Long Way Place (Cannibal Country Trilogy, Book 1)

by Andrew Wareham

  “I mean, I’ve got me own hand tools, like any engineer always 'as, but is there a full workshop with all I’ll need to keep steam engines running? And parts and materials? You know, sir, boiler plate, tubes, white metal for bearings, bronze and brass and copper, solder and everything. What about fuel, sir? Is there a supply of steam coal or will we be burning wood?”

  Fitzgerald had to admit to ignorance, he had not even known that he should know about such things.

  “Well, Mr Hawkins, the man who built the steam, ah, plant, he called it, could have answered all of those questions, I am sure. Unfortunately, he died some three months ago, which is why, of course, we need you now.”

  Ned shook his head, it did not sound good.

  “Maybe you could talk with the captain and the engineers on your ship on the way up, Mr Fitzgerald, and they could explain how even new engines need maintenance all the time. The thing is, see, that they’re big and the parts are ‘eavy and are moving all the time and rubbing against each other. Add to that, water makes rust and lime scale and the ‘eat can dry out the oil so you always got to watch and mend and replace, all the time, right from the first hour you light ‘er up.”

  Ned’s accent slipped even further under the pressure of trying to make this posh idiot understand what was obvious to him.

  “I did not know that, Mr Hawkins. Of course, in Malaya, the engines and things were all quite separate from the planting side. How much will it cost?”

  “A workshop, a lathe, a forge, a drilling machine, welder and cutter, some sort of derrick or small crane; at least one labourer; bar stock and tube; white metals. I don’t see you getting much change out of two thousand, sir, time it’s delivered up the Gulf.”

  It was unwelcome news to Fitzgerald – rubber trees took seven years to come to maturity and first production and the Company was more anxious to secure an income than spend even more of its waning cash in hand. He would see, and definitely take Hawkins’ advice about speaking to the ship’s engineers, just in case the young man was overstating his case.

  They shook hands and Fitzgerald departed for the comforts of civilisation on the Burns Philp ship north. Ned bought a celebratory round in the hotel bar and asked for advice – there was always someone who knew the answers.

  “It’s like nowhere else, mate, either you stay for the rest of yer natural or you gets out quick. No bloody good for me, I’ll tell yer, mate. I went down to the islands, down the Trobes, after the gold, but I came out inside three months, back ‘ere. She just gave me the shits, mate.”

  Blue Morris was a crocodile hunter, most of the time, these days, appeared in Cairns every month or two when the skins had made enough for him to go on a drinking spree for a week or two. He was a hard man, short-tempered and red-haired, as his name said. He had been a soldier in South Africa and had taken a ship east rather than go back to England – presumably he had deserted, but that was his business – and none would call him a weakling or a coward. His opinion had to be respected.

  “One thing, for sure, mate, and that’s that you got to look after yerself, yer health, that is. You can get sick there quicker than any other bloody place on Earth. No doctors, pretty well, and the ones who are there are just pissheads, mostly, or bloody missionaries, and that’s pretty much the same thing. You got to take yer own kit and look after yerself.”

  “Fair enough, Blue – what sort of stuff did you take? Have another beer, mate?”

  The discussion lasted a couple of hours, most of the men in the bar having suggestions but all agreeing on the basics.

  “Kaolin and morph, mate, that’s the most important! Yer going to get the quickshits, can’t avoid it, and you got to stop it before it rips yer guts out. You heard of the bottom comin’ out of yer world? The old dysentery’s the dead opposite, mate! And dead it can be if you ain’t careful! You need at least four quart bottles always in yer digs. Don’t shake ‘em up, keep at least one still so the clear stuff comes to the top – take a glass of that when it starts and that numbs yer guts enough so that you can drink plenty of water without spewin’ it up, and you got to keep full of fluid, mate. Then get plenty of the thick stuff, the kaolin, down so that yer guts get solid again.”

  There was general agreement – they all knew of a mate who had died of the dysentery out in the bush some place and unable to get to a doctor or an aid post.

