Line of Fire Read online

  In the military histories of the time I read about the Japanese fortress of Rabaul, and in those appeared a group of civilians executed as spies. Ted and Marjorie Harvey, their son, Richard, and men called James Manson and William Parker were mentioned as footnotes, not really part of the bigger military story of Rabaul, more curiosities because of the nature of their deaths and the fact they were civilians. A mother and son executed for espionage, but they were names without faces, facts without context, people without voices. Who were they? What string of surely remarkable events had led them to this end, under a volcano of all things? Here were lives with a shocking end, but no beginning and no middle.

  I started to search for them out of curiosity and inevitably I did begin to care. Theirs was a story worth telling, an ordinary working-class family from Adelaide, civilians caught in a war fought on Australian territory. What choices had they made that had led them to their deaths in Rabaul?

  I also began to wonder why Rabaul’s story wasn’t better known. I knew a little about Australia’s battles at Gallipoli in Turkey, Tobruk in Libya, the Somme in France, and even knew something about the Americans at Guadalcanal and Okinawa. But Rabaul, an Australian town on Australian territory, invaded by the Japanese just after Pearl Harbor, the garrison overwhelmed, civilians left behind, most of them to die? That felt like something that should long ago have left the military history books and become part of our cultural memory. Where were the popular movies and novels and documentaries about that? I could find hardly any. As a culture, we’ve forgotten Rabaul, and I was curious.

  In my search to find Marjorie and Dickie, Ted, Jimmy and Bill, I needed to understand Rabaul, and I discovered that the town shouldn’t exist at all. It has been built and rebuilt against all political and scientific advice, inside a volcanic caldera, surrounded by volcanoes, a survivor — but only just — of two world wars and numerous eruptions. The very nature of disaster, of wars and volcanoes, has tried hard to physically and metaphorically bury all trace of this beautiful tropical town and the lives that were lived there.

  By recreating the lives of a family who met their fate at Rabaul, this flashpoint of geopolitical and geological conflict, I came to understand how small things, from small cracks in the earth’s crust to the everyday decisions we all make, can change lives and history.

  To understand the big stories of war and disaster, we do need to care about the small stories of ordinary people.

  CHAPTER 3

  She was a good girl only they don’t always listen to their parents.

  — Marjorie’s mother, Phyllis Manson

  There’s a photograph on my wall of Marjorie Manson, taken by a street photographer in 1932. A young man with the camera had stepped out onto an Adelaide street and captured her in an unguarded moment. Click click.

  The photograph shows a 20-year-old woman in mid-stride, and her eyes, which I know to be blue-grey, have pierced the camera and travelled more than 80 years into the future to judge me poorly for revealing her secrets.

  Marjorie is a single mother and is hurrying to court, where she’s been named as ‘the other woman’ in a divorce case involving Dickie’s biological father, Jack Gasmier.

  Marjorie is a dressmaker and what she wears is important to her, so let me describe it in some detail.

  She’s dressed for a cool day and is wearing a woollen skirt suit that’s older than the rest of her ensemble. The jacket has a notched lapel and underneath she’s wearing a short-sleeved jumper she knitted herself, with Bakelite buttons. On her hands are gauntlet-style gloves with the cuffs folded down, as if she put them on in a hurry.

  She’s wearing skin-coloured seamed silk stockings and high heels rounded at the toe. She carries a clutch bag and a square case that’s light and may hold makeup or papers. Both are in her right hand, to keep her left hand free for opening the courthouse door.

  Her pale face and aquiline nose are framed by short wavy hair, which a later police ‘missing friends’ report describes as red, but which might be better described as auburn. The photographer has captured her face with the reaction still forming, but it’s a face of determination, or at least defiance, and she’s dressed in a style that belies her poverty.

  Marjorie Manson snapped by a street photographer in Adelaide, 1932

  (Manson family collection)

  Her son, Dickie, was a year old when that photograph was taken, and Marjorie was determined to make the best of her circumstances, as dire as they seemed at the time. She ran her small dressmaking business from her bedroom and would soon marry Richard’s father, Jack Gasmier.

