Line of Fire Page 12

  ‘And so we started climbing and the path just ran out. It wasn’t a proper path; we couldn’t walk, we had to crawl this little part up a cliff. And then, in the end, we were on our tummies, going up the side of a cliff, and we couldn’t wriggle back to get out of it, so we had to keep going and we finally got to the top.

  ‘Then we went into the rainforest to try to get home, and we got a bit of a way through the trees. We came across a fence, a rough little light fence, built of little tree branches and things, and we went in. A couple of trees must’ve been cut and let sun into the darkness. The rainforest was quite dark and there was this light patch of grass, and there on the grass were two Duk-Duk costumes. Towering things. It was a secret place and, of course, girls and women were not allowed to see them at all. I think as soon as the Duk-Duks came to the village the women had to run away, and there we found ourselves right in the middle of this spot.

  ‘But no-one came. I don’t think we were seen. I hope not. So, we ran away home again. We used to have those adventures.’

  Travelling to Tavui today is also an adventure, of sorts. It involves catching a happy little Toyota bus that seats about 20 and is constantly stopping to let people on and off. A sign on the front announces its name: ‘Amazing Grace’.

  People pass packages backwards and forwards as the bus speeds down the coast road past huts, and banana palms, and trees from which hang large fish for sale. People call out through the windows to their friends. Music blares. The bus stops suddenly to let people on and off, and then careers on through potholes. A sign on the sun visor reads: ‘Relax. God is in Control.’

  Tavui is at the end of the road and I’m the last passenger, stepping off the bus almost onto the beach. The bus drives off and I’m left with the sounds of small waves and chickens.

  An old man appears and shouts questions, and says his name is George Taman. He wants to show me the Japanese submarine base in the cliffs, and I ask him instead about the Coote home.

  ‘Coote? Coote? Yes.’ He points to the trees at the top of the bank, above the beach.

  We climb to a flat area of neat houses, some with grass roofs, some with corrugated iron, set on lawns fringed with crotons, palms, frangipani, bananas and flowering ginger. There are clothes on the line and chickens scratching in the flowerbeds between the homes. There are no fences here.

  There are two big old Japanese cement pillboxes, or maybe they’re just old water tanks. It’s hard to tell what’s a war relic and what’s pre-war; everything is jumbled up, although between yellow heliconia and a custard apple tree is an anti-aircraft gun rusting under thick layers of green paint.

  Here, an old corrugated iron tank; there, cement slabs on the ground.

  ‘Floor,’ explains George. ‘The Coote house.’

  This was the ground floor of the Coote’s H-framed house. The house has gone, of course. And then down towards the end of the lawn George shows me a set of concrete steps that Diana and her dogs took down to the swimming pool of colourful fish. They now lead nowhere, ending halfway, broken and hanging over the sand. On one of the last steps someone put a finger in the cement while it was still wet, long ago, and wrote: ‘This conncret was built by . . .’ but the name is worn away.

  ‘Swimming pool there,’ and George points to the beach, but it’s hard to say where the pool of fish was. It’s all sand and rock.

  George takes me along the beach to the cliffs where Diana played as a nine-year-old girl, more than seventy years ago. When the Japanese came in 1942, they blasted tunnels into the cliff face and made Tavui their submarine base.

  ‘Australians, Americans. Night day, night day, bomb,’ said George. ‘Careful here. Slippery.’ The path is over rocks and the tide is in. It swirls around the rocks at the bottom of the cliff that Diana once climbed.

  George shows me a cave dug deep into the cliff, the sides spongy with spiderwebs. They hang from the ceiling like rags.

  As we walk into the darkness towards the back of the cave, George tells me that the Japanese forced his uncles to dig these tunnels. In here, deep beneath the North Daughter volcano, food, water and torpedoes were stored for Japanese submarines. When a submarine surfaced, the supplies would be pushed out on rail wagons to a short jetty. All that remains of the jetty are a few slippery green squares of cement. A few steps from the cave entrance, past the shore, is a stomach-lurching 300-metre abyss.

  It’s said that black-eyed trevally and grey reef sharks patrol the wall of the abyss where unexploded torpedoes sit on ledges and are wedged between cracks. During the war, the submarines would rise to the jetty at night, men would roll out supplies and share a cigarette, and then the submarines would vanish into the dark sea.

