The Forgotten Islands

by Michael Veitch

  Lightkeeper Munro had seen the aircraft as well. The two met up and decided to search, Munro heading to Squally Cove, Ford to the ridge below the light. Bashing down a rocky slope through thick bush, he soon came to the wreck. The aircraft had hit nose in and ploughed a 30-metre passage through the scrub, leaving a scar and clearing that exists still today. One airman was pinned under the wreckage, another thrown nearby. Both were dead. It is not clear whether he was able to locate the remaining two. Wearied by his journey and by what he had seen, and with nothing more that he could do, he retraced his steps and reported his findings by radio.

  The air force was nothing if not efficient, arriving by boat the very next day to inspect the wreckage and intern the bodies of the four young airmen. Because of the remoteness, they requested to bury them here on the island. On the 25th, witnessed by two RAAF padres, the four were buried overlooking the hills and the seascape of Deal Island.

  ‘What’s this?’ one of the men of our group asked, prodding a short metal pole with his foot. ‘Part of the tail, I think.’

  I suggested to him it might be the wheel strut.

  ‘No, I think it’s the tail,’ he insisted.

  Knowing it, beyond a shadow of doubt, to be part of the starboard wheel strut assembly, I bit my lip and said nothing.

  What made their little aircraft roll, dive and crash that spring day in 1943? What was happening in the cockpit in those seconds before the crash? What was the pilot reading on this very instrument panel, now half grown into a tussock of sedge grass at my feet? The day was clear and the weather was fine. A sudden updraft caused by the swirling contours of the island, perhaps? Mechanical failure? A moment’s lack of concentration? We will never know.

  I looked about, picturing the scene that must have confronted poor Mr Ford as he climbed down this hill that morning – the twisted roundels on the torn canvas, the splintered timber props, and perhaps right here by this smooth oval-shaped stone, the broken body of one of the young men, still and crumpled in his dark-blue cadet uniform and yellow life preserver.

  I knelt down beside one of the two decaying Armstrong-Whitworth Cheetah engines which powered the Oxford and read the serial number out loud, still legible after seventy years. In recent times, a small plaque has been attached to a rock, marking the event and the loss of the four men who were close to achieving their goal of flying and fighting in their country’s great struggle, but who instead were marked down as just some of the thousands of young men killed in flying training: Sergeant Norman Graham, navigator, born in Burma, twenty-two; Flight Sergeant Joseph Docherty, pilot, born in Glasgow, thirty; Pilot Officer Kenneth Cowling, gunner, born in Bendigo, nineteen; Leading Aircraftman Peter Hendrickson, wireless operator, born in Maryborough, twenty-one.

  Emerging back at the lighthouse, the noise of a large engine could be heard, coming from the plant room next to the light. The Deal light had been decommissioned more than ten years ago, but much of the discussion among these travellers had been about a ‘re-light’ with the aim of making its historic mechanism light up the darkness once again. They had decided that it was indeed possible, and, given Deal’s historic importance, certainly desirable, and the tower and workings were not beyond repair. ‘The window seals. Just the window seals,’ one of them said. ‘Sounds like nothing, but just the water getting in over time, causing the rust and all that it leads to. If we could just go around to all these places and fix the window seals, they’d all last forever.’

  One big step along the long road to restoring the Deal light’s glory was restoring its power source, and that at least was proving easy. Although I had less than no time to waste, I poked my head into the plant room’s jolly atmosphere as an antidote to the melancholy of the crash site. Four beaming men were crowded around a large green diesel engine, which was roaring with life, echoing, I imagined, across the entire island.

  Bob stood nearby, his head too shaking in wonderment. ‘A few have managed to start this thing up, but not make it run. It’s amazing. I don’t think it’s done this in a decade.’ One of the party, it turned out, had advanced skills in electrical engineering, knew the foibles of old diesels, and even managed to hook it up to the grid, flooding the island’s mains with current for the first time in many years. All of them looked delighted. With power, they reckoned, anything was possible, and as I left them to proceed down the main track on my own, they stood in small groups looking up at their goddess, their beloved light, already planning its return, phoenix-like, from the recesses of history.

