For Lampie, the afternoon passed quickly and despite the quizzing, it was a surprisingly pleasant jaunt. Peter Wilks had definitely recovered, for he politely but firmly insisted that he help to load up the ute with their required supplies. Not that she was refusing – Sid had ordered loads of stuff, she just hoped they all fitted. During their zigzag journey through the town and around the outskirts, one feature seemed to grab his attention above all the others – the boab trees. They lined the streets, dominated the parks and were the natural skyscrapers of Derby. Every few hundred metres he asked to stop and then slowly walked round them – small, large it didn’t matter. Neither did the fact that since it was the dry season they were bare of leaves so that their gaunt branches seemed to clutch at the empty blue sky in mute appeal for rain. They had a long wait ahead. Still Peter Wilks continually stared at them deep in thought and at every tree probed her botany creds to the limits.
Lampie was in a pretty good mood. From what had promised to be a gruelling task, namely the pick up of their artefacts consultant, had instead proved to be a breeze. She tried to blank out the memory of her clumsy introduction. That was just due to the stress of the whole Deception Bay excavation and of course bloody Sid. All afternoon she’d kept a careful watch on both the time and the sky, so she smiled happily as the familiar shape appeared to the south and then dipped towards the airfield. Yeehaw their ride home! Giving the township one last spin, she took the road back to the terminal while silently going through the checklist.
That prior concentration must have been why Peter Wilks’ sardonic question took her by surprise. “Miss Lampie, I do not mean to be remiss or impolite. However I couldn’t help but notice that all this afternoon you haven’t mentioned how we are to join the rest of your party and I also noticed that this is the road back to the airport.”
Awh shit! She’d forgotten what had so recently happened to him. Instantly Lampie spun out a clumsy apology and explanation. “Oh yeah, it is. I mean… Well… We have to catch a flight up north – it’s the only way to get there!”
“Ohh, I see.” Her passenger once more lent back into his seat and closed his eyes, with what sounded like a heart felt or rather stomach felt sigh. That was a very short reply, terse and to the point, loaded with the anticipation of pain.
A feeling of compassion is probably what made her blurt out an addendum to her answer in an attempt to calm his anxiety. “It’s alright Peter. It’s a really good plane and he’s a bloody great pilot – handles the old girl like a kite.”
“A kite, umm I see. I thought there weren’t any airstrips where we are going.”
“Yeah that’s right, except for the old one on Cockatoo Island, but he doesn’t need one – it’s a float plane!”
From the suddenly increased pallor of her passenger, Lampie realised once more she’d got foot in mouth disease. Peter seemed to slowly digest that latest piece of news with a certain amount of stoic dread and his reply, loaded with false hilarity, made her feel really embarrassed over the apparent omission. “I see. I can expect to experience a real adventure. I can look forward to being airsick and seasick all at the same time.”
Oh no! Freck he gets seasick! Damn Sid, why didn’t he tell her? She’d have to grab some more medicine and an extra bucket. Then they hit the access road to the airstrip and swung left towards the row of hangers. She could tell Peter Wilks was getting nervous – his left hand was clenched tightly around the passenger strap. Lampie slowed down and rolled to a stop before their aircraft and immediately began apologising “Ahh this is it. Sorry, it’s the best that we could find and he really is a very good pilot. Does all the runs to the gas rigs.”
Her passenger looked like a stunned mullet. His jaw had dropped and one trembling finger out thrust was pointing to the plane in front of them with single minded intensity. “Do you know what that is?”
“Yeah, as I said it’s…”
His voice boomed in the ute cabin, abruptly cutting off her second attempt at an apology “It’s a Catalina! My God, a Second World War vintage Catalina. Do you know how rare these old girls are? They where the mainstay of naval reconnaissance and sub hunting, a brilliantly versatile plane, only equalled by the Sunderland, one of these found the Bismark!”
“Ahh, ohh. Well in that case…”
Her charge was bouncing up and down in his seat then flung open the door and leapt out. Too excited to stand still, he kept on running from the nose to the tail of the plane stroking its fuselage as one would a favoured horse. Finally Peter Wilks spun back towards her. “Flipping heck I’d puke for week to be able to fly in one of these!”