  That abyss marks the edge of another volcanic caldera. Rhoda Coote had moved from the shadow of one volcano to live on the lip of another, much larger one.

  Evidence can be found on the rock face in the Japanese tunnels. Carefully brush away the webs and you can see that the rock is layers of limestone and pumice, mixed up with layers of beach pebbles that seem to be welded together in a type of conglomerate rock. And then there are other layers of grey rock with dark burnt bubbles in them, studded with pumice.

  This is a rock called ignimbrite, and it’s associated with colossal volcanic eruptions, much larger than the one Diana witnessed in 1937. A rising column of ash from a Plinian eruption becomes so heavy it collapses onto itself and sends a superheated pyroclastic flow across the landscape. The pyroclastic flow from the volcano that formed this rock was enormous, the ash so thick that when it settled it compressed the pumice beneath it into the hard ignimbrite rock.

  Only the largest eruptions, the ones big enough to empty a magma chamber and cause the volcano to fall in on itself, are believed to produce the thick pyroclastic flows that form the distinctive ignimbrite at Tavui.

  This caldera at Tavui wasn’t discovered until 1986, but it’s ten kilometres wide (a little smaller than the caldera at Rabaul) and more than a kilometre deep at the deepest point. Its sides are sheer. No-one’s quite sure how long ago the Tavui volcano erupted and collapsed to form the caldera, but it’s believed to be the source of ignimbrite dated to nearly 7000 years ago.

  When the Tavui volcano collapsed, its magma chamber wasn’t completely destroyed. It’s still there, pumping the bottom of the Tavui caldera up like a tyre, just over the edge of the abyss that was metres away from Diana’s swimming pool.

  Volcanic eruptions are measured on a scale called the Volcanic Explosivity Index, or VEI. It’s a measure of how much and how quickly material is thrown out during an eruption and it’s an open-ended scale, although the largest volcanic eruptions in history aren’t bigger than magnitude 8. On the VEI scale 8 is described as ‘mega-colossal’. There’s probably no way to describe something bigger than ‘mega-colossal’ without sounding silly. The eruption of the Yellowstone volcano in North America around 640,000 years ago was a ‘mega-colossal’ VEI 8 eruption and that, hopefully, is as big as it gets.

  The eruption that formed the Rabaul caldera 1400 years ago was merely ‘colossal’: a VEI 6. The date for that eruption has been narrowed down to a 32-year period between 667 and 699 AD, which happens to coincide with ash particles found in Greenland and Antarctic ice cores. Eruptions of that scale can affect the world’s climate; all that ash thrown high into the stratosphere cools the earth down. In fact, the Rabaul eruption coincided with a cold period in the northern hemisphere, shown in the frost rings of bristlecone pines of the western US around 680 AD.

  By comparison, the eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia in 1915 was a ‘super-colossal’ VEI 7. Krakatoa in 1883 was a colossal 6, and so was Mount Pinatubo in 1991. The twin volcanic eruptions of Vulcan and Tavurvur in 1937 were a VEI 4, merely ‘cataclysmic’ on the eruption scale. The words begin to lose their meanings, so it’s more descriptive to use numbers, which are more frightening when you understand what the numbers mean.

  Like the measurement of hurricanes and cyclones,
the Volcanic Explosivity Index is a logarithmic scale. A ‘mega-colossal’ VEI 8 is ten times bigger than a ‘super-colossal’ VEI 7. The eruptions that formed the calderas of Krakatoa, Tavui and Rabaul were 100 times bigger than Rabaul’s twin eruptions of 1937. And the VEI 8 caldera-forming eruption of Yellowstone Park 640,000 years ago was 100 times bigger than Krakatoa in 1883 and the eruption here at Tavui 7000 years ago.

  So when Rhoda Coote came down to the beach to watch Diana play with the fishes in the swimming pool in 1938, she was thankful for a benign sea and no volcanoes in sight. She couldn’t have known that nearby were volcanoes at the bottom of that blue abyss where a magma chamber was being fed by the subduction of tectonic plates.

