler must have offered to take him on an ‘unofficial’ trip to f resh beds; no other naval personnel to interfere, no Japanese divers to contend with. Father, in his frustration, would have leapt at the chance. Father must have arranged for a ‘loan’ of the compressor. He would not have thought to bring an ally to watch over him and protect him when he was on the line. He was too trusting. Perhaps Keeler did not intend that he should die. Maybe it was an accident caused by his incompetence as a tender. Maybe the compressor was

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damaged in transferring it to the Eurus. Or maybe, when he realised the opportunity was there, with Father’s life in his hands, the temptation was too great. He had motive enough. Keeler had wanted the best of both worlds, all the latest technology, but with cheap labour. He had wanted all the Royal Navy equipment and expertise, but not white divers, at ten times the wages of Japanese. The opportunity would not present itself twice. All it would take would be a turn of a valve. Then saunter off, have a smoke, and check on things later. I felt sure of this much. My host for Christmas lunch had killed my father. He approached me now, his big boots rattling the old verandah boards, his manner distinctly thre a t e n i n g beneath a thinly spread layer of sweetness. ‘I trust you are comfortable, Webber.’ I had my feet up on the railing. Perhaps this was not permitted, but I left them there. ‘We are expecting some guests for Christmas lunch. It is quite important to me that this lunch should go smoothly. Perhaps you could help me in three regards.’ Three regards? This was a well-rehearsed lecture. ‘Firstly, please don’t drink too much. Secondly, please don’t feel compelled to participate in conversation, especially if the subject is one on which you feel you have a s t rong viewpoint. You may feel most comfortable not speaking at all, and if so, I would be happy with that. Thirdly, please don’t gawk at the daughter. I really would be most appreciative.’ He turned to leave. ‘Mr Keeler, tell me something ...’ He stopped in his tracks. I put my feet up to the next

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rail and swung on the hind leg of the chair. ‘Who was the tender on the Eurus on the day Father died?’ Any pretence of sweetness vanished from his face. ‘Was it you, Mr Keeler?’ He clicked his tongue, drew breath angrily. A car pulled up outside the house. ‘It was not,’ he exhaled. ‘Who then?’ ‘Jesus. Not now, Webber. Not fucking now, of all times ...’ It was him, I was certain now. ‘You see, Mr Keeler, I think you killed my father.’ A stubby nicotined finger pointed at me, angry and tre m b l i n g . ‘Do you? Listen to me very carefully, Webber. I will say it but once. You are out of order, way out of order, son. I have this very morning dragged you out of the lockup, at some cost I imagine to my reputation as well as to my purse, though I wasn’t going to mention that. I have washed you, dressed you in my son’s suit, and I now offer you a meal for Christmas Day. This is the season of charity and forgiveness, I know, but by God you are testing the limits, boy. If I had listened to my own advice and not that of my wife, you would be sharing your Christmas pudding with the blacks in the slammer. ‘Look, you are under my roof. We can discuss whatever you wish, after. If you want to believe I killed your father, then believe this too. It is very important to me that today goes smoothly and if you mess it up, I swear I’ll kill you too. Got it? Truly, I will.’ I needed to know, now, while he was under pressure. Later, he would be calm again and evade my questions.

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‘I know Dollop was not on board that day. So if it was not you, then who was tender?’ A brief defeated pause followed. ‘Your sons?’ His voice was now drained of anger, almost pleading. ‘I’m not sure. Yes, I think the boys helped me that day. It was eight years ago. Look, We b b e r, please, no one killed your father. He was in a dangerous profession and in a dangerous situation and he wanted to win. He was a determined man, your father. He knew the risks. I tried to help him, that’s all. He died of the bends, like plenty before and after him. It was his day, son.’ There were some beads of sweat on his crimson pate. He rummaged clumsily in his pocket, as if searching for a weapon, but produced a handkerchief the size of a teatowel. He held it over his face for a full minute, composing himself, then wiped slowly from crown to chin and emerged, like a mime artist, transformed. He was ready to greet his guests, who had politely waited at the gate although it was wide open. He waved to them, and while doing so said one last thing to me, sotto voce. ‘Nothing you can say about me can hurt me, Webber, but you must understand, I will not tolerate any criticism of my sons. Don’t even think about it. We have lost them, boy, do you think there could be any punishment worse than that?’ His voice cracked. He coughed, composed himself once more. ‘They did their best, as they always did. But they were young. We all make mistakes when we are young. That is the only reason I can forgive you your impertinence,

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because you are so young. But I am at my limit, son. I warn you!’ Then he walked away, to the top of the steps, smiling warmly to his guests, who had waited politely at the bottom step. ‘Nagoya-san, welcome!’ he called cheerily. ‘Please do come in, do come in.’ It seemed unbelievable, especially in light of the events of the past week, but Howard Keeler’s distinguished Christmas guests were all Japanese.

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Nagoya-san was greeted with an enthusiastic embrace. His wife and daughter exchanged nervous happy nods with Marta, amidst giggling. Then Keeler himself exchanged nods with the ladies — a low, distinctly oriental nod, which could not be mistaken for the slow bow of an English gentleman, nor the quick nod of the Australian bushman. This was a kowtow. The fourth guest, an effete bespectacled young man in an expensively tailored grey suit, was introduced as ‘Mr Otomatsu from Ago Bay’. He stood to one side until waved in with the others. I received a cautionary glance from Keeler as the Christmas guest list was escorted in past me towards the dining room. My introduction was cursory. ‘Mr Webber, our house guest.’

