Fishing for Stars

by Bryce Courtenay

  While, of course, I had initial pangs of guilt, I also felt enormously honoured that I was still a loving part of this convoluted, mixed-up, damaged, undoubtedly brilliant, unreadable, enigmatic, stubborn, drug-addicted, strong-willed, frustrating, loyal, loving, generous, exciting and beautiful woman. She was also, if you’ll excuse the pun, the world’s greatest expert at tying a man up in all sorts of knots. Anna, Anna, Anna, how deeply I miss you!

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ‘I was simply casting my net for future stars. They won’t all make it. When you’re fishing for stars even some very bright ones fall through the net.’

  Anna, Solomon Islands

  THE FIFTEEN YEARS FROM the seventies to the mid-eighties brought a great deal more wealth for Anna. Everything she touched seemed to turn to gold and it was during this time that the real trouble started between her and Marg, and where the epithets Green Bitch and Princess Plunder evolved as the two women’s worlds drew steadily further apart.

  After we returned from Japan, Anna turned her business attention to Indonesia, although, unbeknownst to me, the land of her birth had been receiving her quiet attention for several years, more as a result of her time as a prisoner of war under the Japanese than from any fond memories of her childhood in Batavia.

  Every year since I can remember Anna would visit Indonesia, but from around 1965 she began visiting at least three times a year, ostensibly to see her Javanese family, as she referred to Mother Ratih and her son Budi and Kleine Kiki (Little Kiki).

  If asked she would say, ‘We have lots of fun, I practise the language and I help them with their restaurant businesses, which are doing very well; they now have two more.’ In truth, while she was enormously fond of the two women and, of course, Budi, whom she regarded as her little brother, I would eventually discover the visits were to conduct regular reviews of a rapidly expanding property empire initially based on the money Anna had left behind during the war.

  Perhaps a little background is warranted. Anna, her father, stepmother and personal maid, Kleine Kiki, had been stranded when their refugee ship the Witvogel broke down and limped into Tjilatjap, a river port on the east coast of Java, where it remained for the duration of the war. Her paraplegic stepmother had subsequently committed suicide by rolling her wheelchair over the edge of a wooden dockside; her father died of diabetes brought on by advanced alcoholism; and Kleine Kiki, an indigenous Javanese, was apprenticed by Anna to Mother Ratih, the cook and manager of a small kampong restaurant, a widow with a young son, Budi, whom she couldn’t afford to keep at school and who worked for a local Chinese merchant named Lo Wok.

  Anna’s father left her a steel box he’d brought away with him that contained his will, personal papers, several valuable diamonds and a considerable amount of money in Dutch guilders. It was cash that Anna knew would be taken from her as soon as it was discovered, and, furthermore, as a Japanese prisoner of war she had no way of concealing it. She consequently used it to buy the kampong restaurant for Mother Ratih as well as a native house each for her and Kleine Kiki, which left sufficient funds to put Budi through high school and then university after the war and independence. Anna had also paid the passage money that allowed Lo Wok to escape to Malaya when the Japanese were systematically murdering the local Chinese merchants in Tjilatjap. Sadly, he may well have been killed in the massacre of Chinese that took place in that country in the sixties.

  In return for her generosity, and perhaps remarkably in those hard times, Mother Ratih and Budi kept the remainder of the money, still a considerable amount, in safekeeping. The diamonds Anna managed to hide in the brass casing of a military revolver shell that she then sealed with candle wax and inserted, whenever necessary, in a very private women’s place. She used the precious stones to fund her share of the bondage house, Madam Butterfly, when she got to Australia, and to buy her first three workers’ houses in a slum area of the city. I had met Budi and his mother and stepfather – a lieutenant in the police force, now deceased – when, after the war, I went to Java in an attempt to find Anna.

  All this seems a rather long way of saying that by the mid-sixties Mother Ratih and Kleine Kiki had prospered and Budi had graduated from the new University of Indonesia as a lawyer. When Anna made her big move into Indonesia he was a captain in the army.