  The existence of the Tavui volcanic caldera has complicated the understanding of an already complicated system, and also raised the stakes. The biggest risk at Tavui isn’t just an eruption offshore, but a tsunami. If a big earthquake or an eruption were to cause part of the vertical submarine caldera wall to collapse, it would send a giant wave along this beautiful coast.

  George Taman walks with me up the road from the Tavui beach to find the bus that will take me back to Rabaul. Beside the road is an ornate old cement gatepost covered in vines, and another lies shattered under vines, marking the entrance to what used to be Diana’s home.

  ‘The Coote family house,’ he says.

  ‘Yes, Philip Coote.’

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘He’s dead,’ I say. ‘He died in the war.’

  ‘Ah.’ George was a small boy during the war. He shakes his head. ‘It was a terrible thing.’

  CHAPTER 19

  Well, if you were a bumble bee and a bull sat on you what would you do? You would sting him. And that is just what this bee did to Ferdinand. Wow! Did it hurt! Ferdinand jumped up with a snort. He ran around puffing and snorting, butting and pawing the ground as if he were crazy.

  — Munro Leaf, The Story of Ferdinand, 1936

  In Adelaide in 1938, Dickie turned seven, a strapping boy already, his hair sandy, a handsome face, broad shoulders. He had long arms already showing the muscle of a wrestler. He was physically confident, and stubborn.

  I wonder who he gets that from? said Phyllis, but having Dickie back may have placated her. Dickie needed a family while Marjorie did what Marjorie wanted to do.

  ‘Through it all we were not on very good terms,’ as Phyllis later explained.

  In any case, Dickie was back at 55 Gordon Road, walking to Nailsworth Primary School with John Skinner from number 32. It had pained Marjorie to be separated from him, but she had already taken him from one end of the country to the other and he needed to go to school. He had also developed what Marjorie would have recognised as an independent spirit.

  You mean stubborn, Phyllis might have said, with a little bit of pride. I know where he gets that from.

  He also had his father’s physical courage. Dickie had missed his uncles George, Jimmy and Graham when he was away, so it wasn’t such a big wrench to be back with them in Gordon Road.

  Phyllis kept everyone’s secrets close, including Dickie’s. There’d been no more news of Jack Gasmier since he’d arrived mysteriously before Christmas, in the middle of the day, and asked Phyllis to take care of Dickie. Gasmier couldn’t tell her where Marjorie was (Your guess is as good as mine, Mrs Manson) and left. Phyllis didn’t know Marjorie had actually married Jack Gasmier, and Jack never mentioned it. Phyllis prayed every day that her daughter would come home, but she’d settle for Dickie if that was God’s will.

  In New Guinea, Marjorie may have wondered where on earth she was as well, her new life was so different to the old one. Lassul was isolated, primitive, hot, green, wet, but also beautiful and exotic and far, far away from the hard life in Prospect and Kalgoorlie and Brisbane. In New Guinea, there were servants to clean the house and cook. She didn’t have to do much more than sew and look after the man who was looking after her.

  But it was lonely with Dickie gone. She had few friends; certainly no women friends close enough to talk to. Muriel Peterson from Guntershohe plantation would sometimes arrive unannounced on horseback with her dogs, but she tended to do all the talking and asked too many questions. She’d met Mildred Scott, the wife of Hugh Scott, who managed several nearby plantations, and they got along well enough, but it was all rather awkward with Mildred for no reason she could put her finger on.

  Marjorie began to feel trapped at Lassul. Harvey didn’t have his own boat and he became more reluctant to let her go into town by herself. They weren’t broke, but they had very little money. The only link to the outside world was the copra boat, which delivered the mail.

  When 1939 began, the copra price was low, Germany was still demanding back its former colonies, including New Guinea, and the British were considering it. Then, in March 1939, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, sweeping appeasement off the table.

  A mixed blessing, I should think, said Marjorie.

  Hear hear.

  One day in June, the copra boat delivered a large and important-looking letter from England. Harvey opened it with a shaking hand and then sat with a grunt that might have been relief.

  What is it, Ted?

  Oh, well, it’s my father. Apparently he has died.

  I’m so sorry. Marjorie was surprised he’d apparently been still alive. Ted had hardly mentioned his father, a London policeman. (The names Israel and Bedford might have prompted too many questions.) She had assumed his parents were dead.

