Line of Fire

by Ian Townsend

  Cocoa is still grown here, in the mountains, but the biggest potential source of income is gold. Gold and other minerals. In the 1930s, when Ted Harvey was scratching for gold in the mountains of his backyard, he could not have known that the real mineral wealth was actually in his front yard, under the sea, beneath that gorgeous sunset.

  For a century, gold, copra and rubber made the northeastern, volcanic half of New Guinea a colonial battleground. The Germans came to this coast in the late 19th century looking for gold and copra and other things to mine and trade. Germany colonised New Guinea in 1884 and Chancellor Otto von Bismarck let the Neuguinea-Kompagnie run it as it wished, for a while. In 1914, Australia, which had already colonised Papua, fought the Germans near Rabaul and expropriated Germany’s New Guinea assets. The Japanese invaded in 1942 and took over the plantations and mines, and then the Americans helped the Australians take it all back.

  The events that led Marjorie and Dickie to Rabaul, and Ted Harvey before them, may seem almost like accidents of fate, but they were influenced by Rabaul’s volcanic activity, the minerals and landscapes it created, and the nations far away that wanted the trading ports and coconut oil, the iron and gold.

  The Gazelle Peninsula, at the north-eastern end of the island of New Britain, was the scene of battles during the First and Second World Wars, and those battles were fought in most part for those resources.

  It’s called the Gazelle Peninsula, but it looks nothing like a gazelle. It’s not much of a peninsula, either. If it looks like anything at all, it’s the head of Snowy, the fox terrier in the Tintin cartoons. It was actually named after the German ship SMS Gazelle, which came exploring to New Guinea in 1875, nearly a decade before Germany annexed it.

  So if you imagine the Gazelle Peninsula as the head of Snowy the terrier, then the Baining Mountains run from Snowy’s floppy right ear to his bearded muzzle.

  The rocks of the Bainings are young, only hundreds of thousands or millions of years old, compared to the two-anda-half-billion-year-old rocks of South Australia and Western Australia, where Jack Gasmier was prospecting for gold. The Gazelle Peninsula was pushed up out of the sea in the late stages of the current Cenozoic geological era, which stretches back 66 million years (just after the Mesozoic, the age of dinosaurs, when Pangaea was breaking up and the continents were drifting to their current positions).

  In geological terms, it’s a blink. A palaeontologist, talking about the evolution of mammals, will talk in smallish chunks of time called epochs. The oldest rocks in the Bainings are from the Eocene epoch between 34 and 56 million years ago. Those rocks make up the backbone of the Baining Mountains, and mixed up with them are even younger rocks from volcanic activity in the last 30 million years. In that time, the land has been rising and also twisting and tilting.

  All this movement has happened quickly in geological terms, and much of the volcanic activity around Rabaul has happened in the current two-and-a-half-million-year Quaternary Period. The Rabaul caldera is a baby, sculptured a mere 1400 years ago when that giant volcano erupted and collapsed into its emptied magma chamber, to be flooded by the sea.

  The whole of the Gazelle Peninsula, at that northern end of the island of New Britain, is also being twisted anticlockwise as the Australian tectonic plate moves north. Snowy’s head is being wrenched from his body and it’s cracking. A big faultline runs down the spine of the Baining Mountains, with small faults radiating outwards. The ground shifts and snaps, and if you walk through this area, you can feel it moving.

  Around the Pacific Rim, along the Ring of Fire, the plates jostle and crunch, creating volcanoes, pushing up mountains, and raising islands in long archipelagos. It’s a complicated picture, but nothing’s quite as complicated as what’s happening around the Gazelle Peninsula.

  Trapped between the northward-heading Australian Plate and the westward-moving Pacific Plate are those smaller plates that have snapped off in the collision, in a sort of eddy between the big plates. The boundaries of at least three plates meet near Rabaul, and here the rocks are churned and heated as hot water rises through the cracks, dissolving minerals and bringing them to the surface. Most of that is happening under the sea.

