No Samoan could enter the Club, and if he was seen hanging about waiting for Ned they would both be labelled ‘poofters’, which was to be avoided.
A month and the ship from down south had come in and offloaded twenty tons of teak beams and posts and ten tons of galvanised roofing iron, the raw materials for plantation house and drier and go-down storeroom. There was a small steam engine, a derrick and a circular saw, a portable forge and bar stock and a selection of hand tools. Beyond that Ned had six months of the services of a carpenter - more or less. Marty said he was a ‘bush chippy’, but he had his tools.
The Victoria loaded all aboard and stacked her forehold with local hardwood boards and planking. It would be possible to negotiate the purchase of timber locally, eventually, but it might take years of talking before any agreement could be reached. Even with active assistance from the Administration it had taken BPs four years to alienate the land for the five plantations it was setting up on the coast towards Gurney, of which Ned’s was to be the first.
“The thing is, Ned,” Maurice explained, “most clans don’t recognise the idea of property. No bugger ‘owns’ anything, so the land ain’t theirs as such, it’s just the place where they live and nobody else can and where their ancestors hang out. So, if everybody in the clan agrees, they can let us use the land, but that don’t make it our land, and they can only speak for themselves. If unborn descendants don’t agree, then we can’t stay, or so they think. Even Murray won’t wear that – once the land is ours and being worked, then it stays ours, as long as the payments keep coming. No problem for twenty years or so, I reckons, but it could be funny come 1930 or thereabouts, mate.”
“Half way down the coast to Samarai, Ned, the place hasn’t really got a name yet, because we can’t really speak the local language well enough. You know Murray’s policy on names, Ned? Not like Africa with its Salisburys and other English names, every place here is to be local, only, it’s bloody hard to find out what it ought to be. Murray swears blind that three mountains he has named all come out the same when someone finally translates the local placetalk. ‘That hill, mister? It’s a bloody great lump of rock, even a bloody whiteskin ought to be able to work that out!'”
Ned promised to be good – he would discover a reasonable local name for his new plantation and use it faithfully – no ‘Hawkinsville’ in Papua.
“Nearest mission station is thirty miles down coast from you, LMS, feller who came out on the same boat as you, with his wife and children, so he should be alright with the local piccaninnies. You won’t see anything of him – no tracks due to a bloody great stretch of swamp along the coast between you. Boat only and the mission schooner won’t call at your wharf and BP’s boats won’t go there unless there’s something to deliver, which won’t be very often as they don’t spend money with us.”
Ned asked whether there was a wharf at his local village, was told that the RM was based there and had a rickety timber pier out to deep water. He was to be allowed free mooring at the plantation facilities as soon as Ned had created them.
The coast became increasingly attractive as they moved south and east from Port Moresby, the bush thicker and less drought-stricken, the hills rising to mountains a few miles inland, patches of mangrove and swamp less frequent. The soil itself was obviously richer – the coconut palms growing taller and closer together. It became clear that the sole reason for building a town at Port Moresby was the harbour, the bay that could shelter a substantial fleet and was consequently important to the colonial powers. Equally, if the colonial warships lost interest then the town would have no real economic justification for its existence.
Ned pondered on all he saw, slowly came to realise that the politics of empires were important to the local people, and they had no knowledge or control of them. A pity that their future should depend on the maintenance of ill-feeling between Britain and Russia and Germany, and perhaps the United States as well.
The Victoria was hard pushed to make six knots, a thick cloud of black smoke announcing the fact, and took nearly forty eight hours to travel the bare two hundred miles to their destination, closing the coast on a glaring Dry Season morning.
Quite a large village, Ned saw, fifty more or less square huts raised on low stilts, four or five feet off the ground, timber framed, split bamboo and cane and heavy grass matting making the walls, roofs that seemed to be palm fronds covered in some sort of thatch in a thick layer. No obvious decoration to these places – no paint, no carved timbers, no woven cane figures. That suggested mission influence, the old ancestor images all destroyed in the name of the loving Jesus.
The Magistrate’s quarters – a five or six room bungalow, European style, inside a strong fence, police barracks next door, a small parade ground with a flagpole – was the only outside element. There was no mission station in the village itself so the pastor must work patrols, a visit to each of his flocks at intervals of a month or two.
The flat land behind the village was well worked, gardens tidily laid out, and there were bananas, paw-paw and mango trees on the lower slopes of the hills. Ned counted twenty small canoes and six substantial outriggers, boats big enough to take a net a few miles offshore, so this was a well-fed village except in a very deep Dry Season.
Less of a problem of theft from his stores, then.
The Victoria berthed against the pier where she was to unload Ned’s future and he started to implement the plan he had carefully made.
Twenty local men were waiting to act as stevedores. The RM had already sent a message that the plantation labourers should not attempt to do any of the work that the villagers expected to be paid for. Ned noticed that they were very similar in appearance to the men of Boroko village outside Port Moresby – medium height, dark brown, fuzzy haired, but seeming healthier, better fed, the land more fertile here, the fishing more reliable perhaps.
