The Bishop looked at the heaving water. ‘It’s very rough. Do you think they can be launched?’
‘Have to be, Bishop.’
The skipper was calling to the ship’s crew. Father Sutherland and I kept on at the so far ineffective pump, while the rest moved to the stern to try pushing overboard a very heavy dinghy that we had only just managed to drag on board at Aurukun.
‘Careful,’ warned Flag. ‘It may swamp. Bishop, would you help on the bows. Smart!’
The Bishop, Father Sutherland and I all helped but the solid dinghy was reluctant.
‘Another shove.’
‘Swivel her this way.’
‘Now ready. Push.’
With a roaring plunge she slid back into the yellowing sea. Twenty or thirty gallons came over the edge, but no more.
‘Good,’ said Flag. ‘Tie her up, William. Fast. Now for the other. She’s lighter.’
We got the second boat over without much trouble. But in these seas, would they survive when full of passengers?
‘I shouldn’t like to try them,’ said the Bishop.
‘Not with my weight in one,’ said Father Sutherland.
The dinghies bounced astern, ready for emergencies. Flag came back to the wheelhouse.
‘So the pump doesn’t work. How about the sails, Tumena? Could you get any sails up?’
Tumena had never sailed on this boat. In a booming voice he appealed to the regular crew. While tension tightened, the heavy sails at the foot of the two masts were laboriously hauled up, all hands tugging at the halyards and steadying the unpredictably swinging booms. But, lacking a jib – there was one but it was badly damaged – the deeply laden ship failed to make any movement in the direction we wished. The resistless south-easterly trade wind, the wind that blew Captain Bligh for a couple of thousand miles in an open boat across the Pacific, refused entirely to trade with us; in fact was tearing wildly at us from the shore. It seemed we were drifting from the coast towards some dangerous-looking shoals. Flag gave the order to drop anchor. In spite of wind and wave it held, in two and a half fathoms.
Flag turned his attention to the underdeck. ‘Get men to bring up some cargo on deck. All that flour, sugar. We might have to ditch it.’
As the boys moved to help, the Bishop said quietly, ‘Ditch it? I hope not. Edward River needs that food. Needs it badly.’
‘The water’s still rising,’ said Flag. ‘It might be the food or us. Anyway, we’ve got to get it out of the way of that propeller shaft to see what we’re doing. And for hand bailing.’
‘I see.’
‘Our only hope is to get on the sked. Hope the set works.’
Since boarding the Reliance, I’d hardly noticed that we had a set. But there it was, with various knobs, placed inconspicuously under the canopy. I knew that the five missions of the Gulf coast, Presbyterian or Anglican, were linked with the Queensland Government’s shortwave service based on TI [Thursday Island], two hundred and eighty miles north. By a bit of sheer luck, the Reliance was the one ketch so linked. If Flag could raise TI on the ship’s transceiver, someone there might be able to help us. Contact could be made only at certain hours. So we waited: while the Aboriginal mother sat quietly on deck feeding her baby from a bottle. Neither had uttered a sound.
At last the transceiver whirred. The four white men gathered around.
‘Coming on now.’
‘Good.’
‘Listen.’
A little furred, with liberal crackle, a voice came to us. We recognised it immediately as that of Ian Mullins of the TI base station.
‘The sked’s open and in a minute I’ll be calling you all in turn. I’ve a couple of telegrams for Mitchell River and three for Mapoon and four for Weipa. But before I start are there any urgent medical calls? Over.’
Flag was in charge of the switches, once again the only one among us with know-how. The Bishop said, ‘Now’s your chance!’
‘Reliance to TI. Emergency call! Emergency call!’ Flag spoke, tense and low. ‘This is the Reliance on the Gulf coast. Are you receiving me? Over.’
A fractional pause and then, mixing in with the howl of the wind around the ship, ‘Receiving you loud and clear, Reliance. What’s the trouble? Over.’
‘We’re off the coast about sixteen miles north of Edward River. We have a busted propeller shaft and water coming in from the stern. We can’t move. We’re filling up, repeat filling up, slowly but definitely. Are you receiving me? Over.’