  At the bottom of the Bismarck Sea, water heated by magma to 600 degrees Celsius is being forced up through the cracking earth’s crust to the sea floor, and on its way it’s dissolving gold and silver, iron, magnesium, zinc, tin, lead. All these heavy metals are being mixed with sulphur to make a sulphide cocktail. When the cocktail hits the cold and deep ocean floor it suddenly cools and those metals drop out of solution, sometimes as alloys and occasionally one metal at a time, forming metal chimneys. These smoking columns rise from the sea floor before collapsing under their own weight, to rise and fall again and again. Vast fields of broken metal columns lie on the seafloor near these hydrothermal vents like the ruins of an ancient city.

  A Canadian company called Nautilus has secured the rights to mine these metal columns lying on the floor of the Bismarck Sea, and the company has chosen Ted Harvey’s plantation at Lassul Bay as its local base.

  Nautilus plans to send robot trucks rolling over the seabed to grind up those chimneys, the so-called ‘seafloor massive sulphide deposits’, which will be sucked 1.6 kilometres up to the surface through pipes, as though by giant vacuum cleaners.

  There’s life down there, too, and the project’s been condemned by environmental groups, who say it will destroy ecosystems and perhaps species before they’ve even been identified, with unknown long-term consequences.

  Whether it’s mining versus the environment or nation against nation, conflict comes with the territory here.

  But back in the late 1930s, Marjorie Manson would not have imagined the conflict that was about to descend from the north. As she watched the sun set over the Bismarck Sea, she could not have pictured warplanes fighting among those painted clouds, ships exploding on that calm blue-green sea, or soldiers running up this beach to search for her. She had absolutely no reason to believe that war would soon overrun this peaceful place and sweep away everything she loved.

  CHAPTER 17

  One never tires of the views round about and the mountain greenery. The sunsets are particularly beautiful and at night the fireflies come flitting among the trees, making it a real fairyland.

  — Mercia Murphy, ‘Life on a Copra Plantation’, The Argus, 1 August 1935

  As Marjorie watched those sunsets at Lassul, the talk on the plantation house verandahs and at the New Guinea Club was of the stubbornly low price of copra, the still-smoking volcanoes and war in faraway Europe.

  Nazi Germany wanted to reclaim its lost colonies and, as Bismarck had done in the 19th century, establish a new Reich. There were fears New Guinea might be handed back to appease Germany, and the political rhetoric had become heated.

  In June 1938, the Australian Minister for External Affairs (and former Prime Minister), Billy Hughes, visited Rabaul and told Ted Harvey and other residents who lived ‘in the shadow of Matupit’ that Australia had its mandate ‘and all hell is not going to take it away’.

  This Territory has a great future, and what we have we shall hold. Some people down below ask what will happen if they took the Mandate away from us. I say: nothing.

  What he meant was that Australia wouldn’t abandon Rabaul even if the mandate was removed. New Guinea was Australia’s.

  Hear hear, said Ted Harvey, adjourning with the white male crowd to the bar.

  When word of Hughes’s speech reached the Prime Minister, Joseph Lyons, he no doubt sighed despairingly before writing to the German and Japanese ambassadors in Canberra to explain Hughes’s comments. Best not to prod the hornets’ nest.

  The League of Nations had given Australia a C-class mandate to hold the Territory in trust, but that didn’t mean Australia owned it. At some point, New Guinea had to be handed back to the New Guineans, although in 1938 the thought of handing New Guinea over to anyone seemed absurd to plantation owners like Harvey. Nearly all th
e New Guineans in Rabaul were servants or, on the plantations, indentured labourers. Few had an education beyond primary school and those who did worked as clerks for government departments or shipping companies.

  The other reason why Australia believed it needed New Guinea was as a shield. In 1938, the Japanese also had a mandate over Pacific islands north of the equator. Rabaul was closer to Japanese Truk, in Micronesia, than it was to Cairns in Australia, and the Japanese, in contempt of their own mandate rules, were fortifying Truk.

  ‘The ring of these South Pacific islands encompasses Australia like a chain of fortresses,’ said Hughes, ‘and any Power which controls New Guinea controls Australia.’

  Ted Harvey would drink to that. White Australia had always feared invasion by an Asian country, and in 1938 that seemed more likely than ever.

