by Ian Townsend
Before that big earthquake in 1941, Fisher didn’t know the Bainings fault existed.
Norman Fisher had moved into the Rabaul Volcano Observatory in 1940. The New Guineans called it Haus Guria and it was built of fibro and tin and looked as though it might have been plucked from the suburbs of Melbourne.
When war was declared in Europe, Fisher was in Wau and had joined the local militia, the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles. When he moved into the observatory at Rabaul, he realised the seismographs he’d ordered from Germany would never come, so he designed his own and had the local Public Works department build them. Each was a hollow steel cylinder with five lead weights inside, and the whole thing was wired to the walls and suspended from the ceiling. Any movement in the earth would be magnified by levers, and a stylus would scratch the earth’s signature on smoked paper. He also placed other instruments around the caldera to measure land tilt and tides, and he regularly took the volcanoes’ temperature. He soon had a mass of data to examine.
Things were heating up below and above ground at Rabaul. Fisher worked at the observatory during the day, taking the earth’s vital signs, and in the evenings prepared for war by drilling with the militia at the Rabaul Botanical Gardens on the slope of the North Daughter.
By the start of 1941, Japan was fortifying its islands just over the equator and the Advisory War Council told Australians that the war had moved into a new stage of ‘utmost gravity’ and needed ‘the greatest effort of preparedness that this country has ever made’.
The remaining Japanese at Rabaul quietly went home and, around ANZAC Day 1941, a battalion of nearly 1000 men from the 2/22nd Battalion of the Australian Imperial Forces began arriving in Simpson Harbour.
George Manson took his nephew Dickie to town on Harvey’s plantation schooner to watch the soldiers parade. Dickie, who had just turned ten, knew what he wanted to be when he grew up.
Plenty of time for that, said Marjorie. School work first.
By the end of the year the garrison, known as Lark Force, had grown to 1400 men and women and outnumbered Rabaul’s civilians, who couldn’t decide whether to be alarmed or annoyed by all the young men and the marching.
Early one Monday morning late in 1941, soldiers hauled two obsolete anti-aircraft guns from the previous war onto Norman Fisher’s lawn, and dug slit trenches in Ellice Fisher’s flower beds. Later, a dozen Wirraway fighter planes would buzz the ridge on exercises.
The 2/22nd Battalion and the 24 RAAF Squadron had made themselves at home. The 2/22nd called itself Little Hell (‘little hell’ being slang for a hand of three two-pip cards in poker), but the battalion and the town soon adapted to each other, and Little Hell’s brass band of Salvation Army recruits put on concerts. For a while, it was almost fun.
The battalion was badly equipped and undertrained for the war that was coming, but morale was high. New Guinea was Australian territory, after all, even though the terms of the League of Nations mandate stated that ‘no military or naval bases shall be established or fortifications erected in the territory’.
In fact, there were secret plans to turn Rabaul into an American base. The US and the British were already having a conversation about what to do should Japan attack the US, and that included turning Rabaul into a base for American ships and planes. In the secret dispatches between Washington and Melbourne, Rabaul was code-named ‘Base F’.
What made everyone nervous about Base F were its volcanoes. After the big earthquake in January 1941, Fisher began to see the temperature inside Tavurvur climb and, just after breakfast on 6 June, it erupted with a bang and scared the hell out of Little Hell. It wasn’t as bad as the eruption four years earlier, but the Australian press suggested the harbour might be ‘blown to atoms’, so the government sent its top brass to Rabaul, where Fisher reassured them that there was unlikely to be a major eruption, in the short-term at least.
Relieved, the Chief of Naval Staff sent a polite cable to Washington: ‘The Commonwealth Government would be pleased to receive a United States mission to make all necessary arrangements for the defence of Rabaul and would suggest that such a mission should include the technical officers necessary to make detailed plans.’