  35

  THE COVE

  The sound of the diesel, almost unbearable at close quarters, was reduced to a hush by the first bend of the track, and at the second was all but silent – its thudding rhythm effortlessly dispersed among the ancient crags and trees. A place like this, I decided, was not to be ruled by anything. Even an attempt to make it reveal a secret track with a carefully positioned stick I had found was not to be tolerated. Search as I may, the marker I had left just a couple of hours earlier was now nowhere to be seen. I had been the last to arrive at the light, and was now the first to retrace my steps. It made no sense. I complained to no one in an exasperated whine, pacing back and forth along the same hundred metres of track, trying to recall some other distinguishing features – the rocks, the trees – cursing the lack of attention I had paid earlier. After some time, I saw a mark on a rock that jogged something in my memory and a second later, the old sign to ‘Squally Cove’ revealed itself again, exactly where – so I thought – I had just been searching. Forcing down uneasy questions, I checked my watch again and, with alarm bells of foolhardiness clanging in my head, plunged into the bush along its barely discernible trail.

  The terrain changed in an instant and I was soon crossing an unevenly placed set of stones laid across a stretch of low swamp. I slipped, putting one foot completely underwater. I cursed my clumsiness, but took it as a free warning. Should I, in my haste, turn an ankle out here, or worse, not only would I fail to reach my destination, but with our boat due to leave in a couple of hours and a storm looming from the west, I may well be stuck on this very remote place for some time, assuming, that is, my companions managed to find me at all.

  Something Bob had mentioned earlier about this track, something about ‘a wreck’, rubbed like a grass seed in my memory. I had intended to question him further, but the thought had melted away, as was, seemingly, the path before me. Emerging from the soggy little valley, the track switched back on itself, then straightened out, and, to my surprise, began not to fall, but to climb through some thickly wooded melaleuca. It was a jumble of landscapes, dry then damp, open then thickly wooded, one after the other, like some haphazard ornamental garden. It was stifling, and my thick trousers seemed to be making the journey even more strenuous.

  Reaching some low eucalypts, there were no markings, and no signs of footfalls. This path could be going anywhere. I stubbornly reasoned that it was taking me to the water, and that was straight ahead. I ploughed on blind, following my nose.

  The ground was now almost bare underfoot, and I walked quickly, at times nearly breaking into a run. The pale boughs of trees flew past me as I weaved around them with a surreal sense of ease. I had no real knowledge of where I was going, but was being driven, or even led, by a growing confidence that I was, unquestionably, heading in the right direction. The little forest seemed to go on and on, then broke into the open, and I gave out a laugh, standing right where I had hoped I would be, by a little sign at the top of a path that descended away into a gully towards the sea. It was dark as I peered down into it, like standing at the edge of a deep pool, despite the sun still being high in the sky. It felt like an hour had passed but in fact I had been travelling almost no time at all, although I was panting and covered in sweat. My exhaustion, though, was only physical and my mind felt as sharp as a needlepoint. I swigged the last inch of warm water from my bottle, and plunged down, once again, through the trees.

  The slope was giddying. Do
wn and down I went along a zigzagging path, in some places well kept, in others almost vanishing altogether. At a couple of points, makeshift ladders had been put in place to assist with a precipitous plunge over a rock or ledge – tired, flimsy things that looked as though they hadn’t been used in ages. The ocean was, I could see, stretched out through the tree line, but still a long way down. ‘The wreck was called the Karitane’ came into my head as I edged closer, through the bracken, and under the cool dappled light towards the water.

  As shipwrecks go, the story of the Karitane is not one of the most dramatic, and even contains elements of the comic. She was an iron steamship of over a thousand tons, laden with a load of copper on her way from Devonport to Sydney when, on a foggy Christmas Eve in 1921, she struck the cliffs under the lighthouse on Deal, staving in her bow. Mattresses and other items were used to try and plug the leaks, but her collision bulkhead was breached and water began to pour into the engine room.

