‘What’s that you’re reading?’ one of the lighthouse people asked me. I’d slipped away from more lighthouse conversation to remind myself of what my travelling companion, the Reverend Canon Brownrigg, had made of his first visit to this same island nearly a century and a half ago. I held up the stapled pages of his journal for perusal, but seeing it to be in no way lighthouse-related, he lost interest and headed off.
Brownrigg, unlike George Bass, was much impressed with this place, employing all the weapons in his nineteenth-century literary arsenal to wax about it:
… lofty conical granitic hills, in some cases clothed to their summits with an impervious scrub, – its deep ravines, – its wooded slopes, and bold precipitous cliffs, this is certainly the most picturesque of the islands forming the eastern group of the Straits …
My initial impressions were, I realised, merely the continuation of a long tradition observed by visitors to this remote island. To my silent satisfaction, I found that he too was astonished by this very same view that emerged as he ascended from the cove below:
… The landing place is near a boat shed, on a little sandy beach, at the foot of an abrupt rise thickly covered with sheaok, mangrove and boobyalla. The hill is ascended by a zigzag road, which, at the cost of immense labour, has been cut out of its side … the scene we now beheld, reminded us of the experience of Bishop Nixon of which he writes when he viewed the same scene: ‘Here on this wild isolated rock, we found a comfortable stone house, a well-appointed homestead, a garden redolent with sweets – an atmosphere of peace and content breathing around this ocean home.’
Both of these venerable gentlemen, dead for a century and more, could have been writing yesterday.
After so many years thinking about this place, the time I had been given on Deal was criminally short. Bass Strait’s fickle weather, exquisite today, was set to give way to a westerly gale by the morning, and James had instructed us all to be back on board by the end of the day, when he would leave, he said, with us or without.
‘James knows these waters,’ Bob told me gravely as I mumbled about the time given to my truncated visit. ‘One working bee I was on out here, years ago, was set to last ten days. They couldn’t pick us up till day twenty-one. There wasn’t much to eat by the end.’ I decided to quicken my pace. If I was to satisfy myself that the story told to me as a kid was at least plausible, I had no time to waste to search for the place it may have happened.
The track to the lighthouse continued away from Deal’s cottages through a gate and series of fences marking indiscernible divisions across the paddocks of grass and silver tussock. Evidence of some long-abandoned industry left its impression: concrete slabs and riveted tanks of rusting steel plate, finally succumbing to the elements and cracking like the granite, which, over on my right, ran in mighty buttresses down to the shoreline. This track was a long one, at times hard and even treacherous underfoot. Sudden downpours over the years had washed parts of it away, leaving whoever was in charge to repair as best they could. Bricks, pieces of concrete and other odd building materials could be seen, shoring up patches of broken track, borrowing from demolished sheds and buildings that had expended their usefulness. ‘There’s even a roll of carpet under here somewhere,’ Bob told me.
A forest sprang up around us then, unexpectedly, thickened to a range of sheoks and the only gum tree to be found on the island, the short and rough-barked Eucalyptus nitida or Smithton peppermint. At the bases of these, shrubs of prickly wattle gathered in glowering clumps, their spindly, thorn-studded tendrils belying their pretty yellow flowers, warning curious onlookers to continue on their way.
I overtook a couple of the lighthouse people, whose initial pace and enthusiasm had been sapped by the heat and terrain. All of us, I realised, were overdressed, and sweat marks expanded their way across middle-aged backs and brows.
I took my opportunity to tell the story of the boy to Bob. It felt immensely satisfying to be telling it finally in this place, and he took it in with scholarly curiosity. I asked him where the logical place was that such an event might have occurred. As the story goes, the setting was close to the lighthouse itself, perhaps even under it. Finally being here, however, and seeing for myself the terrain, the dearth of tracks and roads, made me think that nothing I had been told could possibly be true. Did such a place even exist?
