Line of Fire

by Ian Townsend

  — Letter to the editor, Sydney Morning Herald, 22 October 1945

  At her home in northern New South Wales (where it’s raining so heavily the hares have now abandoned the lawn), Bev McLean sits at the big kitchen table with photographs and letters laid out in front of her, and I ask her why such a large part of her family history is missing.

  ‘No-one talked about it.’

  There are some photos of Jimmy Manson. There are none of Marjorie or Dickie at all. There are snippets of information about them. It’s not much.

  ‘But Marjorie must have written letters. Didn’t Phyllis keep them?’

  Bev shakes her head. There are photographs of Marjorie’s brothers at Gordon Road, but not Marjorie. Phyllis’s Bible records all family birthdays, but not Marjorie’s. Only her death is mentioned.

  Even the reasons for forgetting have been forgotten.

  I ask Bev if the family had any information about Ted Harvey.

  ‘No,’ says Bev. ‘He was hated by the family.’ She holds up a photograph of a man with grey hair. ‘That’s Graham. He never would talk about it. He didn’t know what had happened, he was hoping that the family got out. The other day when I spoke to him he said, “You know they were beheaded,” and I said, “I don’t know if that’s right.”’

  ‘Graham?’ I ask.

  ‘Graham. Uncle Graham. He’s the youngest brother.’

  At that stage, I hadn’t known Graham, Marjorie’s youngest brother, was still alive.

  ‘Oh yes,’ says Bev. ‘He’s in his 90s now.’

  Graham Manson is the last living link to the family as they were, before the war. He is the youngest of that generation, born in 1922. His sister Marjorie, nephew Dickie and brothers George and Jimmy all went to Rabaul, but Graham stayed in Adelaide to finish his apprenticeship. It’s Graham who has photographs and stories of Marjorie, Dickie and Jimmy.

  Bev warns me that he finds it hard to speak about what happened. He begins to talk, then chokes up, and then the whole family starts to cry.

  ‘Did you know Phyllis committed suicide?’ asks Bev.

  I hadn’t known that. It seemed the war took a toll on this family long after the fighting finished. Of course, many families suffered terrible losses in war, but this ordinary family from Adelaide lost almost everything. Only George and Graham survived, and they carried a terrible burden that they never felt they could share.

  In Graham, Marjorie and Dickie and Jimmy and Phyllis and Joseph are still alive, but he’s the last who remembers.

  CHAPTER 15

  ‘It’s a fine island, and would make the best hiding-place in the world!’

  ‘Jack! Jack! Take us to see your secret island!’ begged Nora.

  ‘Oh, we must go. We’re all tired — but we must, must see the secret island.’

  ‘Come on, then,’ said Jack, pleased to see how excited the others were. ‘Follow me. It’s a good way.’

  — Enid Blyton, The Secret Island, 1938

  What Marjorie noticed first, of course, were the volcanoes. They stood on both sides of the entrance to Simpson Harbour as barren and scarred memorials to their own destruction, although they weren’t nearly as fearsome as she’d been led to believe.

  She would have imagined towering affairs spitting flame, but these were smaller than some of the peaks surrounding them. If squat Tavurvur, or Matupi, on the ship’s right, hadn’t been steaming, she may not have noticed it at all. Vulcan, on the other hand —

  Port, interrupted Harvey.

  Pardon?

  Vulcan’s on the left-hand side of the ship, which is the port side. Matupi’s to starboard, on the right.

  Marjorie said, Vulcan on the port side is more the thing, don’t you think? It’s more volcano-shaped, although it’s really not doing anything volcano-like at the moment, is it? Why is that?

  Marjorie in that moment might have reminded Harvey of Mercia, who also asked a lot of questions. (Had Wyn been there, she would have been sitting morosely at the bar.)

  A drink? asked Harvey. A drink to celebrate your first sight of Rabaul. It’s a tradition, you know.

  I’m afraid it’s a bit early for me . . . Ted. He’d wanted her to call him Teddy, but that seemed a step too far.

