Line of Fire Read online

  Mugshot of Jack Gasmier, 1932

  (Records Office of Western Australia)

  Johann Gatzmeyer settled north of Adelaide, where his son John changed his last name to Gasmier and passed on some of the family optimism to his grandson, Edward Clarence, who preferred to be called Jack. You can see it in a police mugshot taken a few years later, which shows Jack looking confidently at the camera, a strong face, hooded eyes, balding, but still young, and very well dressed in a suit and tie. His confidence rubbed off on everyone he met, including Marjorie Manson.

  When Marjorie first met Jack, in early 1930, she had no idea he was married with a six-year-old daughter. By July, Marjorie was pregnant.

  Phyllis’s worst fears had come true, although she wasn’t one to lay blame.

  I blame myself, she said, and then contradicted herself by whispering to Joseph: The sins of the father, you know.

  Seems a bit harsh, muttered Joseph.

  On 5 March 1931, Richard Manson was born. Phyllis felt some righteous satisfaction and, truth be told, she quite liked babies, although she wasn’t sure how she’d feed another mouth.

  Marjorie had been sent to the McBride Maternity Hospital run by the Salvation Army at Medindie, a short tram ride away, and by the time she came home with the baby, Jack had left town for the South Australian goldfields. He still hadn’t told his wife, Elizabeth, but it wasn’t a secret he could keep for long.

  Two weeks before Dickie was born, Jack Gasmier had read an article in the Adelaide News in which the South Australian Minister for Mines exhorted young men out of work to look for gold ‘in an endeavor to discover useful and profitable occupation during the present difficult industrial period’.

  It wasn’t called the Great Depression then. No one knew that the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange in 1929 would have such a lasting and devastating effect on the world, but the flow of money had already stopped. Banks stopped lending, people stopped buying, factories stopped making things, Jack lost his job and there were no others to be had.

  In fact, going bush to find gold seemed like the solution to a number of his problems. Gold held its value, while the value of everything else was falling. Jack said goodbye to his wife and joined hundreds of unemployed men heading to South Australia’s old gold-mining fields to see what they could find.

  The Mines department rented out tents and lent picks, shovels, gold-panning dishes, dolly pots and maps, and sent the men into the deserts. Jack Gasmier collected the free equipment and caught the train to a moribund town called Manna Hill, three-quarters of the way between Adelaide and Broken Hill. From there he walked 30 miles to the bleak ghost town of Wadnaminga, where he staked a claim and hoped that somehow his luck would change and the trouble he left behind in Adelaide would blow over. With 30 other men, he chipped away at the hard ground until the extraordinary heat and flies of summer gave way to a cold winter. None of them found much gold in the quartz veins that ran down into the Cambrian slate, sandstone and limestone. Most of the gold at Wadnaminga had been mined out 40 years earlier.

  Jack was still digging when his son Richard was born in March and he kept digging until he dug himself deep into debt at the Manna Hill store.

  ‘In South Australian gold mining there are more hardships than nuggets,’ said the Advertiser and Register. ‘The Government gives the men every encouragement to go out prospecting. They get rations for themselves on the field and for their wives and families who stop in the towns . . . Some of the prospectors are earning a living, but most of them would be in a hopeless position without the rations.’

  Jack realised he would only make money if he could persuade other people to invest in his claim, or buy him out, and so he promoted the claim as ‘Gasmier’s Option’ and sent a letter to the Adelaide Advertiser. By October he’d dug a shaft 133 feet long following the quartz lode which he said was ‘exceptionally rich, some of the stone showing quite a lot of free gold’. But the ground was so hard it took one week to dig four feet.

  Jack reported, ‘I confidently expect this parcel to go 2 oz. to the ton,’ or two ounces of gold for one ton of rock dug by hand, but whatever the results of Government assay, they weren’t worth reporting. In 1932, he walked away from Gasmier’s Option and back to Adelaide, where another disaster was waiting.

  His wife, Elizabeth, was suing for divorce ‘on the ground of the defendant’s misconduct with Marjorie Jean Manson, of Gordon Road, Prospect’.

  To Phyllis’s horror, it was reported in the newspapers.

  And so Marjorie Manson, in her woollen skirt suit, went to court and was snapped by that street photographer. Click click.