  This was a fact her mother, Phyllis, would never know.

  Marjorie and Phyllis were at war and, in their stubborn refusal to surrender any advantage to each other, they were probably more alike than they’d ever admit.

  The street photographer from 1932 captured the spirit of Marjorie Manson and she must have been pleased with the overall effect because she took the ticket from him and later found the studio to buy the print.

  It’s the only photograph of Marjorie as a grown woman. Phyllis in her grief threw away everything else.

  Twenty years earlier, Marjorie had been born Marjorie Jean Manson in Wellington, New Zealand, which was odd because Phyllis Robison was not yet married to Marjorie’s father, Joseph Manson.

  Phyllis was 21 at the time (about the same age Marjorie was when Dickie was born) and she had no doubt that she would marry Mr Manson when she returned to Adelaide. No doubt at all.

  So just before Christmas in 1911, a heavily pregnant Phyllis Robison walked from Wellington Harbour up Thompson Street (a very steep street) to number 37, a two-storey white weatherboard house on the slopes of Mount Cook.

  As she walked past other overcrowded homes where girls as young as 13 sat on verandahs and waited for their futures to arrive, Phyllis, a staunch member of the English Church, might have reflected on what the Bible said about such things: ‘A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord; even to his tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of the Lord.’

  Dear God, that seemed harsh. Phyllis was prim, neat and determined to control, as much as she could, her circumstances. She was determined that her own child would not grow up, as she had done, without her father’s name, so when she eventually arrived at number 37, breathless, her long auburn hair clinging to her neck, she gave her name as Manson.

  A little white lie for the greater good. She smiled sweetly, a handsome girl. No questions were asked.

  Phyllis was shown to a room to be shared with other girls, and there she would wait and wait until, on 12 February 1912, a month past all reason, Marjorie Jean was born.

  Phyllis discovered that maternity homes were something of an industry in Wellington in the early 20th century. ‘Wretched Wailing Women,’ was the headline in the New Zealand Truth, which had sent a reporter to Thompson Street. ‘Wellington’s Welcome to “The Woman Who Did”.’

  The Woman Who Did was a controversial novel of the time about a single mother, and it sparked a number of novels in reply, including The Woman Who Didn’t, The Man Who Didn’t and The Woman Who Wouldn’t.

  Phyllis was mortified. She was the woman who didn’t want to, really, but she had done and so these were the wages of sin.

  ‘It is an admirable institution in its way,’ wrote the reporter from the Truth, ‘for there go those weak sisters who have erred, to give birth to the banned babes whose fate it is to enter this world with the taint of illegitemacy [sic] upon their innocent heads.’

  If she had erred, it was because she was human, but no one who knew Phyllis would ever describe her as weak.

  Phyllis Robison had been working at a guesthouse in Port Adelaide in 1911 when she met a tall, handsome and kind widower named Joseph Manson. Joseph was 50, a railway ganger, his own red hair already greying, a handlebar moustache softening his features to produce an uncanny resemblance to Henry Lawson.

  Phyllis would answer, on polite inquiry,
that she came from the goldmining town of Ballarat, and Joseph might have quoted the new Lawson poem.

  Oh! the girl that sewed the silk,

  Blue as skies and white as milk,

  (Jeanie Scotland — of that ilk)

  In the hut there by Eureka long ago —

  Years agone —

  Auld Lang Syne —

  With her young dead digger sweetheart on Eureka long ago.

  What gold-miner’s daughter could resist?

  Joseph Manson was in good form and 1911 was going to be a good year for him. He’d been grieving for his dead wife, Harriet, for six years and it was time to emerge from his funk. The biggest social event of the year would be the coronation of George V in June, so Joseph had decided to return to England to celebrate. He had saved some money (well, who else was there to spend it on?) and splashed out on a ticket to London on the new Orient liner RMS Otway. His fellow passengers were the cream of Adelaide society and they would be joined aboard by the Prime Minister, Andrew Fisher, and most of his government, no less.

  Oh my word, Phyllis might have said. London.

