by Phil Jarratt
Claude held out his hand and pulled her up, shaking his head and laughing with her. He could not take his eyes off her Isabel as she clambered to her feet in the shallows. Only a little over average height for her age, Isabel was an imposing presence in a swimsuit, having developed a figure at such a rapid rate since turning fifteen as to frighten her parents and make her the envy of her classmates at the Apsley School for Girls. Dark-eyed with dark, wavy hair frequently held back in a bun, she tanned quickly in summer, and was sometimes thought to have southern European antecedents, rather than her ‘black Scottish’ blood.
A year older than Isabel, Claude was her only male friend of similar age. They were beach chums, not girlfriend and boyfriend, and the distinction allowed them the freedom to cavort unchaperoned on the sand and in the water without the local womenfolk raising an eyebrow. Claude’s face creased into a lopsided smile as he brushed the wet sand from Isabel’s shoulders and the pair walked across the hard sand to the changing sheds.
It was the first Sunday in December and the world was at war, but here in the sand dunes of Freshwater, in the warmth of a brilliantly sunny early summer morning, the known world ceased to exist. There was a stack of newspapers at Randell’s Camp City store back by the northern headland, and Isabel’s father occasionally bought his Sydney Morning Herald there when the dray delivered it at noon, and read it on the verandah while waiting for the billiard table to become free. But at the beach, and at Donald McIntyre and Roy Doyle’s Boomerang Camp a couple of hundred yards up Undercliff Road, there were no newspapers and no news. The real world, with all its modern complications, ended when you crested the Queenscliff rise and trudged down the hill through the tussocky fields of sarsaparilla vine and tea-tree, or emerged from Mr Lewers’s tunnel out on the point, squinting at the bright ocean vista ahead.
This being the first weekend of the summer, there was reason to celebrate, and not just because young Isabel Letham and Claude West had notched a personal best in surf shooting, and not just because a long, lazy season of surfing and beach frivolity lay ahead of them. As joyful as these prospects were, there was more. Much more. The Duke was coming—at sea already, actually on his way! There may have been little spoken of the war in Europe around the Boomerang Camp, but of the impending visit of the Olympic sprint-swimming champion and legendary surf-rider, Duke Paoa Kahanamoku, there was nonstop talk. When the men gathered around the boiling billy, or later in the day in the shade of the tarpaulins with tankards in hand, there was little else touched upon, even though they battled with the pronunciation of the great Kanaka’s name after every yeasty gulp.
When the proposed Kahanamoku tour for the summer of 1913 had foundered, a new tour was promised for the following summer, but then, even as the ink on the contract was drying, a Serbian terrorist cell known as the Black Hand assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It took only weeks for the dominos of the intricate European political alliances to fall, and when Britain joined France and Russia in declaring war on Austria-Hungary and its ally, Germany, on 4 August 1914, the countries and dominions of the British Empire, Australia included, were also at war, not only with the much-maligned Hun, but with a string of countries few people had ever heard of. But this was beside the point. Most Australians of British extraction (and that was the vast majority) were ‘British to the boot heels’, and when Labor leader Andrew Fisher announced in his broad Scots accent that Australia would ‘stand behind her own to help and defend her to our last man and our last shilling’, such was Australia’s loyalty to ‘Home’ that he was immediately assured of winning the prime ministership at the coming election.
The sparsely populated new Commonwealth of Australia, so far away from Europe, might have been expected to take some time to digest the news of the commencement of hostilities, but in fact within a couple of hours of the declaration of war in London, she had struck the first blow for the Empire, the Fort Nepean battery shelling the German merchant ship, Pfalz, in Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay and forcing the surrender of captain and crew. But the pace of the war soon slowed and then came to a virtual standstill, and while thousands of young men enlisted for the ‘great adventure’ and went off to spartan training camps outside the capital cities, the business life of Sydney (and that of other Pacific coast centres of commerce) continued much as normal.
