Line of Fire

by Ian Townsend

  The ground gives a shudder.

  ‘Guria?’ I ask.

  We look at the ground. Nowhere in the world have I found people so conscious of the earth beneath their feet. Few people have spent any time in Rabaul and not felt a guria and, truth be told, I’d be disappointed to have come all this way and not experienced one. This is one of the most seismically active places on the planet.

  When Norman Fisher came to investigate Rabaul’s 1937 twin eruptions, plate tectonics wasn’t something he considered. The idea that the world’s continents could be moving around the earth’s surface, floating on the mantle and colliding, seemed like nonsense.

  Fisher imagined then that the volcanoes were caused by a plume of heat below the earth’s surface that was being slowly exhausted by eruptions, and Rabaul’s volcanoes were on their last legs. It was a good theory, but his suggestion that the volcanism at Rabaul was ‘nearly dead’ didn’t take into account plate tectonics.

  He knew that a magma chamber lay under Simpson Harbour, but believed it was isolated; there was no mechanism to replenish it. We now know the magma chamber is fed by the zone of subduction nearby, where plates large and small slide over and under each other, as the large Pacific Plate moves west and the entire continent of Australia moves north into Asia. Near Rabaul is a triple junction of plates and their constant jostling heats rocks and produces magma so that, far from being nearly dead, the volcanism at Rabaul is very much alive.

  Looking at a map of the world, you can’t help but notice that all the continents could fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. Push Africa to the left and it’ll fit snuggly against South America. Australia’s Great Australian Bight would hug the coast of Antarctica.

  Back in 1915, German meteorologist Alfred Wegener wrote a book, The Origin of Continents and Oceans, that added more evidence to a theory that the continents were once joined together, forming a supercontinent he called Urkontinent, which we now call Pangaea. He noticed that until 180 million years ago, many fossils in Europe and North America looked exactly the same, as if they evolved at the same place but then went their separate ways.

  Wegener thought that maybe the continents had floated apart, like ice in a glass of water.

  Few scientists liked the idea of ‘continental drift’ because Wegener hadn’t been able to explain why and how the Urkontinent broke up in the first place.

  After Wegener died on an expedition to Greenland in 1930, an English geologist named Arthur Holmes took up the theory. He said that, maybe, the heat at the centre of the earth generated convection currents, rising, spreading and sinking within the mantle.

  The theory that the continents floated on conveyor belts of hot rocks was taken up again in the 1960s by other geologists, including the American Harry Hess, who suggested that new sections of the earth’s surface were forming along great long cracks that circled the earth under the oceans. Magma rose through the cracks and cooled, and the pressure from fresh magma coming up behind it pushed the crust apart. When the heavier ocean crust reached the edge of the lighter floating continents, it slipped beneath, back down into the mantle.

  This happened to be a theory that could be tested, because, if the theory was right, the rocks close to those undersea cracks should be younger than the rocks that were on the other side of the ocean, about to slip beneath the continents. The age of rocks can be measured, because the earth’s magnetic poles switch every 780,000 to 950,000 years, and when lava cools, iron crystals point like compasses to where the magnetic pole is at the time. The little iron compasses should switch back and forth as the rocks age. And that’s what scientists found when they took core samples from the bottom of the ocean. The ocean crust was moving.

  Near Rabaul, the crust of the Pacific Ocean Plate is colliding with the Australian Continental Plate and sliding beneath it. Between the two plates are smaller plates that have snapped off in the collision. It’s a complicated system of plates colliding and slipping under and over each other, and also moving sideways past each other. Sometimes the plates lock together until the pressure builds up and they suddenly snap apart, causing earthquakes.

  If you look at a map of that part of the world, you can trace a line of volcanoes above the subduction zone. It runs from the volcanoes of Watom Island down to Rabaul’s Crater Peninsula, where there are five volcanoes following roughly the same line.

  Between the vast Pacific and Australian plates, the small Solomon Plate dives beneath the even smaller South Bismarck Plate. As it dives, it takes mud with it, and the friction and chemistry change the rocks and heat them up.