  As they came nearer the wharf, Marjorie was surprised to see the town bursting with colourful life. All she would have heard on the ship were stories of the terrible destruction and she’d expected a wasteland. But Rabaul had recovered its composure. In fact, it might have been the most beautiful town she’d ever seen.

  A crowd of people dressed in bright white was waiting on the wharf. Rabaul was still a small town; as the capital of New Guinea, it was a bit of a disappointment in that respect.

  Like all small towns, everyone knew everyone else’s business, and the return of Ted Harvey, the reclusive planter from the Bainings, was noticed. Harvey had dressed in his splendid white suit and he and Marjorie, this slender young woman with auburn hair, walked together down the gangway to the wharf. Her appearance in place of Mrs Harvey was to be the subject of wild gossip for years.

  ‘Each time he went to Sydney he came back with a different woman,’ wrote one observer, years later. ‘This was his sixth or eighth mistress.’

  Marjorie, thankfully, was unaware of what people thought. She was certainly surprised that Mr Harvey (Teddy, please) had had to leave his sick wife behind in Brisbane. She might have felt uncomfortable that her own ticket to Rabaul turned out to be in the name of Mrs Harvey (Shame to waste it, you follow me?), but, as far as she was concerned, she was Ted Harvey’s new secretary, and that was the limit of their relationship.

  Ted Harvey had talked almost nonstop the entire trip, but she’d learnt little about him by the time the Nankin arrived in Rabaul, other than that he owned a plantation and needed a woman’s help, and was prepared to offer her room and board and a reasonable wage. It would be the first time she’d been someone’s employee.

  On closer inspection, Rabaul still bore the scars of the eruption. Grey mud had been shovelled aside into ridges beside the roads, and some yards were still covered with a hard grey crust that plants struggled to penetrate. Storms had swept the roofs almost clean, but black men were excavating storm drains so deep she couldn’t see them until she was at their very edge. They looked exotic, marvellously strong; quite unlike any men she’d seen.

  Don’t stare, Harvey warned her.

  The town was glorious. There were trees everywhere, with fruit.

  Mangoes, said Harvey.

  It all smelled exotic: rotting mangoes and salty air, cooking fish, frangipani flowers and something foul she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Dickie would have loved it.

  Leaving Dickie hadn’t grieved her as much as she’d feared. Their separation was only to be brief, she told herself. How would a boy live on a plantation? How would he go to school? She still had no idea. If she felt any guilt, it was for leaving Jack so suddenly. But even then, now that she was here, she had few regrets. She felt alive.

  They caught the copra boat to the Bainings and Marjorie had her first glimpse of her new home. The blue-green mountains behind Lassul Bay rose 1000 feet into the clouds. It was the monsoon season and the mist hung like wisps of cotton from the steep slopes. She would have seen a short, flat, palm-clad strip of coast and wondered whether there was a house there at all. It looked wild. There was a short section of white beach at the top of the bay, and rough headlands reached into the sea on both sides.

  A dinghy came from the shore and they and their luggage were lowered. A crowd of dark faces was waiting for them and she glanced at Harvey for reassurance. She heard strange voices until they came closer to the beach, when the chattering and yelling died away.

  Marjorie saw a white man on the sand and would later become friends with Bill Parker, the overseer, but at the time he, too, was wondering who on earth this new woman was, and where the hell was Mrs Harvey?

  One of the men stepped forward as the dinghy grounded on the sand. He turn
ed and bent over, inviting Marjorie to get on his back.

  Climb aboard, said Harvey. Don’t get your feet wet.

  The procession then made its way along a track from the beach inland for two and half miles to what amounted to a small village. The buildings were laid out between trees, the lawns cut short by men wielding curved iron blades. Around the house were beds of yellow cannas, zinnias and red poinsettias.

  The plantation bungalow was large and wide, six feet off the ground on stilts, the verandah screened and dark. The luggage was taken to the house, and Harvey gave Marjorie a tour. With appropriate use of Oh and Well, Marjorie admired the gardens, the cannas, orchids, impossibly coloured flowers even Harvey couldn’t describe, a small store where the workers bought rice and tobacco, a wooden hospital, a long barracks, steel drum kilns for the copra, a mountain of coconut shells and husks, and a storehouse.