  Even in third class, Joseph told her as she waited on his table at the guesthouse, the dining saloon has views of the sea on both sides. And of course the men have their own smoking room.

  Joseph hadn’t returned to England since he’d immigrated with Harriet nearly 30 years earlier. This second trip of a lifetime would mark a new beginning for Joseph Manson, in more ways than he imagined.

  The Otway was due to leave Adelaide’s Outer Harbour at one o’clock sharp on Friday afternoon, 7 April 1911, and Joseph was told to board in the morning. Even though he lived then at Woodville, which wasn’t far from Port Adelaide, he decided to book into the guesthouse near the harbour the night before.

  Better safe than sorry, I suppose, said Phyllis, who was lonely, as was Joseph, who was also in unusually high spirits.

  The next day he walked onto the Otway with a spring in his step and sailed to England for the coronation.

  When he returned in September, he found a pregnant Phyllis waiting for him.

  You can imagine this meeting.

  Phyllis, she might have reminded him as she stood there with a hand on her belly. My name is Phyllis.

  She had spent months in despair wondering what was to become of her, but she was in luck. Joseph was as much a gentleman as society allowed, and agreed to marry her. But not while she was showing: that would invite scandal.

  Yes, he agreed, if the child was his and they were to be married anyway, it should not have to suffer from the stigma of being born without his name. The convoluted solution was to pack Phyllis off to have the baby in New Zealand, which was more liberal about such things.

  In November 1912, nine months after Marjorie Jean Manson was born, Joseph Manson married Phyllis Robison at the Adelaide Registry Office.

  At 51, Joseph had a new family and, despite the rocky start, he and Phyllis had as good a reason as anyone to be happy.

  Two years after Marjorie was born, George was born at Woodville, and two years later James Samuel (Jim) arrived. They all lived in the rambling Woodville house that Joseph had shared with his former wife, Harriet. Joseph was a railway ganger, in charge of a team of men loading trains, and while his wage could support a wife, three children (as Phyllis might point out) were another matter. Joseph had no desire for another fresh start, but Phyllis wanted to move away from the spectre of Harriet and so, in 1919, when Marjorie was seven, Joseph found a better paying job, sold the house at Woodville and moved them all to Victor Harbor, a small seaside town about 40 miles south of Adelaide.

  Young Marjorie loved Victor Harbor, a happy place where happy people seemed perpetually on holiday, strolling arm in arm on the beach or the long, long causeway to Granite Island. She even loved the name, Victor Harbor, spelt in the American style without the ‘u’ because someone important had made a mistake. She loved the town for embracing that small point of difference and arguing without success against spelling the Victor Harbour railway station with a ‘u’. Difference was tolerated at the Victor Harbor school. The exception proves the rule, her teacher might have said, which suited Marjorie, who was growing into an exceptional young woman.

  It annoyed Phyllis, though. Why can’t they make up their minds?

  Does it really matter? asked Joseph.

  In 1922, their third son, Graham Richard, was born and, at the same time, Joseph was offered a job as a foreman at the Islington Railway Yards workshops back in Adelaide.

  Well you must take it, of course! Phyllis told Joseph (for which Marjorie would never forgive her).

  Joseph was 61. He didn’t feel old but, as Phyllis pointed out, he didn’t have many more years before retirement. So, just after Graham was born, he moved his young family away from the sea and borrowed money to buy a house at 55 Gordon Road, Prospect, within walking distance of the railway yards.

  Gordon Road lies between the shops on Prospect Road and the Main North Road that cuts Adelaide in half. Today it’s close enough to the city centre to be gentrified and the tin-roof freestone cottages are expensive. Most of the old cottages remain, many renovated, their bull-nosed verandahs still facing the street.

  Number 55, though, as it was in the 1920s and ’30s, is gone, replaced by a more modern two-storey affair. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but it was a little disturbing, as if someone was running ahead of me to erase all traces of Marjorie and Dickie, even their childhood home.

