Line of Fire

by Ian Townsend

  ‘Hurry up! Tell the boy to make the boat go,’ she shouted, but all the men were mesmerised by what they were seeing. Sarah was becoming frightened and she leant forward, poked the man at the wheel in the arm, and yelled, ‘Make the boat go!’ and they started heading back to the jetty.

  Two hundred yards in front of them, 30 large rocks suddenly shot out of the sea. None of them was able to grasp what was happening, and before they could pass through a gap in the unexpected rock wall, more rocks rose to fill the spaces and they had to turn sharply. The driver opened the throttle and now sped in terror for the nearest shore, 70 yards away.

  ‘Look what’s coming up behind,’ shouted Sarah’s husband, Chin. They turned.

  A stone’s throw from the rear of the boat, at a point they’d just passed, a fountain of black water was rising 30 feet into the air from a swirling 100-yard wide hole in the sea. It was as if someone had pulled the plug, but the water was swirling up, not down. The launch accelerated towards the shore and when Sarah looked back again, the black column of water was 100 feet high and getting higher and wider.

  Back in Rabaul, the Methodist missionary Jack Trevitt and Melville Chaseling were being married at the quaint timber Rabaul Methodist Church on the corner of Malaguna Road and Mango Avenue.

  ‘Jack and I had an amazing wedding,’ wrote Melville to a friend five days later. Melville was a geologist and had arrived in Rabaul only a couple of days earlier.

  During the wedding ceremony two earthquakes rocked the church so violently she thought the flower arrangements would fall onto the minister’s head, and while she was signing the register in the vestry she, too, heard the terrific explosion that Diana Coote heard at Haus Rakaia.

  As she came down the church steps under a shower of confetti, Melville noticed a cloud in the distance, above the trees. Someone came running up, yelling, ‘The crater has broken.’

  There was some confusion as to what that meant. Wyn, standing outside the church, perhaps fortified, might have asked Ted what on earth was happening now. You said it would all stop. Ted Harvey would have had no idea.

  It dawned on the bride, Melville, who had completed her geology degree at Sydney University two years earlier, what was happening.

  ‘It’s a volcano,’ she said, turning happily to her husband. ‘Let’s go and look.’

  CHAPTER 11

  Close to Rakaia, the people suffered greatly. The earth buried Tavana and Valaur completely and many people perished. This is the number of those who died . . . 390.

  — Reverend Laurie Linggood, ‘The Disaster’, A Nilai Ra Dovot (The Voice of Truth), Rabaul, 1937

  After the loud bang that Saturday afternoon, Philip Coote, like nearly everyone else in Rabaul, decided to take the family down to the shore to see what had happened. He couldn’t see Vulcan Island and it wouldn’t have occurred to him that it was about to explode.

  He drove the family to the Burns Philp offices and found cars parked all along the road, people crowding the wharf.

  ‘And they were all looking out into the harbour,’ said Diana, who was six at the time. ‘I remember, as a little thing, running with three adults out to the wharf, but I could hardly see anything because I was getting in between long legs.

  ‘What I saw was above their heads. I could see this huge cloud coming up, huge, and Mum and Dad said, “Oh no, it’s blown up.”’

  As they watched, the cloud rose higher. Then part of it collapsed and a wall of black came sweeping across the harbour towards them, ‘coming quite fast in a sort of spear’, a wall of black with black clouds thrusting ahead.

  Ted and Wyn Harvey followed the newly married Mrs Trevitt down to the wharves, where she stood in her wedding gown, confetti in her hair, marvelling at the sight of her first volcanic eruption.

  They saw what Sarah Chinnery was seeing up close, on the other side of the harbour: a thick, black column rising from the sea. The column swirled as it rose, higher and faster than seemed possible, turning from jet black at the base to white at the top. Across the water came a steadily growing roar.

  The view from Rabaul across Simpson Harbour just as Vulcan erupts in 1937

  (Keith Colyer; University of Queensland’s Fryer Library PNGAA collection UQFL387/1/17)

  Oh, Plinian indeed, said Melville Trevitt, the geologist, recognising the eruption as of the type Pliny the Elder saw in AD 79 when Vesuvius buried Pompeii. When the column of ash was six miles high, the upper winds from the south-east nudged it to the north-west.

