by Juliet Wills
from that day forward was never without a quid.
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The trial was one of the most celebrated of the era and
generated publicity nationwide, the newspapers labelling the story ‘as bizarre and sensational as any best-selling thriller’. From Albany to Wyndham and across the country to Sydney,
Melbourne and Brisbane, people speculated about the fate of the missing diamonds. Most people believed Diamond Jack had hidden away some of the treasure.
Outside the court, Captain Smirnoff leant against the wall deep in thought, drawing back on a cigarette. He felt someone touch his arm and turned to see Ernst Smits from the Javasche Bank. He asked the captain if he was surprised, to which
Smirnoff replied, ‘I have known a moment in my life when a human being would be justified in asking himself what the real value of diamonds is, and in the past year I have seen many things that make me wonder about this still.’
The trial was the culmination of a miserable year for Smirnoff.
Aside from the trauma of Carnot Bay, his wife’s cancer had worsened, and the former war hero and world-renowned aviator had suffered the humiliation of almost a year’s unemployment.
While the war in the Pacific had begun to turn around in
favour of the Allies, there was no immediate end in sight. When compared to things like peace, health and security, the value of the diamonds no doubt seemed insignificant to Smirnoff—
though he wondered what happened to the remainder until the day he died.
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DIAMOND FEVER
Diamond fever
In the end, the diamonds returned to the Dutch East Indies Trade Commissioner, Jan van Holst Pellekaan, had an estimated value today of more than A$20 million. An even greater amount has never been recovered. As Carnot Bay survivor Leon
Vanderburg said before his death in 1975, ‘Personally, I do not doubt that quite some fortune in diamonds has still been unaccounted for, possibly buried in the sand at the place where several lives were lost.’
At the height of diamond talk in the Kimberley, the belief that these gems might lie buried somewhere along the coastline between Broome and Cape Leveque led to frenzied searches.
When a showboat full of magician’s trinkets—including rings with imitation diamonds, and cigar boxes full of different 200
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coloured glass beads—sailed close to Beagle Bay, the local Aborigines, believing they were valuable gemstones, rushed to the coast in droves and stripped the boat bare, leaving it stranded.
Glass beads and imitation diamonds soon circulated throughout the Kimberley. Some were handed in to police.
In the book Port of Pearls, author Hugh Edwards wrote that a young married Aboriginal couple, who had been given a house at Beagle Bay, asked permission to demolish it because they believed a tin of diamonds was plastered into one of the walls.
In another story, a handyman offered to carry out renovations to the home of Broome resident Jack Pryor at a ridiculously low price, but when Pryor went to check on the progress of the work, the handyman had gone. The job was left unfinished and there was a small hole in the fireplace where he had been working. It was said that diamonds were hidden in the niche and that the handyman, whoever he was, had finally built up the courage to collect what he had kept hidden for years. Other diamonds were said to have been found in the fork of a tree.
Several expeditions have dug through the wells at Beagle
Bay, but no diamonds have been discovered. In general, the remoteness and vastness of the area daunted many of those seeking an easy prize, the distance and terrain forcing them to retreat defeated.
Diamonds were part of the Kimberley folklore well before
Jack Palmer’s find—several stories whispered of a fortune buried beneath the land. For example, before the outbreak of the Second World War, the Benedictine monks at Kalumburu
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Mission on the northern tip of the Kimberley were handed a quantity of stones purported to be rough diamonds by a man named Watson. He wouldn’t identify where they had come
from. But on his deathbed Watson handed raw diamonds to a Sydney jeweller and told him the location—he described a
mountain with one side crumbled away where a fortune in
diamonds could be found. A search by professional geologists, along with the Benedictine monks and the Aborigines from the area, failed to find the fabled jewels.
Ironically, as treasure hunters scoured the region—first for Watson’s and later Palmer’s diamonds—lying beneath the ancient rocks and creekbeds of the Kimberley lay a fortune in diamonds.
A rich alluvial pipe discovered to the south-east of Kalumburu in 1979 would lead to the development of the world’s largest single producer of diamonds, the Argyle Diamond Mine. Their diamonds are renowned for their unique brilliance and stunning array of colours, from the rare pink to the classic white and sparkling champagne. Today, the mine produces approximately one third of the world’s supply of natural diamonds, although only 5 per cent are gem quality. And near Derby, a town that Jack Palmer visited regularly while sailing the coast in his lugger the Eurus, another mine at Ellendale is predicted to become the fifth-largest diamond producer in the world.
Soon after the trial of Diamond Jack Palmer, Ivan Smirnoff travelled to the United States, where KLM was running a service
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of big Lockheed L.14s from Miami. The press were there to meet him and he was soon booked for a series of lectures across the country.