Through the early spring there were serious concerns that the new conflict would cause Duke Kahanamoku’s Hawaiian contingent to call off the tour, but as it became clearer that the United States and its territories had no immediate intention of involving themselves in the European hostilities and civilian trans-Pacific shipping continued to operate normally, Bill Rawlins confirmed that he would accompany Duke and Hawaii’s second best swimmer, George Cunha, when the RMS Ventura steamed for Sydney on 30 November. In the event, Rawlins, who had just been elected to the legislature, was unable to come and was replaced as manager by Francis Evans at the last minute. Cecil Healy, having added journalism (but evidently not name-checking) to his bulging portfolio of skills, reported the scoop news of their imminent departure from Honolulu in The Referee on 22 November: ‘Kahanamouku [sic], world champion swimmer, is coming!’
As the teenagers approached Boomerang, Donald McIntyre was overseeing a frenzied clean-up of the camp, shouting orders over his shoulder at a couple of Pacific Islanders (seconded from his Manly home) as he moved garden chairs back and forth without rhyme or reason, occasionally wetting a handkerchief with spit and dabbing at soiled spots on his cream linen Sunday suit. Mr McIntyre was a known fusspot, but he meant well, even if, as some said, he presented as ‘mad and dangerous’.
Boomerang Camp, named after Mr McIntyre’s stately family home that overlooked Fairy Bower at the North Head end of Manly Beach, was itself anything but stately: a rather crudely constructed two-room timber shack propped above the sand on hardwood stumps and cut stone piers quarried at the north end of the beach, with rows of pebbles plundered from the headland at the south end used to mark out walkways across the sandy yard. An L-shaped verandah faced the north and east with a ladder providing access to a viewing platform on its roof, from which vantage point the residents could check surf-bathing conditions at the beach, some 200 metres along Undercliff Road. When McIntyre or Doyle were in residence, an Australian flag was run up the flag pole at the centre of the platform, so that neighbours on either side of the bay would be aware of their presence.
Donald McIntyre (right, in white) with the Freshie surf club committee, 1913. Photo courtesy Freshwater Surf Life Saving Club.
In the summer season tarpaulins supported by poles were erected in triangular fashion around a central outdoor living area behind the cottage. These could be adjusted like sails to take account of wind and rain. To one side were the work stations of the camp—a rusting rainwater tank on a rough wooden frame, a chopping and scaling bench, and several water buckets, knives, ladles, fishing rods and nets piled against the door steps of the shack. A three-sided kitchen attached to the back of the bungalow housed a small coal-burning oven and grill and a fly-screened pantry cupboard. In the centre of the yard was a fire-pit, used for warmth on cooler nights or to bake spuds or grill whole fish too big for the kitchen oven.
Built by Robert D. Lewers in 1905 and sold to Donald McIntyre and his business partner, Roy Doyle, for a song the following summer, Boomerang was one of about 70 such ‘camps’ dotted around the curve of Queenscliff Bay, the only dwellings in an area that had been named for the stream that emptied into the north end of the beach, but until 1906 came under no local government authority. This gave landholders the freedom to build cheap and cheerful shacks designed for varying degrees of permanence, and usually outside of any accepted building code. The fact that the bottom had fallen out of the real-estate market since the Manly Land Company subdivided 20 hectares of the ‘Freshwater Estate’ in the 1880s meant that land by the beach was cheap, and unlike neighbouring Manly, where g
entlefolk holidayed in smart hotels and promenaded along the Corso, the Freshie camps were a paradise for everyman, accessible to all classes.
William Nixon, who would later develop Freshwater’s first proper commercial buildings, built a row of camps at the northern end of the beach and rented them cheaply to his employees at the Balmain Glass Works, which helped establish the concept of Freshie as an affordable holiday destination, but during the first decade of the century its perceived ‘blokiness’ meant that women were barred from the camps, except on ‘ladies’ Sundays’ when the men would sober up, put their shirts back on, rein in their colourful language and host afternoon teas.
