How I Became the Mr. Big of People Smuggling

by Martin Chambers

  I showed the picture of Lucy to them one by one. There was much headshaking and discussion and laughter but no one could help. None of them spoke more than a few words of English and I realised it was pointless, but that at least here there was work, some income for her family. I would tell the landlady to show them across the road to ask for work.

  Have they found each other? I don’t know. I think there is a pretty good chance that they have. You can only do so much for people.

  After that I was alone. I was free. But the city was so noisy, so rushed, so crowded. People and traffic everywhere. I felt anything but free. At least my parents would be happy to see me. What news did they have? Maybe I should ring them first. I had found it difficult to read the letters Spanner had discovered hidden in the safe but I had them all in my bag. Maybe I should stop and re-read them first but then how would I explain the fact that I had not written? What would I tell them? What had Simon said to them? As I drove I rehearsed what I would say: that the station was remote, that it was very busy, that the boss was difficult. The more I went over this in my mind, the more I knew I was not ready. I needed to calm myself and get my story straight. The shooting of Palmenter did not happen. But what did?

  I was stopped at some traffic lights and two young women in short skirts walked by, looked long at me. I smiled at them and they walked towards me. In a flash of realisation I panicked. What if I was recognised by one of the girls who had been shipped south to work in the brothels? Or maybe Margaret. What would happen if she happened to walk by? Or one of Palmenter’s cowboy mates. The graffiti-painted campervan was distinctive. Suppose someone recognised it?

  I had burnt all the files and records at the homestead but I didn’t know what else there might be, and the more I thought of it the more I knew there must be some connection between the recruitment agent and Palmenter. I was pretty sure the recruitment agent had my parents’ address; I didn’t remember but I must have filled out some sort of application form. If someone came looking for me – the recruitment agent, or more likely, one of the cowboys – if they arrived at my parents’ and saw the van, or worse, found me, or if they searched and found the million dollars, then my parents would be involved. I decided that before I visited my parents I had to get out of town and dump the van and hide the cash.

  I drove west along the Princes Highway and suddenly it felt as if behind me Melbourne was one big trap full of Palmenter henchmen. The cowboys, Margaret, the recruitment agent were all in Melbourne somewhere looking for me. Before I knew it I was in Geelong. The warehouse was in Geelong. On his last two trips Charles had simply paid cash for campervans being sold outside backpacker lodges because the warehouse was locked up and no one was about, but I didn’t want to take the risk. I’d go a bit further before I dumped the van.

  I kept going towards the coast and then past Anglesea and although it was summer it drizzled all day. I slept in the van and it was still drizzling the next day, that horrible, not quite enough to wet you, but enough to chill and make you miserable type of rain. I was lonely. Empty. It was cold outside but warm in the van. I wanted to head home but I had over a million dollars in my bag that I wanted to hide somewhere. I couldn’t work out where else to put it. I couldn’t put it in my own bank account. Not that amount. I was terrified someone was going to steal it.

  From Anglesea I continued along the coast, worrying about all the money and the distinctive van. I had in mind to buy another car but each small town I came to was little more than a holiday stop. I would have to wait until I got to a bigger place. I promised myself I would ring my parents, but every time there was an excuse, mostly that I could not ring them until I had ditched the camper and was ready to head home. As I went, I realised the van was pretty functional. I felt I could travel forever with it.

  I kept driving, taking it easy and playing the tourist, stopping at all the sights. At Cape Otway I decided to camp in the forest so I drove back to Apollo Bay and bought some food and some warmer clothes. I parked in the forest and slept uncomfortably in the van. I found the forest oppressively dark and cold and full of strange noises. I missed the desert.

  The next morning where the Great Ocean Road meets the Princes Highway it was time to decide: turn back to Melbourne or keep going? I drove into Warrnambool and sat in McDonald’s with the duffel bag of cash at my feet. I wondered what Spanner was doing. How far he had got. Up until then he hadn’t even crossed my mind but now I was wondering if I could visit him on his fishing camp. How would I find him?