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‘Ah, yes, of course. Merry Christmas, Mr Webber,’ smiled Nagoya-san. He seemed to know me. Keeler was trying hard to impress. Gone was the confidence he had displayed at the guardhouse, the expansive gestures and laughter. Now, it was nervous h a l f - g e s t u res. At the start of the meal he commenced grace, then seemed to think better of it and abandoned it with an embarrassed cough, leaving his guests in confusion. He grinned and nodded at the women, and harried poor Marta to ensure every plate and glass remained full. ‘Marta, Mr Nagoya needs more wine ... No? Really? It’s Christmas Day, you’re allowed! ... Mrs Nagoya? Not at all? Very commendable too. Then perhaps some more lamb? Oh, well. It’s wonderful to be able to enjoy Christmas Day with such friends.’ I accepted wine when it was begrudgingly proffered my way. Keeler poured my glass, without comment. I didn’t talk. Keeler was doing all the talking. The thin one with the glasses was silent and watchful, and ate little. Nagoya-san’s wife pushed tiny portions of food around the plate and looked pleased to be there, constantly nodding and smiling at Marta, but saying little. Marta was up and down, as usual, quietly efficient as she b rought out platter after wonderful platter. Despite Keeler’s constant goading, not one plate was allowed to become empty and no one could complain of hunger. A kick under the table distracted me from the daughter’s bodice. She was an exotic creature, looking as soft and sweet as a cream cake in gold and pink silk. She didn’t seem meek, like her mother — she had met my

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eyes a couple of times. I had heard that Japanese girls were the softest in the world. This one looked like she could melt. Keeler held the floor throughout dinner and interruptions were rare. I had no opportunity to speak to the daughter until Keeler left the table, ‘To help Marta with the Christmas pudding — I believe it’s quite a weight, tee hee.’ There was a silence, more relieved than stunned, in his wake. I caught the girl’s eye, and managed a halfsmile out of her. I had to hear her voice. ‘And how are you enjoying Australia, Miss Nagoya?’ I asked, smilingly, full of Kentish charm. Everyone sat up awkwardly at the question. It seemed unexpected. The answer did not interest me; I just wanted to hear her voice, to hear if it was as sweet as the rest of her. But she just smiled and cocked her head towards her father. Perhaps she was under orders, as I was, to hold her tongue. ‘My daughter was born in Cossack. Do you know Cossack, Mr Webber? I believe you have only recently arrived here. You may not know of it.’ I confessed my ignorance. I think I was being politely put back in my box. ‘It is down the coast a few hundred miles. There are a few of us now in Broome who started off pearling there, although the waters are not so productive as here. So, here we are!’ Everyone seemed happy with this. An awkward moment had passed. ‘And you, Mr Webber. For how much longer may we expect to enjoy your company in Broome?’ ‘Not long. In fact, I must leave tomorrow.’

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Eyebrows were raised. I was surprised myself, for it was the first I had heard of my imminent departure. ‘I am sorry to hear that, Mr We b b e r,’ said Nagoya. ‘I hope your departure is not because of more bad news. It seems you are having a most eventful time at the moment.’ What was the meaning of this? A most eventful time — was he referring to my nights in the lockup? The business on the lugger? Father? Keeler had barely introduced me and there had been no opportunity for them to discuss such things. Everywhere I went, people seemed to know my business. The daughter smiled sweetly at me. Was she offering me encouragement, or was she simply amused by my discomfort? What did she know about me? An annoyed cough from over my shoulder indicated that Keeler had rejoined us. Contrary to orders, I had managed to become the focus of attention of all the invited guests. His discomfort only encouraged me. I had not yet heard her speak. ‘No, Mr Nagoya. It is simply time for me to move on. In fact, I have not yet decided my next destination. Perhaps I should ask Miss Nagoya for a suggestion?’ I was desperate to hear her speak. Keeler bristled, but she was not at all embarrassed by the attention of the table. She seemed amused by it, her round eyes unblinking. She had a cool beauty, and her voice, when it came, was just as it should have been. Each word further melted my heart. ‘Once, when I was young, my father allowed me to go with him on the boat and we stopped at Onslow. I can’t recall it well, other than to say that it seemed very pleasant

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and the people were nice to me. Perhaps it just seemed that way, because it was an adventure with my father.’ She nodded slightly, but did not avert her eyes from me. There was a little pout for me. That was it, she’d finished. She was beautiful. ‘Christmas pudding!’ announced Keeler in a tone which demanded full attention. Possibly I had been staring. ‘There you are, young We b b e r, you will be requiring some energy for that big trip ahead of you. Watch out for sixpences everyone!’ Miss Nagoya smiled at me again over her pudding spoon, and when, at the end of a long lunch the women were ushered from the room, she again gave that special sweet pout that seemed full of secret meaning, causing me to spill red wine on the linen tablecloth in an effort to stand. She had spoken to me but once, and she had only left for the next room, yet her departure left me feeling heartbroken The men were speaking in serious tones now. All p retence in their voices had left the room with the women. They were discussing something seriously. Numbers. Pounds. My scrutiny must have distracted them, for all three turned to r e g a rd me. W i t h o u t bothering to lower his voice to avoid offending me, Nagoya asked Keeler if he was happy to continue in my p resence, and Keeler nodded, ‘Since it appears Mr Webber is leaving us tomorrow.’ It was becoming clear that this was a business meeting, and an important one. Nagoya-san seemed to be in c o n t rol of proceedings, although Keeler had re g a i n e d some of his equanimity now that the social part of the day was dispensed with, along with the women, and it

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was down to business. Last night the Eurus had been torched. Was it conceivable that Keeler had been forced to swallow his pride and sell the remains of his business and equipment to the Japanese? Especially now, of all times, with tensions still high and the ringleaders of the riots still in the lockup? ‘The project would be more acceptable in many ways with your involvement,’ Nagoya told Keeler. ‘Yo u r standing in the community will help overcome some obstacles that might otherwise be large. And I think, when you have seen what Otomatsu has to show us today, you will finally be convinced. There will, I think, be enough benefits to satisfy both of us.’ Until now, Otomatsu had sat unblinking, but his moment had now come. All eyes upon him, he reached inside the pocket of his tailored jacket and, like a magician, produced a blue velvet box which he placed on the table before us. He had our full attention. Our four crowns almost touched as we hovered over it, this magic box. But he didn’t open it immediately. He neatly laid out a square of baize, and on this a polished pearl shell. The lustre of the mother-of-pearl seemed to promise riches. He brought out a tiny set of brass scales, a pair of silver forceps and a jeweller’s eyeglass; the tools in trade of the pearl buyer. Since coming to Broome I had never yet held a real pearl. I had seen more than I’d like of shell, of course, and plenty of the blister pearls which encrusted the shell. But genuine stones were a rarity, and they were too valuable to be left on display. As soon as they were brought from the depths and saw sunlight, they were again hidden away, sometimes in the possession of their