The plans included upgrading a little-used airfield outside the caldera to take B-17 bombers. Vunakanau, 11 miles from Rabaul, had been a grass airstrip just over one kilometre long and the Australian Government quietly asked the New Guinea Administration to extend it another 600 metres. In November, an unmarked B-17 bomber landed at Vunakanau on a secret test run and, later that month, in San Francisco Bay, the US Navy began loading a ship bound for Rabaul. The cargo included antisubmarine nets, a minefield, sonar and a team of US ‘technical advisers’, as well as six 7.45 inch guns for coast defence, eight 3.5 inch anti-aircraft guns, twelve 0.5 inch machine guns, and ammunition.
But it was all too late. On 7 December 1941, only days after the loading began, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
CHAPTER 21
I say, then, to the people of Australia: Give of your best in the service of this nation. There is a place and part for all of us. Each must take his or her place in the service of the nation, for the nation itself is in peril. This is our darkest hour.
— Australian Prime Minister, John Curtin, 8 December 1941
The dogs began barking as a car crunched up the white coral drive just as the Coote family was sitting down for dinner at Tavui. An Australian Army officer appeared at the front door.
‘Just for safety’s sake,’ he told Philip Coote, ‘you’d better clear out tonight. We’re expecting bombs sometime or other.’
The Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor.
Where’s that again? asked Philip Coote.
I’m not sure, sir. Hawaii, I think.
Oh, for heaven’s sake, said Rhoda. It’s Hawaii.
It may have come as a surprise to the American public, but in Rabaul preparations for war with Japan had been underway for months and everyone joked that the house at Tavui would be the first bombed. Suddenly it wasn’t funny. Standing there at the door, the gardens and sea silver in the moonlight, Rhoda must have felt very vulnerable.
‘I remember running around,’ said Diana, ‘and we got mosquito nets, a couple of sheets, things that we thought would be important. The dogs were my main worry. And we got in the car and we went into the bush somewhere, and stayed the night there.’
Visiting them at the time was Hugh Scott, Diana’s uncle on her mother’s side, just arrived from the Baining coast, where he managed the plantation next door to that odd bod, Ted Harvey.
Rhoda had run into Marjorie at a wedding in Rabaul two days earlier, and might have asked Hugh over dinner about Ted Harvey’s current state of mind.
She seems all right. Although, I suspect she’d be as mad as he is if her brothers weren’t there, said Hugh. But it’s the boy I worry about, running about like Tarzan, half-naked . . .
Hugh! Diana’s here.
The family drove the car a short distance away from the house into the jungle and spent an uncomfortable night with little sleep.
Diana remembers her father and Hugh giving up on sleep and walking down to the beach, to look out over the dark sea.
‘I went with them and it was just dawn, grey light, and I remember thinking, oh, this was very strange, and they were talking. And you could sort of feel that something terrible was happening.’
But nothing terrible happened to them, then. No planes came, no bombs fell, and no-one could really imagine a war being fought in such a peaceful place. The South Pacific was as far as you could get from the war, surely. The family moved back into the house, but the next day Philip Coote decided to have a slit trench dug near the house. As Gordon Thomas wrote in the next edition of the Rabaul Times, ‘Rabaul has its tin hat on — metaphorically speaking, of course — just in case.’
Down in Melbourne, 5000 kilometres away, the Australian War Cabinet was less sanguine about what fate had in store for Rabaul. A large part of the Japanese battl
e fleet that had hammered Pearl Harbor was about to dash south towards Australia. Cables marked ‘Most Secret’ flew in both directions, their diplomatic language masking a sense of grave disappointment.
‘It had been that [the] carrier should sail for Base F on or about January 1st,’ the Naval Attaché in Washington told the Chief of Naval Staff in Melbourne the day war was declared on Japan, ‘but there is every likelihood that transport of material to Rabaul will be indefinitely suspended owing to insecurity of trans-Pacific route and possible shortage of shipping consequent on necessity for transporting large quantities of repair material to Honolulu.’
The ship in San Fransisco Bay was unloaded and the plans for reinforcing Base F shelved. You can imagine, in the War Cabinet in Melbourne, men putting their heads into their hands.