  She’d confronted Jack Gasmier, who’d made a rash promise to her: when the divorce came through, he would marry her.

  I’ll need more than a marriage proposal, said Marjorie. I need someone with means. What life would we have, Jack, with you out of work?

  Jack’s marriage to Elizabeth was dissolved in March 1933 and his daughter, Joan, was now fatherless, as was his son, two-year-old Dickie, living with his mother and grandmother in Gordon Road.

  He’d made a mess of one marriage, but he was going to show Marjorie Manson that he was a man of means, and she would marry him. A month later, Jack Gasmier was on a train to Kalgoorlie to try his luck in the West Australian goldfields.

  CHAPTER 4

  He was a ‘long skinny bloke and could climb a coconut palm like a native’.

  — Rabaul veteran Bill Harry describing George Manson

  Two hares are on the lawn in the rain, their hind legs splashing as they cuff each other. Behind them, green hills roll away in a rainy mist. The driveway ends at a hedgerow and the smell of pine trees floods the car when I open the door to see, between the trees, an unlikely two-storey Georgian-style house. I might have stepped into a Jane Austen novel, and the green subtropical hinterland of the northern New South Wales coast can often look more European than Australian, especially if it’s raining.

  This is where Dickie’s cousin lives. Beverley McLean is the daughter of Marjorie’s brother George, who in 1940 went to New Guinea to work on Ted Harvey’s coconut plantation and managed, remarkably, to escape the massacre of his family. We’re all the unlikely products of our parents’ whims, but I’m particularly happy to see Bev, the living proof of George Manson’s resourcefulness and luck.

  It’s taken some time to find George. At first I didn’t know he existed, then I thought he must have died too, but it turned out he had escaped. But had he survived the war? He had. He was engaged and married in 1948, and had one child, Beverley.

  When I phoned Bev she’d only weeks before discovered that her uncle, aunt and cousin had been shot during the war. She wasn’t as surprised as I thought she might be that I was calling out of the blue to ask about them.

  ‘I’m a believer in fate,’ she told me on the phone. We arranged to meet at her place.

  ‘You have hares,’ I tell Bev.

  Bev tells her husband, Bill, behind her, ‘Ian’s seen the hares.’ The hares are wild.

  ‘Is that a good sign?’ I ask. I have a vague memory of hares being associated with reincarnation.

  ‘You know, I think it is.’

  In the kitchen, Bev has laid letters and photographs on the table, the remnants of a family almost destroyed by the war. There are photographs of George, her father, with his brother Jimmy in front of a corrugated iron tank in the backyard of 55 Gordon Road, probably taken in the late 1920s when George was about 14.

  George Manson

  (Beverley McLean collection)

  During Marjorie’s pregnancy and the birth of Dickie, when other young men had gone looking for gold, George had jumped the rattler and ridden the train north of Adelaide to Kybunga, rolling farm country, where he fixed tractors, turned brown and took on a particular Australian wiriness.

  There’s a photo of George on his service record, sporting a moustache and bearing a striking resemblance to Errol Flynn.

  ‘Did George talk a
t all about what happened in Rabaul during the war?’

  Bev shakes her head. ‘So the thing is, it was very hush-hush. It’s only as we’ve got older that we found out, but we never knew much about what happened in Rabaul.’

  ‘We found it hard to get anything out of George at all,’ said Bill.

  ‘Nothing,’ agreed Bev. ‘He wouldn’t talk about it. The only time he’d say something was when I wasn’t eating. As an only child, I was the fussy eater and he’d say, “If you had to eat what I had to live on, and that’s all I had to eat, it was berries and leaves. Now eat that up.”’

  In Bev’s collection of family photos and letters, there are no photographs of Marjorie or Dickie. None at all. There are photographs of Jimmy, tall and lanky, but he’s as much a mystery to Bev (who was born in 1950 and never knew him) as he is to me.

  George’s letters were all written post-war. They reveal a lot about George, a dashingly handsome man who lost all his teeth after spending months in the jungle hiding from the Japanese, and then years running supplies behind enemy lines to troops in Borneo.

  ‘How would you like me without any teeth?’ he writes in 1948 to Bev’s mother, Nina, just before he asks her to marry him.