  “Quinine next – the bloody malaria’s bad up on the Gulf, mate. Take the pills every mornin’, never miss a dose. Best in the mornin’ because if you take ‘em at night and go on the piss you can throw ‘em up and lose their good.”

  “They reckon too much quinine’s bad for a bloke, can bugger up the liver. So they say.”

  “Dunno, mate, but I know a good few blokes got killed by malaria and I ain’t never heard of any bugger who died from quinine.”

  It was a good argument, accepted as such.

  “Last thing, you got to clean and cover over any cut, straight away, even a little scratch.”

  Alfie, who worked the sugar cane boilers each season and did as little as he possibly could for the rest of the year, held up his left hand in response – thumb, first and second fingers only.

  “Went up to Thursday Island on one of the fishing boats, mate, barely nicked me fingers, rope burn putting a net out, didn’t take no notice. Red lines in half a day, buggers was going black time we got to harbour next morning, lucky to keep me hand.”

  Carbolic soap, strong disinfectant, plenty of bandages kept clean and covered and away from the flies. Wash out and cover the least pinprick, quickly and thoroughly.

  “If you ain’t got nothing else, then tip spirits on it. Gin cleans up as good as most medicines.”

  “Not rum, though,” Jim said. “Too much sugar in it, I reckon, that can make it go rotten. What you can do is stick a bit of meths on and set fire to it; stings a bit, but it cleans a cut up if you’ve had to let it go for an hour or two.”

  Ned decided he might prefer to avoid those lengths, but he took the message to heart.

  Next morning he went down to the blacksmith’s and paid him to make up a small metal trunk with partitions inside big enough to hold bottles safely. A visit to the Burns Philp store later in the week filled the trunk with kaolin and morph and carbolic and a thousand quinine tablets.

  After that he needed clothing, reckoning there would be a shortage of tailors up on the Gulf.

  “Reckon to have three showers a day, Ned, and a full change with each. Stops you sweatin’ and keeps you healthy. You’ll have a houseboy to do the work, so you don’t have to worry about laundry.”

  To have a servant seemed strange to Ned, a reversal of his universe, but he liked the idea of some other bloke doing the washing.

  “Twenty pairs of long socks, Ned. Strong cotton. Six pairs of boots, wearing them in rotation so that each pair gets two days breathing for each four or five hours of wear – stops ‘em stinkin’, that way. Plenty of underclothes, Ned, forty pairs of cotton shreddies and the same of string vests – come the Wet you got to change them as often as you can and they can be a bugger to get dried. Shorts and shirts, a couple of dozen of each. Four or five pairs of long strides as well. A couple of long sleeve shirts what’ll take a collar and tie, just in case you got to dress up, with a pair of black shoes and a jacket of some sort. Couple of hats, slouchies is best. Fifty of snot rags and you’re right, mate. A belt or two as well, I suppose. If you reckon you can’t buy anything up there, you’ll be just about right.”

  Another, larger, trunk for his clothes and the only problem left, and one that exercised the whole bar for days, was what to do in his spare time.

  “You knows I ain’t got nothing against having a drink, as such, Ned,” Jim said, “but, if you don’t do nothin’ else with yer evenings then yer goin’ to be in trouble pretty damn quick. Kills more men than malaria, up there, so they say. You got to ‘ave somethin’ to do with yerself, mate, weekends especial, or you’ll just grow a beer belly before the year i
s out.”

  A number of beer guts were reflexively sucked in along the bar but there was a general mutter of agreement. Blokes did drink a bit too much out in the bush, they all agreed.

  “Well, what can you do when you ain’t working?”

  It was a new problem to Ned. Since he had come to Cairns he had been solidly busy, spending most evenings and almost every day in one workshop or another, making up parts from bar and sheet metal or performing running repairs on various pieces of machinery.

  “Well, there’s always books to read,” Bob offered, “if you can get hold of them, that is.”

  Not too attractive an option, Ned was a slow reader and had never tried stories apart from Cook’s Westerns. His sole experience of thick books was of struggling through the texts he had had to master for his ticket.