  My word, she said.

  Harvey seemed to need more.

  It’s like an . . . estate.

  Yes, said Harvey. Yes, it is an estate. I am the lord of the estate and these are my servants.

  He appeared to be serious.

  Stairs led to the plantation house, a dining room, kitchen, a bathroom on one end of a wide dark verandah. She was shown to the bedroom that was to be hers. Her suitcase had already been unpacked, the clothes hung in a wardrobe. A wire screen window opened onto the verandah.

  There was a lot of noise coming from Harvey’s bedroom next door as things were moved and traces of his sick wife, the poor woman, were packed away.

  Marjorie discovered that she would need new clothes. Strange that it hadn’t occurred to her until she arrived. Would she need a gown for dinner? A hat with a brim was something she certainly would need. She sat on the edge of the bed, hearing the birds and the chatter of natives. Someone yelled and she flinched. It was all as strange as the moon. She got up to close the door and sat back down and wept, wondering what on earth she had done.

  Each new day was better than the last. One foot in front of the other, until she was almost skipping. After spending Christmas on the plantation (fruit on platters, roast ducks, and painted natives holding a sing-sing in the garden) Marjorie wrote that letter to Phyllis, telling her where she was and that she was married. Not technically a lie, she might have told herself. Phyllis wrote back, a terse letter, to say Dickie would start school at Nailsworth and she would be welcome home when she returned. The boy missed his mother.

  Marjorie by then had no intention of returning. The question was, when to bring Dickie out to Rabaul? He couldn’t go to school in Rabaul. He might as well be in Adelaide until she sorted things out. There didn’t seem to be much else for her to do. It didn’t take long to discover that Harvey already had a secretary in Bill Parker, who could type and take shorthand and kept the bewildering plantation accounts in order, when he was able to. He spent some days in bed.

  Bill Parker was still confused about the sudden turn of events, the casting aside of Winifred.

  The woman was mad, said Harvey. Doctor’s orders.

  It didn’t explain the new woman. Not at all.

  Parker was a short man, shorter than Marjorie, with grey eyes and grey hair. He had no teeth, just badly fitting dentures. She would have been shocked when he told her he was 39.

  Parker had had a bad war. He’d been a law clerk in Melbourne, signed up the day after his 18th birthday, in 1917, and served as a stretcher bearer in the war’s final stages. That would have been all right except for one small indiscretion. He could even remember the date and place: 14 October 1918, Paris. He’d come home with syphilis, cured they said, but it remained on his record. What he’d seen as a stretcher bearer wasn’t on his record, but it was in his mind’s eye most days.

  Bill Parker had tried to make a go of it at his father’s law firm in Melbourne, but he couldn’t settle and in 1920 took a job in Papua as a clerk of the court. It lasted all of two weeks before he went to New Guinea to work eventually as a Patrol Officer, or Kiap. That’s where he met Ted Harvey, who later took him on as manager.

  Ted’s a very generous man, Parker told Marjorie. Too generous for his own good, sometimes.

  Parker had long been in poor health, possibly because of recurring syphilis and malaria. He would be unable to leave his bed for days at a time, and Marjorie may well have taken over the running of the plantation, pouring herself into her new life.

  Every day she was woken by the striking of a bell. The plantation workers would line up in front of the bungalow’s front steps, where Harvey or Parker would address them, and then they’d be sent in groups to collect coconuts or to clear the grass around the rubber trees. A line of boys (‘They are all called “boys”,’ she would write to George, ‘even the old men! I can’t tell you the other names they were called’) worked at the kiln, splitting the coconuts, removing the white flesh, drying it in the drums and bagging the copra.

  Marjorie’s own work around the house and in the office would be done by late morning, before the heat of the day. In the late afternoon, she would wade in the sea before the sandflies drove her back to the house.

  She had told her mother that she was ‘married’ and knew the impression she had given was that she had married Ted Harvey, but in the early days they didn’t live as man and wife, in what Phyllis might have called the Biblical sense. That would come later.