  Nina would be unfazed.

  ‘Mum will get a shock when she hears I’m arriving at the end of the month,’ continues George in that letter. ‘I’m also looking forward very much to coming down for quite a number of reasons so, my dear, don’t go and make too many appointments . . . Looking forward so much to seeing you, dear. All my love, George.’

  There’s another photograph of George on a boat during the war, and another of him in a village in Borneo.

  ‘Swashbuckling,’ says Bev. ‘Always a cigarette in his hand. Always smoked Camels.’

  There’s plenty of evidence of George on the table, and Bev is of course living proof of his existence, but there’s much less of her Uncle Jim; only a few photographs. Marjorie and Dickie are ghosts. At this stage I’ve seen no photographs of them and George has never spoken about them.

  ‘That’s the family Bible,’ says Bev. Inside the Bible is a list of family birthdates, including Dickie’s (but not Marjorie’s).

  Below the birthdates is written, in Phyllis Manson’s cursive hand: ‘Marjorie and Dickie and Jim lost there [sic] lives in Rabaul they were put to Death by the Japs May 31 1942. “Call it not death it is life begun, the waters have passed the home is won.”’

  The front pages of the Bible enclose old newspaper cuttings, saying that Marjorie and Dickie died with civilian prisoners of war when the ship Montevideo Maru was sunk, which Phyllis would later discover wasn’t true.

  ‘So Phyllis had that and she put all these cuttings in there. She was in Adelaide, she came up to New Guinea, she came to Lae and visited us in ’55. She was, I don’t know, an old-looking lady. Here she is,’ says Bev, showing me a photograph of Phyllis with short wavy hair, wearing round tortoiseshell glasses, trying to smile for the camera.

  George returned to New Guinea after the war, but not to Rabaul, and he never spoke about Marjorie or Dickie or Jimmy.

  ‘What about Jack Gasmier?’

  ‘Who?’ says Bev.

  ‘Gasmier. Edward Clarence Gasmier.’

  ‘No. Who’s that?’

  ‘Dickie’s father. He’d be your uncle, I suppose.’

  ‘Oh.’ Bev shakes her head. ‘No, I never knew his name. Well . . . but you see . . . no-one ever said anything.’

  Phyllis Manson

  (Beverley McLean collection)

  CHAPTER 5

  It’s a country of red dust, black flies, and white heat.

  — Geologist and later President of the United States, Herbert Hoover, writing from Kalgoorlie

  Herbert Hoover was still President of the United States of America when Jack Gasmier hatched his plan in 1933 to leave his troubles in South Australia and start afresh in the western goldfields.

  Hoover had made his mark as a gold mine manager in Kalgoorlie three decades earlier, something that wasn’t lost on Jack as he sat in the train heading west, watching the desert sweep past.

  Sitting beside him on the train was Willi Fritz, a prospector with a little more experience but just as broke. Willi was a likable German plumber, not long in Australia, arriving full of hope and caught out like everyone else when all the promised work evaporated.

  The Great Depression had put many men out of work, but Willi and Jack were in luck and couldn’t stop slapping each other on the back. They’d managed to generate jobs for themselves from nothing.

  Well, not quite nothing. Five days earlier, they’d been in the offices of McCarthy and McCarthy solicitors in Currie Street, Adelaide. Jack had done all the talking, and had managed to persuade a group of Adelaide businessmen to back him in a mining venture in Western Australia.

  Jack’s plan was simple and not very ambitious, which may have been why it had worked. His father’s brother, Albert, was a long-time prospector in Kalgoorlie. He knew the ropes and had worked a claim north of Kalgoorlie near the ghost town of Broad Arrow, so when Jack had asked about opportunities, Albert had suggested staking a claim near the old diggings at Ora Banda and Bardoc, about 30 miles north of Kalgoorlie. There would certainly be gold there for a man who knew what he was doing and was prepared to work.

  Jack had no money, but he took his plan to Adelaide businessmen Edmund Hudd and Russell Fuss. He literally had nothing left to lose. He told the pair that he and Willi Fritz would go to Bardoc and register claims. The syndicate would provide some small upfront costs and, should gold be found, then there was an opportunity to form a company.

