Line of Fire Page 6

  Instead, she contacted her father, who sent her money for two tickets home.

  CHAPTER 8

  ‘You might do worse, do you know, than to go in for Alan Merrick.’

  Herminia’s lip curled an almost imperceptible curl as she answered gravely, ‘I don’t think you quite understand my plans in life, Mrs. Dewsbury. It isn’t my present intention to GO IN for anybody.’

  — Grant Allen, The Woman Who Did, 1895

  Marjorie hesitated at the top of the gangway when she saw Phyllis waiting in the crowd on No.1 Quay at Port Adelaide. Marjorie was slight, but the blue dress she’d sewn hugged her figure so well it made her look brittle. She wore a light blue hat at an angle and held a brown suitcase in one hand and Dickie’s small hand in the other. Dickie was pulling at her. He’d spotted Graham by his grandmother’s side.

  Marjorie had bought the tickets using her married name, Gasmier, and had left Perth on the Westralia at the end of November 1935. The weeks in hospital and the catastrophe of the false cheques had left her physically and mentally exhausted. She couldn’t bear another battle or any ‘I told you so’s. She took the gold band from her finger, put it in her purse and took a deep breath. Dickie could not betray her; he was too young to know what it all meant. It would be easier to simply pretend it had never happened.

  Joseph, Phyllis, Dickie, Jimmy and George Manson at an oval in Adelaide, c. 1936

  (Manson family collection)

  Phyllis waited until Marjorie was in front of her and held out her arms. Marjorie, despite herself, collapsed into them and cried and cried on her mother’s shoulder.

  Marjorie Manson might have seen her homecoming as a personal failure, but she was accepted without question at Gordon Road. Dickie was nearly five, Such a big boy.

  For the first few months, it was as if she’d never left. Phyllis did her best to be civil and mostly avoided asking what had happened in Kalgoorlie. Joseph would sit at the end of the kitchen table with his paper and cup, and if he happened to walk past her in the sitting room he might put a hand on her shoulder. Graham would take Dickie down the road to play with the ubiquitous Skinners until it was dark, and after Graham went back to school at the start of 1936, Dickie would be waiting at the gate when he came home.

  Things mightn’t have changed for Marjorie, but for Dickie, who was about to turn five, the house wasn’t the same as when he’d left. Jimmy was working and George was still away most of the time. Graham was always at school. There was no-one to play with. The adults were quiet because, for a long while, no-one seemed to want to talk for fear of saying the wrong thing.

  Money was still tight in Gordon Road, and tighter now that there were two more mouths to feed. Phyllis made scones to sell at the Anchor Flour and Woodson’s Tea stand at the Adelaide Show, making enough money to buy the boys their boots for the year.

  Marjorie made dresses in the front bedroom she shared with Dickie, but her heart wasn’t in it. Her hopes had been shattered and she was depressed. She wondered if Jack was all right, felt guilty for what he’d done for her, but also blamed him for that and everything else that had gone wrong. Would she ever be able to have children again? The doctor had never really answered that question. This was now to be her life, she supposed, sitting in the front room stitching. Dickie would grow up and leave, and she’d be an old spinster who’d once dreamed that she could do anything and the world had smacked her down.

  The hot start to 1936 stretched out into a particularly miserable autumn, with nothing much to do and nothing much to look forward to.

  In April 1936, Marjorie received a letter from Jack Gasmier. She’d been expecting something of the sort. He’d just been released from Fremantle prison and he asked if he could visit.

  Please don’t, Jack. There is no future for us. I can’t go through all that again.

  He caught the next steamer back to South Australia, but he didn’t go to Adelaide. He went to Port Augusta, where, by July, he’d reinvented himself as a professional wrestler, as the Transcontinental newspaper reported:

  Mr Gasmier is an instructor of no mean ability, having spent some time in this role at the Weber, Shorthose & Rice School of Physical Culture. He has at various times wrestled such well-known men as Koolman (middle-weight champion of Australia) and H. Whitman.

  He then challenged Hughie Whitman, the light heavyweight champion of Australia, to a match. Jack had been an amateur wrestler in the 1920s, but pro wrestling was something completely different. The hard labour in jail had kept him fit, he needed the money, and he certainly hadn’t abandoned the idea of winning Marjorie back. Hughie Whitman and Anton Koolman were the biggest names in pro wrestling in South Australia, and if they could make money, so could he. It wasn’t actually a bad idea, but pro wrestling was more about theatre than sport. Did Jack have it in him?

