Karen just glowed with happiness, like she used to.
Maddy had already sorted Drake out. She found him at the pizza café one evening, just before Steve and Karen came home. Jem and Tyler were with her. She marched straight up to him, in a room full of people, and tore strips off him.
‘Wow,’ whispered Jem to Tyler, ‘she’s just as good as Mum! Only louder …’
Drake went pale, and then red, and then all kinds of colours as he tried to pretend there was nothing wrong, just a crazy girl yelling at him. But when Maddy picked up his pizza and turned it upside down on his head, sauce and melted cheese everywhere, all Drake’s friends applauded and laughed.
Zac was so proud of his Uncle Victor. The sea rangers appeared on TV, grinning at the camera as they described how the flash game fishing boat got stuck on the reef, but that the old lady and the kids had navigated their way safely out of the Hole in the Wall. ‘Number One sailor, that old aunty,’ Victor told the reporter.
Zac and his father were going out to stay with Victor at the next holidays and taking Tyler with them. Both Zac and Tyler were planning to become sea rangers when they grew up.
Jem was sitting out in the backyard, turning the elephant knife over in his hands, and thinking about the dark-haired boy on the cliffs. It was hard to believe he was really his own great-great uncle, and not a kid practically his own age.
‘He’ll always be around you, Jem,’ a gentle voice said. Ella was looking down at him. She sat on the garden seat beside him, and they watched the chickens scratching around in the grass. ‘I don’t think Jack will ever be too far away from you.’
Jem passed her the knife and she held it lightly in her hand.
‘What are you going to do now Ella?’ asked Jem. He felt bleak suddenly, as if a cloud had passed over the sun, at the thought that she might disappear again so soon.
‘Well, I’m not sure. I was thinking that Freya and I might take a break for a while, and have a rest here, where the weather’s so warm and friendly. And of course, there’s the work that the museum has offered me …’
Jem looked up at her. ‘Work? Here? So you might stay here then?’
Ella nodded. ‘Would you like me to stay a while, Jem? Do a bit more sailing perhaps?’
‘Yes! I mean, well, I don’t really want to go sailing again. I really don’t want to go sailing again, no offence. But it’d be great if you stayed around for a while – you’re our family, you should be here with us, not by yourself all the time.’
Karen’s voice drifted out of a window. ‘Ella? Ella – cup of tea’s ready!’
Ella patted Jem on the shoulder, handed him back the silver knife and stood up. ‘It’ll be fine now Jem. We’ve all come home again.’
Neenie opened the door of her little flat and saw Jem sitting on the garden seat.
‘Oh, Jem! There you are. Grandpa’s just gone to get the paper, and he might bring us back an ice-cream. How about a lovely game of snakes and ladders?’
Jem put the elephant knife away in his pocket, and smiled at his grandmother.
‘Sure thing, Neenie – set them up!’
In July 2007 my family and I sailed our 46-foot yacht Malaika from Cairns to Darwin, and we were amazed at the sheer remoteness of the coast, with so few towns or people in all those miles. This sparked the idea of a little hidden colony that might have existed undetected for a long time.
Some of the places in the book are fictional, such as the Lonely Isles, including Castor and Pollux. I’ve put them out in the Arafura Sea, about 70 kilometres north of Maningrida, a real town. The real ‘Hole in the Wall’ is situated in the Wessell Islands, where a narrow strait between two islands has the tide ripping through it twice a day and churning up a wall of white water across the entrance. I’ve moved it out to the fictional Lonely Isles further west and north.
Port Essington, Black Point and Victoria Settlement are real places. Victoria Settlement was the site of one of the first attempts at settlement along the far north coast. It was established in 1838, and a small contingent of Royal British Marines, with a few civilians, was stationed there until 1849 when the settlement was abandoned. It was a very difficult life and many people died, mainly of malaria. All that remains are ruins of the buildings and the little cemetery. It’s a haunting, sad place even today, and still a long way from anywhere.