Late in 1943, Hollywood film director Cecil B. De Mille
approached Smirnoff, hoping to put the story of his life up on the big screen. Smirnoff was at first delighted until he met the actor De Mille chose to play him. ‘I am a pilot, I am an experienced man, everybody knows it. People see me in a film as a damn silly youngster, they don’t fly with me any more.’ He refused to budge and the project was called off.
A month later a representative of Sir Alexander Korda, who at that time was the executive producer of the English division of MGM, approached Smirnoff, anxious to buy the film rights of the book being written about his life with the help of a Netherlands government official. By that time, Smirnoff was so concerned the motion picture treatment would make him
look like ‘a gigolo’ that he would not entertain the idea. Smirnoff had also been arguing with the government official and the manuscript had been scrapped.
His wounds played up and he ended up back in hospital
where the bullets he received over the Australian coast were finally removed. Smirnoff and his wife Margot returned to the Netherlands in September 1945. Margot was overjoyed to return to Amsterdam, where she and Ivan had spent so many happy
days. Margot’s battle with cancer ended on 3 July 1946. In her final days, her husband never left her side. After a long bout of depression, he completed the story of his life, titled De
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Toekomst heeft Vleugels (The Future has Wings). He eventually remarried and moved to Spain. In 1956 he died of cancer in Palma, Majorca. His body was later exhumed and reburied in the Netherlands next to Margot’s.
After the trial, Jim Mulgrue returned to Broome, working
in various local stores. On the morning of 14 February 1957
a cyclone passed directly over the town. Jim, then aged eighty-one, was sitting in his house when he heard the roaring rage of the gale-force winds as they uprooted trees, ripped up metal
and tossed debris into the air. Frustratingly, he couldn’t see what was going on. He had become blind and disorientated in
his old age and the sound was deafening and disturbing.
Then it was quiet for a short while as the eye of the cyclone passed over. A minute later part of the walls and roof of his home collapsed and Jim was trapped unconscious beneath the rubble. He was rescued and taken to Broome hospital, but he never regained consciousness. He died alone without a penny to his name.
Frank Robinson had not allowed his crippling arthritis to chain him down. He had travelled the world, from port to
port, never staying in one place for long, and the prospect of long-term incarceration would have weighed heavily on his mind. He must have decided at some time during the trial to move far away from Broome. The author has been unable to
trace his final resting place.
Beset by health problems, Jack Palmer was discharged from the military forces in December 1943, seven months after the
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trial. Many locals thought Diamond Jack was ‘the richest man in Broome’. After the war he bought a blue Chevrolet he called Bluebird, and a house in Wallcott Street, which he purchased outright and later swapped for another house a few streets away. He worked now and then but mostly continued what
he liked doing best: fishing, beachcombing and hunting
for dugong.
On one occasion he gave about a dozen wharf labourers
their entire wages from a roll of notes he pulled from his pocket when their pay was late arriving at the jetty office. He was also said to spend quite a bit of money satisfying his sexual urges.
When asked by a friend what he had done with the diamonds, he grinned. ‘It helps keep the gins happy.’
Plagued by cancer in his later years, Palmer was cared for by the Sisters of St John of God in Perth and in Broome.
On his deathbed in 1958, 62-year-old Palmer was asked by
a priest what he had really done with the rest of the diamonds.
Smiling broadly, Palmer replied that he had handed them all over to the authorities. He was said to have had well over
£1000 in the bag at his bedside, but the money disappeared the day after he died. His house was left to the local baker, Phillip Cox.
Now buried beneath the sand at Carnot Bay, a plaque
commemorates the crash of Smirnoff ’s Dakota. A few remnants of the ill-fated plane can still be seen at low tide, and a metal cross on the beach marks the place where Maria van Tuyn, Jo van Tuyn, Daan Hendriksz and Joop Blaauw lost their lives.
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The place is remote and almost impossible to get to, with only a handful of local residents able and willing to locate the desolate shore. Travel must be by day to find the rugged tracks through dense bush and soft sand. Not even the hardiest of four-wheel-drive vehicles can make it all the way to the remote beach.
When the rough track runs out, there is still a five-kilometre walk in the blazing sun to reach the crash site, and that walk can take place only if you arrive on low tide.
Despite the difficulty of the terrain, a few have travelled to the beach. Over the years pieces from the plane were removed as souvenirs, while other parts washed away on the tide. In the mid-1970s a group of young men came across the wreck.
They filled the plane with explosives and blew it up for the fun of it.
Treasure hunters still visit the remote north-west coast in the hope of one day finding the missing diamonds. But if
Palmer’s diamonds have brought anyone else fortune, they have learnt from Palmer’s mistake and not whispered a word about their find.