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rightful owner, sometimes not. The little beauties which rolled out of Otomatsu’s velvet drawstring purse caused a collective drawing of breath. They rolled like marbles, three perfect rounds, their pinky-white lustre made more beautiful by the candlelight. Under the expectant gaze of the two Japanese, Keeler eyed each gem under the glass, each soft whistle and shake of his jowls seeming to be further confirmation of their extraordinary beauty. ‘Fine stones, fine stones,’ he said, shaking his head again in disbelief. ‘Beautiful colour, beautiful orient.’ He looked up at the bespectacled one. ‘You have done a fine, fine job Mr Otomatsu. My congratulations.’ He spoke to him not as he might a pearl buyer. ‘We are very happy with them,’ nodded Nagoya-san. ‘The best yet. The other batch had a rather displeasing greenish tinge, as you recall. Mr Otomatsu has managed to solve that problem, as you can see.’ Keeler rolled the stones across the baize. Each one rolled straight as a die. He drew one over his teeth to feel the reassuring grittiness. ‘You would never know the difference,’ he said. ‘There is no difference of course, Howard. These are the genuine article.’ Keeler whistled again. He rested his great chin on his clasped hands, and stared at the three pearls which he lined up in front of his bulbous nose. He seemed entranced, a fat boy offered a treat too good to be true. The others sat back, arms folded, patient. ‘Mr Nagoya, I am convinced. We can do business on the terms we have discussed.’ He smiled at all of us. He b e a m e d at me. It was impossible not to return it.

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Handshakes all round, a deal had been struck. Everyone was happy. ‘What do you think, young Webber?’ Keeler grinned. ‘A nice Christmas present for a pearl master with no boats left, don’t you think?’ It seemed a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders. All eyes were upon me. Even Otomatsu was smiling now. What I was thinking was this. My father died for these little balls. But I said they looked very beautiful. ‘Oh, indeed they are, son. And ... expensive!’ Keeler almost drooled the word. ‘How much would you pay for this stone, Mr Webber?’ It was Nagoya-san, teasingly. ‘I have no idea.’ ‘Guess.’ ‘Two hundred pounds?’ They laughed. ‘Ten times that, I would hope,’ said Nagoya, coolly. The three shared a smile. Their joy was becoming too much to bear. ‘And how much of that will you share with the men who have earned it for you, Mr Nagoya? The divers and the crew, or their widows and children, as the case may be? Mr Keeler and I were discussing such tragedies this morning, as you arrived.’ This drew a sober silence. Keeler seemed surprisingly unmoved by the comment. A few hours earlier he would have flown into a rage at my insolence, but the anger seemed to have gone out of him now. It was the considered voice of Nagoya which broke the silence. ‘You speak with reference to your father, Mr Webber?’ I attempted to show no surprise at his frankness. ‘Among others,’ I replied.

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‘The Koepanger?’ he added. I nodded. ‘Yes. In both cases, very unhappy circumstances, that have touched you, naturally. But, Mr Webber, if I may say so, with no disrespect, you must have realised by now that you are not alone in your loss. Mr Keeler, I am sure, would have loved for his sons to have been here today, for his business would one day have been theirs. I myself have had the sadness this week of losing the boy Kusano, who was entrusted to my care, and was like a son. You knew him, Mr Webber, as Sunny. He was fond of you. Your concerns are well placed but you should not think that you are alone in having them. Your sadness and anger is shared by many. Far too many.’ He shook his head. ‘Have you ever visited the Japanese cemetery in this town, Mr Webber? It tells a story. Maybe it would mean not so much to you, as you are a visitor only, but I can put a face to every headstone, you see, so for me it is a very sad place. Your father died in 1912. That was a good year otherwise, only nine divers died. Others were paralysed of course, but only nine dead, so that was a kind year. In 1913, twenty-nine died. In 1914, thirty-three died. In 1915, there were twenty-one. In 1916, nineteen. I know these numbers well, as you see. I could tell you most of the names too. In 1917, twelve divers died, a terrible number really with most of the fleet out of action. And that is just the divers. Many times those numbers of crew are lost at sea when boats go down.’ He paused. He held up the smallest of the three pearls. ‘But that is why this little white ball is worth a thousand pounds, Mr Webber, while a necklace of paste

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pearls is worth nothing. It is just a pretty white marble really, but it is imbued with a value beyond the object itself. Look at it, Mr We b b e r. When you look at a sea pearl, you should also think of the thousand shells brought to the surface before, and the thousand shells after, which did not contain such a stone. So it is a rarity, as well as a beauty. The real value of the pearl is hidden within. The divers who have died, the boats and men lost in storms, the pearlers who have been ruined; the energy, the money, and the lives expended to find such a pearl are not truly wasted, for these awful things are hidden within the pearl. It is the exterior of the pearl that we look at and call beautiful, but the true value is inside, where it cannot be seen. Or so I believe, Mr Webber. The outside is just pretty casing.’ The words seemed to come easily to Nagoya, but his eyes gave little away. He held one pearl up to the flame and examined the fall of light. ‘Did you know, Mr Webber, that the pearl is so dense that X-rays will not penetrate it. It has been attempted, but it is not possible to see inside it without destroying it. I am pleased about that, for that would be like seeing inside the soul.’ He was simply musing now. ‘I am pleased about it, for other reasons,’ Keeler contributed. It drew a smile from the others. ‘Indeed,’ said Nagoya. He turned his attention to me again. This time he looked straight into my eyes and I could see Keeler was sitting back, quite unconcerned. For the first time it occurred to me that we had been brought together not merely by chance. Both Keeler and Nagoya seemed almost to have anticipated this

