Line of Fire Read online

  MAP

  AFFECTION

  ‘this is strong stuff. The oppressive humidity of Townsville seems almost to drip from the page and lends Affection a hypnotic, dreamlike quality that is hard to shake . . . an astonishing novel’ — Vogue

  ‘Brilliantly conceived and superbly written . . . a literary tour de force’ — The Australian

  ‘a bona fide page-turner. [The author] has found that thing often eluded by serious literature: a good story’ — The Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘I love cricket biographies. I love Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, American realists like John Steinbeck, Faulkner, not that he was a realist really. I like Hemingway. And I tell you what, I read Ian Townsend’s book. Now that was fantastic. I really liked that book. Really graceful writing. Really interesting, too. A cracker’ — William McInnes, The Advertiser (Adelaide)

  ‘An engrossing and skilful debut’ — The Bulletin’s Books Supplement

  ‘A finely crafted novel . . . there is both humour and pathos here in the broad sweep and the intimate detail’ — The Age (Melbourne)

  ‘A beautiful first novel’ — The Canberra Sunday Times

  ‘accomplished . . . downright hilarious at times’ — The Courier-Mail

  ‘A stunning work of “faction” . . . meticulously researched and superbly written’ — The Gold Coast Bulletin

  THE DEVIL’S EYE

  ‘this is fiction at its dramatic best . . . By the time the storm strikes, bringing death and destruction with it, I felt I was there in Bathurst Bay experiencing the unstoppable force of Cyclone Mahina . . . It is history with greater resonance than a text-book’ — The Courier-Mail

  ‘The characters remain with the reader long after the tale is told, and that surely is what good writing is all about’ — Sue Gammon, ABC Radio

  ‘Hour by hour the story moves towards the worst cyclone in Australian history. Just when the heat and exhaustion of all concerned are becoming almost overpowering to the reader, the cyclone hits . . . Breathtaking. Far more chilling than any murder mystery’ — Cairns Sun

  ‘A fascinating tale of commercial exploitation, inter-racial relationships and a natural disaster. Townsend has done a wonderful job in recreating this terrible event’ — The Examiner, Launceston

  ‘Townsend follows in [Thea Astley’s] considerable footsteps . . . [He] draws the force of a cyclone with true authenticity, and the destructive effects on a motley collection of people . . . Part of the accomplishment of this novel is its use of dialogue, presented without anachronisms, direct as a script, and loaded with covert meaning . . . The Devil’s Eye is vivid, complex and assured’ — Sunday Age (Melbourne) Book of the Week

  DEDICATION

  For Kirsty

  CONTENTS

  Map

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Postscript

  Notes and References

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book is an attempt to collect the best evidence, hoping to approach the truth.

  In the case of the Manson family, Ted Harvey and Bill Parker there are gaps in the evidence caused by war and grief. The documents that survive don’t tell the full story and the memories that survive are often too painful to be expressed.

  Within those limitations, I’ve tried to explain how and why one ordinary family from Adelaide, including a little boy, ended up in New Guinea to be caught behind enemy lines in a particularly brutal war. I’ve also tried to understand why their extraordinary experience in Rabaul has been so thoroughly forgotten.

  So I’ve used many sources to reconstruct the sequence of events that led them to Rabaul and to their deaths. Where there are gaps, I’ve asked other people what it was like living through the Great Depression and in Rabaul before the invasion. I’ve also used the expertise of people who study those bigger geological, economic and military events, to provide the backdrop to the lives of Dickie and Marjorie and Ted.

  Throughout the book, I’ve indicated where I’ve speculated. I’ve italicised conversations that are speculative, while trying to keep what people said true to their character and circumstances. I did this as a reminder that these Australians did live and breathe. They struggled like we do to make the best of our circumstances. They happened to live through extraordinary events in Rabaul, and their experience is as much a part of our history as the military campaigns that raged around them.

  I’ve chased information for this book across Australia to New Guinea, and where possible I’ve gone back to primary sources. Primary sources can be wrong and memory is fickle. Any other errors are entirely mine.

  CHAPTER 1

  It is very regrettable that such an incident as mentioned in the sworn statement took place, although it had been carried out upon orders.

  — Mizusaki Shojiro, commanding officer, 81 Naval Garrison Unit, Rabaul

  On the afternoon of Monday 18 May 1942, Richard Manson, Dickie to his family, sat in the back of an uncovered utility truck belonging to the Japanese Navy and watched the river of dust swirl and tumble away behind him.

  He might have imagined, as 11-year-old boys sometimes do, that the road was moving and he was not, and that if he jumped it would carry him away to the mountains, where no-one would find him.

  Last chance, then, for this story to end differently.

  His mother, Marjorie, took his hand and wouldn’t let go.

  Earlier, as they had been driven from the prisoner of war compound, men had stared after them: soldiers in tattered khaki, a few in grey shirts that once were white. He’d recognised some of the faces behind the barbed wire.