  ‘What Australia must do now is to accelerate her defence programme,’ said the editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald on 11 October 1938, ‘for in these days armed strength is the only real title to either island or mainland possessions.’

  Australia’s mandate, though, forbade turning New Guinea’s islands into fortresses, as Hughes was suggesting, so if they were to be fortified, well, best keep it secret.

  As Marjorie would learn, secrets in Rabaul were hard to keep. There were 40 to 50 Japanese residents in town, mostly shopkeepers and traders who some people thought might also be spies.

  Japanese ships were coming in to port and roaming the coast, trading with planters such as Ted Harvey. Some Japanese men were well dressed, educated, carried cameras and asked about gold and iron deposits being found in the Bainings.

  In May 1938, Australia had placed an embargo on iron ore exports to Japan and the Japanese felt they were being forced to look elsewhere.

  Since the early 1930s, Japan had maintained a policy of advancing its trading influence into the south seas. Later, this policy meshed with the ambitions of Japan’s military and foreign policy.

  The Japanese Government encouraged the spread of trade into the South Pacific, and the Japanese South Seas Company, Nan’yo Boeki Kaisha (NBK), became one of the biggest traders. Like the Australian company Burns Philp, NBK had retail stores and trading vessels, coconut plantations in the Japanese territories, and even gold and iron ore mines on the Japanese islands. NBK established an office in Rabaul, and its agents were to play a role in the war and in the fate of Ted Harvey and everyone else at Lassul.

  Unlike most planters, Harvey wasn’t contracted to Burns Philp or Carpenters. He would sell copra, cocoa, gold and rubber to anyone he damned well pleased, and he was known to do business with the Japanese. The main Japanese trader in Rabaul was NBK.

  Nan’yo Boeki Kaisha did more than just trade. It held film nights in Rabaul, showing the wonders of Japanese industry and the beauty of the Japanese landscape.

  Oh my. Real silk. And the kimono is so feminine, Marjorie said to Ted. Have you ever wanted to go to Japan?

  Good lord, no, said Harvey. Can we get a drink now?

  The Pacific Islands Monthly wasn’t impressed with the film nights either.

  In spite of wars and the echoes of wars, and the manifest distrust of all British communities in the Central and South Pacific, the Japanese continue with their program of commercial penetration — part of their campaign to secure economic domination of the Pacific.

  Talk of volcanic eruptions had made way for war. Vulcan by then had stopped steaming, its lower skirt even showing some green leg. On shopping trips into Rabaul, Marjorie had seen the town recover even more of its former beauty. From May to about September, when the wind blew from the south-east, the volcano Tavurvur still gave everything a daily layer of grey dust, but from October the north-west monsoon washed the dust away. An army of boys had coaxed grass and colour back into the gardens.

  It seemed as if people had forgotten the disaster, until a guria stopped them in the streets, and they’d exchange glances and wonder, Again?

  Marjorie was amazed by what could be bought at the Chinese and Japanese stores: china (of course!), cloth, cigarettes, furniture, and sweets all of a design that she’d never seen before. In the Rabaul Hotel, where she and Ted stayed when they came to town (yes, as a couple, the consequence, she supposed, of a lie being told often enough becoming the truth), boys swept the ash daily from the floors and then scrubbed them to a high polish with pieces of dried, oily coconut. On nights when the breeze brought the smell of rotten eggs, they’d hang pineapples in a bag from the ceiling to sweeten the air.

  Starved for a social life on the plantation, Marjorie increasingly begged Harvey for forays into town, for dances, dinners, and horse racing carnivals at the Botanical Gardens. But Harvey would avoid a trip if at all possible, and if he did go he would drink until the copra boat arrived to take them back to the plantation.

  They’re all fools, he’d say.

  Who are, Ted?

  They stare at me, you know. They talk. They stare at you.

  Marjorie wasn’t sure that was true, and she didn’t really care; she was restless again. The plantation books could be done in an hour, and if there was nothing to fill up the time, she thought of Dickie. Or worse, she forgot to think of him.

  In the quieter evenings, when the fireflies came out of the jungle and sparkled in the garden, her former life seemed so very far away that she wondered if it was real.

  CHAPTER 18

  ‘If I could live here on this secret island always and always and always, and never grow up at all, I would be quite happy,’ said Nora.