It seemed to my ears that Ian Mullins gulped, before replying, ‘Ye..es, go ahead, Reliance. Go ahead.’
At least a few dozen ears up and down the coast, on TI and in Torres Strait, must have been eagerly awaiting Flag’s answer …
‘Looks like we might have to abandon ship and row ashore in dinghies, but we don’t want to do this if there’s any chance of saving her and the cargo. Anyway we don’t know if we’d make the shore. It’s very rough. If we reached the shore we’d have to try walking to Edward River and there’s rivers to cross and they say they’re full of crocs. Are you receiving me? Over.’
‘Receiving you, Reliance. Go ahead.’
‘Before I ask you for suggestions as to rescue, I’ll give you details about what happened. Ready? Over.’
‘OK, Reliance. I’m alerting the Anglican and Presbyterian offices here at once. All missions down the coast will listen and they’ll suggest what they can. Over.’
‘About 11 am we were …’ As Flag searched for words, I looked at the faces of the Bishop, Father Sutherland and the young mother. In their various unemotional ways they reflected relief at this measure of contact with the outside world. The miracle of voice reception and voice transmission had at least let other people know of our plight.
~
Actually the news travelled further and fast. At Shellcove we were in the kitchen getting our breakfast when the ABC’s 8.00 am news bulletin reported: ‘A supply boat carrying the Anglican bishop is in danger of sinking in the Gulf of Carpentaria. There are grave fears for the safety of the people on board.’ Before my mother hurried off to ring the ABC newsroom for more details, she turned to me, grim-faced. ‘There’s no end to the lengths Les will go to for a good story.’
~
Coralie’s natural skills of empathy and gentle diplomacy came to the fore when she met people who might feel threatened or shy in responding to an interviewer’s questions. She was interested in creating psychological depth by sensitively probing the actions, reactions and interactions of people she met. ‘Queer Night on Quintell Beach’ was a favourite piece of hers. She never forgot the romance of meeting the phantom horseman by moonlight and no doubt he fell victim to her charm and ease, as many people did. She wrote of that encounter more fully in People of the Big Sky Country and then contracted the story for a radio talk she narrated herself. The following text is from a radio script she broadcast on the ABC.
Queer Night on Quintell Beach – CCR
Perhaps you’ve never heard of Quintell Beach. It could be described as one of the loneliest beaches in Australia and among the most inaccessible. To get to it you must first go to Cairns and then take the plane that runs north to Thursday Island. Your first set down is Cooktown. Next stop is Coen, a handful of people on the map, deep in the cattle country of Cape York Peninsula. Third stop is Iron Range, just a hundred and fifty miles south of the northern most tip of Australia. And that’s where you alight for Quintell Beach.
Iron Range has a permanent population of one – the keeper of the aerodrome who is also the post and telegram master, the radio telephonist, meteorologist, bridge mender and transport consultant to all who set out for Quintell Beach.
‘You’ll find the track pretty rough,’ he told us. He went on to say it was seven miles down to the beach and all badly gutted by recent floods. As for transport, there was an old tractor belonging to th
e mission we were about to visit and there were some mission boys to drive it. He would lend us a trailer and Les and I would have to sit on the floor, clutching our luggage and be jolted along through the bush behind the tractor. At the beach a little engine-driven mission boat would be waiting, or should be waiting, the aerodrome keeper said … The scepticism in his voice was a little disturbing.
Anyhow we trundled down the rough track to the coast, through stringy-bark or messmate trees and shoulder-high blade grass. It was late afternoon when we arrived at Quintell Beach and a more eerie desolate stretch of coast I’ve never seen. The southeast trade winds were blowing straight onshore at gale force, lashing the sea into angry muddy waves, whipping up the sand into a spray of spiteful needles and contorting the pandanus palms until they looked like souls in torment. Out in the waves, the little mission boat was tossing and bouncing and straining at her anchor like a mad dolphin on a leash. Quite frankly, the prospect of boarding her and clinging in her open cockpit, drenched with spray, through twelve long hours of a storm-savage night caused me to hesitate.