  The Harveys and the wedding party were craning their necks to take in a massive volcanic storm cloud. Lightning flashed red down its flank.

  They saw part of the column suddenly collapse under the weight of rock and ash, and a black cloud rolled across Simpson Harbour towards them — the same cloud Diana Coote was watching. To Wyn, her nerves already frayed, it must have looked like the end of the world. The sound of car horns erupted behind them as people began to flee.

  Closer to Vulcan, but on the other side of the crackling, thundering eruption column, Sarah Chinnery’s boat sped to shore, hit a rock, bounced clear and then grounded on the rising seabed.

  Sarah leapt from the launch with the others into waist-deep water and staggered ashore, and then began running through the kunai grass to the road.

  Black sulphurous smoke followed them, and when they reached the road, they realised they were a mile from their car. The black roaring cloud grew behind them and it seemed as they ran that it would overtake them, but an old Ford truck loaded with terrified people and driven by a Chinese man pulled up beside them, and they all squeezed in. No-one spoke as they drove off.

  When they reached the spot where they’d left their car, it had gone. George Murray’s driver had seen a supernatural spirit that inhabits volcanoes, a kaia, emerge like a great snake from the sea, and he had jumped into the car and moved it back a mile, fearing to leave without his boss and fearing to stay.

  By the time Sarah, Chin and George Murray found him, the column behind them was throwing lava high into the vanishing sky. Red hot boulders as big as houses shattered in midair, falling into the coconut plantations on the other side of the road and setting trees alight. As they got into the car, people were running and riding bicycles past them. The relieved driver sped off; the black cloud of hot rock and ash followed them, but they began to pull away from it. The column was collapsing, but in the other direction, towards Rabaul.

  When Philip Coote saw the black cloud rolling towards the shore, he picked up Diana and ran for his car. The street was jammed with cars trying to escape.

  There were only two roads out of town that could take them away from the volcanic fallout, and Philip chose the road over Namanula Hill, up over the caldera wall to a coastal village called Nordup on the other side.

  ‘Step on it, Phil, step on it!’ said Rhoda, but crowds of people on foot slowed them. They stopped to let people jump on the running boards, and then they started up again.

  Eventually, the ash cloud caught up.

  Day turned to night and grey ash fell like snow. Philip Coote couldn’t drive, he couldn’t see the road. They had to get out and walk. At one point they stopped because they could hardly breathe, and Diana crouched between her parents under a towel while around them people cried and prayed.

  You can imagine Ted Harvey taking Wyn by the arm when the black cloud came racing across the water and bundling her into a car with other members of the wedding party. They would have driven west, over Tunnel Hill Road. Behind them, it must have seemed that a kaia had indeed risen from the earth and was bent over the town as if about to butcher a pig.

  The Trevitt wedding reception was to be held at Kabakada, a mission six miles from Rabaul and this, fortunately, was where the road led them. By the time they reached the mission, it must have seemed as if nothing had happened. They were on the other side of the caldera, where the afternoon was clear, the light soft as the sun sank over the Bismarck Sea. Apart from the strange continuous rumb
ling, nothing seemed out of place.

  Tables on the lawn were set with flowers and crystal, silver and china; the meal was to be held by torchlight overlooking the sea.

  Am I going mad? Wyn might have reasonably asked Ted, who, as a matter of fact, thought she was.

  The Trevitts arrived. They even posed for wedding photographs, until small stones began to fall. Other guests arrived from Rabaul in a panic and told them the blackness was coming and to get into their cars.

  Wyn might have poured a last glass of champagne, Break a leg, holding the glass up to the cars as they left again, and don’t spare the horses. Perhaps it all then unfolded as follows.

  Ted Harvey bundled her into the car they’d come in and they drove south-west, straight underneath the ash cloud that was now an electrical storm raining mud. Wyn was sobbing.

