Long Way Place (Cannibal Country Trilogy, Book 1)

by Andrew Wareham

  It was easy over the weeks for Jutta to persuade herself into loving her husband – he was generous, polite, considerate, affectionate and turned to her at night with a joy that seemed beyond mere lust, giving as thoroughly as he took. She contrasted him with her father, the only other man she had known – dour devotion and happy paganism, yet the lighter-minded man the better worker, abler, producing more and respected by the labour line as her father had never been. Ned was older than her by some years, she conceded, but that mattered less and less – he had the experience, the maturity that she lacked, provided strength that she could lean on, depend on; he was certain where her father had been weak. He was, she thought, truly a man; she wondered why she had not started a baby yet, she wanted to give him a son as a return for all he had offered her – maybe she was not quite old enough yet, her Ned would know.

  Ned, too, enjoyed married life, just as he had enjoyed life before with Raka and Hani: a lively young lass to live with, a job of work to do, food on the table and no expectation of hard times to come, a bit of money put by – a gutter rat could ask no more. In mental attitude a guttersnipe he still was, and always would be, the slum would never leave the back of his mind, would always be there to colour his expectations of life; he would fight when he had to, be a back-stabber if he must, a survivor always. As a boy he had looked after his sisters, because he had had to, they were his – he still sometimes wondered how they had got on in Canada; as a man he protected his women for the same reason, they were his responsibility and if he did not care for them, nobody else would. Love? He did not know the word, and, possessing no great esteem for himself, could hardly offer it to another; affection would do – he liked Jutta, very much, more so each week, and that would have to do. It was not an unpleasant vacuum he lived in, for he was not aware of it; for him life was something a man endured – some times were better than others and he adapted in the right way, said the correct words. Sprawling in his bed, whispering ‘I love you’ into the ear of his naked, shuddering wife, savouring her moans and sighs, life was pretty good, the best yet; why complicate things with the emotions he was not equipped to handle?

  Life was busy, too. Three days a week he rode out to visit one or other of the plantations where he threw himself into the task of raising production, improving quality, exporting more. As 1916 passed and the war dragged on it became clear that there was no end in sight and that the casualty figures would grow beyond any level ever previously dreamt of – he remembered the horror of the newspaper placards in the Boer War at figures of a few hundreds lost – now they counted the dead in thousands every day, in tens of thousands on bad days. It seemed increasingly wise to Ned to become indispensable where he was, well clear of the insatiable maw of the European fronts and the mass of dead Diggers, out of the sausage grinder that was revealing itself as it destroyed a civilisation. He said little of it, nothing to Jutta, who was losing on both sides of the Western Front, but became more urgent in his work, even less tolerant of idleness or waste.

  Well before the year was out he found himself faced with wartime expediency. There was a double problem of manpower and shipping, neither soluble without recourse to procedures that would have been unthinkable in the years of peace.

  Supervision of the plantations demanded literacy and numeracy, a basic education at least, and the absence of any except Bible schools for the natives had meant that all management had come from Australia or England or occasionally from the earlier colonised islands, Samoa particularly. Active, fit young men with a taste for adventure were no longer available to come up to New Guinea – they were off to a much more certain death in France or Turkey instead. Ships were also going off to war – some to be lost to commerce raiders and mines, few in these waters to torpedoes - but most to be hopelessly fouled in the great bureaucratic jungle that had suddenly grown across Australia, never to die, merely to become increasingly less penetrable to reason, less accountable in use and function over the years.