Melbourne told Washington four days later that, ‘Under the forgoing circumstance and as reinforcements and subsequent supply would be hazardous without United States cooperation, it is considered better to maintain Rabaul only as an advance air operational base, its present small garrison being regarded as hostages to fortune.’
The Australian Government was leaving the small garrison to its fate, but what to do with the civilians? For a few days, as the War Cabinet ruminated, life in Rabaul carried on under its own languid momentum.
Marjorie’s belief that Lassul was a paradise, a benign and happy place for all, was shattered the day a young man named Yambai died in her arms.
Yambai had been hired six months earlier, but like many new recruits found he didn’t like the work and spent most of that time trying to run away. Harvey would have said Yambai was lazy, but he was probably homesick for his village in the Sepik, far away on the New Guinea mainland.
A day earlier, George had brought Yambai back on the schooner from Rabaul, where he’d been in jail again for deserting. The day after he’d returned (according to the prosecutor’s statement) Yambai woke up in the workers’ quarters and went outside to eat a plate of tapioca for breakfast. He was walking back to his quarters when he passed Harvey’s ‘boss-boy’, Manek, who noted that Yambai was back and confronted him, asking why he kept running away. Manek then slapped Yambai, who covered his face and crouched, expecting more blows. Manek kicked him in the stomach and walked away. Yambai lay there moaning and was helped back to bed, but after a few hours he got up and went outside. As he reached the bottom step, he fell face first onto the ground and vomited. One of the workers ran to fetch Harvey.
By the time Harvey arrived, Yambai had stopped breathing. Harvey tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and Marjorie came running and held Yambai’s hand, but the young man was dying. She felt his pulse flicker only once.
Harvey tried for an hour to revive him, before standing back. Yambai lay limply on the ground. It was the first time Marjorie had seen death up close.
Harvey called the district patrol officer, who arrived that night and took the body back to Rabaul the next morning. He then returned to question everyone, and Manek was arrested for manslaughter and taken away.
An autopsy revealed a two and a half inch tear in Yambai’s spleen, which had grown abnormally large because of malaria. Yambai had bled to death internally.
‘Working a native with an enlarged spleen is a dangerous thing,’ the Rabaul Times had noted after a spate of deaths from beatings. ‘It has been suggested on many occasions that the authorities should make it compulsory for a native’s indenture to be cancelled when signs of abnormal splenic growth are apparent.’
What if the authorities made it compulsory not to beat people? said Marjorie quietly to George, who was spending more and more time way from the plantation, on the schooner.
Life at Lassul lost its shine for a while.
Dickie, however, was still in love with it. He was ten, had been living on Ted Harvey’s plantation for nearly two years and, as Hugh Scott had said, running wild, but reluctantly doing his correspondence school lessons. He’d sneak away to help George on the boat and with the various bits of machinery that Jimmy was fixing.
The declaration of war with Japan came just before the Christmas school holidays. Dickie thought Marjorie, George, Jimmy and Bill Parker looked worried the next day, but Harvey seemed quite happy about it.
Do I have to finish the lessons? said Dickie. There’s a war on.
Marjorie asked George, What’s going to happen to us here? Japan was a long way away; she knew, she’d been there.
Probably nothing.
No civilian at Rabaul really knew what was going to happen, but Harvey sat hunched over the Teleradio every evening muttering and sometimes trying to have conversations with people who told him to get the hell off the air.
The day after war was declared, Harvey sent George to Rabaul to get supplies.
For Christmas?
For the war, said Harvey. There’s a war on. We have to be ready for when they come.
Surely they won’t come here, though, said Marjorie.
They’re coming, all right. Harvey put his head to one side as if listening for something coming, but there were only the sounds of the night: native voices, the tap of a moth against a lantern.
The next day a plane flew low overhead, following the coast. Harvey gave George £50, an enormous sum, to buy all the tinned food he could find.
Dickie and I will go, too, explained Marjorie. Christmas shopping.
Christmas be damned, said Harvey. But don’t forget the beer.