  Jack would have read about Whitman’s recent bouts in the Truth newspaper.

  A razzling bout between Hughie Whitman (12.8 stone) and Leo Demetral (13.5 stone) (U.S.A.) at the City Baths to-night, came to a sensational end, when Demetral’s neck became entangled in the ropes, in the eighth, and he was almost hanged.

  Demetral had secured a fall with an ‘Indian whiplock’ in the second round, but Whitman pinned him with ‘the newly-perfected devil’s clutch’ in the fifth. In the final round Whitman entangled Demetral’s neck in the ropes. Referee Jack Higgins disqualified Whitman.

  The crowd promptly roared its disapproval and showered Higgins with cushions.

  That’s the sort of thing the people of Port Augusta were expecting to see when Jack Gasmier challenged Hughie Whitman to a wrestling match. But on 17 September, the large crowd at the Port Augusta Town Hall might have been disappointed.

  Whitman secured a submission fall in the second round and Gasmier a similar fall in the third. Gasmier appeared to have the points in his favor until the sixth round when Whitman scored a fall.

  Either the reporter for Port Augusta’s Transcontinental newspaper failed to capture the spirit of professional wrestling, or the match was a dud.

  After the contest, Jack challenged Whitman for the title, but Whitman had other matches to arrange closer to his home in Adelaide with better known wrestlers. Jack’s brief pro wrestling career was over.

  Broke and jobless again, he moved back to Adelaide to live with his brother, Richard. It was an opportunity to see Marjorie and Dickie, but he kept away. There was no point approaching Marjorie until he had something concrete to offer her.

  Richard Gasmier had gone into the motor body building business. After the war, if you wanted to buy an American Packard, what you bought was a locally made car body built on a Packard chassis. Only the chassis were allowed to be imported, and by 1937 the economy was improving and people were buying cars again. Backyard businesses building car bodies sprang up in Adelaide, competing with the General Motors Holden factory in Woodville.

  Jack thought it was something he could do. He had been a coachbuilder on the railways, and surely building cars was much the same thing. Richard took him on, to show him the ropes, and it may have worked out if Jack’s past hadn’t caught up with him again.

  In February 1937, a warrant was issued for Jack Gasmier’s arrest for failing to pay maintenance for his daughter, Joan. He owed £7 and quickly needed a better job, or to get out of the state. Perhaps both.

  Jack saw an advertisement in The Advertiser for car body builders in Brisbane. He wrote and received a letter in reply saying that if he made his way to Brisbane and could show he was as experienced as he claimed, the job would be his.

  Jack took the convoluted railway journey to Brisbane and got the job at Charles Hope Limited in Fortitude Valley. He then wrote to Marjorie and asked her to join him.

  The letter caught Marjorie off-guard. Brisbane seemed more remote than Kalgoorlie. Queensland was almost another country. What should she do? Their last attempt at married life had been disastrous, but perhaps that wasn’t all Jack’s fault. And Adelaide held nothing for her;
there was no future in being ‘The Woman Who Did’ for the rest of her life.

  She said yes.

  Not again, said George, back from the bush.

  Phyllis wrung the dishcloth in her hands and bit her tongue when Marjorie said she was leaving. Joseph raised his head and said, Are you really sure?

  On a brisk autumn day in 1937, Marjorie and Dickie left Prospect for the last time. Phyllis didn’t seem to have any say in the matter and wasn’t to hear from Marjorie again until January the following year.

  ‘I didn’t approve of her going so far away,’ said Phyllis later. ‘Through it all we were not on very good terms,’ which might explain it.

  When Marjorie arrived in Brisbane, she found that Jack had rented a room in a house in Russell Street, West End, but it was awful: small, dirty, noisy. They stayed only a few weeks before moving into a flat on busy Breakfast Creek Road, in Newstead, closer to Jack’s work.

  Their rooms at the Mascot Flats building were small, but they were furnished. There was a tram stop outside and it was a short walk to the Charles Hope factory that sprawled over an entire block.