Charles D. Paterson, a founding member of North Steyne Surf Club at Manly and later president of the Surf Life Saving Association of Australia, owned several camps a stone’s throw along Undercliff Street from Boomerang. In his working life he was a director of the recently formed NSW Immigration and Tourism Bureau, and in this capacity he and his boss, Percy Hunter, were responsible for many of the photos and articles sent out to promote the new outdoor lifestyle that New South Wales offered. Perhaps mindful of a potential conflict of interest with his own real-estate investments, Paterson used only the initials ‘CDP’ for an article espousing the virtues of surf and sunbathing that he wrote for New Zealand’s The Red Funnel magazine:
The great adjunct to surf-bathing is sun-baking … After the dip in the breakers, costumes are slipped down to the waist, and the sunbakers lie or stand about in the sheds, or in the case of less frequented beaches, on the sands. After a liberal dressing of cocoanut oil, they revel in the sun’s heat. So great is the craze that lads will club together and hire a camp, and they are well catered for in this respect at places where the speculative builder has not yet laid his spoiling hand … Freshwater Beach leads the way in this respect. The place is a regular camp settlement. There are dozens of camps, rented by the year or season, and each is occupied by from four to six lads, and perhaps more on a holiday … In many instances pianos are to be heard, a phonograph or gramophone in the evenings; but all day, apart from the time required to prepare meals, the lads are rolling in the blazing sun on the red-hot sand, or ducking about in the breakers.
Later that year, Paterson was among the men who gathered with McIntyre and Doyle on the verandah at Boomerang to help draw up the charter of the Freshwater Surf Life Saving Club, with Doyle elected captain and McIntyre honorary secretary. In that same summer, camp owners Amos and Ruth Randell opened Freshwater’s first general store.
Matilda Ruth Walsham, the first child born to the Randells, recalled in later life:
My father had bought several blocks of land in that piece of bushland overlooking Freshwater Beach. He built a general store and weekend cabins and he named it Camp City. My mother made a very large calico sign that stretched across the road to let visitors know he had camps to let for weekends. The cabins contained built-in tables and forms, and bunks which had wooden crossed legs with canvas stretched across. Shelves were provided around the walls … Women were allowed on Sunday afternoons only, to visit. My mother spent all Sunday mornings making scones for their afternoon teas.
With Mrs Randell in residence and prominent behind the counter at Camp City, the all-male domain of Freshwater began to crumble. Some of the camps (although not Boomerang) relaxed their rules and rented to families, and some families even bought land and built their own more domesticated cottages. Tracks through sandy scrub became gravel roads. Power lines came over the hill from Queenscliff. The horse-drawn tram from Manly Wharf gave way to a steam tram and then to electric, with a loop service off the Brookvale line to Harbord (the new and somewhat unpopular name given to Freshwater after the Tramway and Progress Association petitioned Warringah Shire). Progress was on the march.
It was into this rapidly changing environment that master builder William Letham first brought his wife, Jeannie, and young daughter, Isabel, in the summer of 1910 to spend the long school holidays in the three-room cottage he had knocked up over the winter on two lots he had purchased for 82 pounds 10 shillings, along a sand track recently named Foam Street.
Life had been good to Willie Letham since the day in 1897 he had decided, devastated by the early death of his first wife, to sell up in Scotland and start a new life in the colonies. On the voyage to Australia he had met Jane Loudon, known as Jeannie, a handsome redheaded dressmaker almost a quarter of a century his junior. Neither her parents nor Jeannie herself were initially impressed by the attention of the dour middle-aged tradesman from Glasgow, but he was gentle as well as persistent, and when their ship, SS Ophir, docked in Melbourne, they were married at The Study, a small chapel annexed to Our Father’s Church in Bourke Street.
Travelling on to Sydney, the Lethams settled in Chatswood, the commercial hub of the fast-growing suburbs on the northern side of Sydney Harbour, where Isabel was born on 23 May 1899, around eighteen months after their arrival. The fact that the Lethams had married in some haste after a shipboard romance was regarded as rather racy by the few friends and family who knew the situation. And considering the ways in which the well-mannered and well-educated Isabel would often throw caution to the winds, it is worthy of mention. For both Jeannie and Isabel, in their life choices there was a touch of the daring.