  — Enid Blyton, The Secret Island, 1938

  After the volcanic eruptions of 1937, Diana Coote’s mother refused to return to Haus Rakaia at Sulphur Creek. The house on the hill, built to catch the seabreeze, had caught the brunt of Tavurvur’s eruption. The windows of the upper storey that once showed a green and pleasant hill now showed a black and evil cone that had destroyed everything within a mile and poisoned the air. Its foul breath carried corrosive ash over the garden and house. It was an affront to good homemaking.

  When she’d returned to the house and seen the damage, Rhoda Coote had told her husband that if he wanted her to stay at Rabaul, Burns Philp had to build another house where there were no volcanoes. Under the circumstances, the company thought it was a reasonable request.

  A site was chosen eight miles out of town, over the caldera wall, along the coast that faced the Bismarck Sea, on a slice of paradise called Tavui Point. Not a volcano in view.

  The Burns Philp house, home of Diana Coote, at Tavui before the war

  (National Library of Australia)

  From Rabaul, Tavui is north, on the far side of the North Daughter, over the caldera wall. The North Daughter is another stratovolcano that the Tolai call Tovanumbatir, but it is definitely extinct, and from Tavui Point you wouldn’t even know it was there. The sides of the old volcano plunge down to the sea at Tavui and are so heavily wooded that you can’t see the top for the trees. The only view is of a languid sea, usually calm, often flat, and utterly serene. Coconuts and casuarinas frame a white coral sand beach. (Rabaul’s foreshore is black volcanic sand.) The view from Tavui was much the same as Marjorie’s view from Lassul, 40 miles west along that same stretch of coast.

  Burns Philp built the Coote family a new home at Tavui in the shape of an H. It had two storeys with two long parallel wings joined by a long corridor, designed to take advantage of the view and breeze. The family lived upstairs, and there was room enough downstairs for Burns Philp staff if there was another eruption. It’s of Tavui that young Diana Coote has her fondest childhood memories.

  Diana’s father, Philip, as manager of Burns Philp, would drive into Rabaul every day, but Diana stayed at Tavui and was enrolled in an Australian correspondence school. Since the eruption, Tavurvur kept breathing ash and gas over the town and Rhoda was worried about Diana’s health, so the Court Street school was out of the question. Diana did her correspondence lessons at Tavui in a downstairs room which had a view out to the se
a and, given a chance, she would climb through the window and escape to the beach with the dogs. It was a magical place for a child: a quiet sea, sandy beach, cliffs, dogs, warm tropical nights, cool breezes, parties on the lawn.

  ‘In front of the house there was the place we used to put chairs and they’d all sit outside,’ said Diana. ‘Around the house was white, with coral from the beach. They brought up truckloads of white dead coral and put it all over the ground, and all along the driveway that circled right up to the house and back again.’

  At the end of a long lawn, steps dropped down to the beach where her father had used dynamite to shatter the rocks and make a swimming pool at the water’s edge.

  ‘I could swim you see, and the rocks were all built up around and soon became lived in by little tiny coloured fishes, all sorts of beautiful fish, so if I wanted I could spend time looking at those.’

  The water was shallow near the beach and small tropical fish flashed through the coral between the rocks, but a few yards further out the water turned dark, dark blue. The beach was a wonderland, but the fine line separating Diana from the menacing depths of St George’s Channel made Rhoda uneasy.

  At one end of the beach was a native village. At the other end, an Enid Blyton landscape of cliffs and caves. (‘Now listen,’ said Jack thoughtfully. ‘Those caves are going to be jolly useful to us this summer if anyone comes to get us.’)

  Diana Coote at Tavui in 1939

  (Diana Martell collection)

  On weekends, Rhoda would arrange play dates with friends from Rabaul and, when she was about nine, Diana explored the cliffs and caves with a friend from town, Muriel MacGowan.

  ‘We went around to the cliffs, and we decided we better go home, the tide was coming in, but we left it too late,’ said Diana. ‘The little point of land we had to go around had waves beating on it, so we didn’t know what to do. We were stuck around there beneath the cliffs, so we thought we had better climb up over the cliff.