  Anna had already laid the foundation of what was to become a vast property portfolio, but it grew dramatically as she capitalised on several turning points in the young country’s history, the first of which was the demise of Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno. Like most resistance leaders who become president, he built a great many monuments in praise of himself and ran the national economy into the ground until the poor were starving and the middle class had become totally disaffected. Many of both classes subsequently joined the PKI, the communist party directly aligned with Peking. With Sukarno ailing and isolated, the PKI attempted a coup in 1965 that was put down by a relatively obscure army officer, Major General Suharto. He then took over the army and the government and subsequently became the next president of Indonesia. It was at this time, in the most disastrous circumstances, that Anna saw an opportunity to truly prosper.

  Following the suppression of the coup, in 1966 Suharto went after the communists and the previous president’s immensely rich Chinese cronies. The army presided over the murder of possibly a million Indonesians accused of being communists or fellow travellers. In addition many of those Chinese who had grown rich under the founding president Sukarno and who posed a threat to the new regime were either slaughtered or in some cases exiled, their property seized by the army and appropriated by Suharto’s followers.

  The army’s approach to the killing was unsophisticated but very effective: they would enter a town or a village and order the population to round up all the communist party members and sympathisers, while the army detachment set up a cordon around the area. The locals were then ordered to kill all the people who had been rounded up. The wealthy Chinese, traditionally hated by the people, were even easier prey. Victims were hacked, strangled, burned and beaten to death en masse by the frenzied mobs. This complicity in the killings is one of the reasons why most Indonesian citizens were and still are reluctant to revisit the events of 1966, which have been virtually expunged from official records; a truthful version of events at the time has never appeared in the nation’s official history books. Many countries have revised, rewritten or ignored the blacker parts of their own history – witness Australia’s attitude to the history of the invasion of Aboriginal lands, or the gap in the official records about the massacre of the Chinese in Malaysia in the early sixties.

  Budi, a lawyer and a captain in the army, was undoubtedly heavily embroiled in organising some of the killing, in this way gaining favour with the new Suharto regime. Years later he inadvertently mentioned to me that in 1966 he’d been stationed in Bali, where over 200 000 communists and fellow travellers were killed in that year. It was inconceivable that Budi would not have been involved, especially given his later influence and power in the Suharto hierarchy. Nevertheless, he was too low in rank to get much direct benefit from this macabre bonanza. Still, he was in the right place at the right time, and under Anna’s instructions, he was able to use her inheritance to buy for a song former Chinese-owned mercantile properties from the suddenly property-rich but often cash-strapped generals. Moreover, he was able to do his own conveyancing, thus ensuring watertight titles.

  Anna sensed that Bali, a tourist resort popular with the Dutch since the 1930s, would take off again, so they bought several sites in Denpasar and Kuta Beach. But most of the properties suitable for restaurants were in the better areas of major cities in Java – Jakarta, Surabaya, Solo, Semarang, Jogjakarta – and Cilacap, the large town, now a city, formerly known as Tjilatjap, where Anna had spent the war.

  Anna, as usual, had a long-term plan which she had formulated on her first trip to America in the late fifties when she’d attended a clinic in an atte
mpt to withdraw from her heroin addiction. There she’d noted and been impressed by a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. After fish, chicken is the next most commonly consumed protein by the middle class in Indonesia. It also constituted a large part of the cuisines of the four restaurants the two women owned. On her next visit to Indonesia Anna registered the KFC initials and the name Kiki’s Fried Chicken for a nationwide restaurant chain.

  Suharto and his cronies, having eliminated the communists and the influence of mainland China, were quick to establish relations with the West, and Indonesia was soon seen as a valuable anti-communist ally of America. Foreign investment poured into the country, the standard of living rose immeasurably and Indonesia became one of the fastest-growing economies in Asia.