  Dickie had turned six, and Marjorie enrolled him at the local school. Then she advertised her dressmaking business. ‘Order work, prices reasonable, will go out, 8s. day.’

  She tried to muster some enthusiasm; things might work out this time. Brisbane would be permanent, they’d make some money, find a bigger place, maybe buy their own home. That’s what married couples did.

  It’s going to be all right, said Jack, determined to do better this time. It was Marjorie, though, who was having second thoughts. The flat was small, and as hard as she worked, she had little money for anything that might be called fun. Without money, life was relentlessly grim, even in Queensland, and what life was it for a small boy, living in a tiny flat?

  Outside the window she could see other people with different lives getting on and off the trams, and they looked, well, not exactly happy, but not unhappy. Marjorie was simply tired of being poor. In the distance she could see the river and the wharves, the steamships going to and from exotic places, and she was suddenly certain she and Dickie were meant for something greater than this.

  As it turned out, they were about to be touched by events in a faraway place they’d never heard of. Across the Coral Sea in New Guinea, the sleeping volcanoes of Rabaul had woken up.

  CHAPTER 9

  Mighty earthquakes shake us from time to time. We had one the other night. I heard some neighbours scream, my dog howled in terror, birds started twitters, cocks crew and lots of dogs howled. I got up out of bed and walked around the verandah. The stars were as tranquil as ever. Except for the swishing of water in the tanks and the noise of birds not yet settled down, nothing might have happened.

  — Sarah Chinnery, Malaguna Road, The Papua and New Guinea Diaries of Sarah Chinnery

  Diana Martell, wearing a blue jacket and a silver necklace, opens the door and puts her hands on her hips, as if I’m late.

  ‘There you are!’ she says, turning to her husband, who’s standing behind her. ‘Henry, Ian’s here.’

  We’ve never met before, but we’ve spoken on the phone. I’d arranged to meet weeks earlier, but she had me doubled-booked and lost my phone number, so she wrote a letter in elegant cursive handwriting learnt as a child in Rabaul in the 1930s.

  Here I am, at last, speaking to a woman whose life has been buffeted by volcanic eruptions and war.

  Diana is one of a few people alive whose life intersects with Marjorie Manson’s and runs parallel with Dickie’s. They never met, or if they did, she doesn’t remember. Diana’s and Dickie’s childhoods in Rabaul overlapped and they shared similar experiences after their lives began to intersect in 1937.

  Diana is 85, Dickie’s age were he still alive, when I meet her in a neat brick home in suburban Brisbane. It’s a suburb that blends in with the bush at the base of Mount Coot-tha, the backdrop to Brisbane, formed by volcanic activity aeons ago and now supporting the city’s television towers.

  Diana’s husband is Henry, a retired lecturer in Indian studies, and they have brought with them through the years the memories and mannerisms, the handwriting and speech of the 1930s and 40s. When I arrive, it’s been raining and a wheelbarrow near the front door is full of water. The garden feels tropical, dripping and smelling of damp earth and flowers.

  Diana Martell is the daughter of Philip Coote, the Rabaul manager for Burns Philp in the 1930s. Philip did business with the eccentric Ted Harvey. His wife, Diana’s mother, Rhoda Coote, once attended a wedding with Marjorie. These are details that Diana doesn’t recall, but she shares memories of Rabaul that Dickie would recognise.

  Diana saw Rabaul through a child’s eyes, before the war, when it was the most beautiful town in the South Pacific.

  Diana was born Diana Coote on Rabaul’s Malaguna Road, just before Christmas 1930, a few months before Dickie was born in Adelaide.

  Malaguna Road runs along the narrow piece of flat land between the coast and the steep wall of the volcanic caldera, connecting the main centre of town on the eastern side of the harbour to the wharves of Burns Philp and W.R. Carpenter and Co. as it circles anticlockwise towards the west. The Burns Philp company house in which Diana was born was down the road from the Burns Philp wharf. The road was lined with tall, glorious raintrees under which Philip Coote could walk hatless if he wanted to.