  Philip Coote was a grey shape, reduced in size, but still one of the most recognisable figures in Rabaul. His hair was longer, it was no longer dark, and he had a salt and pepper beard. Mr Coote looked older than the same Mr Coote who had handed out lollies to the kids who sat outside his office when their fathers were called inside. It was hard to imagine now that he had managed Burns Philp, the company that once owned Rabaul. In the back of the utility truck, as it swayed down Malaguna Road, it was harder for Dickie to imagine Rabaul was even the same town, until recently the capital of New Guinea, Australian in its accent, British to its bootstraps.

  The buildings looked the same, but the people had gone. In the tropical afternoon, Japanese soldiers lounged on the verandahs where white men with red faces once sat. Everywhere, poached egg Japanese flags hung limply beside the black swastika.

  Dickie sat between his mother and the man who wasn’t his father and whom she called Ted. They didn’t say a word, which was unusual for Ted Harvey, who usually had something to say, even if it was only to himself.

  Across from Dickie, with a suitcase between his legs, was his Uncle Jimmy, who tried to smile. Dickie desperately wanted Jimmy to say something, to tell him where they were going and that it was all right,
but it was as if they were all in the same dream in which they wanted to shout but couldn’t.

  Beside Jimmy, Bill Parker might have been silently crying.

  Dickie turned the other way.

  There were six Japanese soldiers who took up most of the back of the truck, three on each side, and they all had rifles. They wouldn’t look at him; they stared at some faraway point as if they were on the parade ground. He knew Hamada, one of the prison guards. A surly Jap, Jimmy had said, but he didn’t look surly now. He looked like he was going to be sick.

  They passed the town’s iceworks, called the Freezer, and another white face flashed past, Mr Gordon Thomas from the Rabaul Times, who also had a long white beard, longer than Mr Coote’s. Mr Thomas raised a hand, just a little, as if unsure, before he, too, was left beside the river of dust.

  Dickie caught glimpses of Simpson Harbour between the foreshore buildings. The water was a grey blue in the afternoon light and the hulls of grey battleships and transports appeared here and there, some beside the wharves. The last of the sunlight caught them and showed holes, dents and scratches from some recent battle. Jimmy and Teddy had shaken hands when they saw them come in a week earlier. Dickie hoped they weren’t going to Japan on one of those.

  The truck rumbled under the canopy of trees where the sun cut the road to pieces. It turned right onto Mango Avenue, the extinct Mother volcano swung into view, and then they stopped in front of what used to be the courthouse but was now Naval Garrison Headquarters. Japanese flags hung from the windows.

  The dust washed over the floor of the truck and sank onto his boots. It was an ever-present fine grey dust that would have sent his grandmother in Adelaide mad. It came from one of the smaller volcanoes, the one near the mouth of the harbour, hidden for the moment by trees and buildings.

  The dust settled. The truck’s engine ticked in the shade. It was hotter now that they’d stopped. No-one moved. The air was syrupy with rotting fruit and a tang of sulphur that Dickie could almost taste. The sulphur smell came in mysterious gusts even if there was no breeze, sometimes even when the breeze was blowing the volcanic ash away from the town.

  Of all the volcanoes surrounding the harbour, only one, the smallest, called Tavurvur by the natives and Matupi by the Europeans, was smoking and steaming. Last year it was throwing stones at the town. His Uncle George had shown him when they’d come to town on the plantation boat; a column of black smoke rose from the volcano, and then there was a roar and the smoke shuddered as red rocks crashed down the black slope. Some fell with a great splash and hiss into the sea.

  Just like fireworks eh, Dickie? George, who loved fireworks, might have said. Dickie wished George was with them and was glad he wasn’t.

  Why anyone would build a town a stone’s throw from a volcano, Dickie didn’t know. He wished it would blow up again and take the Japs with it.

  Another Japanese soldier with a long sword climbed up the tailgate, the guards shuffled along so he could sit, and the truck moved off. It rolled down Mango Avenue away from the wharves. They passed through Malay Town and by the house on the hill above Sulphur Creek, heading towards the aerodrome.

  To the west the sun had sunk below the rim of the ancient crater that had once blown everything inside it to atoms. Its shadow stretched ahead of them. The European homes with gardens of cream frangipani and blazing purple bougainvillea and red poinciana gave way to shacks, chickens, bananas and papaws, and then these were replaced by thin sickly scrub as they passed the aerodrome. The fast, grey Japanese fighter planes called Ohs were lined up beside the runway and there were larger planes at the far end.

  Two of the Japanese soldiers suddenly stood, unsteadily, and produced red lap-laps torn into strips. They passed them to Ted and Jimmy, who looked down at them as if someone had spat betelnut into their hands. A cloth strip each was passed to Dickie and Marjorie. Jimmy tried to give one to Bill Parker, but he didn’t move.

  The Japanese soldier said something, not harshly. Jimmy took Bill by the shoulders and pulled him up. He put an arm around his shoulders and then took two ends of the red lap-lap, put it over Bill’s eyes and tied it at the back of his head.

  Before Dickie let his mother put the cloth around his eyes, he looked around, a sweeping view from mountains to sea. The black volcano was straight ahead, a grey column of smoke rising from the top, the green rim of the caldera wall between the Mother and the South Daughter not far beyond.