  As soon as all things American were once more in favour, Anna got Kleine Kiki and Mother Ratih to restyle their rapidly growing Kiki’s Fried Chicken restaurant chain to resemble a typical American Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. Foreigners who had visited America and Americans themselves thought of Kiki’s Fried Chicken as a quaint imitation of one of America’s cultural icons, a form of Asian sycophancy, and smiled indulgently, at the same time often remarking that Kiki’s spicy chicken was infinitely tastier than the original eleven herbs and spices of the Colonel Sanders American version.

  By the mid-seventies Anna, together with her two partners, had acquired ninety-eight potential restaurant sites and converted forty into Kiki’s Fried Chicken restaurants. In each instance Anna owned half the property, Kleine Kiki owned a quarter, and since her death in 1970, Mother Ratih’s quarter had passed to Budi.

  In 1975 Kentucky Fried Chicken decided to enter the burgeoning South-East Asian economy, by which time the rules of doing business in Indonesia were truly set in concrete. To operate in the country you needed to have a local partner, almost certainly drawn from among the ruling army clique, who would also require a majority holding.

  By this time Budi had risen in rank and status and was now a colonel and a junior member of Suharto’s kleptocracy. It didn’t take Kentucky Fried Chicken long to sniff the wind and examine the lie of the land and soon Kiki’s Fried Chicken was converted to the real thing, with Anna and her two partners owning fifty-one per cent of the profits. Moreover, they owned outright the real estate of forty of the outlets and sold half of the remaining fifty-seven outlets for a vast fortune to their American partners. Anna, with Budi as her gatekeeper, was now in business as a big-time player in Indonesia.

  It stands to reason that Anna must have endured several failures in business over the years. Most great self-made business successes are built on failure, which is where the lessons are learned that ultimately lead to success. Apart from her Indonesian successes, she’d taken the considerable fortune she’d made selling the site for Nauru House and built an international conglomerate. Increasingly she would be referred to in the financial sections of the newspapers as Australia’s richest businesswoman, her fortune often compared with that of the wealthiest male tycoons. But Anna seldom talked about business when she was at Beautiful Bay and I knew as little of her successes as I did of her failures. That is, except for the Japanese–Pacific fishing business that had resulted from our trip to Japan.

  Today, in the islands of the South-west Pacific, cruise ships deliver tourists eager to pick up bargain bangles, beads, T-shirts and sarongs, as well as a quick dose of island culture, but in the 1970s, which doesn’t seem all that long ago, the islands were backwaters. The shorts, white hose and short-sleeved shirts of the perspiring white men and the cotton dresses and sandals of the exasperated and constantly complaining women usually indicated one of the three Ms – missionaries, misfits or mercenaries, the last two categories usually consisting of Australians or New Zealanders, with the occasional American or even European. Pacific Islanders have always had a pragmatic view of white folk. Providing you don’t break any tribal taboos they accept you as they find you, angel or bastard or, more commonly, a mixture of both.

  I had chosen the Solomon Islands carefully for our first foray into the fishing business. The winds of change were beginning to blow in the islands and, like all change, they brought confusion. New Guinea, the largest of the islands, and the second largest in the world, was five years away from independence, but at the start of the seventies, even the most optimistic supporters of independence, as well as the Australian Government, believed that it was far into the future, despite the fact that Indonesia had been enjoying independence for decades.

  My own home, the New Hebrides, with its joint British and French administration, was torn between the British desire for a graceful exit and the French determination to hold onto their Pacific territories come what may. If they caved in over the New Hebrides they felt certain that the valuable nickel reserves in New Caledonia would be threatened and, of course, no government in its right mind was going to give up Tahiti.

  The British had already signalled that Fiji was to be granted independence on 10 October 1970, with the Solomon Islands to follow in the not too distant future. In preparation for this, Solomon Islanders were increasingly filling the lower levels of the public service, although British expatriates still clung to the top jobs and headed the government departments.

  Every week Joe, who got the weekly newspapers from every island state brought in by ship, sent me clippings mapping the progress of ‘his’ islanders, the names of recipients of Uncle Joe Scholarships underlined in red. Joe never lost touch with his kids, many by now adults. People said of Joe that, when independence came, he could choose to stand for president of any of the emerging nations in the South-west Pacific and it would turn into a one-horse race. He had grown an afro – greying at the sides – and at six feet four inches of hard, firm-gutted man, he looked every inch a chief.