  “Some blokes do woodwork, Ned, making furniture or carvings, that sort of thing.”

  Tom was a carpenter by trade, had spent every spare hour of the last ten years building his own house from local timber, had a small palace which he was painstakingly furnishing with heirloom pieces. He intended to go down to Sydney to find a wife before too long, he needed someone to do the polishing and dusting.

  “Fishing, mate?”

  Several of the men had their own small boats. It was a possibility, provided he was on the coast.

  “Birds, Ned, with a camera?”

  Michael, not Mick he insisted, was their remittance man, received a cheque every month which he had to cash at the hotel in the absence of a bank. Why he lived in Cairns was his business and none of the locals had ever asked, but he was believed to have come from London originally. He had brought a camera with him and had set up his own darkroom, was generally thought to be taking pictures of all of the local plants and birds, had certainly sent some of his photos out in the post.

  It was a possibility, but getting the chemicals and other materials would be hard up on the Gulf.

  “Flowers, Ned? They got half the orchids in the world up there, so I hear. You remember that Pommy poofter, said he was from some college in England? Before your time probably, Ned, but he was drawing and writing down all of the plants round here and he was goin’ to go up to Moresby, but he drank himself to death first. Left a great pile of books and paper behind, and sod-all money to pay his last month’s bill! I’ve still got his stuff.”

  Jim opened a cupboard at the back of the lounge, produced a suitcase full of drawing paper, pencils and powder paints and brushes and a folio of drawings of individual flowers and plants. Ned had some draughtsman’s skills – he had had to produce drawings of machine parts for his ticket; he was immediately interested.

  “He owed me eight quid, Ned. You can have the lot for that, there’s a couple of books as well.”

  “Books?”

  “Yeah, so as he could give ‘em names, or something. He had to know what they looked like, ‘families’ he called them, said there was Latin names but we didn’t get on with them – he said it wasn’t any good bothering with them. Once he’d got half a bottle of rum inside him he’d talk for hours about the flowers he was going to find that no bugger else had ever seen, they were going to make his name, so he said, when he’d found them. Then he’d fall down and we’d put him to bed, except that last time when we took him upstairs and he got up again an hour later and went out the back door without us seeing ‘im go. Picked him up floating near the wharf just after dawn. No money in his wallet and a letter saying that the college didn’t want ‘im back again but his family would send out a ticket for him to come back to England and he could run one of their farms for them, ‘e shouldn’t worry about it, anyone could meet up with a failure. Poor sod! Looked like ‘e couldn’t take them being kind to ‘im. Anyway, we planted ‘im down in the graveyard and sent a letter back to England and never heard bugger all in reply, so that’s ‘im done!”

  Ned took out the eight sovereigns – it was more than he wanted to spend but he felt he owed Jim a favour or two. It was no time to be tight-fisted and there was room in his big trunk.

  The Papuan Trader made her berth and the purser confirmed he had a second class cabin booked from Cairns for Mr Hawkins of the Papuan Rubber Company. Ned made his last farewells at the wharfside, hands shaken all round, and boarded, a passenger, a new experience. He had a headache, the lads having said goodbye the previous night, and that made him even quieter than normal. He found his cabin, a single, the more expensive sort, dropped his new valise and arranged with the purser for his tools and trunks to be stored safely, and then let the steward lead him to the second-class saloon where he was expected to spend most of the five days of the voyage. There was a round dozen other passengers, five men of about his own age and a missionary family, parents, four daughters and a young son, all under twelve years of age. They formed two physically separated groups, the men close to the bar, the missionaries as far from its contamination as they could be, the children playing quietly under their parents’ close supervision.

  It was near enough to midday to have a beer – breakfast time drinking was generally looked down upon but a couple later was no problem. Ned had been warned to check with the barman about paying. They normally preferred to run an account at the ship’s bar, or so Jim had said.

  “G’day, mate, I’m Ned Hawkins, going up to Moresby.”

  The barman glanced at his list, confirmed Ned’s name was on it and that there was no warning to keep him dry – some of the regular passengers needed to be controlled.