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gathering. Nagoya’s knowledge of my circ u m s t a n c e s was disconcerting. ‘You have learned, Mr Webber, something which all of us here have also come to learn through awful experience, that the pursuit of these small treasures comes at awful cost. And yet the desire to possess them seems able to overwhelm these considerations. Is it not so, Mr Webber? Doesn’t its beauty compensate us for our losses, if only a little? If your father — and I hope I give no disrespect in referring to him in this way — if he had been, for instance, a miner, would it give you any sense of consolation to hold in your hand a lump of coal?’ I searched his face for irony, but there seemed to be none. He delicately placed the smaller pearl down on the square of baize and gently flicked it with his finger. The little ball, my father’s life, rolled truly across the baize. He picked it up, placed it in my palm, closed my fingers over the pearl, and held my fist between his two hands, as if in blessing. ‘Please, take the pearl, Mr We b b e r. You are leaving B roome tomorro w. I should like you to have it, as a reminder of your time here.’ He gave me no chance to refuse it. When I withdrew my hand from his, with the pearl in its grasp, it seemed to me I had forfeited the right to raise the circumstances of Father’s death again. I was still holding the pearl guiltily in my hand when we heard the first drop of rain fall on Keeler’s tin roof. The four of us looked up for a second, willing more to follow, and in the next second there came the deafening crack of heavy tropical rain. Miss Nagoya ran into the room, her lovely voice

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singing with excitement, ‘Papa, it’s raining,’ and she u s h e red us out onto the verandah to watch the rain with the women. Nagoya-san whispered in his daughter’s ear and she returned from somewhere with a bottle of champagne, which she insisted on opening and pouring herself. I noticed Marta searching her husband’s face for a sign of how the business had gone. He leant down, whispered something in her ear, and she smiled, kissed his ample b e l l y, and pulled his bear’s paw about her waist. She giggled as Miss Nagoya passed her the glass. ‘Krug, how wonderful!’ sang Marta, ‘my God, we have not had this since the war!’ We drank to health and prosperity and wished each other well for the coming year of 1921. T h e re was indeed something miraculous about the first fall of the Wet season. We all remained on the verandah to watch it fall, to breath in the beautiful damp smell of it, to feel its freshness, and to curse it for not having come sooner.

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(Editorial, Westralian Historical Society Quarterly, Summer Edition 1956.) THE SPECTRE OF WILDMAN

This year will see the commencement of a new enterprise in Camden Harbour in the remote North Kimberley r e g i o n , namely the first attempt to ‘cultivate’ sea pearls on a commercial scale. The bold project has already captured the imagination of the public because of its potential for huge profits, but not everyone in the north is so enthusiastic. There are many in Broome holding their breath in anticipation of what they see as potentially devastating effects on traditional deepsea pearling.

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History can offer some perspective to this controversy, for, as usual, it has all been seen before. There is an historical figure who may be seen as a spectre, looming over this venture as a warning to those seeking untold wealth in this remote corner of the continent. I write of course of Wildman, who claimed to have found a fortune in this very place precisely one hundred years ago, in 1856. His story would seem to promise the current hopefuls either wealth beyond measure, or catastrophe — or perhaps one followed by the other! Wildman was a convicted forger, jailed at the notorious Fremantle Roundhouse in the 1860s. Like most men of his calling, he was said to be intelligent and skilled at deception, and a most convincing liar. Nevertheless, he was permitted to make a public proclamation from his prison cell, on the basis that his claims could have enormous importance for the colony which at that time was teetering on the brink of financial collapse. His claims caused a sensation in the young colony. In 1856, he said, he was first mate on the Maria Augusta, on passage from Rotterdam to Batavia via the Cape of Good Hope. As was then the custom, the ship caught the Roaring Forties across the southern Indian Ocean, and then followed the western coast of Australia northwards towards Batavia. The ship had to pull into an unpopulated harbour in the far north for r e p a i r s . Wildman wandered off away from the rest of the cre w, he claimed. He became lost, and in trying to make his way back came across a hilly area strewn with gold nuggets. He could only carry a sackful, about half his own weight, and managed to stow them secretly on board until they returned to Europe. In Liverpool, he sold eighty-one pounds of nuggets to a bullion dealer for the sum of four hundred and sixteen pounds sterling. The Swan River Colony was at this time in dire financial

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straits, and many who had taken great risks to establish themselves in what was then a remote outpost in the hope of becoming wealthy, were instead facing ruin. Wildman’s story gave them renewed hope. There was not one person who would not have wished it to be true. And the story had credence. Wildman could name the bullion dealer. He was able to give a good description of the land at Camden Harbour, and various experts agreed that the type of land he described, of quartz and ironstone pebbles, sounded auriferous. He was able to draw a detailed map of the exact location. In 1864 under public pressure, the government authorised a party to explore the area described by Wildman, and allowed the prisoner to join the party. He proved unhelpful, tried to escape, and no gold was found. Wildman was returned to prison and was eventually declared insane. That should have been the end of the legend of Wildman’s Gold. But it was not. One of the exploratory party returned to the area to investigate further, with two others. All three died. When eventually located, all three bodies had mummified in the heat. In 1865, a group of settlers from distant Melbourne, including women and children, having heard of the wealth of the area, came to establish a colony and perhaps find their fortune. They persisted against all manner of natural disasters, but within two years all had died, gone mad or left. Wildman died and interest in his claims gradually withered, until the discovery of gold at Halls Creek and The Pilbarra rekindled interest many years later. By this time the Kimberley had been opened up for cattle grazing, but the area Wildman had indicated remained accessible only from the sea. It was protected from a land approach from the south by a mountain range, not high but treacherous. Two parties had attempted to

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find passage across it. All members were lost, bar one. The sole survivor was a lad of sixteen named Tucker. He was found wandering, naked, emaciated and dumbstruck, his eyes unblinking and seemingly unseeing. He was unable to give a coherent account of how the others in the party had met their ends. One version of events had it that the lad’s skin appeared shiny, and that when the bewildered boy was given his first wash, the bathtub was found to contain gold dust! The truth of this anecdote is, in common with so much of the story of Wildman, now impossible to ascertain. The story has been retold so often that we are left with as much legend as history. It may be correct in general to assert that truth is stranger than fiction, but in this case one must add the caveat that the ‘truth’ in this case refers to a contentious historical record of the unproven claims of a renowned liar! What does all this mean for the new cultured pearl venture? Well, perhaps it means nothing at all that every pre v i o u s fortune-seeker who has ventured to Camden Harbour has met disaster. We shall have to be patient and see. But it may be that the progress of the Camden Harbour pearl farm will deliver us the final verdict on Wildman’s claims. As historians, we should remain alert to any reports of the company’s employees supple menting their incomes by the sale of large quantities of alluvial gold, or of their being found wandering the North Kimberley stricken blind or mute! While of course I wish the best of luck to those involved in the new pearling venture, I admit I will be somewhat disap pointed if things proceed too uneventfully, for there could only be two explanations for such an outcome, neither of them pleasing ones to an historian. Firstly, that some hitherto unrecorded catastrophe took place during the last hundred years which not only destroyed Wildman’s gold, but also destroyed

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whatever malevolent force had so jealously and effectively guarded the riches from those hapless early intruders. Or secondly — and sadly I have to confess this would seem the m o re scientific and likely — that Wildman was, as many suspected from the first, a fraud. From the members of The Westralian Historical Society, to the management and staff of the Camden Pearl Farm Company ... GOOD LUCK! You may need it!