Bob shook his head thoughtfully, then, as if drawn by an unexpected force, moved to one side of the track and stopped, pointing into the bush. I would never have seen it if he hadn’t paused at that very moment and stood silently, devoid of comment or conversation, a curious expression clouding his brow. A small wooden sign, which had at some stage been lovingly decorated with a small brass plate cut into the shape of a ship, indicated the sparest of gaps between some sheoks. And there a vague and narrow track disappeared into the shaded forest floor behind it.
‘Yes,’ said Bob slowly at last, a finger tapping his lips. ‘Squally Cove. It’s not used much anymore but it leads you down to the wreck. It may have been used more back then.’ I stood with him, questions crowding my brain.
Up ahead, a shout went up. The advance party had reached their Shangri-La, the Deal Island lighthouse. Bob snapped back to his previous self. ‘But you really must see the light. It’s quite spectacular. They’ll need the key, excuse me,’ and he accelerated ahead, his fit, sinewy body taking the ever-increasing gradient with ease, leaving me puffing and bewildered.
I glanced back down the little track, then found a stick to lay at a right angle to mark its entrance before continuing up to the light.
The track became very steep towards the end, almost unbearable on the back of my legs. Reverend Brownrigg, I noted along the way, had also found the going hard:
After passing along some clear ground, it pursues a winding course upwards through a scrub of stunted gums and tea-tree; for the greater part of the way the ascent is steep, and we were glad to rest occasionally. At its approach to the Lighthouse, the road becomes so perilously steep that one is full of wonder how the team of bullocks manage to drag the dray up such a place.
Rising up onto the balls of my feet to take in the last hundred metres as it lunged upward towards a patch of open sky, a sudden sea breeze deliciously chilled my sweat-laden shirt and heavy, clinging trousers. Towering above the trees, now hoving like a ship into view, was the white stone tower of the light, but I was stopped short before it as I rounded a corner at ground level. In front of me was a tiny grave, ancient but well maintained, with one word inscribed on its diminutive headstone: ‘Baby’. It stopped me in my tracks. ‘Baby.’ Not another word. I looked for Bob for some explanation, but he was nowhere to be found.
The light was indeed a grand sight. At just over 20 metres high, Deal’s cement rendered granite rubble lighthouse tower is by no means the tallest around, but a wilder and more spectacular setting cannot be imagined. Looking about, though, it seemed I was in the middle of some ancient archaeological dig, such was the plethora of ruined walls, buildings and floors around me. Barely standing was a cluster of former assistants’ cottages, which had also housed their large families. Crude walls of stone, broken in some places and all now roofless, outline tiny rooms with large back-to-back fireplaces. Some still showing evidence of their nightly use in streaks of fading soot, and here and there a fragment of charcoal from a fire which had once warmed a long-departed family. I later learned that in one of these, all seven of an assistant and his wife’s children were raised.
Fires have periodically swept over Deal, the most damaging in 1919, which destroyed much of the original infrastructure, including a telegraph line between the light and the keeper’s residence. Even as late as 1996, a rubbish fire got out of hand, destroying much bush and nearly the light itself. ‘The light went from white to black,’ said Bob, ‘and some of the glass was smashed. It was a very close thing.’
Remnants of other buildings were evident too: a wall, a lonely sunken floor, a ragged pile of rubble and broken bric
ks. The year 1950 saw another fire ravage parts of the island, destroying some weatherboard cottages, which, in one early photograph, gave the site a pleasant, almost village feel. Not so today.
I caught up with Bob, who explained the little he knew about the grave of the baby. ‘We think we know who the keeper was at the time, but that’s about it. Babies were born, some of them lasted just a day,’ he said. I complimented him on his job of maintaining the diminutive site so well, its whitewash looking almost fresh, but he shook his head. ‘We have no idea who’s kept it like that,’ he said. ‘Certainly not us.’
Having seen the light, I was tempted to dash back to explore the mysterious little track and the cove that lay at its end. Bob assured me it was the only one even remotely accessible in the area of the lighthouse itself, but was no easy walk. He seemed concerned at the prospect of my plans to go there on my own, and searched my face to see if I was serious.