That was not quite the reaction she wanted to hear, but the meaning got through. For some unfathomable reason, Peter Wilks, Pommie archaeologist, would cheerfully suffer the flight for the experience. Somehow she knew that with enthusiasm like that it‘d go a long way to gaining Trussie’s forgiveness for the odd splatter in the cargo hold. As Lampie shepherded her excited charge towards the office of their pilot, she shook her head. There really was no accounting for some people’s passions. This was going to be some flight north. She just hoped it was going to be worth all this effort. She’d had a gutful of false promises and failed leads.
Chapter 7 Kimberly Here!
“OOOOHHHH SHHIIITTT YYYYUUUURCCHHHH!!!”
Peter pulled his head out of the bucket and took a breath while glancing out of the transparent side blister at the scenery below.
“Ahh Peter, did those travel sickness pills help?”
He nodded and spat a another gobbet of stomach lining into the blue bucket in front of him, then wiped his face with the towel that was thoughtfully draped nearby. This view was incredible, the rocks and ridges set amongst the turquoise arms of the sea. You had to see the beauty to understand the pallid-ness of the description. Those romantic poets of the nineteenth century, like Tennyson, would have been struck dumb at the merest glimpse. But he wished he hadn’t made such a rash promise about flying. His stomach in a fit of cooperation was trying its hardest to live up to it.
“Yes, yes they did, thank you Lampie.” He forbore to mention that all they’d done was make a thudding noise as they bounced around in the bucket ten minutes after he’d swallowed them. As for the taste, well he was sure wire brush and Detol would have been preferable. To complain however, would be rude and ungracious. They were offered in the spirit of kindness and compassion and that, at the present, helped more than the drugs.
A crackling voice sounded over the intercom “Hoay Lampie and Peter. Hav’ a look out of the left blister. I’m going to slowly bank over the feature.” The plane tilted as instructed and swung down towards the double ridge line in a graceful swoop over a moderately large island. “Yeah, see that down there – that’s Koolan Island!”
As instructed Peter took in the view. Well how would you describe it? The island was the site of a mining operation and one clearly visible from the level of couple of thousand feet, probably even from space. One ridge on the side of the island had been sliced open in a series of large stepped terraces, for at least a two kilometres length. Once it had been four hundred foot high but the excavation had gouged a large pit tens of metres below sea level. Only a thin spur of rock held back the surging tides of the Kimberleys from flooding the open cut mine. He’d heard some lecturer demeaning the idea that man’s puny deeds couldn’t affect the stately majesty of the Earth’s natural system. Well, that naysayer only needed to fly over this and be proved wrong.
Peter tapped Lampie on the arm and pointed at the hole. “Ahh what did they dig out?”
“Iron ore, they’ve been at it since the Fifties and pulled out sixty eight million tonnes so far, according to the locals at Derby.”
A simple answer but awesome in its concept. To get a handle on that, Peter dug into his collection of obscure historical facts. The one that seemed appropriate for this mammoth development was another record breaking project. The construction of HMS Dreadnought, the first modern battleship, w
hen completed in 1907, was rated as displacing 16,700 tonnes and was the largest and most powerful vessel of its time, making every other warship in the world obsolete overnight. After a quick calculation on his mobile Peter figured out that you would need over four thousand Dreadnoughts to displace that amount of extracted ore. How much steel was that? “How pure was it?”
Lampie frowned and shook her head before leaning across to the intercom and relaying the question. The answer shot back immediately from the cockpit. “That’s easy Lampie. I still shuttle engineers and workers to the site. They say it’s running at close to seventy percent pure iron.”
Peter’s eyes widened in appreciation. One of his research projects at Portlee was an experiment to see how much workable iron you could get out of British bog iron pulled out of well, bogs, fens and marshes, using medieval tools and methods. It tended to be variable from a pitiful fifteen percent to a considerable fifty percent. If however, medieval smiths had recourse to ore like this, well they could have almost welded the rocks together and pushed the industrial revolution forward by hundreds of years. Not to mention the side benefit of producing arms and armour of a quality that would have rivalled the then technologically superior Saracens. In light of his most recent lecture at Skaze, Peter had a wild thought, no doubt brought on by the air sickness pills. If by some fluke the crusaders had managed to get here and find this iron deposit, the West might have actually kept the Holy Land.