  One hundred kilometres below Rabaul, the magma is like chewing gum, but it’s hot and it expands and so it’s less dense than the rocks around it and will rise if it finds a crack or weakness. The closer the magma gets to the surface, the more like liquid it becomes. It can gather closer to the surface in vast chambers, until the pressure from the magma rising beneath it to erupt to the surface through the easiest path it can find. These subduction zones encircle the Pacific Ocean and explain the volcanoes of the so-called Ring of Fire.

  At the end of 1937, the Australian Government had agreed to build the Rabaul Volcano Observatory on a ridge at the top of the caldera wall, behind the town, but that didn’t happen until 1940. In the meantime, Fisher married his childhood sweetheart in Brisbane and then went back to the goldfields at Wau, which were also the result of recent volcanic activity.

  It was an exciting place for a geologist. In Australia, the goldfields were the result of volcanic activity millions and sometimes billions of years earlier. In New Guinea, it was all happening in front of Fisher’s eyes and beneath his feet.

  The Japanese were also taking an interest in New Guinea. Japan’s economy was rapidly industrialising and its population was booming. It needed food and minerals, and volcanoes had blessed many of the islands in the South Pacific with fertile soils and tall mountains to catch the rain, gold and iron, and, in Rabaul’s case, a big handy harbour. In the 1930s, Japan wanted to expand its trading empire into the South Seas, into an area it vaguely termed Nan’yo. It also had a term for its policy of southward movement, nanshin-ron, and that political policy became entwined with Japan’s military ambitions.

  In Rabaul, the volcano Tavurvur became quiet again, but tectonic forces never sleep. A global war was brewing and at the same time, beneath Rabaul, the ground was heating up.

  CHAPTER 13

  EMILE: (Ease R. to platform R. foot up on step) I came to the Pacific twenty-five years ago when I was a young man.

  NELLIE: (Sits in chair R.) Emile, is it true that all the planters on these islands — are they all running away from something?

  EMILE: (Sits in chair L.) Who is not running away from something?

  — Oscar Hammerstein II and Joshua Logan, South Pacific, 1949

  In October 1937, Marjorie Manson was still living in Brisbane under her married name, Gasmier. Dickie was at the Fortitude Valley Boys School as Richard Gasmier, and his mother spent the days making and mending clothes in the small living room at Mascot Flats. Jack was working down the road at the Charles Hope factory, building motorcar bodies. Marjorie’s prayers had been answered and she should have been happy. But she wasn’t.

  Marjorie put aside the sewing and went to the window. The people in the street below moved to and fro as mysterious in their ambitions as ants. A tram came clacking along the road from Newstead, stopped to let the ants on, then took them to the city, where they did God knew what.

  The distant tin houses and sheds were shrouded by smoke, and steamships belched black smoke above the river. Marjorie decided that she didn’t like city life; at least life in this city. She knew absolutely no-one, although that wasn’t the real problem.

  Marjorie went back to the sewing machine, lit a cigarette and came back to the window.

  The problem was that she was poor. Even the little money they had now hadn’t given her the sense of freedom, the control over her own life, that she’d been expecting. Ja
ck worked late and spent evenings in hotels. She was a slave to this flat, to Jack’s pay packet and his schemes. She was a slave even to darling Dickie. Despite herself, she missed Gordon Road, her father’s calm presence, her brothers. She even missed her mother, not the nagging, but that sense of home.

  This wasn’t a home and she didn’t have the time or money for the small escapes that might have made it bearable: a tram to the city to browse shop windows, or take tea at the Carlton, or see a Nelson Eddy film at the Lyceum.

  Some people spent their whole lives in flats. Imagine that. She couldn’t imagine Nelson Eddy making a film about someone who lived in a flat. No-one went to the theatre to see their own lives reflected; they wanted to see Mounties and romance in a Canadian forest. Perhaps Brisbane wasn’t far enough away from Gordon Road after all.

  Marjorie turned on the radio that Jack had bought cheap from someone at a hotel, the only piece of furniture apart from the sewing machine that they owned, and went back to her sewing.

  The wider world was falling apart in October 1937. There was a Federal election in a few weeks’ time (Marjorie and Jack had even enrolled to vote, so you couldn’t say she wasn’t trying) and all the talk was of war.