Four days after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the Australian Government ordered the evacuation of all civilian European women and children from the territories of Papua and New Guinea.
Japan’s South Seas Force was already scheduled to invade Rabaul, with the help of Admiral Inoue Shigeyoshi’s 4th Fleet. Rabaul’s volcanic harbour was an obvious strategic prize and Inoue was worried the US would get there first. If the Americans could put B-17s on Rabaul’s Vunakanau aerodrome, they’d be close enough to bomb Japan’s 4th Fleet’s base at Truk, just north of the equator.
Rabaul’s garrison and civilians knew the Japanese were a threat but didn’t know they were coming so fast, or would hit them so hard. No-one, apart from Ted Harvey and Marjorie, had seen Japan’s huge sleek battleships and fast shiny planes, and so the evacuation of New Guinea was done at a tropical pace, and many people ended up missing the evacuation ships.
A week after the evacuation was ordered, a boy came running up the track from the beach to the Lassul homestead carrying a brown ‘On His Majesty’s Service’ envelope.
Marjorie knew from the radio that the Japanese were sweeping down through Asia towards Singapore, Where they’ll meet their match, said Jimmy.
Will they? said Marjorie. She wasn’t so sure.
Jimmy and Dickie had seen from the beach what they were sure were Japanese reconnaissance planes, but an actual invasion didn’t really seem possible.
The only person talking about it openly was Ted Harvey.
For heaven’s sake, Ted, you’re scaring Dickie.
No, he’s not, said Dickie, who was enjoying the excitement.
Harvey winked at Dickie. Be prepared, right?
Marjorie was on the verandah when the boy came panting to the house, ran up the stairs and handed her the brown OHMS envelope. She opened it and read that she and Dickie had to leave the next day. She surprised the delivery boy, and herself, by bursting into tears.
The monsoon had arrived and Lassul was being swept by heavy showers that day. The wind had whipped the Bismarck Sea into foam that blew onto the beach.
The envelope told her that the schooner Shamrock was going to call in the next day, on its way down the coast picking up the plantation wives and children, but she wasn’t sure how she’d get out to it in this weather.
Harvey saw her tears, and she handed the letter to him.
These chaps don’t know what they’re talking about. Worst thing they could do. After a moment, he sat down next to her and took her hand. You won’t leave, will you?
Of course not.
It’s unlikely that Harvey could have stopped Marjorie from leaving if she’d really wanted to. He would have been no match for Jimmy and George, but what were Marjorie’s choices? If she abandoned Harvey, she would be returning to Australia with no money and no right to any financial support from Harvey or the government. She wasn’t his legal wife. As an evacuee, she’d be asked all sorts of awkward questions, and all sorts of things might be revealed: that she wasn’t married to Harvey, that both she and Harvey were married to other people. And if she did return to Australia, what then? She’d left Jack Gasmier and couldn’t reasonably expect him to take her back. Her mother believed she had married Harvey, and the inevitable discovery . . . well, it didn’t bear thinking about.
Perhaps if she and Harvey returned to Brisbane together? But the letter hadn’t mentioned civilian men. Only the women and children were being evacuated. In any case, Harvey was determined to do his bit and would refuse to go.
Lassul was now her home and Harvey was convinced that the Japanese, if they did invade, would leave the planters to work their plantations. Why wouldn’t they? The Australians had let the Germans run their plantations during the Australian military occupation of the Great War. Nothing else would make sense.
Marjorie had also seen how polite the Japanese had been to her in Japan. The brutality she’d heard about didn’t match her experience at all and was surely propaganda. In any case, the war would soon be over, now the Americans were fighting. And they had supplies to last until then.
In the end, the decision to stay may have been an easy one. The risks of staying may not have seemed great, but if she left, she risked almost everything.
On 22 December, despite a heavy gale, the schooner Shamrock came to collect Hugh Scott’s wife, Mildred, and Muriel Peterson from Guntershoe. It anchored in Lassul Bay, but Marjorie and Dickie didn’t appear on the beach, and eventually it sailed on.