Hundreds of stark naked natives were hurling spears and boomerangs at one another. Short stone knives rattled on the hardened shields carried by the warriors, while there were some who fell never to rise again. Mr Wilson, manager of the station, advised me not to go near the natives, but nevertheless, I drove my car as close as possible and went up amongst them. They stopped fighting immediately and crowded round. Beads and sweets put them in a good humor and the result was that they parted with some of their weapons as a keepsake.
As she motored across the continent, Mrs Bell was tracked by the press and celebrated by advertisements by the agents for Oldsmobile. Some called her the wonder woman. It was a great story of woman and machine pitted against the forbidding might of the great Australian continent.
In Adelaide the local press reported that hundreds had inspected Mrs Marion Bell’s Oldsmobile: ‘It speaks highly for Mrs Bell’s driving ability that no dent is to be found on the car. The duco finish has withstood the sand, mud and heat remarkably well, and the engine ticks over like a clock.’ The journalist wound up the report by writing, ‘Keenly interested in motors and imbued with the sympathy between car and driver that should exist, she has come “smiling through” one of the most, if not the most strenuous trial a car and a woman have ever attempted.’
Marion and her daughter returned to the west and made their grand entrance at Sawyer’s Valley in April 1926:
Smartly clad in riding breeches, with a leather motor-coat and cap, and with a happy smile on her face, Mrs Bell, who had just completed a circuit of Australia by motor-car—a distance of 12,000 miles—stepped out of her car, and remarked, smilingly, ‘It is a warm day.’ On the front seat of the car was her little daughter, Marion, who accompanied her throughout the trip.
Mrs Bell gave an account of her trip to the press:
‘I started on my trip on October 14 last,’ said Mrs Bell to a Press representative, ‘and no hand but mine has touched the wheel of the car since we left home. Even from the worst of bogs, I extricated the car myself. For many days the temperature was 123deg. in the shade. My little girl contracted fever, and I had to nurse her in the car, and drive on, day after day. At times the journey seemed fearfully monotonous; for days on end the scenery was unchanging, and we appeared to get no further ahead. We had no trouble with the natives—indeed, they treated me everywhere as if I were a little god. By some means they seemed to be apprised that I was coming, and I was told that some of them with their piccaninies had camped on the road for a fortnight waiting for me to pass. I wish especially to pay a tribute to dwellers in the Northern Territory, and throughout the route for the manner in which they treated me. They could not do enough for us. The police also were excellent. They offered us hospitality at the stations, and waited on us hand and foot. Although we left Perth with only 11lb. of groceries, we had no difficulty in getting further provisions; we lived on tinned meat and biscuits, chiefly.’
Then a procession of fifteen or so cars escorted the Bells the forty or so kilometres to Perth where an enthusiastic crowd cheered their achievement. The president of the Royal Automobile Club of Western Australia gave a speech emphasising the uniqueness of Mrs Bell’s journey. ‘I assure you that it is jolly nice to be back again,’ Mrs Bell replied. The news was reported throughout the country and the lady motorist from the west became a celebrity.
But the celebrations were hardly over before the trouble began. Circumnavigating the continent in motor cars of all kinds was a positive mania in the 1920s. Two other expeditions had left Perth the same year as Mrs Bell. One of these was Joshua Warner in a four-cylinder Citroen. Warner claimed that he had to help Marion out with petrol and other necessities because of her lack of preparation and incompetence. He said that he towed her out of trouble on more than one occasion. Mrs Bell retorted that this was not true. On the contrary, Warner did not even know how to change the tyres on his car and she had to provide him with oil from her own supplies.
Worse followed. Scandal-sheet The Mirror in Perth reported that the Oldsmobile in which Mrs Bell had left Perth was not the Oldsmobile that had returned. According to the newspaper, the original car broke down at Fitzroy Crossing where it was abandoned. Another was obtained locally in which she completed her famous journey.