  The letter was from his sister, Eva, whose husband, Henry Darling, had been named executor of the will. Henry detailed the inheritance: £7793 sterling (the equivalent of approximately $800,000 Australian dollars in 2016).

  Good God!

  But . . . I thought you said he was a policeman?

  The sudden lurch in fortunes that came with Harvey’s inheritance set Marjorie’s mind racing. They should marry. But no, she still had a husband and Harvey had a wife. Still, she could at least now bring Dickie over. Money could buy schooling; perhaps a tutor?

  Of course, of course, said Harvey. And you know what? I’m going to buy a boat.

  A few months later, Marjorie was on the verandah watching the fireflies when Harvey turned up the volume on his new AWA radio. Listen. The voice belonged to Australia’s Prime Minister, Robert Menzies. Germany had invaded Poland, and Australia was at war.

  Oh my God, Ted. Marjorie’s first thought wasn’t that the war would affect her, but that George and Jimmy were of military age. They can’t go to war. I won’t let them.

  Forty miles along the coast, Diana Coote was in bed at Tavui Point when she heard raised voices, her parents talking excitedly.

  ‘They were all listening to the radio. I didn’t understand it really. We all thought, “It won’t touch us, we’re safe out here.”’

  The Prime Minister appealed to Australians to carry on.

  This war will involve not only soldiers and sailors and airmen, but supplies, foodstuffs, money. Our staying power, and particularly the staying power of the mother country, will be best assisted by keeping our production going; by continuing our avocations and our business as fully as we can; by maintaining employment and with it our strength.

  Both Philip Coote and Ted Harvey knew it would be difficult keeping the copra business going. It relied on Europe buying soap, candles, margarine and explosives, which would be needed more than ever, but the trading routes were closing. Eventually the planters would cease delivering their copra even to Rabaul. It was one thing to keep production going, but another to ship it to Europe.

  There was one big market still open, though. Japan was still eager to trade, and the Japanese South Seas trading company, Nan’yo Boeki Kaisha, was looking for business.

  With his newfound wealth, Ted Harvey suddenly seemed successful. Everyone in Rabaul noticed that he had money when others didn’t. Ted and Marjorie had celebrated with new clothes, new furniture, a radio and a motor schooner. Had Harvey struck gold? People, particularly the
Japanese, became curious.

  About this time, a man named Harry Ralfs paid a visit to Lassul plantation. Ralfs was an Australian businessman who had been working since the early 1930s with Japanese companies trying to sell clothing and ceramics and buy Australian wool and iron.

  Japan was Australia’s third largest export market and its population was exploding. Japanese women were having a million babies a year, and the Japanese needed raw materials for industry, as well as the money to buy them.

  Europe, America and Australia had put up trade barriers to protect their own jobs during the Depression, and the Japanese employed people like Ralfs to try to sidestep those barriers.

  It had become a shady business involving shady characters. In 1934, Ralfs had been travelling to Japan by steamer when his Sydney business partner, Kakusaburo ‘Henry’ Matsumoto, was poisoned by a young, mysterious, US-educated Filipino woman.

  She was 21 years of age, slim, refined, a linguist, and a graduate in law of the Chicago University. She had not been seen since she landed at Shanghai. Ralfs found Matsumoto in his berth on the boat at Shanghai covered with a blanket, despite the heat. His pockets were empty, and he was unable to speak reasonably.

  It took some days for Matsumoto to die. The Truth newspaper reported, in capital letters, its conclusion.

  BUT IN THE BACKGROUND LURKS THE FIGURE OF A SHAPELY FILIPINO GIRL, SHE OF THE DARK PIERCING EYES . . . TRUE TO TRADITION, MYSTERY AND DEATH HAS COME OUT OF THE EAST . . . TRUE TO TRADITION PROBABLY IT WILL NEVER BE SOLVED.

  Ralfs later became involved in a scheme to sell iron ore to the Japanese conglomerate Mitsubishi, the shipbuilder and, later, maker of the A6M ‘Zero’ fighter plane. The Japanese were desperate for iron, after Australia infuriatingly embargoed the sale of iron ore to Japan. And iron ore had been found in the Bainings by Harvey’s neighbour Jock Maclean. Perhaps Ted Harvey knew something about that.