  ‘This election is being held at a time when the international situation is most ominous,’ said the Prime Minister, Joseph Lyons. The British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, was hoping for peace, while Germany was arming itself for war. Japan was fighting in China, and the US President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was calling for everyone to calm down, and if not, well, there’d be sanctions.

  In that ominous atmosphere, with the world sliding into chaos, the paths of Ted and Winifred Harvey, and Jack, Marjorie and Dickie Gasmier were about to cross.

  Winifred Harvey’s world had already fallen apart. Ted and Wyn had arrived in Brisbane in September and booked in to the Carlton Hotel in the city centre, only a few tram stops away from where Marjorie lived.

  Few people who lived in the Bainings for a long time could be described as healthy, but Wyn was almost broken by the experience, and the eruption had been the last straw.

  Harvey took her to a Brisbane doctor he knew in Wickham Terrace, the psychiatrist John Bostock, who treated ‘nervous and mental disorders’. Dr Bostock was highly respected, but he had what today would be considered extreme opinions. He believed in eugenics, that a better ‘race’ of Europeans could be bred, and in racial segregation. Harvey (according to Wyn) knew Bostock personally and probably shared his views. Harvey was, after all, a New Guinea planter convinced of his superiority over his native workers.

  ‘There is needed the fostered race-pride of wiser nations,’ Bostock said in a lecture around the time the Harveys arrived in Brisbane. ‘There should be certificates of fitness prior to marriage, and sterilisation or segregation of the unfit.’

  Hear hear, said Harvey, who may not have been a fan of Mussolini or even of a white Australia (Who in the blazes would cut the cane and the coconuts?) as Bostock was, but he might have admitted to himself that the doctor had a point about segregation.

  Winifred later wrote, ‘My medical adviser I’m sure would testify regarding my health as his advice [that she not return to New Guinea in 1937] was at Mr Harvey’s request.’

  Dr John Bostock was at the forefront of psychiatry in the 1930s, and he was treating the Premier of Queensland, William Forgan Smith, no less, for a drinking problem.

  Wyn also had a drinking problem and Harvey had his own problems to which he wouldn’t admit. Apart from lying about his relationships and changing his name, Ted Harvey had over many years consumed large amounts of quinine to combat malaria and he’d been handling mercury at his gold mine. People later described him as ‘mad’, but it’s hard to say whether he’d always had a mental disorder or whether his ‘madness’ was a result of toxic poisoning and alcohol abuse.

  Wyn was 40 when she made that final trip from Rabaul to Brisbane. Her 70-year-old mother, who was also ill, had moved to Brisbane after the death of her husband. Just after Wyn and Ted arrived in Brisbane, in October, something catastrophic happened. Harvey not only left her, but he cut her off financially.

  On 5 November a legal notice, worded in a way that’s often a precursor to divorce, appeared in Brisbane’s Courier Mail newspaper.

  ALFRED ARTHUR HARVEY, of Hotel Cecil, George Street, Brisbane, will not be responsible for any Debts contracted in my name without my written authority. Alfred Harvey.

  A week later, Mr and Mrs A.A. Harvey boarded the liner Nankin and sailed for New Guinea. But Wyn was in Brisbane at her mother’s house. It was Marjorie who was sailing to Rabaul with Ted Harvey, and using Mrs Harvey’s ticket.

  So, what happened in Brisbane in October 1937?

  Even Jack Gasmier wasn’t sure. In 1942, four full years after she had left and just before she was shot as a spy, Jack reported to the South Australian police that his wife, Marjorie Jean Gasmier, was missing, ‘last heard of at Mascot Flats, Breakfast Creek Road, Newstead, Brisbane’. The report made no mention of his son, Richard.

  Marjorie wrote a letter to her mother in January 1938, only weeks after arriving in Rabaul, saying that she was married and living with Ted Harvey on his plantation.

  Something had happened that changed Marjorie’s and Dickie’s lives forever, and it’s impossible to say exactly what that something was. No-one spoke about what had made Marjorie vanish one day and then mysteriously turn up in New Guinea, of all places. But here’s one scenario.