And so the dispute went on. The local Oldsmobile agents in Perth tried unconvincingly to disown their connection with the drive, admitting in the process that, contrary to some reported statements by Mrs Bell, that she had changed cars.
Mrs Bell replied through another newspaper:
‘Some people are trying their best to give me a rough spin’, she complained. ‘What it is all about, or what is the motive behind it, may not be so clear to the public as it is to me . . . My domestic concerns and my business affairs are being dragged in, and I think it is very unfair. After all is said and done, I did motor around Australia. I have newspaper extracts to show the different towns, large and small, at which I was interviewed on arrival, and my daughter can support my statement, that no one but I handled the wheel of the car from the time we left Fremantle in October last until we returned a fortnight ago.’
She went on to say that she thought the public was not ‘at all interested to know whether I helped Mr. Warner or Mr. Warner helped me’:
but in view of what has been said and printed on that aspect, all I want to say now is that I rendered quite a lot of service to Mr. Warner in critical circumstances. But I did only what any motorist would do for a fellow motorist in difficulties. I hope I will be pardoned for suggesting that, even, though it was true that Mr. Warner did for me all that he claims to have done, a spirit of chivalry—to say nothing of the Freemasonry of the motor car—would have urged him to do no less, and should have restrained from criticism said to have been uttered by him concerning me—a woman who at least had the pluck to undertake a journey of that kind.
That’s all I want to say.’
Others wanted to say more but the controversy soon faded from the press. The book of her exploits promised by Mrs Bell never appeared. But the Oldsmobile company did not mind at all. Mrs Marion Bell and her daughter had provided them with months of priceless copy and public relations imagery for the virtues of their product.
In November 1928 the list of motor vehicle registrations for Western Australia showed Mrs Marion Bell of 130 Queen Victoria Street, Fremantle, had a new car—a Hudson.
THE SECRET ORDER OF THE DOUBLE SUNRISE
The outbreak of the Pacific war in 1941 dealt an almost fatal blow to Australia’s fledgling airline, Qantas. The company’s business—then known as Qantas Empire Airways—was based largely on flights between Britain and Australia, and from February 1942 it was no longer possible for civilian aircraft to fly that route.
After a lot of investigation and negotiation the managing director of Qantas, Hudson Fysh, convinced the British government to lend his company five Royal Navy flying boats, which were already travelling on an established route from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to Perth. In June 1943, Qantas crew began operating the Cats, as the Catalinas were affectionately known. They flew from their base on the Swan River to Exmouth then directly to Lake Koggala in Sri Lanka where it was safe to connect with British military transport.
The covert journey took between 28 and 33 hours nonstop. As they were timed to ensure they flew only at night across Japanese-occupied areas, each flight saw two sunrises. Almost total radio silence was observed and although the planes were not fitted with guns they usually carried military documents. The top-secret character of the route meant that the six-man crews did not wear uniforms. If intercepted the crews and their passengers would almost certainly have been executed as spies.
Those who flew as passengers were issued with a special certificate stating that they had become members of the Secret Order of the Double Sunrise. In the two or so years of its operation, the double-sunrise flight transported around eight-hundred passengers. They included Rupert Murdoch’s father, Keith, and a British minister of par
liament, as well as others travelling mainly on official business related to the war effort.
Conditions for the passengers were far worse than even the most cramped cattle-class accommodation of today’s passenger flights. There were a couple of bunks intended for the crew and three chairs. The rear wall of the plane featured a small toilet—just the toilet. The need to keep the Cats as light as possible meant they were fitted only with vital equipment; there was no allowance for privacy. Temperatures inside the fuselage could fall as low as minus 14 degrees Celsius. Skin was easily burned off if it touched the metal body of the plane. Four or five meals were served during the long flight.
One of the first to fly the usually overloaded Cats was Rex Senior. He was first officer and navigator on the initial flight and eventually completed many flights on the route. He later recalled a shopkeeper telling him to join up and was once given a white feather, the symbol of cowardice.