Quakers are certainly peace-loving people, opposed to war and conflict. As far as I know, they have never tried to establish a haven of their own in Australia. But other people have done this in the past in other places. In 1893, a group of Australians set off for Paraguay in South America and set up a community called ‘New Australia’, because they weren’t happy with life back home. The colony lasted only a short time before it split into two groups, and within a few short years many of the settlers had returned to Australia.
The sea rangers of Maningrida are also real, and work with Australian Customs to protect that part of the coast, checking for illegal fishing vessels and retrieving lost or abandoned fishing nets from the sea. Maningrida is a town of about two thousand people, mainly Aboriginal, in northeast Arnhem Land. The Djelk Rangers, the organisation to which the sea rangers belong, manage some 12,000 square kilometres of land and 2000 square kilometres of sea and coast.
The invention of GPS – Global Positioning System – has made navigation much easier, and means you can see exactly where you are on the map very quickly without having to do complicated calculations. When Captain Cook sailed to Australia, he used a sextant and a clock to work out where he was. Some of his charts are still in use today, so it was possible to be very accurate, even with eighteenth-century technology.
Do you think Ella might seem to be a bit old to be sailing by herself? While sailing through South-East Asia, we met many older people – older than Ella – who were sailing either on their own or as a couple, so it’s definitely something people can do for a long time if they’re fit and healthy enough.
As well as older people, we met many families at sea with school-age kids on board. Most of them kept up with their schoolwork via correspondence lessons, mainly when they were at an anchorage or in a marina. We were really impressed by how those children were totally at home on their boats. Most could handle a dinghy by quite a young age, take their turn at steering and help with anchoring. It’s a wonderful way to grow up, meeting people from all over the world and learning about other cultures firsthand.
Lex and I are looking forward to our grandchildren joining us for some sailing adventures in the future.
Joanne van Os
September 2010
The Secret of the Lonely Isles was largely written on board our yacht Malaika during a voyage from Darwin to Thailand.
Thank you to my husband Lex, for correcting my apprentice-sailor mistakes, and for checking the sailing descriptions and other maritime material. And for introducing me to life at sea.
Thanks to my son Shaun Ansell who checked my facts about the Djelk Rangers at Maningrida, with whom he has worked for the past three years.
Warmest appreciation once again to Linsay Knight and Sarah Hazelton at Random House Australia, to my editor Loretta Barnard and to my agent, the wonderful Selwa Anthony.
Have you read Brumby Plains and Castaway?
Sam and George McAllister live on a buffalo station in the Northern Territory, and this Christmas their cousins are coming to stay. This means weeks of fun – horse riding, camping out, fishing and exploring, driving themselves around the station in a four-wheel drive.
But what they haven’t counted on is a strange meeting, an old mystery, and finding out more about their isolated home than they could ever have guessed.
People aren’t always what they seem …
Brumby Plains is an isolated place, and the outside world doesn’t intrude much there. But when brothers Sam and George McAllister discover a refugee child washed up on the shores of their buffalo station, the rest of the world is brought a lot closer. An accident has taken
their parents, Mac and Sarah, far away, and Uncle Mungo has strong views about refugees. Sam discovers that it’s a lot harder to stand up for what you believe in than to follow the crowd.
I first arrived in the Northern Territory in 1976 and lived out bush for the next twenty years on cattle and buffalo stations, where my two sons Callum and Shaun were raised. In 2008, my husband Lex and I sold our house and left Darwin with our sixteen-year-old daughter Ali, on our yacht Malaika, intending to sail around the world. We spent a magical eight months cruising Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, until we lost our beloved Ali in a fatal accident in a Phuket marina, where she was watching a super yacht berth. Now, in late 2010, Lex and I are heading out to sea again.
In memory of Alexandra Maria van Os
14.6.1992 – 18.2.2009
The Secret of the Lonely Isles Page 13