We asked the mission boys: shouldn’t we wait until daylight tomorrow to see if the storm blows itself out? Their faces were polite but deadpan.
One of them spoke: ‘That boat sink a few month ago right over there!’ He pointed to the murky distance then added cheerfully: ‘We got boat up two week later.’
While we were considering this information, out of the tangled scrub that grew right down to the beach, rode a horseman – tall and lean as a stockwhip. His hair was grey and his horse was grey – both so ghostly grey we wondered whether he was a phantom. We had been told there were no white men for miles around.
‘The Don Quixote of Quintell Beach,’ murmured Les, ‘riding Rosinante.’ The horseman wore a battered felt hat, frayed pants and boots laced up with string. But when he spoke, the voice that came from under the hedge of grey stubbly whiskers was unexpectedly warm, rich and courtly.
‘Madam,’ he addressed me, ‘do you intend crossing to the mission tonight?’ He stroked his grey chin doubtfully and added: ‘If I were you I wouldn’t set out, not tonight …’
What was the alternative? We looked again at Quintell Beach. Great grey shoulders of rock lurched drunkenly through the sand, bearing down on us. But spending the night on Quintell Beach would be definitely preferable to breasting out into that snarling sea. The horseman pointed. ‘Madam, there’s a rough bough shelter over yonder between the swamp and the creek. You could doss down there. Have you any food?’
‘Very little. Only some bacon and coffee we were taking to the mission. We expected we’d be there tonight.’
‘I’ll see you at moonrise.’ And the strange horseman dug his heels into his horse and melted into the scrub.
Darkness stalked up on us with a flail of pricking rain as we made a damp little fire in our bleak nook. The mission boys brought us a billy of water from the soak and we shared coffee with them. We had a feeling we would never see the phantom horseman again so we decided to try and sleep. The night was pitch black with no sign of a moon. We’d been asleep some hours when a rustling in the bushes startled us awake. A great yellow pancake moon had risen and silhouetted against its light was our horseman with a sack slung over his shoulder.
‘Here’s your bread, Madam,’ he announced as if it were the most natural thing in the world for fresh bread to be delivered to a bough shelter near Taipan Creek. He dismounted and handed us the sack. ‘I ran you up a batch of scones too and brought you a drop of spare boy – golden syrup – to spread on them. All I had in the shack.’
We built up the fire and made more coffee and sat on our haunches and yarned with him while we munched scone after scone until the stars turned pale. Then, as suddenly as he had appeared, he swung into the saddle and wheeled away towards the scrub. ‘I’ve got to round up my horses at daylight. But it’s been very enjoyable talking to you both. A man gets hungry for a bit of conversation when he’s been in the bush most of his life. Well, so long …’ And as he spoke, his shadow was swallowed up by the dark mass of the trees.
We dozed till sunrise then walked down to the turbulent beach to signal the little mission boat. She was gone! The grey horizon was bare. Both boat and crew had disappeared. We waited for hours, till well past midday. Then we decided to make it back to Iron Range. At last we arrived at the lonely airstrip and started to explain to the lone occupant and caretaker.
‘Are you sure you saw the boat when you first arrived? I’ve just received a radio message from the mission saying Boat broken down. Tell Mr and Mrs Rees to proceed to Thursday Island.’
We protested loudly. Of course we saw the boat. It was just as real as the horseman we had seen.
‘What horseman?’ the aerodrome keeper asked cynically.
‘Don Quixote on Rosinante. Look, he baked us a loaf of bread.’ And we delved into the sack and brought forth the remains of a perfectly baked loaf to prove the truth of our queer night on Quintell Beach.
~
22
The Perils of Literary Coupledom
Coral and Les were not the only renowned literary couple of their era in Australia. There were two other notable partnerships that, like the Rees duo, combined love, travel, family and literary endeavour in one heady and challenging mix. Ruth Park and D’Arcy Niland were both born in 1917 and Charmian Clift and George Johnston were born in 1923 and 1912 respectively.