The first of the enthusiasts emerged noisily high up on the outside platform, their jaws agape at the vista before them. ‘It’s a wonderful view from up there,’ said Bob quietly, and I was sold. ‘… fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. One, two, three, four …’ I counted under my breath, fighting the vertigo of the impossibly narrow iron staircase as it brought me up to the top of the tower. At every sixteen steps a small landing had been placed with a window, its view grimy and cobwebbed, but giving a foggy idea as to what awaited me at the top. Away from the overwhelming sense of light and openness the island gave, this lighthouse chamber was claustrophobic by comparison. My eyes had trouble adjusting to the sudden gloom. ‘… eight, nine, ten, eleven …,’ I counted on, pushing my sore calves up the old iron stairs. The drop of each step was oddly spaced, and felt awkward underfoot. Unusually, they emanated not from the wall but from an iron pillar in the centre, splayed like the leaves of a gigantic vine, narrow enough to make my foot slip several times, making a loud clatter and prompting calls of ‘You right?’ from somewhere in the void above. My grip on the steady iron rail, luckily, never faltered.
At the balcony directly under the workings of the light, I emerged to a wondrous scene.
… the view we obtained was most extensive and grand. No description can possibly do it justice. One the one hand, the Victorian Coast, Rodondo, Curtis Island, and the Hogan Group, are visible, and on the other, the majestic peaks of Flinders, with Wright Rock and Craggy Island intervening, these latter appearing as stepping stones, making one feel, as if a hop, skip, and a jump would be sufficient to transport one from Kent’s Group to Flinders. It would be difficult to conceive of a more glorious sight than that which was now opened to us on all sides.
Reverend Brownrigg captures it perfectly. From nowhere else, I was told, can more of Bass Strait’s islands be taken in with a single turn of the head. From Deal’s summit, the rest seemed to follow, this fleet of islands, making a line of vanished mountains which, an aeon ago, ran in a scything curve from one great landmass to another.
I looked for someone with whom to share the view, but to my surprise I seemed to have it all to myself. Voices, though, could be heard, somewhere above me. Looking up, a small forest of men’s legs could be seen on the topmost landing surrounding the very epicentre of the light, the revolving cupola. How they had managed to get up there is a mystery, but there they were, huddled together as one, discussing its inner workings in reverent tones.
I listened in on a conversation about Chance Brothers of Birmingham, the great British glass manufacturing company and creator of Deal’s light. ‘It would all have been ordered out of a catalogue, the whole thing,’ someone said. ‘Everything from the masonry upwards arrived in kit from England, and assembled here. Amazing.’ My interest piqued, I waited for the tramp of shoes to descend, then climbed up a thin ladder myself. One of the group invited me to see the inner workings. I climbed into a tiny chamber, the lantern, the highest accessible point of the lighthouse. Here I was enclosed in a forest of multifaceted glass panels still gleaming and brilliant after a century and a half of use. Beside us were enormous twin globes, which had replaced the acetylene, which themselves had replaced the original whale-oil lamps. I had to admit, it was all rather wonderful.
My guide quietly explained some of the features, and pointed out the slightly offset nature of the glass panels surrounding us. ‘With flat glass, you get what they called “parasitic flash”, where the light reflects off one side of the glass and out the other – making in fact a double flash that could confuse people at sea.’ The Deal light, I was told, was designed to emit three precise flashes in a row, then go black, giving it its unique optical ‘signature’, enabling mariners to pinpoint their whereabouts. In twenty minutes, I learned more about lighthouses than I had in a lifetime. I discovered Gustaf Dalén, the Swedish genius who gave us the Dalén light, enabling full automation of lighthouses and buoys before the advent of electricity because of his Nobel Prize-winning ‘sun valve’, in which alternately darkened and polished strips of metal absorbed the sun’s heat irregularly, allowing the light of the sun to close off the gas. I learnt about John Hopkinson, the inventor of the rotating flash system, whereby all lighthouses could be individually identified. And perhaps most mesmerising of all, I heard about something called ‘the loom’. ‘There’s nearly a million candle power generated by those globes,’ he explained. ‘On the deck of a ship on a clear night, you would be able to see the beam of light from here, sweeping above your head from over the horizon.’ My brain slowed to take in this wondrous image.