The wagon was put ashore first, followed by the two van horses from their pen on the fore deck. Winds were light in the Dry and it was safe to keep them two days in the open air, and far better for them than being stuck away in the damp, dark heat of the hold. Two boys had been shipped as grooms, both with some experience of horses and, importantly, neither afraid of them, and they led the horses to their temporary quarters behind the RM’s bungalow, safe from the axes of meat-hungry local men. The horses would be rested for two or three days before being put to work – they had to be cosseted in the Tropics.
The building materials came next, all stacked tidily next to the pier by size and expectation of use. Rations and tools came last and were taken under police guard organised by the RM into his compound, together with the first thirty labourers who had been brought in by schooner two days before.
The RM had personally surveyed the acreage the plantation was to occupy and had his suggestions to make on the locations of wharf and house. It would have been foolish to disagree without very good reason.
There was a creek running through the thousand acres of alienated land, ten feet deep and fifty wide in the Wet, an intermittent trickle in the Dry, but sending a sufficient quantity of fresh water into the sea to prevent the growth of coral immediately offshore for a stretch of at least a couple of hundred yards along the white sand beach. A little dredging, done by small boat and cheap, and there would be a deep water passage good enough for any island boat, including the Victoria.
The RM pointed to an outcropping of rock a little way along the beach.
“Two months or so of work there, Mr Hawkins, and you can have a stone-built wharf that will last for as long as you do, sir. Better than timber which will eventually rot away.”
And there would be a legacy for the villagers, Ned realised, a basis for a harbour or just a mooring for fishing boats in future years. It made sense and would cost little because the labourers would be underworked in the first year or two before the plantation came into full production.
“Good idea, Mr Norton. I will make that one of the first priorities. House and dr
ier and a warehouse to go up as well, then we can do something for the labour line.”
Norton agreed – the boys could run themselves up bush material huts for the Dry Season, that would be no great hardship.
Ned ventured a grin, nodded his approval.
Norton smiled back, to his relief.
The few RMs he had seen, and there were no more than a dozen in total, had been either thin, austere and naturally sombre, or short, overweight and beery. Norton was one of the lean kind but might well be good company, and was the sole whiteskin besides Ned along the whole of this coast. He was probably five years older than Ned and a good six inches taller, spoke with an English public-school accent slightly overlain with Australian, was one of Murray’s appointments so was likely to be a decent enough sort of fellow.
“I met a missionary a few weeks back, Mr Norton – O’Leary, a Catholic. Are there any hereabouts?”
“None, Mr Hawkins.”
Norton snorted, noted the absence of a title for the priest, decided Ned was unlikely to be of his flock.
“That particular gentleman made a few patrols in this direction, seeking a location for another mission, I believe, but I encouraged him to look elsewhere.”
Norton did not say what form his encouragement had taken.
“Good – I had no liking for his ideas of what to do in his evening hours.”
“Nor me! Ned, isn’t it? I’m Jasper.”
They shook hands, a solemn ceremony of acceptance.
“We see the bloke from Port Moresby twice a year, Ned, doing his rounds by boat. He wanted me to conscript the locals to build him a church and a place for a lay preacher, the village to feed him as well, but I knocked him back. Three years ago, that was, and his appeal to Murray is still being processed; will be for another ten years with any luck.”
“Too expensive for my taste, Jasper – bloody scroungers who’ve found a better way of making a living than working.”
Local lay-preachers were universally unpopular amongst the whiteskin community. They tended to have ideas above their station, frequently needed to learn that acquaintance with the Word of the Lord did not change the colour of their skin or their place in the great scheme of things.
“I had one turn up, first place I was in, assistant to the RM while I was learning the trade. He lasted two months. It seems he taught the locals about Communion – the blood and the flesh of the Lord? He was in a village about ten miles from the post, half a day’s walk through thick bush. Limestone hills with deep, narrow valleys, almost impossible to get through, much of it. Anyway, Ned, we got into the village, me and four native constables and a dozen carriers, and he ain’t there. Asked about, he might have caught a fever, perhaps. Headman of the village, the official bloke, was perfectly open about it.”
“‘Eat the flesh and drink the blood and be born again, that’s what he said’, so he told me. So they did and the lying bastard never rose up at all, and they waited a full three days for him!”
“What did you do?”
“Strictly speaking, it was murder, by law. But, I ask you, Ned, could you hang a man for that? I told them to ask for advice next time, before they experimented, and wrote it in the book as suicide.”
The first problem rose four days later after Marty, the bush chippy, had finished the sixth and last bottle of Bundaberg rum he had brought with him and discovered that the village was dry – truly so, not just on the surface. Ned had never seen an alcoholic suddenly deprived of his supplies before – it was very educational.
“Wouldn’t think a bloke could spew so much and so often, Jasper. Amazing when you reckon he hasn’t eaten bugger-all for a week!”
“He’ll stop soon, Ned – either he’ll die or he’ll start taking nourishment in a day or two. His problem, cobber – he’s been up here long enough to know the score out in the bush.”
“He’s been on the gold workings at Samarai all of his time before this, so he said last week when he could still talk.”