Of the six writers, the eldest three would be deeply affected by World War I. While Leslie was growing up, two of his brothers were away at the Front; one lost an eye and was injured by shrapnel in the trench warfare of the Somme when he was just seventeen. George Johnston’s father survived Gallipoli, only to be sent on to France for three years. Coralie had a young relative killed at Bullecourt in France at the age of twenty-six. As with the rest of their generation, their worlds were shaky: they were ‘acquainted with grief’.
Most of them struggled to find work in the Depression at an age when they were ready to establish themselves. They then faced another period of war, this time closer to home.
All six writers made their start as journalists, although only Leslie and George completed cadetships. Ruth Park was editor of the children’s page of The Auckland Star before becoming the first woman promoted to the newsroom, not without ‘blood on the floor’, as she recorded in her autobiography. George was a war correspondent for the Melbourne Argus, the same paper Coralie’s grandfather had worked for at the end of the previous century. Charmian Clift did a brief stint on The Argus before she and George left – or were asked to leave – to start their life together. D’Arcy Niland started as a copyboy on the Sydney Sun and was sacked when he turned seventeen because he required higher wages. It was the 1930s, the height of the Depression.
It seems that the inducement of sharing ‘a vocation as well as love’ is what catapulted each of the three women into their marriages. None was typical of her time. Each was forthright, independent and determined. Few women in general, including their mothers, worked outside their roles as wives and child rearers. Having a career generally meant refusing marriage to earn the unenviable title of ‘old maid’. If marriage intervened, the career had to go. Coralie, Ruth and Charmian were not interested in that sort of marriage. The last thing they were looking for was a meal ticket in trousers. They were bent on their own ambitions, their own individual shining goals of becoming writers. They were all also stunning young women.
Les and D’Arcy were of similar age to their girls and were talented, charming and interesting, while George had the undeniable éclat of being a published writer before he and Charmian met, an experienced journalist who had travelled the world. So the irrepressible mating instinct had its way despite Coralie’s feminist pretensions, Ruth’s determination not to get married and Charmian’s obvious challenge in that her man was already married to someone else.
Of course when starting out, n
one of them had any idea how hard it would be to make a career as a writer earning enough to provide a reasonable living. All worked prodigiously and all struggled financially. All eventually had families to support. Ruth, D’Arcy, Charmian and George took the courageous step of freelancing as journalists and producing novels – a risky and uncertain source of income. In her autobiography, Ruth tells of the complicated financial side of a freelance writer’s life – in reality, total insecurity. Charmian and George in Greece were endlessly trying to wrangle advances out of their publishers to tide them over and were devastated when large portions of their meagre royalty cheques were deducted for income tax.
The Rees family enjoyed a little more financial security thanks to Les’s tenured position. His regular if unprincely salary allowed us to live not lavishly but well, in salubrious surroundings with plenty of food and avalanches of books. Our parents were able to indulge their passion for travel of an unluxurious type: what Coralie acidly described as ‘round the world second class with Leslie Rees’.
Because of my father’s position, Coralie was able to work mostly from home at her various writing and broadcasting projects. But there were obvious disadvantages to this. She regarded all domestic chores as an imposition and resented the fact they ate up her time and energy. What she loathed most was ‘culinary responsibility’, a burden shared by many of her kind. Elizabeth Jolley was known to complain that she couldn’t write a word until she had worked out what they would eat for dinner that evening.
Les was endowed with abundant vitality and health, a gift that, along with his determined efforts at the typewriter, allowed him to produce an impressive body of work while maintaining a full-time career and his voluntary position as chair of the Playwrights Advisory Board. But not all were as blessed. In each of the families, one of the partners was struck by a major life-threatening illness: George with tuberculosis and other lung disease, D’Arcy with a congenital heart problem, and my mother with ankylosing spondylitis. For these three, the burden of ill health was a constant and determining factor of their output. So Les, Charmian and Ruth had partners who for large chunks of their marriage were not invalids but less than robust, struggling with conditions that, in each case, brought premature death.
A Paper Inheritance Page 21