When the Japanese advance in the Pacific was rolled back in August 1944, Hudson Fysh spoke publicly about the Double Sunrise route. He revealed that the Japanese had once attacked a flying boat and there had been the occasional problem with fuel supplies. In one incident, a plane flew the last 400 kilometres or so of the flight on just one engine. He called the operation ‘one of the epic transport feats of the war’ and pointed out:
It is an enormous flight non-stop. Payload is limited, and it is essentially a war-time service. A civil air route could not be economically operated over so wide an expanse of ocean.
It is said that the Double Sunrise Cats still hold the world record for the longest continuous flight of 33 hours.
The Cats were no longer needed after the war. Four were towed to sea and sunk by machine gun fire near Rottnest Island off the coast of Western Australia. The fifth was eventually sunk outside Sydney Heads.
In 2009, a surviving plane of the same type was located in Spain. Qantas purchased the relic and restored it at great cost, and it can now be seen in the Qantas Founders Museum in Longreach.
THE REAL GREAT ESCAPE
Stalag Luft III is best known as the Nazi prison camp from which the Great Escape took place in March 1944, an event immortalised but also mythologised in the Hollywood movie of the same name. But the Australian dimension to the story and its aftermath is less well known.
Paul Royle was one of a number of Australians who joined the Royal Air Force before the outbreak of World War II. He was shot down during a reconnaissance flight in 1940. After crashlanding in a field near the northern French town of Cambrai, the injured Royle and his crew managed to seek medical attention in a nearby village. Royle went back to destroy the Blenheim but later passed out from loss of blood. He was soon taken prisoner.
After spending time in and attempting to escape from one prisoner-of-war camp, Royle was transferred to Stalag Luft III in 1942. Here, almost 200 kilometres south-east of Berlin, in what is now Poland, he was imprisoned with other pilot officers, many of whom were intent on leaving as soon as possible. Royle became involved with a British tunnelling plot known as X Organisation.
The camp had been carefully designed to prevent escapes. Microphones were buried under the wire fences to detect any tunnelling sounds and there was a trip wire at knee height all round the inside of the camp’s fence. Officers were not made to work in prison camps and the monotony of the everyday routine sharpened their sense of duty to plot an escape, as well as find infinite ways to disguise the necessary preparations and practise the necessary deceptions.
Three tunnels were started. One was discovered and closed and one abandoned. But escape preparations continued in the tunnel codenamed Harry. The prisoners were ingenious in discreetely disposing of the soil they laboriously scooped out almost 10 metres underground. Paul Royle was one of the ‘penguins’ that carried earth held in their trousers. When they found a suitable spot to dump it, they pulled a string sewn into their cuffs allowing the soil to trickle unseen onto the ground as they strolled along. While carrying out this important task, Royle was also a lookout.
The tunnel itself was so cramped and airless that a ventilation device had to be built of old tin cans. A miniature wooden railway carried the workers backwards and forwards on a tiny trolley as they toiled and sweated through their dangerous digging shifts. The unstable walls and ceilings were shored up with wood taken from the wall lining and bunks in prison huts. But at least the diggers had light, courtesy of some cabling stolen from their captors and powered through an illicit connection to the camp’s electrical circuit.
Clothes, rations, maps and forged German papers were produced for the 200 men the escapers planned to push through the 100-metre tunnel on the night of 24 March 1944. A ballot was held to decide which of them could escape then and on the fateful night the lucky winners began assembling in Hut 104. Paul Royle was number 57.
But there had been a mistake in the measurements and the escape tunnel was almost three metres short of the woods beyond the perimeter wire. The escapees had to clamber out of the tunnel right where the guards patrolled. This and other delays meant that only 76 men got through the tunnel by the time it was discovered shortly before 5 a.m.