  In those early days, in the cool of the evenings, on the verandah by kerosene lantern light after sunset, it might have seemed that she’d made the right decision. She missed Dickie, of course she did, but she realised that she had never been truly alive like this before and she wasn’t prepared to let guilt (and, let’s face it, she did feel some guilt for her behaviour) destroy that feeling. Anyway, she fully intended to bring Dickie to this place of colour and light. It would do him good.

  In truth, life on the plantation had more comforts than Marjorie had ever known. She never had to cook or clean or do the dishes, or even wash her own clothes. She went through the books, taking her role as secretary seriously.

  No need for that, Harvey would say. Come and have a drink.

  Harvey seemed determined to try to keep her away from the books, and she began to see why. The plantation was struggling financially. Harvey’s wealth was indeed an illusion.

  The natives were worked hard collecting coconuts and crushing rocks at the gold mine and he couldn’t keep them from running away. At any one time, a tenth of the workforce had run away or were in jail for running away.

  Jail?

  Would you rather me beat them?

  No!

  I am the lord of the estate, he reminded her. Discipline has to be maintained or they’ll all run away. Then they’d have no money for tobacco or kaikai and they’d steal from us. Then they really would be beaten. So you see, it’s all for their own good.

  In the following months, Marjorie learnt to give orders to the ‘boys’ and even picked up some words of pidgin (such as kaikai, meaning food).

  ‘My shoe broke the other day. The boy said, “Dispela bagarap pinis,”’ she would write to George and Jimmy, ‘“This fellow buggered up, finished.”’ Imagine inventing a language based mostly on swearwords.’

  Marjorie thought the plantation workers were charming. Harvey had little to do with any of them except the boss boys, but would yell if he saw someone drop something, or heard someone speak in a manner he didn’t like. The workers would cower, but she never saw him strike.

  One day, Harvey went to a neighbouring plantation called Neu Kauern to see a man called Ernie Till, and he returned in a temper, refusing to speak to Marjorie until dinnertime.

  Bill Parker took Noel Coward’s ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’ from its paper sleeve and wound up the gramophone.

  After a few whiskies, Harvey began cursing ‘an infernal kanaka’ with whom he’d had a fight.

  Bill Parker caught Marjorie’s eye and whispered, Joe Roca. He’s a half-caste.

  What happened?

  Parker shru
gged. Roca’s a very disagreeable chap.

  In what way?

  Oh, well, he’s educated. Finished primary school, I believe. It made him surly. And his father was a Spaniard.

  But that’s terrible, said Marjorie.

  Don’t be sarcastic. You can’t have them arguing with you. Nothing would get done if the boys were allowed to speak their minds.

  Whatever Joe Roca had said that Harvey objected to, it would have been Harvey who had prevailed. He soon forgot about it. But Joe Roca never did.

  CHAPTER 16

  The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions . . . but by iron and blood.

  — Otto von Bismarck

  From the beach at Lassul Bay, looking north, the Bismarck Sea is absurdly beautiful. The setting sun paints distant thunderheads not in soft pastels but in vibrant oils: red, orange and yellow. On moonlit nights it’s all silver, from the palm leaves to the sparkling sea. It’s almost a cliché, a postcard, a ‘picture of serenity’.

  The Bismarck Sea’s human history, though, particularly its European history, is defined by ‘iron and blood’. It’s still a zone of conflict, above and below the picture postcard scene.

  Behind the beach today it’s hard to see exactly where Ted Harvey’s bungalow was, but you get a sense of what Marjorie smelled and heard and saw through the palm trees during those few years of peace before the Pacific War. There are still native huts and cooking fires, dogs, chickens, trees rustling in the sea breeze, the sudden crash of a falling coconut.

  Ted Harvey’s plantation bungalow is gone. It survived the war, I’m told, but not the peace, scavenged for building material in the hard years after the war finished and the plantation fell into neglect.

  Lassul Bay is now the government centre for this area of the coast, and there’s a new health centre, police station, district administrator’s office and local government council offices.