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I have been sitting this morning in the occupational therapist’s room watching television, in tears. The cricket was on, Australia versus Pakistan, and it was washed out so they were showing shots of the crowd. There was a boy in a blue jacket sitting with his father, and they were sharing an umbrella and reading the guide. That was it. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. My father did not to take me to the cricket as others’ did. He was away with the navy, and then dead. Valid excuses, but still, I would have liked to have gone. You might imagine, in your youthful way, that one gets over such things. Time heals all ills and so on. Well, I was jealous of that little bastard in the blue parka, that’s the truth of it. And if you think that is pathetic coming from a ninety-six year old man, I could not agree more.

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The only other explanation would be the wax. I shall ask Dr Basheh, if he is able to ‘tarry’ tomorrow. Could tearfulness be a sign of wax infiltrating the brain, doctor? No, no reason, just asking. Anyway, things are looking up for the afternoon shift because Mary Belotti is on. There is no nonsense when Mary is on, and I find that comforting. She must have lots of grandchildren, and I bet they toe the line for her too. I do. When Mary says ‘You’ll have to move that skinny backside if you want your bed made’, you move. Whereas if Rae Plewright spoke to me like that I’d be stone deaf. What’s that Mary? Hydrotherapy is booked for nine-thirty is it, love? Probably get it about eleven then, with the usual delays. Lovely. No chance of a Milo while I’m waiting is there, Mary? Oh, you are good to me. She is, too. She will oblige only because I am her favourite, she tells me, but now she is attending to Ned and pretending not to notice his skin, so I suppose he is now another favourite. Rae Plewright keeps her distance from him and scratches behind her neck whenever she passes the bed, but Mary treats him like family. Which he may be, I will have to ask. Have I mentioned my new room mate, Ned? Ned has Norwegian scabies according to Dr Basheh. The words w e re plainly audible even with my ears and Rae Plewright’s drawn curtains. Norwegian scabies! Imported, not domestic. The poor little blighters must be a tad confused and homesick, so far from home. I had actually been listening for the word ‘leprosy’, but being Egyptian one would expect Dr Basheh would know the difference, and I know he has been doing a lot of study for his

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Australian medical examination so he should be quite on the ball. He stopped only briefly at the foot of my bed, which was a pity, as I had something for him. ‘I really cannot t a r r y, Mr We b b e r,’ he told me, ‘I cannot stop for our usual banter today, as much as I would like to.’ Tarry. Banter. Thank God for New Australians, they keep the language alive. The pain in my back has more or less completely resolved. I am loathe to admit to too great an improvement in case he threatens to stop my hydrotherapy sessions. I have to admit I enjoy them. They provide a focus to my day, even though Simon the physiotherapist seems to be increasingly sullen, and indeed increasingly absent. He thinks I haven’t twigged that those ‘urgent’ pages he receives are preceded by a quick fiddle with the on-off switch. Still, it’s a nice soak, with or without company. Oh, lovely, Mary. I can see, yes ... indeed it is, piping hot. I can always depend on you. God bless you, Mary ... No, I’m not ‘going religious’, it’s a common enough saying, isn’t it? ... Yes, perhaps I should say it more. Thank you for the Milo, love. God bless you, Mary, a hundred times. She is saint-like, really. I have thought of writing to the Bulletin about her. They might send up the Nicklin woman to do a feature article. The Mother Teresa of the North-West. Mary would refuse to speak with her of course, but she would be secretly flattered to have been asked, and she would have no trouble working out who was responsible. But I was talking about Dr Basheh. I had a gift to give him this morning, had he ‘tarried’. They are still there on my side table, a pair of cufflinks. Pearl in gold setting. Dr Basheh actually wears cufflinks, a rare enough event in

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these parts, and I had wanted, with this gift, to thank him for his kindness to me and to wish him well in his examination. Now I’m not so sure. Perhaps I will show them to him tomorrow and see if he shows any interest. There is a story behind them, and I don’t mind if by telling it I seem a fool. These cufflinks were once my engagement ring for Miss Nagoya. Yes, laugh if you wish. The pearl is the very one given to me by Nagoya-san at Keeler’s table on Christmas Day 1920. Even as I accepted the stone from him, I was certain that one day I would place it on his daughter’s finger. That pout! The coded message to meet her in Onslow! It was clear she was in love with me. I waited for her in Onslow for a full year before I conceded to myself that I may have read too much into those few words she had spoken to me that Christmas Day. By then I had lost my reason to move on, so I stayed. Towns such as this are like quicksand, you either leave quickly or you’re stuck. Thus far in my ninety-six years, Miss Nagoya is the closest I have come to marriage and therefore to a family. I would have liked a son. I would have been an attentive father. I would have taken him to the cricket. I would not have been absent. It was years later, on a rare trip to the city, that I had the cufflinks made up. I commissioned a reluctant St Georges Terrace jeweller to split Nagoya’s pearl. ‘Early cultured job,’ he declared, seeming relieved that he had not offered to buy it. A fake. I had him mount each half with the cut face on display, truthful side out. I hoped one day to be able to casually show Nagoya-san the precious inside of his pearl. What’s that, Mary? Oh, he would like me to cancel, would