  The problem of manpower could be solved quickly, but at the expense of mission outrage and the reversal of peacetime Administration policy. The Administration was controlled by the military and no longer had policies and the missions were weaker in wartime, unable to bully officials who had no career, no commitment, no need to survive over many years of obstructionism. Ned made quiet inquiries on the north coast and south, in the Protestant and Catholic enclaves, and within weeks had the names of a dozen young men who had grabbed all the education they could and had borrowed books and taught themselves more and were now being exploited for a bowl of rice and a tin of fish a day, together with a sure promise of Salvation. The offer of a money wage and a position of responsibility in a job with a future brought five employees willing to jeopardise their souls and wanting nothing more than to work and to learn and to be respected; by the New Year they were keeping records of pay and output and doing all of the basic bookkeeping of their plantations. The priests and pastors, who had ignored them at first, certain they would fail and come crawling back, object lessons for their peers, began to cry ‘anticlericalism’, found that they were unheard. Uncomprehending, they banded together, sectarianism forgotten in the face of this attack on their privileges, and stormed into the governor’s office. Holmes threw them out and threatened them with deportation; upon his excommunication by the one party, and under formal cursing of the other, he placed the loudest and most alien accent under arrest, but was forced to release him when he discovered he was American. He gave the missionaries a week to send a letter of apology, was amazed when they did, decided then that all they needed was a firm hand. Ned, in the background, running with hare and hounds, advising both sides – for he would have to live on the plantation after the war was over and the military had left – was proud of the compromise he had brokered, of the promise that no new sects would ever be permitted to land and seek converts, that the field would be left clear for the existing missions, they, in return, allowing him to recruit and pay no more than a dozen of their youngsters a year in skilled positions.

  Shipping was less amenable to solution. The island boats, the small craft, mostly under sail, still delivered their few tons of copra to the wharves at Rabaul in a steady trickle, but the ocean-going steamers became rare, erratic, unpredictable, keeping to no schedule or logic. Often the warehouses bulged and sacks of copra sat outside under tarpaulins, rapidly spoiling. Occasionally ships called in quick succession and left part-loaded and very angry at the inefficiency of the shore authorities, complaining to Canberra about Holmes’ incompetence, as they saw it.

  “There is an answer, colonel.”

  Ned had been called to conference, as the resident expert.

  “Get the bloody war over, I suppose!”

  “No, sir, easier than that. Process the copra here and send out coconut oil – it’s what’s wanted, it’s less bulky and takes up less hold space.”

  “But it can only be moved by tank ships, Hawkins. Special ones.”

  “That’s right, sir – and they can’t be used for any other purpose, so they won’t be taken away from us.”

  The colonel beamed – he was under permanent pressure to produce and send more munitions material south – success in doing so could make him a Brigadier, failure would see him Stellenbosched, as they had called it in the Boer War, put out to grass as a failure.

  “Can you do it, Hawkins?”

  “Yes, sir; I can organise it.”

  “Good man. Make it so. Do it.”

  It was only much later that day that Ned realised he was free to attempt the project in any way he wished, as long as he was successful; he had carte blanche. It was an awful temptation, one that he resisted for as long as it took him to work out a fool-proof way of not getting caught.

  He located forty acres on the edge of the bay with a deep-water wharf and a pair of big warehouses, German alienated land that had fallen to the Crown and had no native claimants, the original owners having complained too loudly twenty years before an
d become an object lesson to the whole of the new colony. The land was leased on peppercorn rent to Oil Products, the new organisation Ned had created. He then descended on the internment quarters.

  A dozen government bungalows in Rabaul had been set under nominal guard and were now occupied by German Government officials, civilians who were well-behaved and no threat to the new regime but who could not continue in freedom without compromising their own allegiance as employees of the state. Most felt that whether the war was won or lost they would be called to account at its end and dared not show as collaborationists. They were bored, idle, grew gardens, snapped at their wives, reread the same few books, taught their children, fretted, each as suited his natural predisposition. They were forced into each others’ company, into a dull conformity that was hard for all, hell for some.

  Herr Dolfuss was a forty year old bachelor, an agricultural chemist who had been experimenting with plantation crops and processing for several years before the invasion. He had lived, shockingly, with a pair of mainland girls and had had to abandon them and their babies at his place out on the north coast when he was interned. He was lonely, desperate for their safety and anxious to get back to work; the promise of guaranteed employment and safe haven after the war was all that was required to make him take up residence at the oil factory. In a month he was so happy that he had recruited a third young lady to his ménage.

