“I’ll lay long odds more get dead than make a fortune, Mick.”
“Goes without saying, George. What do you reckon for your chances, mate?”
“There’s a few good years yet, Mick. How many, I don’t know.”
“That says it for all of us. The war’s turned the whole bloody world upside down. Not so sure it’s finished, either. The Dutch ain’t going to keep their East Indies, and that’s just next door to us. Add to that, the French are going back into Cochin China and they’ll be fighting there and not necessarily winning. Depends on what happens in China, and that’s anybody’s guess.”
“Fred Higgins reckons the Communists are winning there. Mr Tse says the same. Going to be money running from China as a result, Mick. The Administration was going to take up all of the land owned by the Chinese in Rabaul, on the grounds that it was Crown Lands which returned to the Crown on the death of its tenants. Now, they are going to let the heirs of the families murdered by the Japs come back and rebuild. Lots of cash flying in the wind, Mick. A goodly amount to be invested in Queensland, so they hope. Be useful to rebuild after the war.”
“Then it’ll be the same in Lae, George. All the more reason to get back there and start up again. What about your house in Lae, mate?”
“Sell it, Mick. It’s in a good location. Should be worth a few hundred. We won’t be coming back to Lae. Too much to do here now that I’ve got to pick up where the old man left off.”
“Reckon you can stand in your old man’s shoes, George?”
“Christ knows, Mick! I’d reckoned to spend another twenty years easing me way into being the boss man. Not so simple now. I don’t fit in any place, just at the moment. Thing is, the old man spent twenty-five years with the Tolai, talking to ‘em, working with them, building things slowly. I’ve got six months before they’re going to be expecting me to deliver some sort of change.”
“Can you do it, George?”
“Fred Higgins will want peace and quiet, and he’s bright enough to know that means talking to the Tolai and giving them schools and roads and aid posts as a starter. It’s a question of whether he can find money to do it – and that means twisting the arms of Federal politicians, and they won’t have enough money for all they want to do in Australia. You fancy explaining that to the Tolai, Mick?”
“Not bloody likely, George. What’s the answer?”
“Tread very carefully, Mick, and remember that the old days are gone and the new ones ain’t got here yet. Three or four months of every year have got to be in Cairns, mate – making good and sure the kids grow up knowing where they belong. Some of the planters are going to decide they belong here, which is fair enough. They might manage it, too. I ain’t going that route, unless Mary is determined that she wants to stay. It ain’t just my decision, Mick.”
“Fair enough, George. Not such a problem for me, mate. Nowhere else for me to go. Back home to Lae, for me. One advantage I’ve got on you, mate – I’m thirty years older; I’ll be dead before the old days are gone.”
A New Place
Chapter Eleven
Nearly thirty years later George stood next to Mary in the front row of the stand at the Queen Elizabeth Park in Rabaul, their four children at their side, two grown adults, the younger pair in their late teens. They came to attention as the Australian Flag and Union Jack were hauled down and the new flag of the country of Papua New Guinea rose in its place. The band played and the Constabulary paraded past and saluted, all very smart. The Premier of the Province of East New Britain – a gentleman from Raluana village, to the surprise of none – took the salute.
Similar celebrations took place in every province of the new country, though slightly marred by ongoing tribal fighting in some of the Highland provinces, the Enga especially turbulent. All was quiet in East New Britain, however, and the schoolchildren present from the secondary schools in Kokopo and Malabunga and the pair in Rabaul itself sang mightily in celebration. Their seniors from the National High School on the north coast were also present, all of them aware that they were the elite, were very soon to be senior figures in the new state.
An Inspector of Police stood next to them, watching with pride, tall and intelligent for a policeman. The Constabulary had been first of all of the institutions in the Territory to bring on and promote national officers and many of the brightest of the young men had chosen to become policemen as a result.
“A good day for us, Mr Hawkins.”
“I think so, Inspector Ainui. Necessary – there is no place for colonies in the world of the 1970s. Countries must be free.”
Inspector Ainui agreed – there was no alternative to independence. He had studied in Australia and in England and knew just how far the country had to go before it had economic freedom, but every nation had to start somewhere. He was an ambitious man as well, expected to reach very senior status within a few years, would do better in an independent country than in a colony.
“Are you to stay here and become a citizen, Mr Hawkins?”
“George, Inspector Ainui – no need for such formality.”
“Graham, sir.”
“Thanks, Graham. No, I shall not become a citizen. I am talking to a buyer for the plantations at the moment. I had suggested that the Administration should buy me out five years ago, and then sell the places on to village cooperatives, but they wouldn’t have any of that. Independence would not come for another fifty years, they said, so there was no prospect of encouraging cooperatives, or any other form of local enterprise. So, I shall sell to Carpenters or Steamships, whichever works out as the better. I expect to be gone before the Wet comes in.”
“A pity, George. What happens to your managers?”
George had two Tolai plantation managers, somewhat to the annoyance of some of his contemporaries in the plantations.