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he? Yes, well, I’m sure he is busy but in fact the back is giving me a lot of gip today, and I’m not one who complains. Perhaps I’ve refractured the bone. Or possibly the wax is building up in the kidneys, that could be it. Anyway, tell our Simon that I am very much looking forward to my hydrotherapy session this morning and, no, I shouldn’t like to cancel, thanks for asking. Lazy sod. Busy! I’ll have my soak, you’ll see. Where was I? Ah, cultured pearls. They are the norm now. You read that article from the historical society about the pearl farm? Well, despite Wildman and despite Viney’s fiery demoness, it did not close down. It became the first of many, and why not? Why find one natural pearl in a thousand shells from the ocean floor, with all the risk that entails, when you can lift a crate of a thousand shells from the water knowing a pearl will be in each and every one? The stones are equally valuable. In fact, the cultured pearls are indistinguishable fro m naturals. All the buyer really cares about is the size and appearance of the stone. So much for Nagoya’s pretty words about the value imbued in the stone by the effort and lives expended in finding it. The market value of such things is precisely nil. So Father died for no reason at all. His mission was quite futile, though it must have seemed to him at the time to be frightfully important. It would have made no d i ff e rence if he had succeeded. War would still have broken out, the market for shell would still have crashed, plastic buttons would still have been invented, and man would still have discovered a way to farm pearls. All he did was futile. He might as well have stayed at home. I had expected to find a photograph of Father, or at least something in his handwriting, as I went through the

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battery box. There was nothing. It seems the cufflinks are the only tangible thing I have left. They would be an heirloom, if I had an heir. The last item in the box is Leon Viney’s manuscript, still lying there accusingly. That, too, should have been an heirloom to be passed from Viney to his son, though I only came to realise this yesterday, as I transcribed his final chapter for your benefit. (In truth I had never quite read it to the end before.) If I knew where Father Harold was, I would send the manuscript to him, but I’ve not heard his name now for years. I doubt whether, as a boy, he was ever allowed to read the words that Viney must have written for him. Viney treated that boy badly. I would hope that, whatever failings I may have, I could at least state that in my life I’ve caused no one any great harm, and that’s better than most and certainly more than Leon Vi n e y could say. This is how I try to think of Viney’s death; Spanish flu. Eleven thousand died of it that year. I think of it as eleven thousand and one. Viney’s book was never going to be published. Not because it is especially awful — there have been plenty worse than his published — but because he was twenty years too late. Who reads adventure romance any more? Still, a promise is a promise and I have transcribed his final chapter for your edification and amusement. Go on, are you not even a little curious to know how Lawrence Vesney lost his legs? No? Oh, well. Yes, Mary? He’s managed to find a tiny gap for me in that busy schedule of his, has he? Find those drawers I wear, will you, my love. I have five minutes, do I? Very good, that usually means twenty.

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WESTERN AUSTRALIA Coroner’s Act 1920 INQUISITION (Taken without a Jury) Western Australia) to wit, )

AN INQUISITION taken at CORONER’S COURT, P E R T H ,w i t h i n t h e S t a t e o f W e s t e r n A u s t r a l i at h i s 1 4 t h d a y o f S e p t e m b e r , 1 9 9 5 , b y m e R a y m o n dA r t h u r L E E S ,

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Stipendiary Magistrate, by law authorised to inquire — When, where and after what manner William George WEBBER came by his death. Upon inquiry I find: (a) t h a t t h e d e c e a s e dW i l l i a mG e o r g e WEBBER died on 10th March 1995, at Onslow D i s t r i c t H o s p i t a l as a r e s u l t of A c u t e M y o c a r d i a Il n f a r c t i o an r i s i n g f r o m i s c h a e m i ch e a r t d i s e a s e c o m p l i c a t e d by cardiac amyloidosis.

I f i n d t h a t t h e d e a t h a r o s e by w a y of N a t u r a lC a u s e s .( S e e a t t a c h m e nfto r further reasons.) In w i t n e s s w h e r e o f I, t h e s a i d C o r o n e r R a y m o n dA r t h u rL E E S S . M . h a v e t o t h e inquisition set my hand,

Finding on Inquiry The deceased, William George WEBBER, died on 1 0 t h M a r c h 1 9 9 5 at Onslow D i s t r i c t H o s p i t a la s a r e s u l t o f a n a c u t e m y o c a r d i ailn f a r c t i osnu f f e r e d whilst

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t a k i n g a h y d r o t h e r a p yb a t h . It w a s the u n u s u a ln a t u r eo f t h e s e c i r c u m s t a n c e s w h i c h c a u s e d t h e C o r o n e rt o c o n d u c ta formal inquiry. The deceased was a 96 year old man and a long-term resident of the Permanent Care Unit of the Onslow District Hospital. He was known to have the medical problems of atherosclerosis, ischaemic heart disease, cerebrovasculardisease and amyloidosis. On 28th January 1995, six weeks prior to h i s d e a t h , he h a d s u f f e r e d a s u s p e c t e d mild heart attack. Two weeks prior to his death he had suffered a stroke or cere brovascular accident which caused him to f a l l . In the f a l l he had s u s t a i n e a d stable fracture of the transverse process of the twelfth thoracic vertebra and as a result suffered significant back pains for which he was receiving hydrotherapy. On the morning of 10th March 1995, the deceased w a s t a k e n f r o m h i s b e d by w h e e l c h a i r by the h o s p i t a l p h y s i o t h e r a p i s t , f o r t h e p u r p o s e of r e c e i v i n g his h y d r o t h e r a ptyr e a t m e n t . This treatment r e q u i r et s h a t t h e p a t i e n tl i e i n an especially designed bath of water while j e t s o f w a t e ra r e u s e d t o t r e a tt h e injured part. The bath is normally filled with approximately 60cm of warm water and there are handle grips along the sides in s i x p l a c e s ,b y w h i c h t h e p a t i e n t

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undergoing treatment may, in most circum stances, easily pull himself up. It is considered standard practice for t h e s u p e r v i s i nhge a l t h w o r k e r i n t h i s situation to remain in attendance at all times, and such was the usual practice of t h e p h y s i o t h e r a p i s tw h o w a s r e s p o n s i b l e for supervising the deceased on the day in question. However, on this day the physio t h e r a p i sctl a i m st o h a v e r e c e i v e an d urgent request to attend the General Ward, w h i c h h e d i d . H e d i d n o t a r r a n g ef o r a n o t h e r h e a l t h w o r k e r to t a k e o v e r the role of supervisor in his absence. As a r e s u l t ,t h e d e c e a s e dw a s u n s u p e r v i s e d d u r i n ga p e r i o do f h i s h y d r o t h e r a p y treatment that morning. The duration of t h i s p e r i o di s d i f f i c u l tto e x a c t l y ascertain, but it was certainly more than five minutes and less than twenty minutes. When the physiotherapist returned to the hydrotherapy room, he found the deceased to be fully submerged at the bottom of the bath, apparently lifeless. An attempt was made to lift the deceased from the bath, b u t f o r m a l r e s u s c i t a t i ow n as not i n s t i t u t e da,s t h e a t t e n d i n h gospital doctor declared life to be extinct. A m e d i c a le x a m i n a t i o n was made after death, on 12th March 1995. The heart was grossly enlarged due to infiltration with amyloid. There was very extensive thrombus