  It made sense from Warrnambool to go visit Simon as I was already a good part of the way out to the mine camp. From there I could ring home and have plenty of time to sort out a new car, ditch this one someplace remote where it wouldn’t get found. Or if it did get found, it would look as if I had been on the way to Adelaide or Perth.

  Outside of Port Augusta I picked up two hitchhikers, Ingrid and Sally. They had been backpacking down the east coast and now they were on their way to Darwin to fly out to Bali and the rest of their world tour, but as soon as I picked them up there was something between Ingrid and me. We argued like fury. She looked at me as Lucy did, right through me, and I took that out on her. If she chose a Johnny Cash CD I’d hate Johnny Cash. If the news said a carbon tax was coming and she would tell me about Germany’s carbon tax, I’d say global warming was a lie even though I had no idea. She had recently graduated as a teacher and so I told her you didn’t learn anything from books or classrooms, all the real stuff was learned on the land.

  But there was no way I was getting rid of them, for they were company I needed, and talking and arguing with them let me avoid having to think. For them I was a free ride to Darwin with stops at Uluru and Kings Canyon. While Sally sat between us shielding herself from the sparks Ingrid and I made, I forgot the difficulty of going home. I told them I was going to Darwin and could give them a lift all the way.

  I took them to visit Simon’s camp. We arrived late afternoon and sat outside sharing a barbecue dinner and some beers and then stayed the night. His buddies remembered me and my ‘girl trouble’ and ragged me when the girls left to have showers. They watched them walking away and then offered to help me in the way that blokes do.

  ‘Doesn’t look like it, but if you are still having trouble, maybe we can give you a hand.’

  ‘Sucker for punishment, some people. One’s bad enough, eh, Simon?’

  But Simon wasn’t interested in joining in. I think it was not that he and Michelle had only recently married but that I had again turned up out of the blue with no explanation of where I had been or what I had been up to. He wanted to know more, about why I had been missing for so long, where I had been. When I left the camp last time I had said I would be back soon, I had some ‘serious shit’ to sort out. I think he could tell I was not completely free from whatever it was, that there was something weighing on my mind.

  ‘Time to take charge of your own life,’ he said as we walked to the van the next morning.

  ‘We’ll talk next time,’ I told him. ‘I’m having a break now, a well-deserved holiday. Girls and I are going to Darwin, then I’ll be back home.’

  We stopped at a roadhouse for lunch. As usual, Ingrid and I were debating about something. On the wall a television played with the sound turned down. Ingrid was speaking but I lost track of her words, because I saw a refugee boat in a wild storm. Up until then, I had always imagined the boat trip they took as a fairly simple calm-water crossing. The footage showed the boat rear up and surf into a cliff, and people on the rocks above, throwing lifejackets and floats down to people in the water who were clinging to bits of timber. Waves were smashing into the jagged cliffs and I did not think anybody would be able to survive it. Ingrid and Sally turned around to watch. We sat silent while women and children clung to bits of debris and the waves smashed into the sharp rocks only metres away. Someone threw a rescue rope but it was useless.

  ‘How can your country do this?’ asked Ingrid.

  I would
have argued with her. It was not my country, it was some other country. It was someone who put these people on an old boat with only enough fuel to get to Christmas Island. It was some war lord in a far-off place who had burned their crops. But twenty-seven people drowned and I could not answer her because those twenty-seven were Lucy, or Tariq, or Noroz.

  16

  You know we didn’t go to Darwin. We went to Palmenter Station. By the time we got there it was coming up to the wet, and the build-up is never a time for making good decisions. We drove in and Spanner was there trying to organise things with Cookie and Simms and Charles because Newman was about to arrive with the next import. Except there wasn’t a muster. No one had contacted the muster crew so although it was chaos it was a different sort of chaos to the usual muster.