  There are still enough old homes to imagine Gordon Road as it must have been when Phyllis and Joseph moved in. On the long, hot and dusty summer evenings, it would fill with children. Mrs Skinner at number 32 had 12 kids in all, and the Skinners would form the bulk of the cricket teams that played into the dry Adelaide dusk. Shops at the end of the road sold lollies and iceblocks, and the Ozone Picture Theatre showed the first talkies. On warm Friday nights, the women would meet in the street to talk and the men shared cigarettes and watched the children play.

  It wasn’t Victor Harbor, but it was a good place to grow up and Marjorie was happy in Gordon Road, too. Prospect was close to the city, but there were still big open paddocks nearby where mushrooms would sprout after rain and boys could kick footballs. Nearly all the children in Gordon Road went to Nailsworth Primary School, which, in the baby boom after the Great War, quickly filled with children until it ran out of classrooms.

  In the backyard of number 55, Phyllis tended her apricot trees, laden in summer, the fruit stolen by children as it ripened. She preserved all she could lay her hands on and lined the pantry with Vacola bottles, and the kitchen smelled of sugar and vinegar and biscuits.

  George and Jimmy grew tall and skinny, and tinkered with soapbox billycarts. Phyllis kept Marjorie captive in the kitchen, where Graham would pester her to play. Marjorie yearned to escape.

  Marjorie Jean Manson spent her teenage years in Gordon Road as the 1920s roared just out of reach for a girl who had no money and wore last year’s clothes — even worse, clothes made from material chosen by her mother. Phyllis showed her how to sew on a treadle machine, and as soon as she could, Marjorie bought her own material and tore patterns from magazines.

  Oh Marjorie, you can’t wear that. What will your father say?

  Joseph might lower the newspaper and wink when he thought Phyllis wasn’t looking, and that was all right for him but it was Phyllis who had to manage the budget.

  In 1927, Joseph retired on a pension, but he still had the mortgage to pay and a 15-year-old girl and three growing boys to feed and clothe. Few people in that end of Prospect had much money to spend anyway, but for a teenage girl aching for fashion and parties, it would have been unbearable.

  By 16, Marjorie had become a handful for her mother, and one night in November 1928, she and a boy called Reg Phillips caught the train to Victor Harbor for the Cricket Club Ball, where the Bohemian Orchestra played ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’ and ‘Toot Toot Tootsie’.

  What time do you call this?
asked Phyllis, at the door. Marjorie had caught the last train back and walked all the way from Adelaide Railway Station. And where on earth have you been?

  I’m treated like a prisoner here! A prisoner!

  You’re only 16! said Phyllis, as if that fact would matter to Marjorie.

  By the time Marjorie had turned 18, she was beyond Phyllis’s control entirely.

  Marjorie met Jack Gasmier in 1930, just as the Great Depression fell like a cloud over an Australia that was just starting (like Marjorie) to come of age and really enjoy itself.

  Gasmier worked as a carriage builder at the Islington Railway Yards workshops, but the South Australian Government, like governments around the world, was suddenly having trouble borrowing money and had to cut costs. Hundreds of men at the railway workshops lost their jobs.

  Exactly how they met, Phyllis never did find out.

  Did you know this fellow from the workshops? she would ask Joseph, who had by 1930 been retired three years. Gasmier?

  Rings a bell, he said.

  It’s likely that Jack, who lived not far away in Richmond, was visiting his aunt and uncle, Anna and Charles Snow, in Farrant Street, which runs parallel to Gordon Road. Many of Jack’s workmates also lived in Prospect, and they were drowning their sorrows after losing their jobs, although Jack considered it a minor setback. He had plans.

  When Marjorie first met Jack Gasmier, she would have noted that he was not tall; he was her height, five foot six inches. He was tanned and had black hair and broad, broad shoulders. Jack Gasmier was the rail yard’s wrestling champion, and he was a charmer, that’s for sure.

  Edward Clarence Gasmier was about ten years older than Marjorie, and he came from an upright Lutheran family. His great-grandfather, Johann Heinrich Martin Gatzmeyer, had fled religious persecution in Germany in 1846, enticed to South Australia by the enigmatic Lutheran pastor August Kavel and the possibility of finding gold and a better life.