The Old Balmain House
Page 24
Chapter 20 - 1942 – Discovery
The year was 1942. Sydney was under attack, with a Japanese submarine found in the harbour. There were army and navy people everywhere. Ships needed fuel and fuel needed tanks. The navy looked for good safe places to build tanks, not too close to where anyone lived in case of bombs, but on deep water where the big ships could come and go.
One such place was Ballast Point, where a single big oil tank stood, used for the diesel fuel for truck and ship engines for more than 30 years, but now, leaking an oily film at the seams. The Navy decided this old tank was no longer safe and must come out. Into its place would go three brand new, larger and stronger, steel tanks. So the fitters cut apart the old tank’s steel plates and lifted off the metal base plate with a ship’s crane.
Below the old tank was sandstone rock mixed with sand and rubble, sitting over bedrock. It needed to be excavated further for the bigger, stronger, foundations. So they brought in their machines; dozers, trenchers, backhoes, and cranes, to scrape away the soil and move the loose rock and then lift off the heavy pieces until they were on solid bedrock onto which they would lay a new cement foundation.
There was one big rock slab at the front, closest to the sea, tipped at a strange angle, as if it had somehow dropped crookedly before. Part of it poked up above the ground. This needed to be lifted away to finish the levelling. They brought in their heaviest crane, and secured the cable around this large boulder. With a grinding of gears the crane took up the strain and slowly the heavy rock was raised out of its hole and swung aside.
A dozer rolled forward to push in earth and remove the cavity. As it rumbled into place a worker standing to the side let out a whistle.
He raised a hand and gave a shout to signal “Stop”.
Everyone paused. He waved the other onlookers to come over and look. In this hole were a couple bottles and something else, white things. They lay in pieces on the ground. He climbed down. He realised he was looking at a human skeleton, not an adult but a child, in fact two children. Some long bones were broken as were the skulls, as if crushed by a heavy weight.
“We should call the Military Police,” said the site foreman.
They waited for an hour and two MPs arrived.
“Whoever it was has been dead for a long time, and you need to get on with your work,” said the first MP.
So the MPs collected the remains and the other things from the hole.
One wrote a short report in his notebook for logging at the base.
In it he listed the items. “One green bottle, one blue bottle, one small chest, one blue carved bird, knife, bell, remains of some clothes and bags, maybe some bits of books,” he wrote.
He continued, “Remains appear to be two children, likely age between 6 and 12, perhaps a boy and girl, don’t appear aboriginal.”
Once all was collected they put the objects into bags with labels, then drove away to lodge the remains with the civilian police. In due course a police officer, Sargent Jones lodged them, along with the original report, with the coroner.
Many people were dying at this time and the coroner’s staff was down to one; the others had been co-opted for the war effort. So the coroner glanced briefly at the bags’ contents. He made an entry into his log and his assistant collected the human remains along with the other detritus and put them in a box, which he labelled with the date and record number. He placed this into a storage compartment and closed the door, his work done. Perhaps, one day, when time permitted, someone would examine these items properly.
As the war progressed, the deposition of more body remains continued, but, except in major finds or obvious homicides, the investigation was kept to a minimum. So they accumulated, each lot tagged, lodged in its container and placed into storage. When the war ended they were all moved together into a new storage place. There they stayed.
Slowly their existence and provenance drifted out of human memory.
With the war and all its comings and goings in Sydney Harbour there was no room for a small neglected cemetery, at the foot of the hill, near the ferry wharf at Balmain. The gravestones were old and overgrown. They seemed to have been forgotten. Another cemetery in Leichardt had become the place of burials for many years.
One day, with no permission sought from people who lived nearby or from known relatives, a team of workers arrived. By the end of three days the graves were all removed. They were placed in a group together in Leichardt. A small sign was left behind to advise anyone who cared about the removal. No one seemed to notice and no disrespect was intended, but it was wartime and things needed to be done.