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totally occluding the anterior descending b r a n c h of t h e l e f t c o r o n a r y a r t e r y and t h e r ew a s e v i d e n c o e f r e c e n tm a s s i v e myocardial infarction. Widespread athero sclerosis was noted occluding all the other coronary arteries as well as the common and internal carotid arteries on both sides. It was the view of the Forensic Pathologist t h a t t h e i m m e d i a t ec a u s e o f d e a t h w a s cardiac arrest caused by acute myocardial i n f a r c t i o n ,c a u s e d in t u r n by c o r o n a r y artery thrombosis. Incidental findings, not immediately contributing to death, included extensive multiple organ infiltration with t h e w a x y m a t e r i a la m y l o i d ,a n d t h e observation that the lungs contained large volumes of fresh water, an event which was c o n s i d e r e d to h a v e most likely occurred after death. The absence of the physiotherapist from the hydrotherapy room at the time of death was considered to be not desirable, but neither was it considered t o b e contribu tory to the death of the patient, who had suffered a coronary occlusion sufficient to cause death in any circumstance. The circumstances necessitating the absence of the physiotherapist on this occasion were o f a s o m e w h a tp r e s s i n gb u t n o t u r g e n t n a t u r e ,a n d i t w a s u n f o r t u n a t t eh a t a replacement supervisor was not assigned. It is the strong recommendation of the

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C o r o n e r t h a t steps be t a k e n to make it clear to all health workers supervising p a t i e n t si n h y d r o t h e r a p t yh a t a d e q u a t e s u p e r v i s i oo nf t h e p a t i e n tm u s t be providea d t a l l t i m e s .H o w e v e r , the outcome of this event of 10th March 1995 w o u l d h a v e b e e n n o d i f f e r e n et v e n if s u p e r v i s i o nh a d b e e n c o n s t a n t ,a n d the d i r e c tc a u s e o f d e a t h w a s a n a c u t e myocardial infarction. In all the circumstances I find that the death arose by way of Natural Causes.

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Wi l d m a n ’s Gold by Leon Viney Chapter 31 (final) ‘Glory Bound’

I would never claim to be a man naturally given to acts of bravery, but my adventures had steeled me. It is true when they say that a man may discover hidden reserves of courage when called upon, or skills he did not know he possessed. So it was with me now. Somehow the knowledge of the awful deaths, firstly of my dear friend Sir Harry Huxtable, and now of The Fox, served to instil in me a renewed determina tion to complete the mission we had undertaken together. It

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would be for their sakes that I would persist, where otherwise I may have given in to despair. And there was Kyla. She stood beside me, quaking with fear, wrapping her thin brown arms around her shoulders in an attempt to calm herself as she looked forlornly out to the stilled, silent ketch. She had struck me from the first as a wonderful creature, but since the death of the heroic Tommy she had come to depend on me more and more. Now as I looked upon her, her helplessness made her even more beautiful to me than she had ever seemed before, and I was overwhelmed with a determination to protect her at all costs. Behind us, on the shore and in the cliffs was an army of the unblinking, golden-skinned Watjika men, terrifying in their silence. In the cave our ears had almost bled with the anguished cries of The Fox, and the furious death throes of Djakuwa, but somehow this unnatural silence was worse. Before me, several hundred yards out in the grey murky waters of Camden Harbour, was the ketch that should have been our salvation, but there was no sound from her. I called out again and again. She seemed in good condition, moored in the calm waters of the harbour, sails furled. But there was no answer and no sign of a dinghy being launched. In fact, no sign of life aboard. T h e re began to be some stirrings from the gilt army behind me, and so I took Kyla by the waist and we started to pick our way across the rocks and out along the point, which jutted almost a mile into the harbour. We reached a high ledge which Kyla could not climb over without help. I lowered her over it first, meaning to follow, but before I could clamber over myself, she screamed. I vaulted across, only to share her gruesome discovery. In a rocky hollow beneath the ledge, was a rough grave. The stench was unbearable, and

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the sight intolerable. Belt buckles and remnants of clothing told me it was the crew of the ketch, and the awful confusion of thigh bones and skulls and rotting flesh suggested their deaths had been recent and vicious. They appeared to have been simply torn apart, scooped up and deposited in this dank rocky tomb. It was only now that I fully realised how great was the power of those whose wrath we had raised. Kyla’s fear had f rozen her to the spot. There no longer seemed any hope that salvation may come from the ketch. But there was still hope aboard the ketch, if by some miracle we could be transported there. I tugged the poor girl along the rough rocks towards the point. A few of the sentries had started to gather at the base of the point, blocking off our return. Our fate seemed sealed. Placing the girl’s hands upon my shoulders, and with a shout of ‘For God’s sake, hold on!’, I dived off the end of the point and started to swim the long distance to the ghost ship. At first the girl was heavy, and our plight seemed hopeless, but then her fingers grew less tight as she began to overcome her fear, and then she started to help by kicking her legs. Three-quarters of the way there, I felt a surge of joy. We could after all be saved! I could almost feel my hands upon the deck. Once or twice I had imagined I saw a flash in the corner of my vision, but when I looked across it was gone. Then I saw it, just ahead. There was no mistaking it, a grey wedge of death cutting through the water between us and salvation, then disappearing. It reappeared a minute or so later, ahead and to the right this time, and then there was another. Dear God, they were circling. We were now only yards from the ketch. If only they would delay their attack for another