  There were forty-seven in the group. Newman was expanding. He said it was because two of the boats ended up landing at the same time but that was nonsense, he was wanting to bring in more. It took four days of chopper flights to get them all to the station but there was no raucous crowd and trucks weren’t coming and going and there was less dust and it was altogether a better time.

  We were completely unprepared for this. Every room was full. There were young kids in this lot too, something we hadn’t had before. Simms put the women and girls and all the kids in the stationhouse but Sally insisted we put the families together. She crowded them into the two-bed dongas and moved some of the men across to share a dormitory in the stationhouse. It felt wrong to have men staying in the stationhouse. There were people everywhere, milling and moping around. Waiting. Waiting for us to do something, whatever it was that was next. Cookie was short of food to feed them all and we had only three vans that were working, and one of them was mine. Charles had returned from Melbourne with only one because the warehouse was locked up with no one around. He had spent several days visiting backpacker lodges but it was out of tourist season and he only managed to find one van for sale, so finally, not knowing what else to do, he came home to Palmenter Station. Whoever had been running the warehouse part of the operation had gone. Presumably they had given up waiting for either Palmenter or the money to arrive. What I hoped, at least, was that after a while they had simply locked up and gone and there would be no questions or difficulties because of it. However I told Charles there had been a problem and that was why I had gone to Melbourne, and I was sorry there wasn’t time to tell him before he left on the collection run, but in future he was to go nowhere near the warehouse. I might have given him the impression that some heavy shit went down, that I had sorted it, that I was big-time and Palmenter’s right-hand man.

  I was running the thing from the office. As fast as I could produce papers, more people would arrive. All the time it was people wanting something. It was so noisy, women in the kitchen and kids running up and down the hall, shouting, crying, or men sitting in the lounges, waiting. Waiting. That was the thing underneath all the noise and talk, people just sitting and waiting.

  Hardly any of them spoke English. Once, a couple of years before this I had suggested to Palmenter that we could print them a list of useful words and I even suggested some English lessons.

  ‘Waste of time and effort, Son. Ship ’em in, ship ’em out. One thing you gotta learn is that these are low priority people,’ he said. He said ‘low priority’ as if he was describing a sick dog.

  I got Ingrid and Sally to look after groups of them in the canteen. Ingrid taught them English and Sally helped her with the kids. With everyone in the canteen, that got them all out of my hair and gave me time to think.

  I went to see Spanner.

  ‘What we gunna do?’

  ‘Fuckin’ chaos all right. Two vans and the bus, we could send some off and bus the rest, several trips.’

  ‘Put ’em on a cattle truck and ship ’em south.’

  He laughed. He thought I was joking. I probably was, but I am sure we could have got one of the cattle trucks back to do it.

  ‘Three vans. There’s my one.’

  ‘Why did you come back?’

  I shrugged. Why did I come back? Compassion? To hide the money? Because I was cold and lonely? To show off to Ingrid? Because I had nothing else to do? Because I missed Spanner? No simple answer.

  ‘Why’d you stay?’ I asked.

  ‘Same reason.’

  I laughed. At least we understood each other.

  ‘We could just piss off,’ I said.

  ‘Can’t do that. You seen ’em. Poor sods. And if we don’t get them outta here soon the wet will break, be stuck here for a couple of months. Cookie’s already short of food.’

  These people needed our help. We couldn’t abandon them here and to hand them in would condemn them to years in detention, and instead of being two weeks ahead of anybody looking for us, we would be right in the thick of it. I took charge.

  ‘Tell Simms to go out and shoot a beast. Two, a pig or goat as well. Least we can put on a barbecue and feed them well. Then Charles can go to Darwin to pick up some more vans. Give him some cash.’

  ‘Can’t send him by himself. And he can only fit six on the truck, he’d have to do several trips.’