  He looked over his shoulder. Across the harbour, beyond the grey ships and up the other side of the escarpment, far off into the Baining Mountains, a great crack had opened across the sky. The setting sun lit the tops of thunderheads, held one behind the other like a hand of cards on the edge of the world.

  His mother put the cloth over his eyes. As she tied the cloth at the back of his head, she kissed him on the forehead. He could see only a vague red light from the edge of the cloth and heard his mother’s breathing.

  As the truck left the road and bumped down a track, as he smelled the crushed kunai grass and the stronger rotten egg of the volcano, Dickie may have realised what was happening. At that point, he may have wondered how it had come to this.

  He had only turned 11 three months earlier. Two years ago he’d been playing in Gordon Road with his mates, all just normal boys growing up in Adelaide. How could it be that he had ended up in this strange place, in the middle of a war and been accused of being a spy? A spy!

  It would have made no sense to him, except perhaps as proof of what people had told him: that the Japs were animals. He’d been to Japan, though, and everyone he met then seemed quite nice.

  The truck stopped. The tailgate clanged, orders were barked in Japanese.

  Dickie shuffled blindly to the end of the truck and a soldier grabbed him under the armpits and lifted him down. He felt his mother fumbling for his hand. Ted found the other and in this fashion the three were led across uneven ground that crunched like gravel. The heat rose up in waves. The light at the edges of the blindfold revealed nothing, but there was nothing much more to see except an open pit and three waiting soldiers.

  Still holding hands, Dickie was left standing there for a long moment. He felt the volcano at his back. If he wondered how he’d ended up at this spot, at the start of a vicious war, part of the incredible answer was beneath his feet. He was directly above a vast magma chamber, as wide as the beautiful harbour, created by slabs of the world colliding beneath the nearby sea. The heat and chemistry that made the harbour had played a role in bringing him here, to the rich soils and goldfields of New Guinea, an outpost of distant empires.

  Dickie was standing on a fractured corner of continental plates, a geological battleground and a graveyard in two world wars.

  Hand in hand with his mother and Ted Harvey, at the base of the volcano, Dickie heard quiet words in Japanese and the oily clatter of rifles.

  The last thing he heard was a shout.

  CHAPTER 2

  Marjorie Jean Gasmier, nee Manson, dressmaker, 33 years, 5ft. 6in., very thin, fair complexion, red short wavy hair, blue-grey eyes, aquiline nose; missing for about six years and was last heard of at Mascot Flats, Breakfast Creek Road, Newstead, Brisbane. Inquiry is on behalf of her husband, Edward Clarence Gasmier.

  — ‘Missing Friends’, The South Australian Police Gazette, 15 April 1942

  While Marjorie Manson was hiding from the Japanese in the New Guinea jungle, her husband in Adelaide reported her missing. He described her to the police as a dressmaker, very thin, missing for about six years. Last seen in Brisbane. There was no mentioned of their 11-year-old son, Richard.

  Seventy-five years later, Marjorie and Dickie have been so thoroughly forgotten that some of their closest relatives don’t know they existed. It’s partly because of the secrets they held close, partly because of war and grief, and partly because of the volcano under which they were buried. Under other circumstances, their extraordinary story of secrets, betrayal, love and espionage, set against the backdrop of
war on a tropical island paradise, would be the stuff of legend.

  My obsession with finding the beginning and middle of their story began some time ago, but what I found is more than I expected. This isn’t just the story of a dressmaker and schoolboy caught up in a war and executed as spies. It’s the story of a global conflict and plate tectonics that, in many unexpected ways, conspired to re-arrange the world and shape human history.

  My search for Marjorie, Dickie, Ted, Jimmy and Bill, who died three-quarters of a century ago, ends in a wet and grey Sydney. I’ve just left the home of Marjorie’s brother, Graham Manson, now in his 90s, the last survivor of a family destroyed by war, the only person alive who remembers them as they were and in whose memory they are still alive. Driving me through the wet streets to the train station is Graham’s daughter, Lisa, Dickie’s cousin.

  ‘How do you know for sure that’s what really happened?’ Lisa asks me. Over the decades her father hardly ever spoke about what happened, it was so traumatic.

  ‘I don’t,’ I say. ‘Not for sure. I’m looking for the best evidence.’

  ‘Okay,’ says Lisa. ‘How did you find them? And why do you care?’

  I struggle to remember how I first found them. I can’t properly answer Lisa’s questions. And in my effort to recreate lives erased from history, I’ve forgotten why I started caring in the first place.

  It might have been partly because I saw reflections of my own parents in the Manson family. My father was close to Graham’s age, and my mother to Dickie’s. They were from the same generation and they, too, grew up during the hard years of the Great Depression and the Second World War, and for them it was both the best and worst of times. I originally set out to write a novel about 1942, that tumultuous year when everything seemed to be in peril and everybody lived in the moment. My parents had talked about the ‘war years’ and described the hardship and uncertainty, but also a time when it seemed they were truly, fully alive. I envied them that year.