  Back then, Philip Coote was arguably the most powerful man in Rabaul. Even the government administrators didn’t wield quite the same prestige as the manager of Burns Philp. Rabaul had been built for copra trading and Burns Philp was the biggest trader of them all, bigger than its main rival, W.R. Carpenter. These were aggressive companies, making huge profits in the islands, both trying to corner as much of the lucrative copra trade as they could. They had a reputation among the planters for being ruthless. Burns Philp, B.P., was nicknamed ‘Bloody Pirates’ and W.R. Carpenter, W.R.C., ‘Would Rob Christ’.

  Philip Coote managed the B.P. empire that bought and sold just about anything that could be bought and sold in New Guinea. It had passenger and cargo shipping fleets and retail stores, and it exported rubber, gold, copra, cocoa — anything that the islands could produce. The company owned and managed plantations and had exclusive contracts to buy copra from plantations it didn’t own.

  Philip Coote did business with almost everyone in the Territory and many of them were fragile characters, most independent, some rogues and a few mad. One who ticked all those boxes was Ted Harvey, on the remote Baining coast west of Rabaul, whose behaviour would later lead to the deaths of everyone close to him, including Marjorie and Dickie Manson.

  Harvey was a particularly difficult customer because he refused to sign contracts to trade exclusively with either Burns Philp or Carpenters. Philip Coote tried to persuade him otherwise.

  Philip was an aggressive businessman, but Diana remembers her father as a kind family man, although very serious.

  ‘Totally reserved, unsmiling,’ agreed Diana’s husband, Henry. ‘And he married the opposite. And Rhoda really was the one who made the show.’

  Diana’s mother was born Rhoda Scott, the gorgeous daughter of the Treasurer to the Fijian Government. When Rhoda met Philip Coote in 1916, it was on a steamship travelling through the wonderfully romantic British Solomon Islands. The couple fell in love on a warm starry night sailing through exquisite tropical islands, and at the end of that year they were married on Tulagi.

  ‘My mother was born in Suva in Fiji and she had a brother, Hugh, who had a coconut plantation in the Solomon Islands,’ said Diana. ‘That’s where she met my father. Actually, they were on a ship both going to the Solomon Islands and that’s where they met, on her way to staying with her brother, Hugh.’

  Rhoda’s brother, Hugh Scott, was, back then, married to the daughter of a plantation owner in the Solomon Islands. Diana remembers her uncle Hugh as a portly man who always wore a pith helmet. Later, Hugh moved to New Guinea to manage plantation
s for Carpenters and became Ted Harvey’s neighbour in the Bainings, where he tried to save the lives of Marjorie and Dickie.

  Philip Coote had originally come to Australia from England to work on a cattle station, but he wasn’t cut out to be a jackaroo.

  ‘They put him on a horse that bolted and chucked him off,’ said Diana. ‘So he thought he’d try the islands, because they looked rather nice. The inland of Australia was rather dry.’

  Philip was much better suited to island life, and he quickly rose through the ranks of Burns Philp to become the company’s New Guinea manager.

  Diana remembers that in Rabaul, every day, her father dressed in a white tropical suit. He’d walk out the front door, down the front steps and beneath the frangipani-shaded front yard, crossing Malaguna Road to the Burns Philp offices.

  ‘White starched trousers, short-sleeved shirt, white shoes, a proper suit coat made of the same material as his pants. White. White socks, white shoes, and when he came home for lunch, he changed very often into a fresh lot. So, the wash boy had quite a busy time.’

  Diana shows me a photograph of Philip Coote standing in front of a house, clean shaven and dressed in his white tropical suit starched and stiff to stop the fabric clinging to the skin. Every day inside Rabaul’s caldera was hot and humid, a cauldron in name and nature. The town had to shut down in the hottest part of the day so the men could walk home for lunch.

  ‘I remember having lunch one day at the dining room table and seeing my father’s arms. He was eating and the sweat was dripping off his elbows. It dripped on the floor.’

  A few years after Diana was born in Malaguna Road, the family moved to another Burns Philp house built on a hill overlooking Sulphur Creek, a small jungle-clad inlet on the eastern side of Simpson Harbour. It caught what breezes there were and had wonderful views and rolling gardens. To the north and west, the town and the wharves were buried beneath the canopy of trees splashed with red, purple, cream and pink from poinciana, bougainvillea and frangipani. The wooden houses in town were also painted green, so their silvery roofs floated in a sea of green and flowers.