  The syndicate would be called the New Ora Banda Gold Prospecting Syndicate. Ora Banda is a rough translation of the Spanish banda de oro, meaning ‘band of gold’, and that had to be a good sign, right? Jack had told Marjorie Manson that he would marry her, and Marjorie wanted some assurance from Jack that he had prospects. Well, he’d prove it by slipping a band of gold he’d mined himself onto her finger.

  Jack had seized on the name Ora Banda as part of his sales pitch and for good measure invoked Hoover’s name and the Sons of Gwalia mine he’d promoted.

  Willi, who had gone to a lot of trouble to remain sober for the meeting, and had been told to say nothing, nodded sagely.

  One prospector two years earlier, Jack continued, had found a massive nugget the size and shape of an eagle in a road pothole. A pothole, gentlemen, in the road!

  Yes, we know what a pothole is, said Edmund Hudd, but Hudd had already decided to invest in Jack Gasmier’s scheme. He wasn’t so much interested in the gold as in registering a gold mine and persuading people to invest in its potential and then, hopefully, sell it.

  The businessmen agreed to the deal. They would pay the two prospectors their rail fare and a pound a week each as wages until they struck gold. When Jack and Willi found gold in suitable amounts and the syndicate formed a company, the pair would be hired on regular miner’s wages. It was a deal that wouldn’t cost the businessmen too much to start with and could mean a windfall.

  Jack shook hands all round and, a little dazed by this latest reversal in his fortunes, adjourned with Willi to the Crown Inn Hotel.

  Jack Gasmier and Willi Fritz had sold their labour and expertise cheaply, but at least they now had jobs, were getting paid and (as Jack told Willi, confidentially, over their beers) they could also stake their own claims and form their own company on the side.

  It takes a day and a half to travel by train from Adelaide to Kalgoorlie and Jack Gasmier spent most of the bleak trip contemplating his luck, good and bad, as the low scrub and mulga rolled past his window, the occasional bright shards of distant salt lakes breaking the monotony.

  Willi spent most of the time drinking from bottles he’d packed in a bag, having already spent most of the seven pounds he’d been given for travelling expenses.

  While Willi drank, Gasmier might have wondered how it had come to this: that in the space of a few years he’d lost
a good job, a good house, a good wife and his little Joan. On the other hand, Marjorie Manson might be his saviour. She was a looker and much smarter than he was. And he now had a son. A son! That counted for something, even if it still wasn’t clear whether even that was a blessing or a curse.

  In the end, he had had no choice; he had to find work with whatever skills he possessed and wherever it took him. If that was to the hot dry plains of Kalgoorlie, so be it. It couldn’t be worse than Wadnaminga and, in all events, it would be a relief to be far away from Adelaide.

  On 16 April 1933, the Great Western Express pulled into Kalgoorlie and Jack and Willi stepped onto the platform. Here was a substantial town, more like a city, and it buzzed. They could hear it. There were new cars in the street; people were well dressed. There was money. The rest of the world was going to hell, but Kalgoorlie was prospering because the only product worth a damn in the world was gold and Kalgoorlie still had plenty of it.

  Jack Gasmier’s Uncle Albert met them at the station and drove them to Bardoc, where their high hopes deflated. Bardoc did look an awful lot like Wadnaminga, undulating but mostly flat, with bare red rocky earth and small brittle bushes. Its population was 36 men, all gold miners apart from a local grazier, his son and a man who sold firewood.

  Boys, trust me, Uncle Albert might well have said. There’s another mile of gold under your feet. You just gotta find it.

  On the surface, Bardoc’s geology did look similar to the great mines around Kalgoorlie, but Albert was wrong, it didn’t have the same geological qualities that had produced the famous Golden Mile.

  The Golden Mile is what’s called a ‘Greenstone belt’ of rock, the result of volcanic activity two and a half billion years ago. The green comes from a compound called chlorite, but essentially these rocks have been heated, squeezed and folded so that they cracked. Volcanic activity, or at least chemistry and geology, deposits the gold in these cracks. Rising magma billions of years ago squeezed superheated water to the surface from deep underground. As the hot water rose it dissolved small amounts of gold, and when it neared the surface through those cracks it cooled and the gold dropped out of the solution. It built up slowly and created a vein of gold.