At Beagle Bay, the Aborigines still tell of the time when, as children, they played marbles with the diamonds, and their parents traded treasure for tobacco. Many believe that there are still diamonds to be found at the bottom of the wells or springs around Beagle Bay.
At Broome’s town beach, a tiny graveyard with rusty fence rails and faded headstones sits atop a grassy hill under shady
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trees overlooking Roebuck Bay. Set apart from the grander headstones is a small modern plaque marked ‘Diamond Jack’, the only memorial to the larrikin who sailed the northern shores and found a great treasure.
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Epilogue
On the night of 21 August 1945, Japanese soldiers lined the streets of Bandung in Java to protect the long column of sick, wounded and dying internees carried on stretchers by men
themselves so enfeebled that they could hardly stay upright.
Among the weary bodies that marched towards the railway
station and home were the owners of the diamonds, Willy
Olberg and David Davidson. It seemed at that moment that
peace would be restored to their world—but the world had
changed dramatically and nothing would be as it was before, for Indonesia was about to go through its most turbulent years of the century as the Dutch battled to re-establish authority against the rising tide of nationalist sentiment.
The Second World War came to an end on 15 August
1945—the Japanese announced their unconditional surrender after the United States of America dropped atom bombs on
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Hiroshima and Nagasaki—but in Indonesia a new battle had
begun. Before the Japanese surrendered they had promised to grant Indonesia independence, and on 17 August Sukarno and Mohammed Hatta announced the Declaration for the Republic of Indonesia.
Dutch government officials had hoped to restore the country to its old ways and called on the British and Japanese to assist.
An estimated 70,000 Dutch men, women and children had
been interned when the Japanese took over Indonesia, but as word spread of the Japanese surrender the internees began to break out of the internment camps. Insurgent nationalist groups rounded up some of the escaped internees and in many cases murdered them. Bewildered and rebellious, the nationalists’
sense of resentment against the Dutch was heightened by Japanese propaganda and by what the Japanese had extracted from them during the war years. The Red Cross reported that the majority of Dutch people in Indonesia were ‘in imminent danger of
being massacred’.
Willy Olberg was reunited with his daughter, Elly, but his son, Frans, did not come home. Willy and Elly embarked on a desperate search, and were advised Frans had been found in a POW camp in Sumatra but had been urgently evacuated to
hospital in Singapore. It was thought he would not survive the journey. Frans was suffering from starvation, dehydration, malaria and tropical ulcers, which had eaten through flesh, muscle, tendon and bone; he was blind in both eyes. He had been
among the thousands of British and Dutch servicemen who
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had laboured for eighteen hours a day on a narrow gauge railway in the central portion of Sumatra. More than 700 of these servicemen died.
Frans’s family flew to Singapore expecting to say their farewells, but in the following months he slowly made a remarkable
recovery. However his keen eyesight, the most important tool of his trade as a diamond valuer, was gone forever. Instead, images from the camp would remain vividly etched on his
mind: starvation, torture, disease, beatings and beheadings. ‘To keep my sanity I look forward, not backward,’ Frans Olberg told the author in 2005, ‘but I can’t contro
l my head at night.’
David Davidson was reunited with his wife and four children, including his youngest son, John Frans Bernard Eduard, born the day the Japanese took over Bandung.
Willy Olberg and David Davidson were eager to rebuild
their lives and those of their families, and to try to put the horrors of war behind them. Control of their business was given back to them. They had hidden a few jewels and concealed
gold inside enamel plates when the Japanese marched on
Bandung. They retrieved the jewels, and the enamel shells of the plates from which the Japanese had eaten were smashed, revealing their solid gold cores. The firm again began to fashion the fine pieces of jewellery for which it was famous.
In 1946 Willy Olberg travelled to Australia, hoping to retrieve the diamonds from the Commonwealth Bank in Melbourne.
But he was taken aback by the news that the diamonds had
been sold and only a pittance in cash remained to compensate
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him. He was sceptical about the story regarding the loss of the diamonds, and sceptical too about the sale price. The agreement signed by the directors of N.V. de Concurrent had made the diamonds available to the Netherlands East Indies government and empowered it to dispose of them. But it was never Olberg’s nor Davidson’s intention that the diamonds be sold. Returning to Bandung, Olberg began legal action against the Netherlands East Indies authorities.
The locals in Indonesia were resentful at the return of the Dutch to their businesses and N.V. de Concurrent was frequently targeted by angry youths. Facing the return of Dutch colonial rule, in what became known as ‘Bandung Lautan Api’ (Bandung Ocean of Fire) the Indonesian citizens of Bandung chose to burn the city down rather than hand it back. They fled to the hills, watching as an ocean of flames swept over their home.
There they penned ‘Halo, Halo, Bandung’, the anthem promising their return. Most of the southern part of the city was destroyed.
N.V. de Concurrent survived but attacks on the business