“They stay, as part of the deal. Neither company has shown any problem with that, Graham.”
“Good. What of your children, Ned and Jutta especially?”
“Ned’s working for me in Cairns and Jutta is lecturing in mathematics at university, well beyond my understanding. The other two boys are still working out what they will do with themselves. I doubt they will come up here. Time for us to go, Graham. There’s no place for masters, not any longer.”
“No. The day of the masters is over, George. But we need expertise from Australia and England and America, and from any other country that will help – except India and China. The Indian men who have come have been greedy and the Chinese work for their government, not ours.”
George was not sure that he agreed with the stereotyping; all Indians were not the same, he was sure. He was quite certain that all Chinese were under strict control of their own people, but there were very few of them coming from the mainland now.
“It’s difficult, Graham. Volunteers who come for free generally are young and inexperienced; well meaning, for sure, but not the most useful of people. Real experts, men in the middle of their careers, need to be paid real money – they can’t afford to give their services for nothing, not with houses to buy and families to keep. It has to be government aid, and politicians don’t give something for nothing. I don’t envy you, trying to build your country over the next fifty years. But, it is your country. You have got it, you must make it work. If I do something, then I am the maker, not you.”
“True. But we cannot do it. There are four million people at least in PNG, and fewer than two thousand of us educated to senior high school and above. It can’t be done. There are politicians in the provincial assembly who don’t really know what money is; there’s some in Waigani, in the Parliament at Port Moresby, who think that independence means we shall be as rich as Australia next year. Everybody thinks we shall be better off for being free. We shall be, but not in terms of money, George.”
They looked at the happy crowd, all of them knowing that the good times were about to come.
“Perhaps it would have been better if none of us had ever come to
this land, Graham.”
“If you had not, others would have. The Chinese had been coming for hundreds of years. The Russians were sending expeditions. The Germans took half the country and governed it badly. It would have been worse for us if you had not come. At least the Diggers were less willing to hang and flog us – but maybe the country would have been better off for more discipline. I do not know, George. I must go, I shall be on duty all night - trying to calm down the drunks, I expect.”
“Good luck.”
George drove out to Kokopo, knowing he would not do so many more times, thinking back over the last thirty years since the war.
There were power lines along the road now, and an electricity supply through them that was reliable more often than not. Parts of the road were surfaced with tarmac; the rest was frequently graded. That made a difference to the ordinary villagers’ lives – they could listen to the radio and drive in buses and trucks to take goods to the market and to buy frozen meat in Rabaul and bring it back home to eat a good meal once a week.
There was an aid post in every village now, and penicillin in their fridges. The death rate among children had been more than halved as a result, and the villages were being swarmed under by youths with no jobs and no land to work.
Graham had said there were four million people in the country, which was no more than a guess and probably an underestimate; whatever the real figure, at least a half of them were under the age of twenty. They would not be able to work, but that would not stop them producing families of their own.
He passed the secondary school at Kokopo, still celebrating. Perhaps a third of the teachers were local men and women – the rest a mixture of Australians, English, Filipinos and Canadians, some paid, some volunteers. Too few were nationals, he thought – the children were still seeing that their own people were not good enough to be their teachers. He waved as they shouted across to him, knowing that he personally was well-liked, at least.
“To the Sports Club or down to the Ralum Club? Which do you prefer.”
All in the car voted for the Sports Club – it was a larger building and had better fans.
George stood at the bar, talking to the other planters in for the celebration they would have a barbecue and perhaps a dance in the evening, if they could persuade the record player to work. The wives and girls were sat at their own table, almost all of them with hard drinks – whisky and lemonade a favourite - in half-empty glasses, a long way from their first in most cases. The few young children played in a room to the side, under the supervision of house girls brought in for the purpose, reliable, trusted women who would watch for snakes and spiders as well as keep order among their charges.
“Not a lot longer, Ned.”
“Soon be over, Old Man. Kokopo’s about the last survivor of the old planter life in the whole of the South Pacific. Can’t last. Makes sense to get out. Grandma said that to me a few years back, just before she died. Told me I was sensible not to try to keep the plantations going up here. She was glad she never came back after the war, she said – the old days were dead, like it or not.”
“She was right, Ned. For me, they went when my father died. He was right to go the way he did, you know, Ned. He’d never have fitted in with the way things were going. The Administration would have thrown him out, deported him, for backing the Tolai when they first tried to form a council. He never did accept the official view that independence could never come. He was right.”
“When do you fly out, Old Man?”
“Day after tomorrow. I signed the deal with Carpenters yesterday, though it’s to be kept quiet till tomorrow – they reckoned it was better not to let the news out this close to Independence Day. The money’s in the bank in Cairns. Sleep in the old house tonight, then it’s into Rabaul to the hotel for tomorrow night and first plane out next morning. Your mother has sold some of her stuff and given a load away. Joe Schultz has made up half a dozen packing cases – all out of good, seasoned hardwood, best furniture quality – they’ll make bookshelves and a dresser or sideboard Down South. We finish packing tomorrow – space for anything you want to take for yourself, mate. No sense hanging about once the decision’s taken.”