  When Ted and Wyn arrived in Brisbane, they were already arguing. Ted refused to stay with Alice Consterdine, Wyn’s mother, in Auchenflower, and he was also so concerned about Wyn’s state of mind that he insisted she see the psychiatrist John Bostock. Bostock agreed with Harvey that Wyn should give up alcohol and for that, and other medical reasons, should not return to New Guinea.

  Wyn accused Harvey of abandoning her. Then Harvey did something strange: he bought a house in Toowong, behind the Regatta Hotel, perhaps hoping to mollify her.

  She might well have said, You expect me to live there? Next to the hotel?

  Well, it’s near the railway station and your mother, and I’m not staying with her when I visit.

  How often do you propose to visit?

  Harvey thought perhaps once a year.

  She left the Carlton Hotel and moved in with her mother.

  Harvey was furious that she had walked out on him. He moved out of the Carlton as well and into the Hotel Cecil in George Street. He might well have realised, then, all the little things that Wyn did for him, things he’d taken for granted and now had to do for himself. His jacket and trousers had holes. He couldn’t mend them.

  He asked the concierge, looked in the newspaper or found a card and phoned the number for the woman from Mascot Flats, B7407, leaving a message. Marjorie had advertised that she was prepared to come and collect orders, and off she went into the city on the tram to collect this man’s clothes.

  When Ted Harvey opened the door at the Hotel Cecil, Marjorie would have seen a still-attractive 49-year-old man, charming, able to afford a swanky hotel in the city. This was the sort of hotel Marjorie had imagined she would stay in one day, mingling with women dressed like Jean Harlow, having tea in the restaurant.

  The man gave her the impression that he was rich. He had an English accent.

  A New Guinea plantation owner? My word.

  A coconut plantation. And some cocoa. All rather boring, I’m afraid, terribly boring. Where are you from?

  Newstead.

  Newstead? Have you always lived in Newstead?

  Oh, I’ve only been there a short time. Before that I lived in . . . (Adelaide? It didn’t sound exotic enough) Kalgoorlie.

  Really? Really? This seemed to raise his interest. I have a gold mine.

  Marjorie would have laughed, it seemed such an absurd thing to say, I thought you said you had a coconut plantation?

  Yes, yes, the gold mine is on the plantation.

  She wasn’t sure
if he was pulling her leg now. She took his jacket away and brought it back the next day.

  Marjorie was a talented seamstress and Harvey may have said, then, that he wished he had someone on the plantation who could sew.

  I wonder, can you also type? You can obviously run your own business.

  Business? She hadn’t thought of it quite like that. Harvey perhaps went on to say that he had servants to clean and cook for him, but none who could sew or had any business experience. He happened to have a vacancy for someone with those particular skills.

  Are you serious?

  Of course, of course. I’ve never been more serious in my life. Never.

  She looked him up and down. He didn’t seem threatening; in fact, he seemed rather vulnerable. Of course, it was a ridiculous proposition, except . . . Marjorie would have been flattered. It was a crazy idea, though, she couldn’t possibly . . .

  Jack was left to piece together what had gone wrong again, although Marjorie had probably asked him for a final favour: take Dickie back to Adelaide, to Gordon Road. She couldn’t take him with her; she needed to know that the job was genuine and that it was safe. She had no idea what New Guinea might be like. She had heard of cannibals.

  When Marjorie wrote to her mother, Phyllis, in January 1938, telling her that she’d gone to Rabaul as a secretary for a planter and was married, both those things might have been true, but they weren’t connected. She hadn’t married Harvey, although she had arrived in Rabaul as Mrs Harvey on Wyn’s ticket, and it hadn’t been difficult to pretend they were a couple. She hadn’t even had to take off the Ora Banda gold wedding ring that Jack had given her. Poor Jack.

  Jack Gasmier’s part in the story ends here. He drifted, and probably never learnt what had happened to his wife and son.

  CHAPTER 14

  Sir, — There should be a public inquiry into the treatment of the civilian population of Rabaul, which the Government refused to evacuate, even when it was aware that an invasion fleet was standing off the coast and was within a few hours of effecting a landing . . . [signed] A Victim’s Sister