  She may have still been salvageable at this stage, but some say her captain, a man by the name of Spain, made the error of backing her off immediately, extinguishing the boiler fires and running her up onto the beach here at Squally Cove. All her crew of twenty-nine got off safely, but the Karitane remained, nose up with only her bow, forecastle and boat deck exposed at the high water mark. Already old and at the end of a long and accident-prone career, she would be left where she was, but in her holds was a fortune – four and a half thousand copper ingots. For weeks a party of sixteen salvagees laboured, extracting all but a few bars.

  Year by year, bits and pieces of the Karitane were removed; during the war, the air force used her for target practice; the odd diver has ventured down to inspect her remains; but the old lady has essentially been left for the sea to slowly claim her. ‘There’s still something of her,’ were the words that Bob had used. I dearly hoped he was right.

  At the bottom of the hill, the sweat that had been soaking me all day turned to a chill in the strange, impenetrable dampness of the long, deep gully which I guessed rarely saw sunlight. Lush grasses grew under substantial trees and a sweet floral smell from a large swathe of unknown white flowers mixed with the sea. Pods of small wallabies, curious then amazed at my presence, broke up from sheltering groups inside bushes and scattered like ants in all directions. Then, like a line drawn with a pencil, this garden came to an abrupt halt – beyond which lay one of the strangest beaches I had ever seen, comprising nothing but perfectly spherical rocks.

  I had seen beaches of stone and shale, but never anything like this. Countless numbers of stones, as if crafted by hand, the smallest the size of a medicine ball, ranging to near boulders, each near-perfectly round. I tested one with my foot. It clunked against its identical neighbour, then held fast. Gingerly, I placed my weight on it, and began to proceed.

  To my right was the base of an almost vertical cliff, a thousand feet high. I could not see the lighthouse from here, but knew it to be up there beyond the ridge. If there was any truth to the story of the boy who had made his way down to fish, he would have found no joy in that direction. There the exposed rocky pit, even on benign days such as this, is pounded by waves shattering against the boulders. To my left, however, was a very different scenario.

  A little way off, the boulders came to an abrupt end, crowding up against a smooth, angled volcanic shelf, skirting the water for some distance, which was as much as I could see from where I stood. I looked back up to where I must soon return. It was a daunting sight, a great, frowning slope obscured by the scattered hues of the forest through which I had just descended. The return journey would, I know, be longer and harder. However – though I could not say exactly why – along that rocky ledge was where I must now go.

  I tested for movement at each step; the stones one by one secured my weight and permitted my passage across. Some, I noticed, were spheres of jet black. Basalt perhaps? I would cockily try to leap two or three at a time, until sense stopped me in my tracks and I resumed the cautious, cantering pace that took me across, step by watchful step.

  I did not head straight for the stone ledge. A few metres from the water, a large stand of rusting iron stood all on its own, perfectly straight like a sculpted monument – the very last piece of the iron steamer, Karitane, the remnants of her bow, in fact, which had rammed this shore on a foggy morning ninety years ago. Scattered around it were pieces of steel plate, some still in remarkable condition, rivets now gone, but the grooves from the drill which had made the holes showing clearly. A frozen winch, its cable rust-fused to the drum, some other detritus, and that was all that remained. My disappointment was tempered by the knowledge that no time remained for distractions anyway.

  The stone ledge was, I found, no safer than the carpet of rocks. Immovable, yes, but at a far nastier angle than I had realised. My footing was awkward, with a tendency to slide and slip towards the water. A pair of clacking oystercatchers flew back and forth, outraged at the disturbance of their usually inviolable sanctuary. The ledge took me along the shoreline, waves occasionally sucking at my feet. I would, I decided, explore no further than the first craggy inlet. This was the only shore within a relatively short distance of the light. If the story of the boy and his mysterious demise had happened anywhere, it could not have been any place but here.