  Military and plantation working parties built the factory to Dolfuss’ orders and escorted him as he raided the plantations for their small-scale presses and shredders and boilers – everything was paid for, in Australian government paper which would eventually be convertible to cash but could be used immediately as a backing for credit. The German planters who remained at work discovered they had a choice of being disloyal or being poor as their copra was bought up on the same basis, all production on the Gazelle Peninsula being diverted to Oil Products’ hands, some to be converted to oil, the surplus to go south in raw form. The only cash payments Ned had to make were to Herr Dolfuss as a wage, and these came out of his own pocket. By June 1916 the plant was operating efficiently, its storage tanks full and being emptied regularly by a pair of small tankers running down to Sydney. Ned invited Holmes to inspect his factory.

  The colonel observed as a wagon-load of copra came to the gate and across the weighbridge and was subjected to inspection for quality and ticketed. The copra then went straight into an oven to be quickly heated and further dried, all water removed, and was sent still hot through the presses and shredders, the oil drained off and filtered and pumped to the tanks, the dry residue bagged as various grades of human and animal foods. He approved and sent requisitions south for larger, modern machinery, all of which appeared by the end of the year – there was a major shortage of munitions at the Western Front and glycerine was demanded at any price. He asked Ned no questions, gave him, once again, his sincere thanks.

  Everything was owned by, and in the name of, Oil Products, an organisation that had no owner, no shareholders, no board, no traces, no existence except as a name on pieces of paper. At some appropriate time, probably when the Military Administration handed over to peacetime authorities, Oil Products would transpire to be part of the assets of Vunatobung Plantation. For the while, he was an innocent, obeying orders, doing his best for the war effort and certainly not making any money, losing it, if anything, on paper. The plant charged a modest fee for its services, to cover its wage-bill and running expenses and Ned was quite happy with the small return he made this way, was resolved never to get greedy over the ownership, or not until it was perfectly safe. He made use of Herr Dolfuss’ spare time by getting him to draw up a full and annotated set of plans for a cocoa fermentery for the plantation, but it would be some years before the cocoa came into pod.

  Alarms arose during the year and the military had a full-scale flap as the Wet came in. There was evidence that a raider was operating in Australasian waters, a disguised merchant vessel – too many ships were lost, and then survivors were picked up. Rumour and speculation, plus a diet of spy fiction, led to the conclusion that the commerce destroyer was holing up in the Islands and preparing them for a general uprising. A sudden search of the German held plantations led to the discovery of rifles and ball ammunition, followed by the arrest of their owners and confiscation of their land.

  It seemed, and was presented as, a reasonable response to enemy action, a part of total war.

  Investigation, many years later, showed that there was no firm evidence that any commerce raider had ever penetrated the Islands, no reason to believe that any actual contact had ever been made with any German planters, though a plan to do so certainly existed in the minds of the German Naval Staff at Kiel.

  As for rifles – probably fifty per cent of adult Tolais then alive had eaten human flesh and not all had been pleased to give up the habit, they liked the flavour. The Tolai were recent immigrants to the Gazelle themselves and were a warlike tribe still actively engaged in pushing the original inhabitants back into the Baining Mountains; they were certainly not peace-loving pastoralists. Any sensible plantation owner kept a magazine rifle, just in case, together with a couple of hundred rounds; most stocked a carton of ball for their twelve-bores and had a pistol by the bed and a two-two sporting rifle where the missus could easily reach it. As they would all shamefacedly say, they trusted their people, they weren’t afraid, but you never knew when a puk-puk might walk by, or a snake; a gun was a necessary tool.

  By Christmas 1916 almost all of the planted land was under the control of Australian or British nationals, the exception being that of the mission at Vunapope which had made ingenious use of the law. The mission had been transformed into a limited company, fifty-one per cent of the shares being registered in the name of Jesus Christ. The lawyers agreed that it was sufficiently legal to be arguable in court and that, in any case, they would not recommend expropriation measures against that particular individual

  “Of course, colonel, you can go to the High Court. The company is registered in Australia and the law there states that shares may only be held by living men or institutions. You might wish to argue that this particular gentleman is dead?”

  A horrified pause while the colonel’s eyes rolled heavenwards.

  “No, sir, neither would I. I would add that I for one would not be ready to plead your case, not and go to Confession afterwards.”