  ‘Fuckin’ nigger. Dey gonna make him da king! Where our profits gonna go den? You tell me, buddy. Every piccaninny got hisself a scholarship ta Yale!’ Kevin would shout down the phone from Brisbane. His last words invariably were, ‘Nick, ya gotta do sumthin’ ’bout dat nigger! Dem Uncle Joe’s, dey eatin’ us outa da house ’n’ home. Bren Gun gotta ask can she buy another pair a shoes, ferchrissakes!’

  Kevin’s wife Brenda must have already rivalled Imelda Marcos in the shoe department, and after Uncle Joe, her love of designer shoes was Kevin’s greatest worry. ‘She live a hunnerd years she ain’t gonna wear all dem Froggy an’ Wop shoes. Some ain’t even outta da fuckin’ wrappin’ after two years already, already!’

  I had made my initial approach to the senior local public servant in the Chief Minister’s Department knowing that, strictly speaking, protocol demanded I go through the British expatriate Department Secretary, but I was pretty sure I’d be forgiven my transgression. Gerald Fitzgerald (why do parents do that double-name thing to their kids?) was a good bloke who was doing everything he could to bring the new breed of island public servants up to the mark in the best British tradition. I knew he had high hopes for Joseph Abraham Minusi, whom I’d met on one or two previous occasions on shipping business, finding him both pleasant and efficient. It was common knowledge that he was being groomed for higher office and was a shoo-in for the first local head of the public service.

  There are plenty of expatriates happy to tell you that the locals couldn’t run a chook raffle. While I admit over the years since independence there have been more than a few disastrous appointments, this certainly wasn’t true of Joseph Minusi, who seemed born to be a top administrator and a good one. He was honest, extremely hardworking, loyal and highly intelligent, alas, characteristics that are almost impossible to find today in independent island politicians and civil servants. I expected that Joseph Minusi would get tired of venal and incompetent politicians and would end up as prime minister himself. I trusted him completely.

  As the 727 burst through the heavy cloud on its final approach, Anna and I had fastened our seatbelts for the landing at Henderson Field. We swept low over land before our final turn to approach from the sea, the lush green pl
ains of Guadalcanal visible through my left-hand window. ‘Look!’ I yelled, pointing at a rocky mountaintop sticking up out of the jungle. ‘That’s where I captured Gojo Mura!’ Moments later we came in low over Bloody Ridge, where I could so easily have died in combat and where so many marines gave their lives. I was reminded how precarious is our hold on this planet and that I’d had more than my fair share of luck. Anna and Gojo Mura had also come as close as a whisker to death, Anna at the hands of the Japanese kempeitai and Gojo at my own. My orders had been to shoot him on sight and I could easily have done so had he not been seated on a log painting a butterfly. Anna’s extraordinary beauty had saved her, Gojo Mura’s talent had saved him, but my salvation was just plain luck – the bullet that missed me by a hair’s breadth hit someone else’s beloved son.

  The long contrails of moist air streaming from the flaps as we came over the end of the runway showed that the atmosphere was as humid as ever. I recalled arriving here for the first time and landing on the bumpy marsden matting that had since been replaced with asphalt. I had stepped off the plane wearing the full blue serge uniform of a naval lieutenant and felt as if I had walked directly into a foundry furnace.

  We were met by Jimmy, our local manager and a relative of Ellison, who you will recall was once the native leader of my coastwatch gang during the war and still worked as my indispensable right-hand man. Jimmy had attended boarding school in Brisbane, compliments of an Uncle Joe Scholarship. Ellison made sure that all his relatives were educated and employed by the company, a system that worked well because any slack-arse amongst them was dealt with by the family, so there was seldom any trouble. In fact, between Joe and Ellison we probably had the best labour relations in the islands.