Ned agreed – done was done.
“What about Kathleen, Dad?”
The ex-nurse had come up to the Gazelle with the family soon after the war and had taken over the aid posts on their plantations; she had soon found herself at the hospital at Vunapope as well, training local nurses mostly.
“She’s happy here, Ned, so she says. She’s moving into her own small place at Vunapope and will carry on doing what she’s good at. I’ve organised a few quid a year as a wage for her. She’ll do, mate.”
“She’s useful up here, Old Man. Don’t see what she’d do in Queensland.”
“No more can she. She lost contact with her parents years back; no place of her own to go there. No family, no friends. She’s ain’t got a lot of choice, Ned. Same as Daniel, you might say.”
Daniel was a Papuan Coastal who had come up to work for Ned at the hotel in Rabaul as soon as it had been opened. He had a wife, from a mixed-race plantation family, lived with her happily with their children, and was openly terrified for his future. They fitted in nowhere, had no clan, no land, no place of their own; he had no passport and no right to enter Australia, and no way of making a living there. If the hotel, which he managed very efficiently, was to be sold then he would probably be out, with no place to go. George had been able to find no alternative for him – he had no work he could go to and could not sponsor him to enter Australia, lacking sufficient qualifications for employment there.
“What does he do, Dad?”
“Christ alone knows, Ned. I don’t. I’ve put the hotel up for sale – it’s no use to me now and I can’t keep it living a thousand miles away, in a different country. One of the Chinese families will almost certainly buy it – but they won’t have a lot of use for Daniel. Your mother’s family are looking for a place for him – might be something.”
Mr Tse was long dead and his eldest son had sent his own son from Taiwan to succeed to the family businesses in Rabaul and Australia. They kept on friendly, but not especially close terms. There was a definite feeling that Mary should not have wed out of the community – a gwailo husband was a slight embarrassment. Only George’s money had kept the connection at all – he was potentially very useful if ever the family found the need to get out of Taiwan or the new Papua New Guinea in a hurry.
“We don’t fit in any more, Old Man.”
“Ain’t sure we ever did, Ned. Maybe we were only ever visitors, passing through. The place has done well for us, no question of that, but I ain’t sure about what we’ve done for the country in return. They ain’t cannibals now, and I suppose that can’t be a bad thing. They’ve got medicine and better food, which can’t be too bad, except that they’ve got so many piccaninnies living now that the place is bulging at the seams. We might have solved some of their problems, but I reckon we might have made as many more different ones.”
“Have another beer, mate. It ain’t that bad. There’s people going to be sad as they wave us goodbye.”
“True enough. Poor sods are left behind to fend for themselves now. The United Nations will do nothing for them. The Australians will spend millions in aid, but most of that will be stolen by the pollies, one way or another. For every thousand dollars the Australians send up, you won’t see ten spent outside Port Moresby. Most of the rest will end up back in Australia, buying land there. Good luck to ‘em, Ned – there’s nothing more for me to do. We’ve done our best, and it might be our worst for them. Is the barbie cooked yet?”
“Soon. Have a beer, Old Man?”
# # #
Please check out the author’s other novels listed on the following pages. Andrew’s recently penned Innocents at War Series, has already received much critical acclaim and comes highly recommended. Andrew is currently working on new novels which will be published throughout the
coming year, including another book in the outstanding The Earl’s Other Son Series. The series can be searched for on Amazon.
By the Same Author
Innocents at War Series: The Royal Flying Corps grew from the amateur hobbyists flying
the earliest and most dangerous machines. Mostly drawn from the Army and Navy, the pilots regarded themselves as gentlemen members of a new club. The Great War saw the death of amateurism - except in the higher ranks - and the unplanned, fortuitous creation of a professional force.
Innocents at War follows the career of Anglo-American flier, Tommy Stark, an enthusiastic boy forced to grow up quickly as many around him die. His deep affection for squire’s daughter, Grace is his only certainty as the bitter conflict threatens to strip the world of its innocence.
Series Page Links:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06X9XZDJV
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B06X9XZDJV
Man of Conflict Series: The youngest son of a wealthy merchant, Septimus Pearce is a spoiled brat, wild and heedless. His recklessness promises to cost the family firm money and harm his father's hopes of social advancement. His father forces him to join the army in an attempt straighten him out. However, even the disciplines of army life fail to completely exorcise his nastier character traits. But his callousness and indifference to suffering sometimes proves to be advantageous in the heat of battle, and he slowly gains the respect of his men.
Series Page Links:
www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01AUPM0FC
www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01AUPM0FC
The Duty and Destiny Series: First published in 2014, The Duty and Destiny Series is a superbly-crafted and extensive collection of historical novels with a strong naval/seafaring theme. The series follows the naval career, loves and business dealings of Englishman, Frederick Harris, a brave but reluctant mariner. Despite his disinclination, he is seemingly destined to become a Master and Commander of his own ship
A New Place Page 24