I descended with a new respect for lighthouses, those who kept them and even those who continue to be enthralled by them. By the door I properly read the brass plaque I had brushed by before, satisfied that I could now give it a modicum of appreciation.
Chance Brothers and Co Limited, Lighthouse Engineers and Constructors. Near BIRMINGHAM. 1845
34
A LONELY HILL
Looking at my watch, I saw it was time I headed back down the track to rendezvous with that stick I left at 90 degrees and then head on to the cove. Informing one of the party of my intentions, he said quietly as I walked away, almost out of earshot, ‘Aren’t you coming to see the bomber?’
‘Bomber?’ I asked.
‘Yes, there’s a World War II bomber crashed just over the hill there. We’re off to see it. Just thought you were interested in that kind of thing.’ I stopped dead in a mixture of excitement and despair. I looked at my watch again, my heart racing, trying to calculate if I could possibly fit all this in, but knowing I had no power whatever to resist such an offer.
‘Is it far?’ I asked.
‘Couple of hundred metres, maybe, but it’s downhill all the way,’ said Bob, as we set out and scrambled down a tiny track that seemed to occasionally double as a natural rivulet. It was rocky, incredibly steep, and the full heat of the day had kicked in, sapping our already flagging energy. On the way I questioned Bob, at times bracing myself against the branches of a small, sturdy peppermint gum.
‘Do you … do you know what sort of bomber it is?’
He was a little vague. ‘An Airspeed?’ he said uncertainly. ‘I think it’s an Airspeed’.
That was at least a start, but it wasn’t going to be any bomber, and I could tell Bob was not equipped to satisfy the pedantics of a Second World War aircraft obsessive like myself. The path was becoming steeper, and all I could think of was the climb back up. I hoped it would be worth it.
It was the longest 400 metres I had ever travelled, but after an interminable descent during which Macbeth’s line about being so far stepped in blood that ‘returning were as tedious as go o’er’, repeated in my head, we emerged into a small clearing on the side of a steep hill, surrounded by pieces of smashed aircraft. It was a humbling and heartbreaking sight.
This was indeed no bomber scattered around me in twisted, corroding pieces. What I was looking at was the remains of an Airspeed Oxford, an elegant, twin-engine little trainer aeroplane made from fabric, aluminium and plywood, built in Por
tsmouth, England, probably around 1940. Nearly 400 came to Australia to train pilots and navigators for the war effort, and one bright spring morning in 1943, this steep sunny hillside became the resting place of one of them, along with the four young men who perished in her.
The war would no doubt have seemed a million miles away to Henry Ford, the Acting Head Keeper on Deal Island in September 1943 – distant events read about in the irregularly arriving newspapers, but that was probably about all. At about 9.30 on that clear spring morning, Henry was in the wireless room near the lighthouse, when the sound of aircraft engines was heard approaching from the north-east at about 2000 feet.
A little earlier, Flight Sergeant Joseph Docherty had taken off on an anti-submarine exercise from the Advanced Flying School at East Sale, in Victoria. Onboard were his three crew, all young men in the latter stages of their training, and destined in all likelihood to be sent to England to fly Lancasters with Bomber Command.
The nimble little Oxford, known to the crews as the ‘Ox-box’, would have made the flight over to Deal in about twenty minutes and nothing that morning would have indicated it to be anything but a routine trip in good weather.
Looking up, Henry Ford watched the aeroplane approach in a straight and level line, then, for no apparent reason, it rolled once, twice, then a third time before levelling out again. Then, to his horror, it suddenly dived, almost vertically, for about 300 metres, disappearing behind the steep ridge in front of the lighthouse. His heart in his mouth, he waited for it to reappear over the hill. He heard the muffled sounds of the engines, then a terrible ‘crump’, and silence.
The Forgotten Islands Page 21