Royle was one of the men who got away. He eluded the guards and with the man next in line, Edgar Humphreys, headed through the frozen countryside for Switzerland. But they didn’t get far: they were captured after a day or so by the German home guard and handed over to the Gestapo. After brutal interrogation Royle was returned to solitary confinement in the camp but Humphreys was among the 50 escapees executed on the direct orders of Adolf Hitler. Royle never knew why he was spared the fate of his companion. Only three of the escapees made it back to Britain.
The ashes of the executed men were returned to the camp, where the British prisoners built a stone memorial to their dead comrades. It remains today, tended by the local community. In the Nuremberg war crimes trials in 1947, eighteen of those who had executed the escapees were prosecuted. Thirteen were themselves executed and the rest imprisoned for many years.
Paul Royle was liberated in 1945 and later worked in the mining industry in his native Western Australia. He was not a fan of the famous movie of the great escape, particularly not of the heroic but historically inaccurate motorcycle-riding star Steve McQueen. He never observed the annual commemoration of the escape but he did give an interview on the seventieth anniversary in which he said, matter of factly: ‘While we all hoped for the future we were lucky to get the future. We eventually defeated the Germans and that was that.’
Paul Royle died in August 2015 at the age of 101.
A JENOLAN JOURNEY
In 1954, a group of young men risked their lives swimming through an underground river in the Jenolan Caves. They were searching for a new cavern that might link with the stream that appeared in the Imperial Cave.
Attempts to swim the river had been made before but this was to be a full-scale assault using around one thousand pounds’ worth of what was then the latest diving and communication technology, including an underwater telephone.
Garbed in all-black frogman suits, the four men who braved this dangerous journey were Russell Kippax, Owen Llewellyn, Keith White and the Frenchman Michael Calluaud. As vice-president of the Underwater Explorer’s Club, Calluaud was the most experienced member of the team. He was the first in Australia to use self-contained compressed air breathing equipment under water.
The support team spent the night building a wooden platform in the cave for the divers to use as a base and preparing for all eventualities.
The explorers’ main worries were light, air (or more correctly, lack of them), cold and fatigue. All these were taken care of. Each man was completely encased from neck to ankle in a water-tight rubber suit, and wore woollen underwear. A mask and goggles covered almost all of the face. Sealed beam cat head-lights with batteries to last about an hour solved the light problem. And just for emergency each man carried a waterproof torch.
Each diver carried a knife, and a lead belt to help them
submerge, and was connected to an AFLOLAUN (apparatus for laying out line and underwater navigation). This device paid out the telephone line and could also transmit a distress signal back to the platform where two reserve divers were on standby, should they be needed. Just after 11.15 a.m. the first two frogmen put on flippers and helmets and slipped into the cold clear water. They were followed at intervals by the other two. To the watching standby divers left behind, the yellow glow of the underwater lanterns slowly faded, leaving only the black darkness and silence. The seconds ticked by.
Five minutes later one of the standby divers shouted, ‘A light! One of them is coming back!’ The Frenchman broke the surface, crying, ‘I lost him! I lost him!’ The thick mud churned up by the divers had made visibility almost nil. Fortunately everyone was still in contact via the AFLOLAUN and the remaining divers underwater confirmed they had found a passage leading to a siphon that they would try to swim through.
After another seven anxious minutes of silence, the telephone crackled and Kippax reported excitedly, ‘I’m through!’ He described a cave over 90 metres in length and 6 metres wide.
Keith White also passed through the siphon and into this cave. He reported:
I got a terrific feeling when I stood up in this great cave and turned my light around. I thought to myself ‘No man has ever been here before.’
We were standing in water about a foot deep. It trickled over the floor of the cave. All around there were fallen rocks and there was a sign of a recent fall at one end of the cave. We were very careful not to touch anything for fear of dislodging other rocks. Without our lights the cave was dark—the blackest darkness I’ve ever been in. The roof of the cave sloped up to 70 feet high. There were beautiful lights. Stalactites stretched down from the roof. There was a continual drip, drip, drip of water from the roof.
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