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minute or so ... I had one hand upon the first rung of the rope ladder when I felt the tug at my neck which made me go cold. I felt Kyla’s grip fail, and felt her being pulled under. She had no time to scream, such was the force of the monster. I pulled myself half out of the water and managed to grab her hand, which was all that I could now see in the murk. I pulled at her tiny hand, expecting to lift her to safety, but the weight of it told me the awful truth. I held her beautiful hand, her soft forearm, quite undamaged ... but that was all. She had been taken to the bottom. The water boiled as more killers were attracted by the gore. I could not believe so much blood could come from one person. My grief must have caused me to hesitate for one second, a second that I shall recall and regret forever. I felt no pain, just a tug at the waist, for so powerful are the jaws and so sharp the teeth of these great sharks, that, like a surg i c a l procedure, the pain is not noticed at first. But as I aimed a kick at the water, I realised to my terror that my legs were gone, and my own life blood was flooding in to the water to mix with Kyla’s. My arms grew weak and I felt faint with the shock of it, and a voice inside said to me, ‘Let go! Go to join her!’ and were it not for the boy, I feel sure that is exactly what I would have done. His voice was so sweet and so unexpected that, coming f rom above me, it seemed like that of an angel. ‘Climb into the dinghy and I will pull you up,’ he said. I now realised that I was just inches from the lifeboat which had been secured against the side of the ketch, and with the last strength in my arms I pulled myself up and over and into it, landing on my head, and lying there hopelessly akimbo, my stumps dripping blood upon my face. I began to feel my life ebbing gently away.

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The boy saved my life, or salvaged what there was left of it. He winched the boat up, and attended to my wounds without hint of panic, making tourniquets from strips of material to stem the flow. I felt no pain at all. He gave me a swig of whisky to drink, and I began to feel that it was just possible that I may not die. Unlike Sir Harry. Unlike The Fox. Unlike Tommy and now my poor, poor Kyla. The boy’s name, he told me, was Harold. He seemed about nine years old. He was a mulatto. His father was Irish, or so he believed, for he had never met him, and his mother a native from a long way from here. He seemed very bright, well read, and quite fearless. He told me, quite matter-off a c t l y, what had happened to the cre w. They sounded a scurvy lot. After two weeks of waiting offshore for our party to arrive, rumours had become rife on board that we had all died, or that we had never gotten underway, and, f u r t h e r m o re, talk had grown frenzied of the riches to be gained on shore. Each of the crew had heard in some vague way the story of Wildman’s gold, and the prospect that such wealth may await them on land became too much. Rather than risk an insurrection, the captain authorised an exploratory party, which, because of mutual distrust, ended up comprising all eight crew. H a rold alone had been unhappy to go ashore. He had heard the local legends, and had re m e m b e red the fear he had once seen in the eyes of his mother and the other adults by mention of the place called Kajunuwurra. He took the men across to the point, and then rowed back to await their signal to return. This decision saved his life, and therefore mine. The signal never came. Harold’s account of the men’s demise was interrupted by a flash of light from the shore. An amazing sight met our eyes.

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The golden Watjika men had gathered in an arc below the hill, looking up at the source of the light, which was the ruins of Djakuwa’s cave. It glowed, a fierce red, at first like a star, then taking on a human form, and then clearly that of Djakuwa herself, restored to her ethereal beauty. She smiled sweetly to those before her, and gestured as if to bid them a d i e u , and then, raising her arms above her like a ballerina’s pirouette, she began to transform once more. Her body became a pillar, her arms a loop surmounting it, like the eye of an enormous needle, through which the red light now beamed. I recognised this. The crux ansata. The Symbol of Life itself. All around it the heavens were lit up as if by fire, but from the eye of the crux came a beam of light so bright that it outshone the heavens and threatened to set the earth alight. Then the eye began to rotate and, like a heavenly s e a rchlight, the beam tracked across the hills, across the point, and then across the sea, passing blindingly across us, and continuing across the water to the east until it came to rest on a point on the water between two small islands at the inlet to the harbour. Then the glow ceased. When I looked to shore, gone was the crux ansata, gone too was Djakuwa, and gone were her golden sentries. The fire in the skies had dimmed and begun to darken, with just a glow of red lingering on the distant horizon. ‘We must weigh anchor and set sail now,’ I told Harold. ‘But it is almost dark,’ he objected. ‘The captain had terrible trouble getting into the harbour. He cursed the reefs. Many times we almost ran aground, and that was by good light.’ Already I had heard the first rumbles from the shore, and

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seen the first puff of smoke. Soon, I suspected, would come a catastrophe of such a scale to make Krakatoa’s destruction seem a minor event. ‘So long as we leave this harbour, we can find another safe harbour before dark, Harold. But leave we must, and now, boy!’ To the boy’s great credit, for I was of no use to him, he weighed anchor, unfurled the sails and we sailed ahead of a fresh wind towards the inlet, and beyond that, God willing, to the open sea. ‘By what way shall I take her through the inlet?’ quavered the boy’s voice. ‘Take her between the two small islands, precisely where the light came to rest,’ I told him. ‘But the captain took her ... ’ he began to pro t e s t . ‘ Take her the way I say,’ I insisted. ‘For that was the meaning of the Symbol of Life.’ ‘Symbol of Life!’ he mumbled, by way of protest, but he headed that way. Legless, I could only sit and watch the scene astern. D j a k u w a ’s cave seemed like a sleeping monster once more coming to life. The rumblings grew more threatening, the smoke denser, and the first rivulets of lava spewed forth f rom the mouth of the crater and began to snake their way down the sides. ‘We’re clear of the islands!’ trumpeted the boy. His voice, drifting back from the prow, so young and full of optimism, gave me some glimmer of hope for the future against the despair I looked upon behind us. None too soon, we had left Kajunuwurra. Alas there were three who would never leave. And for what profit, I asked myself. The gold I had carried was mostly in sacks, now lost to the sharks. Even that which

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I had stuffed in the pockets of my trousers was lost, along with much of the trousers, and the limbs within. I patted my shirt pocket. Only a few nuggets remained, a paltry testament to our adventures, a tiny recompense for the terrible price my companions had paid. I reached in, grabbed them, and sprinkled them into my left hand, then stared, unbelieving. One, two, three, four, five, six. It had been for these riches that my companions had gambled their lives, and lost. Six worthless pebbles of quartz.

THE END

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