Regarding the western discovery of this region, well for such a large continent as Australia so many seafaring people seemed to have bumped into it and finding nothing, they ignored it and sailed on. According to Lampie, a Dutchman named Dirk Hartog was the first one to officially recognise Terra Australis in 1616, when he was driven too far west by the Roaring Forties – the trade winds that the western mariners relied upon to get them across the Indian Ocean on the way to the lucrative Spice Islands of Indonesia. Other vessels of that period apparently failed to pull up soon enough and impacted on the many reefs, leaving a string of wrecks including the Batavia and Gilt Dragon, scattered along the West Australian coast. Then Peter got a bit of a surprise. After all the Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese who’d sailed past or found disconnected segments of the continent, it was an Englishman who brought Terra Australis to prominence – a pirate by the name of William Dampier, who in 1688 spent time in this region making copious notes on the strange wildlife and customs of the natives while searching for Spanish treasure ships. In fact the spray of islands they were flying over was part of the Buccaneer Archipelago, named in honour of that ‘pirate’ by Captain Philip Parker King who charted this part of the Kimberleys in 1822. Those intriguing connections made him curious to do some more exploring through the list of discoverers of Australia. It seemed that it was not all down to Captain Cook.
As the scenic tour continued Peter forced back the incipient mutiny of his southern regions. ‘Trussie’ was well practiced as a tour guide and was preparing them for the next cinematic wonder. As both Lampie and Trussie had told him repeatedly, the Kimberleys was different. Not just different like Sydney was in relation to London, or that the kangaroo was just a little unusual as compared to a cow. Those similes were far too weak and couldn’t prepare one for the impact of the savage beauty of the landscape. For one, along the coast the land wore its bones on the outside. The rocky ridges and escarpment didn’t just dominate the landscape, they were over ninety percent of it, while the rest was made up of crystal white beaches, tidal mangroves swamps and sparse coverings of trees. It was always the rocks, orange, red or burnt cream that dominated any scene and told the story of the Kimberleys.
This current spot they were swooping over was a perfect example. At some stage one of the explorers named it the ‘horizontal waterfall’. Now most people would tweak an eyebrow at the name and immediately come up with the opinion that by some natural illusion or perhaps a strange freak of nature, a waterfall was defying gravity and commonsense and flowing sideways. Some time in the geological past, which is on a completely grander timescale to Peter’s usual field, the historical past, possibly the combination of a sudden cataclysm and the slow action of erosion created a pair of parallel ridges in the McLarty ranges, that ran along the flank of Talbot Bay. From the air those looked spectacular enough, worthy of a large panoramic photo. These two ridges stood some three or four hundred metres apart and were breached in some impossibly distant eon, allowing the sea to flood in, creating two distinct land locked bays, the first long and narrow, while the second swelled into a waisted hourglass. At the mouth of each of these portals, the stone cliffs went straight up in layered bands of coloured rock, darker grey at the base to the level of the high tide mark, then a brief band of white deposited by the salty surge, before resuming the usual ragged broken striations of burnt orange and cream for a further fifty meters. And here came the dynamic action of the scene.
These entrances were almost opposite one another and varied in width from ten to twenty metres, creating narrow gorge like choke points. Added to that was the phenomenal twelve metre tides of the Kimberleys and for hours of each day the water was either rushing in or out, creating a bizarre waterfall of several metres in height. From what Peter could see, that phenomena was a popular challenge to the powerboats circling the outer bay, as they leapt the flow as would a salmon up river rapids. Trussie had really obliged his new mate and fellow admirer of his love ‘Betsy’ the PBY, by putting the Catalina in a side ways loop that passed between the gorges. Lampie chattily pointed out that in the 1970s, a lugger chartered by the Maritime Museum for exploring the coast, almost came to grief here. The archaeologists on board had sighted what looked like the remains of a wreck and decided to have a closer look. First they motored in on a rising tide easily enough. Danger can be deceptive in the Kimberleys. Once past the mouth, ten metre wide whirlpools tossed the vessel around like a cork, snapping the rudder and almost sucking down the dinghy being used to tow the vessel out of the currents. That piece of history must have been obvious to the pilots of the power boats below. Trussie swept in so close to the rapids that Peter could see the hair rippling on the heads of the passengers and the gleam of sunglasses, as they glanced up at the sudden shadow. It looked pretty exhilarating and at another time he’d be keen to try it, but now the sight of the boat bouncing around in the white whirl and his sideways stance, made him suddenly recall his other new friend, the bucket!