Willie Letham prospered in Chatswood once his Scottish certification as a carpenter and joiner had been rubberstamped at the North Sydney Court, contracting himself and two or three hands out to some of the biggest commercial and residential developments in the area. He became friendly with George Hudson, the largest timber merchant in Sydney, with factories in Glebe and Redfern, and was one of the first contractors hired when Hudson got the rush job to build a huge stadium at Rushcutters Bay for Hugh D. McIntosh. Through his commercial dealings with Hudson, Willie built up enough credit to supply timber to renovate and extend the simple worker’s cottage he had bought. Later Hudson would also supply at ‘mate’s rates’ the timber for the Freshwater house, ferried across the harbour to Manly Wharf and driven by the dray-load over the hill to Queenscliff Bay.
Jeannie Letham was 27 at the time of Isabel’s birth, and, despite her mane of red hair and her attractive bearing, many of her friends in Scotland had feared that she would be left ‘on the shelf’. This bothered Jeannie not a jot. She’d had boyfriends in Scotland but she had been more interested in debating societies and the work of the suffragette movement. In Sydney she joined the Women’s National Club, and took the ferry to the city from Milson’s Point twice a week, infant daughter on her knee, to attend meetings and assist in the production of monographs and leaflets promoting such radical ideas as the right of women to vote. When Isabel started school, Jeannie stepped up her involvement, becoming a close friend and supporter of Millicent Preston-Stanley, who would become the first female member of the NSW Parliament.
Willie had no interest in politics, although he was a firm believer in the basic principles of free enterprise and the right of every man to create wealth for himself and his family, and he’d made a fair fist of this, turning his quite small capital on arrival into a comfortable nest egg a decade later. Nearing 60, he wanted to enjoy life now, and the beach cottage at Freshwater was a good step in this process. After the first summer at Foam Street, Willie made up his mind to sell up in Chatswood and retire to the beach. Despite Jeannie’s protests that it would take her forever on trams and ferries to reach her city meetings, the die was cast, although Willie had to promise to buy an automobile. After Willie had built extensions to the house, the Lethams moved permanently to 12 Foam Street, Freshwater, young Isabel enrolling first at Miss Squire’s Belgrave Grammar School in Sydney Road, Manly, and later as a boarder at the Apsley School for Girls, opposite Newington College in Stanmore.
After her swim with Claude, Isabel walked swiftly home. She cut across the back of the sand hills to the northern end of the beach, then ran past Camp City store where Mrs Randell was loading up the fruit and vegetabl
e trays on the front stoop, one cautious eye on five-year-old Matilda, as the smell of fresh scones wafted from the kitchen window. The Randells opened at nine on Sundays, which meant she was late for church. It hadn’t rained for weeks and she kicked up dust as she sprinted along the track and up the hill into Foam Street. If her sports mistress could see her now. ‘Fish out of water, you are, Isabel,’ she was wont to say. ‘Lift those feet good and high, legs are like pistons, now put some effort into it, girl.’
Chapter 10
He’s Here!
Duke Kahanamoku stood at the railing on the aft deck of C Class and watched the first pink glow of the sunrise crest the horizon. It was cool on the deck and Duke hugged his Yale-lettered jacket (a gift from Big Bill Rawlins) over his huge frame and pulled a peaked cap down over his ears. It was a little after four thirty. They were just eight hours out now and land must be visible in a while.
Soon enough he would switch decks, or maybe take up the captain’s standing offer to join him on the bridge, and from there watch Australia draw ever closer, and finally feel the rising tide in Sydney Harbour suck him into the next chapter of his life.
Duke sat in the dining room of the RMS Ventura, the pride of the Spreckels fleet, and ate his last meal of the crossing: sirloin steak medium-well done, three eggs, boiled potatoes and a few rashers of bacon on the side. It was not poi, the staple he was raised on, but it was filling.