“Ships in every week, navy as well as Red Duster – you can get hold of anything down there, so they tell me. Opium off the junks, not just liquor. Murray’s certain they’re running cargoes down south, transhipping up here on the coast, but there’s no patrol boats and the navy don’t want to know. The Pommies haven’t got the local knowledge and the Aussies have only got two working ships.”
They shrugged, it was none of their business if idiot Australians wanted to poison themselves with opium instead of alcohol. Let the silly buggers die, the world would be better off without that sort.
The schooner brought the Samoan boss-boy down next morning together with the month’s supplies for the RM, including, unfortunately, a carton of methylated spirits tablets which were intended as fuel for a small bush cooker he took with him on patrol. Marty used the meths tablets as chewing gum overnight, was discovered in coma in the morning, died by evening.
“I suppose we could cremate the stupid bastard, Ned. He should burn well.”
There was no other memorial than a brief note to the clerks at Konedobu to write Marty’s name off the list of useful artisans.
The boss-boy called himself Zacharias – it was the habit of his people to choose a name they liked from the Bible when in the company of magic-using tribesmen. He explained that the name being both holy and false would certainly stymie any devil trying to get him. He also said that he could work wood with some competence, his father having been a canoe maker of great renown and having passed his skills on to his children. Ned presented him with Marty’s toolbox.
The bulk of the house-building was done by the labourers, Zacharias showing them how to do each task and then watching them repeat it until he was satisfied. He explained that they would be able to knock up their own huts much more quickly and efficiently as a result, and better quarters would mean less sickness amongst the line.
Zacharias spent most of his days making furniture – tables, chairs, benches, bed frames, cupboards, shelves – from the teak brought down on the Victoria. It was much too good, he said, to be wasted on mere walls.
Three months after arriving Ned moved out of the RM’s spare room and into his own house. The villagers held a feast to celebrate the occasion, sat around a big fire on flat ground by the beach, half a dozen of the unmarried girls dancing as entertainment for all.
“It seems, Ned, that the elders have given the girls permission to try to attract your attention, and a share of your wealth. They have promised that the fortunate young lady will be guaranteed a respectable marriage with a good share of garden land when you eventually leave. I think they might be irritated if you turned the offer down. One only, of course, and you can’t throw her back and try another one if the first is not as good as you hoped!”
The girls were not very tall and tended to be heavy on hip and shoulder, but they were happy, bright and enthusiastic, wiggling breasts and bums with glee, smiling when they caught his eye. One young lass seemed to him to be intelligent, kindlier in her expression and openly delighted when he caught her eye and patted the ground at his side. She sat by him in triumph, waving and smiling to her mother, who was openly jubilant.
“Name bilong yu, emi wanem?”
“Hani, master.”
“Nogat ‘master’! Name bilong mi, emi Ned.”
The RM was not sure he approved, but doubted it would do too much harm, so long as it did not come to Murray’s ears. Murray did not like undue familiarity, but he did have substantial problems in his own marriage, enough to have created a number of probably scurrilous rumours. Norton himself, like many of the RMs, was scrupulously celibate in Papua – what he did on his occasional leaves was unknown.
The first few tons of copra went out that month, bagged up, smelly and crawling with cockroaches and rhino beetles, on the schooner. For his own interest Ned worked out the value of the crop in a good year at the prevailing price and decided that it could not pay a profit. He suspected that the Australian or British government must be paying
a subsidy to Burns Philp to keep a commercial presence and deter expansion out of the German or Dutch colonies to north and west. That meant he was as much a government official as a private businessman he realised. It could lead to a conflict of interest one day, or to the chance of a bloody good profit, if the government ever found any money to spend.
LONG WAY PLACE
Chapter Six
They could not find a name for the plantation – the local villagers said their own name was for them to know, not to be given away to impious outsiders who might carelessly reveal it to foreign magicians. The clan immediately inland of them, who they traded with twice a year, were very evil and used magic for any number of wicked purposes and would like nothing better than to know their real name and set many curses upon it and them.
Hani told Ned that he must not laugh at magic – it did not work against whiteskins, that was well known, but the local puri-puri man would quite possibly punish her if he caused offence. The RM backed her up – magic could kill, he had known of several men who had simply laid down and died on hearing that they had been cursed, and the reason for that could be argued perhaps, but the fact was real.
“Could we name it for a local flower or bird?”
There was a great clump of golden orchids in a rain tree close to the new house, coloured like the dawn sun rising in the Dry season. The plantation became Yellow Morning in tribute to them – prosaic, but pidgin had little of the romantic in it.
Ned spent little of his time on running the plantation. He told Zacharias what should be done and where, a plan and schedule laid down to the satisfaction of both. There would eventually be a nursery for five thousand young trees here, vegetable gardens for the labourers there, the labour line set up four hundred yards away from the big house, out of sight and smell. Half of the boys were to be set to work on the new wharf, the rest to collect and dry what copra there was in the first years and to cut tracks through the bush. Most of his day was his to fill.
Long Way Place (Cannibal Country Trilogy, Book 1) Page 12