  In this new dark, frightening, unnatural world the car crept along the road, stopping every so often so that someone could wipe mud from the windscreen. Melville Trevitt would later describe this scene, including the appearance from the gloom of mud-covered people and a procession of cars and trucks.

  The thunder was deafening. Lightning showed the way but also revealed a terrifying sight: the coconut palms were bending dangerously under the weight of mud and splitting. Trees struck by lightning caught fire.

  A palm crashed across the road in front of them and they halted. All they could do was sit in the car and hope that another palm wouldn’t fall on them, or that they wouldn’t be struck by lightning, or carried away by a tidal wave. The road was next to the sea.

  Wyn was shivering. It had turned cold. Nothing made sense.

  Eventually, a truck of New Guineans arrived, an axe was found, the tree moved, and they drove on to spend a sleepless night at a plantation house as the lightning circled and the ground trembled.

  On the other side of Vulcan, Sarah Chinnery had outrun the cloud and arrived at the Vunapope Mission. As her husband and George Murray went to organise a rescue mission, she witnessed the terrible lightning storm from the mission verandah and wondered what was happening to the people beneath it.

  Diana Coote and her parents eventually walked over Namanula Hill and down towards Nordup, where a local teacher put them up for the night. Diana didn’t get much sleep, because of the ferocious electrical storm in the volcanic cloud.

  The storm and its rain of mud were the result of the volcanic ash and sea water being thrown high into the saturated tropical atmosphere. The volcanic dust particles rubbing together generated enormous amounts of electricity. Ice probably also formed in the high storm cloud, melting as it fell but chilling the air beneath.

  Rabaul after the 1937 eruption (Keith Colyer; University of Queensland’s Fryer Library PNGAA collection UQFL387/8/13)

  Nearly 400 people died in the 1937 eruption, some killed by lightning strikes or struck by lava bombs, most buried beneath rocks and pumice or drowned when tsunamis swept around Blanche Bay and through coastal villages.

  The next day at Nordup, Rhoda and Diana said goodbye to Philip Coote, the first of their goodbyes. Thousands of people had gathered on the beach at Nordup waiting for the ships and launches that were to take them down the coast to the relative safety of Kokopo.

  Rhoda stood apart from them, with young Diana at her side. Philip Coote, in a white suit, took off his hat and knelt down to talk to Diana.

  Chin up, then, he said.

  All right, Dad.

  And take care of your mother.

  I’m only six.

  He smiled and then stood to talk to her mother about what should be done when they reached Kokopo.

  Some of the Protestant missionaries on the beach started up with ‘Abide with Me’. Diana and her mother boarded a small launch that had been able to come in close to the wharf. As the boat made its way around Praed Point and past the mouth of Blanche Bay, the volcano closer to Rabaul, Tavurvur, erupted.

  ‘There were clouds of dust and the women on the little launch were terrified because they thought their husbands were going to be killed,’ she said. ‘Some of them cried and carried on.’

  God, you’d have thought it was the end of the world, Rhoda told her husband when she returned to Rabaul some weeks later, before she’d inspected their home at Sulphur Creek and found the ash six inches thick on the kitchen table. The garden was ruined.

  ‘I’m not going to live here any more,’ said Rhoda.

  Whether anyone should live in Rabaul any more was a question that the Australian Government wanted answered.

  It brought in renowned German volcanologist Charles Stehn, who was working in the Dutch East Indies. Stehn had been studying the Krakatoa volcano, which had erupted in 1883 and killed 36,000 people. He was to help the Commonwealth’s geological advisor, Walter Woolnough, write a report on the eruption and the future of New Guinea’s capital, and the pair were joined by Norman Fisher, the New Guinea Government’s geologist based at Wau.

  When Woolnough finally wrote his report, he recommended moving the capital on the grounds that Rabaul might be wiped out by a bigger eruption. Fisher and Stehn were flabbergasted by Woolnough’s report, which contained a number of inaccuracies. They believed the capital could remain where it was as long as the government built an observatory, along the lines of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, to warn of future eruptions. Vulcan had shown plenty of signs that it would erupt, it was just that no-one in Rabaul had known what they meant. And Rabaul township itself wasn’t badly damaged in the end. Only two Europeans had died (although nearly 400 Tolai perished, most of them near Vulcan, where many were buried alive in their huts).