  However, for the old tale at the core of my long rambling journey through these islands to hold even the chance of truth, the setting around me now had to fit the description that had been placed in my mind all those years ago. For a start, any large sea creature living under this shoreline surely needed deep water, and, looking at the gentle slope at the bottom of this beautiful cove, clear as glass as it dropped gently into the centre, that seemed unlikely. It was all just too shallow. And was it really feasible that anyone could make a habit of descending that ominous slope on a regular basis? Every muscle in my legs was now aching from the experience.

  Checking my watch, however, I found that my descent to this beach had been made in surprisingly little time. Also, the path, now in poor condition, would have been used more often by more people in the early twentieth century, perhaps even as a route to this sheltered cove, enjoyed by the lighthouse-keepers and their large families, whose now-dilapidated ruins of houses above me would have resembled an active little village a century ago. If I, in my overwrought, middle-aged state, had managed a relatively quick descent, how much easier would it have been for a younger, fitter man for whom it was routine?

  The sloping stone pathway was rougher now, and extra care had to be taken. Rising up, it took me around a corner then stopped suddenly, forming one steep wall of a small inlet. I stood, looking down into this perfect little gully, and gave a small cry. A picture planted long ago in my curious child’s mind had, it seemed, been plucked out and placed before me in reality. Here it was, the cove of my story with all the pieces of the strange old drama in place: a narrow but easy pathway leading down to a small beach of white stone pebbles nestled at its rear; the almost perpendicular walls protecting the little gorge from the weather; and there, right in front of me, a calm pool of sheltered blue water sucking gently back and forth across a natural foot of flat granite jutting into its centre. Most intriguing of all, the water at this place, and this place only, dropped quickly away into a deep, dark trough, as if whatever hand had gouged the gully behind it had continued past the water’s edge to the centre of the cove.

  I clambered down, hot and cold pricklings running over my skin. I walked out onto the natural little jetty of stone. It was flat and even, with a quick drop to the water. I stood on its ledge and could see no bottom. A gash of blue water stretched ahead of me into still deeper parts. Leaning forward, I did my best to detect the hint of a cavity somewhere under my feet. I found a stone the size of a loaf of bread and dropped it in with a splash that covered my legs. The rock let out a gossamer trail of bubbles behind it and vanished into the sudden and mysterious depths. I stood, watching, or rather waiting for something, anything, but the water folded ba
ck to an oily evenness and no movement disturbed the aqua tableau of rock, sun and water around me.

  I sat down on this rock. Its scooped curves were perfectly contoured to receive a human form, seated or reclining. The tension of anticipation and exhaustion, held in abeyance no longer, crashed into me from all sides. I stretched out in the now lowering sun and a deep purple sensation unfurled over me, cushioning my over-stimulated mind. The stone, warmed by the sun, seemed to nuzzle my back and I pushed against it. I heard myself mumble something uncertain, and fell asleep.

  The sweet, drippy fog unleashed me slowly and for a second, my eyes took in some waving weed. Or could it have been an hour? Awakening, I suddenly felt naked, vulnerable, and looked at my watch. I could not focus. I looked at it again. ‘No,’ I said and went cold. I tapped it, shook it, then just stared, as if willpower alone could move its stilled hands, but my watch, bashed, dropped and soaked one too many times, had indeed stopped. I looked at the sun, but could not remember where it had been when I last checked. Reminding myself that panic in this situation was the way people did themselves terrible mischief, I refrained as best I could from breaking into a run.

  Over the boulders, it was excruciating, like applying a handbrake to a powerful vehicle and flooring the accelerator at the same time. For some reason I counted the stones as I retraced my steps, betting that I would finish on an even number. I did not. I glanced back at the rusty bow of the Karitane, then hit the path running. How long had I been here? How long had I been asleep? There was no way I could tell and, now, I began to panic. I retraced the zigzag, finding the odd little shortcut here and there. ‘Coal!’ I said to myself as the notion arrived unexpectedly into my head. The dozen or so black stones on the beach scattered around the rusting remnants of the bow were the last chunks of coal from the long-breached bunkers of the Karitane, refusing nearly a century of efforts by the tides to take them from the site of their long-dead ship. My own time here, however, was well and truly expired.