  ‘Well, we gotta get ’em away from here. It’ll take a month to get enough vans in and by then it will be pissing down, so looks like we’ll be stuck with at least some of them for a while. We could set up a couple of camps away a bit so if anyone comes the station doesn’t look too much like a refugee centre. One up on the ridge and another down south, away from the river, like say down at Morgan’s Well.’

  I had thought about this before, the time when I was camped by myself and I had thought what a great place to set up a camp, have people stay. Right now it was the best plan I could think of. With ten refugees on the back of Bitsy we towed one of the old van bodies out to Morgan’s Well. We took tools and timber and tarpaulins and rope and they knew exactly how to set up a camp. It took a bit of explaining and persuading but eventually they seemed to accept what was happening. We left them to it. Hopefully we would be back with extra food before the roads got too muddy. Cookie and Charles drove to Darwin to get supplies and as many vans as they could fit on the truck. We offered work to two of the refugees, two who could drive and had reasonable English, so they went with Charles and would return with empty vans. If all went well we would have enough food and transport for everyone within two weeks and in the meantime hide as many as we could away at other camps.

  It might sound as if this all happened quickly and easily, but in truth it was an uncoordinated shambles. We kept my van at the station and sent five south in another. Our third van had a bit of a mishap during driving lessons and became unroadworthy. We put up a second camp for another ten people, up on the ridge behind a large rock with great views across the riverflats. It was one of our more popular campsites. We called it Coffeehouse because we set up a stove inside an old van body we towed there, and there were table and chairs so it was a great place to chill with a view. Except that more beer got drunk there than coffee.

  Spanner welded two extra sets of wheels onto Bitsy so she became an all-weather mud-loving crawler. There were six wheels side-by-side at the back and the diff had been welded so it was a bit unwieldy, but it would crawl anywhere. On hard ground it was just about impossible to turn and you had to be careful of trees and narrow gaps or big boulders or uneven ground, but to get out to Morgan’s Well in the wet she was perfect. Later, Spanner bolted two couches to the back platform and it became our most popular tour. We didn’t have to go anywhere particular because driving around in her was such a thrill.

  The other popular activity was Matilda the land yacht, but I’m getting a bit ahead of myself here because all this happened a lot later and I was telling you about that muster. Non-muster.

  I decided that we should stop calling them musters or imports and use the word tourists, but old habits die hard and, anyway, with what happened later it got too confusing to call everyone tourists, so imports it was. People used that as some s
ort of proof that we were treating them poorly, like cattle or goods, referring to them as imports, but that wasn’t the case. Tour operators have always referred to their customers as ‘pax’, an abbreviation surely just as inhuman. Some even joke amongst themselves about ‘cattle’ or refer to their coaches as ‘cattle trucks’.

  That wet was one of the wettest ever. Charles and Cookie made it back in time but then the rains came and nothing would be coming or going for eight weeks. We were isolated but safe, and it was a happy place. We had thirty imports at the homestead. Ingrid and Sally ran English lessons every day in the canteen and some of them were real smart and learned quickly. Every second day Charles would drive Bitsy on a tour out to one of the camps, take ten from the homestead out to change places with the ten at the camp. Spanner worked on getting the vans ready. Charles had bought eight old vans in Darwin that Spanner wasn’t happy with, fussy bugger that he was. He had plenty of time to check them over and fix any faults because we had decided it was too risky to send loaded vans south in the wet. Once on the tarmac they would be all right but there were several hundred kilometres of outback highway to cover before they got there. We all remembered those five who didn’t make it.

  Funny time was when we taught them Aussie Rules. They kept wanting to soccer the ball, or if they picked it up they would then throw it back like in rugby. Couldn’t kick or handball for nuts. We played a continuous championship with four mixed teams and Spanner, Cookie, Simms and Charles as captains. Most afternoons there was a game. The team that lost got to change two of their players with the winning team so it was always a fairly close competition. After the match there was a barbecue dinner, or if it was raining too much we would crowd into the canteen and play pool and table tennis or some of them tried to teach us their card games.