  “I’ll refer the matter to Canberra.”

  “Very wise, colonel – when in doubt, let the politicians take the responsibility. You might wish to point out that the Italian government is an ally and that they might be requested to ask the Vatican to extend a blessing or two in this direction – the mission might well be nudged into cooperation that way, sir.”

  It all sounded very clever to the colonel, and he knew exactly how to handle ‘clever’ subordinates – give them enough rope …

  “Certainly, Advocate, I am sure you are right – draw me up a report and send it down south – run a copy across my desk, if you would be so good.”

  The colonel sat back chuckling to himself – the report would be from the AAG and would be copied to him, clearly none of his responsibility. Now, what to do with the plantations that no longer had managers or owners? Young Hawkins! No other possibility, good lad, too, for his sort.

  Ned spread his endeavours more thinly for a month but, after twenty consecutive sixteen hour days and a very thorough and heavily accented lecture, was forced to demand assistance.

  “Sorry, Hawkins – I can’t do it. There are no men, they’ve all gone to war.”

  “There are seven young Chinese men with education and experience as managers in their fathers’ businesses, colonel, and would be very willing to move into the plantation trade. As well, I know of half a dozen mixed-race youngsters who’ve grown up on plantations and have had more education than most, and in the nature of things, they’ve got no ties of affection to the German government – as far as they were concerned, mixed-race ch
ildren were just Kanakas and shouldn’t really exist anyway. They will make reliable and hard-working men, colonel, because they’ve got no other chance.”

  “Ridiculous, Hawkins! Overseer material, at best! They’re constitutionally incapable of taking responsibility, that’s the job of the white man, why we came here to colonise them, for their own benefit. You didn’t see Chinese junks sailing up the Thames, Hawkins, to make us part of their Empire! In any case, even if you did find the odd one who was any good, it would be bad for them, give them ideas for after the war.”

  “Bullshit, colonel!”

  “Who do you think you are talking to, Hawkins?”

  “You, colonel! I’m no soldier, when I hear bloody nonsense I say so. I can’t find twenty-five hours in a bloody day, colonel, and if I don’t get help then I can’t do the job. No managers, I resign, colonel, and go back to running Vunatobung and bugger the rest of it.”

  “That’s what you think, young man! You are still a police officer and can be posted overnight if I say so.”

  “Yes, sir – and then my wife will run Vunatobung and whoever you appoint in my place can do the rest. I wish him luck. Which one of your officers gets the job, sir?”

  The colonel’s bluff was called, and he hadn’t realised he was bluffing until that point; he thought rapidly, for him. None of his subalterns was capable of running a plantation – it would take the best of them a year or two to learn the ropes on one place – and there were no Australian civilians available. He dared not appoint Germans to the task – he had just spent the better part of a year demonstrating that the Bosche were untrustworthy and Canberra, having grudgingly acquiesced in the expropriation of private property, would be surprised if he gave official positions to the enemy he had had to rout. Indeed, he was quite sure that a number of bureaucratic eyebrows would rise, which would do his future prospects very little good. A substantive brigadier, post-war, with solid administrative success behind him, could realistically look for government employment at a senior level, but not if he had embarrassed the powers-that-be. To appoint no replacement for Hawkins, to let things drift, would be even worse – production of glycerine would fall and he would be replaced, posted to somewhere horrible like the Suez Canal Zone or East Africa or Salonika where there was no glory or promotion but the bullets and fevers were as deadly as on the Western Front. Like many another of the old-time professional soldiers, the colonel had grown thoughtful over the past few months as he had observed the bloody failure of the Australian and New Zealand forces at the Dardanelles and had read the lists from France and Belgium; he had seen thirty per cent of the men he had known in peace-time messes consigned to their graves, and all for no visible gain. These factors had combined, not to sap his courage – that was as high, reflexive, unthinking as ever – but to induce a sense of caution, an acceptance of mortality, a desire to see his family again and watch his children grow; the colonel, at the age of forty-three had left adolescence behind, had ceased to be a romantic; he felt strangely bereft.