  In the end, the government decided to build the Rabaul Volcano Observatory and put Norman Fisher in charge.

  None of that was a comfort to Ted Harvey and Wyn. After the eruption, they’d found a lift by boat back to the plantation. Rabaul’s Simpson Harbour was covered in several feet of pumice and ships couldn’t reach the wharves for months. Harvey had trouble selling his copra, and Wyn’s mental health wasn’t getting any better. Harvey decided that she should see a psychiatrist he knew in Brisbane, and they caught a steamer south in September 1937. It wasn’t a happy time.

  CHAPTER 12

  The proximity to Rabaul of a zone in which tectonic earthquakes frequently originate always allows the possibility of disruption of the volcanic vents by a violent earthquake and a premature release of pressure.

  — Dr Norman Fisher, 1939

  To travel to Rabaul today is to fly over the steaming mountain jungles of the islands of New Guinea and New Britain and land at a small airport near the town of Kokopo, about 40 minutes’ drive south-east of Rabaul itself.

  Rabaul’s old airport near Sulphur Creek was buried under ash when Tavurvur and Vulcan erupted again in 1994. Since then, most things have moved down the coast to Kokopo: the airport, most businesses, many of the people, even the local rugby league team. In fact, the Rabaul Gurias are on the plane, fresh from a match, a volcano with lava bombs erupting from the logo on their chests.

  The plane drops from the rugged mountains through the clouds to the coast, where everything is shades of green, a grey-green sea and then a small green airstrip carved into an old coconut plantation. We touch down quickly. Kokopo is a stop on the daily air run to Kavieng in New Ireland.

  I’m met at the airport by Rory Stewart from the Rabaul Hotel. Rory is a Scot.

  ‘I did not think I would recognise you, but it wasn’t too difficult,’ Rory said. (At least I think that’s what he said. Despite my own Scottish roots, I’ve always had trouble with the accent.)

  The road up the coast to Rabaul winds through Kokopo, full of people and taxi vans, four-wheel drives and Chinese supermarkets. From Kokopo, the road hugs the shore. It has no choice: there’s little flat land between the caldera wall and the sea, often none at all. It’s one of the most beautiful road journeys in the world.

  Rory tries to describe the features to me, but clearly what he’s saying is not getting through my thick skull
so he gives up and simply begins to point at things. On the left, cut into the caldera, are Japanese tunnels from the war, and on the right is the vast stretch of Blanche Bay with the volcanic peaks on the horizon, glimpsed between the huts and palm trees and bananas and frangipanis that flash past. Hundreds of years of eruptions have made the soil rich, and plants watered by tropical downpours grow thick and fast. Everything lives and dies in profusion. A rusting war-era Japanese crane continues its slow motion topple into the sea, a photo opportunity that in a few years will be gone.

  The bitumen ends, and a dusty road runs behind the towering cone of Vulcan, once an island, now a volcano rising beside the road. It’s covered in vegetation. Somewhere beneath its bulk Mercia had admired a small flat island with its grove of pine trees and a lake. The cone above that island, grove and lake now rises nearly 700 metres.

  ‘Did you not hear what I said?’ said Rory, the first thing he’s said that I’ve understood.

  We arrive in Rabaul, still a beautiful place with its volcanoes surrounding the harbour. The business centre of Chinese stores and a market has, over the years, backed away from where it was before the war.

  The old centre of town is pretty much gone. The shady verandahs where Rhoda Coote and Wyn Harvey and Marjorie Manson once walked exist today only in Diana Martell’s memory and some old photographs. Most of the commercial blocks where banks and picture theatres, department stores and grand hotels once stood are empty and overgrown. An Anglican Church is crumbling, rusting, gutted. A few businesses, such as the Rabaul Hotel, cling on and the street signs mark Malaguna Road and Mango Avenue, but it’s hard to imagine the life that was here when this was an Australian town.