To take his mind off his predicament, Peter concentrated on his introduction to the Truscott Air Sea Transport Company. The sight of his mode of transport had been a real surprise. He actually had noticed Lampie’s frequent evasions about the next stage of travel but forbore to mention it. To be blunt, he didn’t want to know what crazy plan Sid had arranged. He had seen too many improvisations by his old ‘friend’ Sid to have any real trust in him. To be honest, only the surprisingly instant transfer into his account of four thousand dollars, and the promise of sandy beaches had convinced him Sid’s offer was for real. So far the trip had been packed with sterling surprises, like his attractive escort, the unusual and extraordinary scenery and most amazing of all, the plane that had been hidden behind the hanger at Derby airport. Lampie had been apologising six to the dozen when they’d rocked around the hanger. Instantly he’d been frozen in stunned shock, a real Second World War vintage Catalina flying boat! They just didn’t turn up. He’d seen only one before and that had been converted into a rather unique canal barge. Amazing as that was, this one was the real deal!
He must have looked a right idiot to the pilot, Ricky Truscott, as he’d burbled on about how crucial this aircraft was to success in the Pacific campaign, recon, hunting subs and so on. Then ‘Trussie’s’ craggy face had lit up with joy, as he beheld a fellow devotee. Instantly Peter had been embraced and granted an exhaustive tour. That included the highlights of the hydraulic system and up a ladder to inspect the twin fourteen cylinder Pratt and Whitney rotary engines, rated at twelve hundred horse power, capable of carrying a load of
fifteen to twenty thousand pounds and travelling over two thousand nautical miles with a full fuel tank. It was a formidable aircraft and perfect for the great distances of the Pacific theatre.
As it transpired Trussie knew it all – every detail and fact of her service, right up to the day he found her languishing at the corner of an old airfield in western Queensland. This old plane was a Boeing Catalina PBY-5A, an amphibious model with retractable wheels and had served in 11 Squadron RAAF. She had been painted all black for use in nighttime raids and for dropping supplies to coast watchers behind the Japanese front line, thus earning the nickname ‘Blackcat’. Both tasks would be dangerous enough in daytime, but doubly so in the dark where you were relying on the skills of the crew to get you through the mission without the usual benefit of clear observation. In late 1943 luck ran out for this Catalina. She was severely damaged by flak after the interception of a convoy near the Japanese air base at Wewak. Despite serious damage to one engine and a shredded wing, she limped back to mainland Australia and put down at a remote airfield. Some fifty years later that’s where Trussie found her, derelict and abandoned. And so, he said, began a long and beautiful friendship.
That avid interest got Peter admitted as a long lost brethren of the Catalina fan club, but he’d begun to pale as Trussie described his favourite flying manoeuvres through the Kimberleys, the closer the better, wave hopping at a hundred foot gave one a really good perspective. At that point in the story, Lampie had pulled the pilot aside and whispered urgently in his ear. The old fellow’s face had fallen briefly at the hint that his more daring feats would merit a ‘chat’ behind the hanger with her. Still he’d only modified his height a tad, it was two hundred foot this time.
The rest of the scenery he had to admit while equally spectacular, was a touch blurred. His stomach had finished its complaints about the rollercoaster treatment and now his head, behind his eyeballs, felt like it was already partying to loud techno music and throbbed with a very disconcerting beat.
Terra Australis Templar (A Peter Wilks Archaeological Mystery) Page 10