  “G’day, Mr Hawkins, what we normally do is set up an account with the purser for drinks, saves putting money across the bar. Meals are all served in here and a couple of beers or a half bottle of wine come with them gratis, except for breakfast. Times are on the cabin bulkhead. A beer now? Bottled will be best today, I’ve just brought a half dozen barrels in but they ought to settle a few hours, but.”

  “Sure, mate. Retsch?”

  “Coming up, and, before you ask, no tipping! The company don’t like it, and nor do I – I works for me livin’, mate, I ain’t no bloody scrounger!”

  Ned wondered if he should point out that he was too tight to tip anyway, but he decided to keep the peace, turned to the five men by the bar.

  “G’day, gents. Me name’s Ned Hawkins, going up to the Papuan Rubber Company, ship’s engineer, to work with their steam engines.”

  Two were planters, managers on Burns Philp copra plantations along the Gulf coast. One worked for Burns Philp’s trading side at the Port Moresby offices. The other two were public servants based at Konedobu, the seat of government, such as it was, barely a mile from the wharves at Moresby.

  “The Rubber Company will be producing this season then, Ned?”

  Ned picked up the doubt in the man’s voice. He was one of the government blokes, Patrick Michael, he thought his name was.

  “So I’m told, Patrick, they wouldn’t need steam up for any other reason, would they?”

  “Not that I can think of, Ned, but the word was that the trees ain’t growing as well as they do in Malaya and over in the Dutch East Indies. The Wet ain’t as reliable as the true Monsoon rains, so they say, and maybe the soil ain’t quite right. Hard to train up local boys as tappers, as well. It seems that the workers don’t eat if they don’t produce their quota in Malaya, and worse in the Dutch and French colonies, but we don’t allow that up here. Starve or beat a worker here and the RM will be on your back, quick time.”

  “RM?”

  “Resident Magistrate, mate, they run their own sections along the coast and inland and they’ve only got one set of laws, for whiteskins and black equally. Murray’s really hot on that.”

  “About the only thing he’s good for, if you ask me!”

  There was a mutter of agreement to the comment made by one of the plantation people. Ned looked blank, carefully.

  “The Governor. You’ll meet him and can make your own mind up, Ned. He makes sure to speak with every whiteskin who comes up, tries to make sure they’re all
the right sort, his sort, that is. Mind you, he has managed to keep out some bad bastards who thought they could turn the gold fields into the sort of bloody mess they had in America – bloody cowboys who thought they could make a new Barbary Coast like they had in California. He settled them quick time, chucked them into the calaboose and then deported them on a slow boat to American Samoa!”

  “Sounds like a good bloke, to me,” Ned ventured.

  “He’s a bloody loony, Ned! He reckons we got no business being there in Papua. We can't stay and we ought to be civilising the kanakas, the natives, ready for them to take everything over, as if they bloody could!”

  Ned had nothing to say to that, or much else with the hangover still throbbing, grunted noncommittally. The others accepted that as agreement.

  A steward came in and laid up the tables for lunch – one for the missionaries, water only, the other for the young men with beer and wine glasses. They sat, the missionary offering grace to his family, loudly, his back turned to the other table, where, if they had the courtesy to speak quietly whilst he prayed, there was little evidence of piety.

  “Bloody fool’s going down coast, with a young family, Ned. They chopped two there less than five years ago, and the daughters will be at risk any time they go out of sight of the house, whatever age they are. They don’t belong to the clan so they ain’t human and it don’t matter what happens to them.”

  “Straight?”

  All five assured Ned that it was true, none of the kanakas believed that anybody else was human, there was the clan and outside there were animals, to be eaten or used in any other way that was convenient.

  “The reverend wants to hope he can convert them all and bloody quickly, otherwise he’s asking for trouble, Ned.”

  “Does he know?”

  “We tried to talk with him first night out of Sydney. Waste of time, he knows his Bible and nothing else is worth knowing. ‘He has been called’, so he reckons, and the Good Lord will protect him because he is virtuous. We don’t know what we are talking about. He ain’t spoken to us since.”