I tried to work out just where it was that Bea Condie had told me the Aboriginal graves had been briefly discovered before being desecrated, but I could find no sign of them. In this, too, Brownrigg and I share a similar experience. The day he wandered, observing the graves of Robert Clark, Wybalenna’s zealous religious instructor, a man who admitted flogging Aboriginal girls for what he described as their ‘moral outrages’, he came across another, that of one Manalaganna. This man was a tribal head Robinson describes as ‘a warrior, unrivalled among the aborigines … considered a sage by his tribe’. He was a man held in great admiration for his intellect, courage and compassion, at one time, it is said, refusing to take revenge on a neighbouring tribe for the murder of his son, but in good faith, helping to bring them in to captivity at the end of the Black Wars, when it was perceived the alternative was immediate annihilation. The memorial for this remarkable man, observed Brownrigg, was a pitiful one.
A solid piece of masonry bearing a tablet with an inscription, now almost illegible by exposure to weather, marks the resting place of this noble chief.
25
MARGE, THE DIAMOND DIVER
I’d come to chat to Marge about her lifelong interest in the local stones, of which she had a huge collection, but really, I didn’t want to move anywhere from her back porch at Lady Barron, where we sat with a cup of tea, overlooking some of Flinders’ wonderful neighbouring islands.
‘That’s Little Green, over there,’ she pointed out over a perfect sea on a perfect morning. ‘Great Dog and Little Dog, and the big one behind. That’s Vansittart.’
‘Have you been there?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes. Many times, many times. They say there’s always sun shining on Vansittart,’ she said, looking over at its distant green slopes. ‘Always a hole in the clouds somewhere to let it in.’ In my binoculars, I picked out its paddocks and hillsides, perhaps just a kilometre or two away. I saw the single sign of human habitation and tried to hold it steady – a small house, all on its own on the side of a hill. Through the heat haze of the warm morning, its two little windows and wooden veranda shimmered, tiny, unreal and dreamlike. It was like looking through the glasses back in time, and I half expected to see the ghostly outline of a woman in a long Victorian skirt standing on the veranda.
‘Come on, I’ll show you the rocks,’ said Marge, breaking my daydream. ‘They’re my pride and joy.’
Marge had built off the lounge a room like a bejewelled cave with dozens of shelves holding shells and rocks and gems of every description. Rock collecting, I was beginning to understand, is something of a Flinders Island passion.
‘This is tiger iron from Western Australia,’ she said, picking one up. ‘The town I found it in has been demolished because of the asbestos. When we were there, all the houses in all the streets had been stripped of the walls. Just the frames standing row after row. It was very eerie,’ she said.
Even to a complete geological ignoramus such as myself, it was an impressive collection. But I hadn’t come to hear about the tiger iron or anything else gathered from afar. I wanted to hear about the local wonder, the topaz that in these parts they call the Killiecrankie Diamond, after the settlement on the island’s west where they are found, and particularly, how Marge used to get them, from the 1950s until just a few years ago.
‘I used to dive for them,’ she said. ‘First we’d find them on the beach, and when they got too hard to find there, we’d follow them on the sand with the low tide and dig them up with a shovel. Then they got hard to find there too. Then someone from Victoria came over with a gold dredge, so we got the idea: “If they can do it, so can we”.’
Three girls, one with a dinghy, another with a five-horsepower Honda motor and a suction pump, and Marge, with an excellent set of lungs, set out to make local legends of themselves, with an all-girl underwater prospecting team.
‘We made a homemade sieve and sat it on a tractor tube and put it beside the boat and then I’d dive down and suck it up and the girls would go through it,’ she said, as if every 1950s girl did the same thing every day.
‘Air tanks?’ I asked. She dismissed the notion with a wave.
‘Hooker unit,’ she said. ‘Just an air hose attached to the engine’.
This notoriously dangerous diving technique over the years accounted for the untimely demise of many a diver before scuba tanks became widely available, but Marge seemed quite dismissive of the idea that it was in any way dangerous. A small motor worked an air pump which was attached to a hose which was attached to the diver. A thousand things can, and did, go wrong, and the motor was just one of them.
‘You were all right as long as the engine didn’t stop,’ she said.
‘And did it?’ I asked.
‘Yes. A lot. But it was pretty shallow so you’d just pop back up.’ The most dangerous part of the operation, she said, was digging under the big rocks. ‘As you sucked it all up you’d dig yourself a bit of a hole, see, then the hole would get bigger. And after a while you’d look up and say, “Gee that rock’s getting big,” so I’d give it a shove and if it didn’t move I’d go back down. If it wobbled a bit, I’d start on the other side.’ I chuckled, a little nervously, at the description of this suicidal operation. ‘One knocked my air hose out once. Took me a while to get it back. Actually, looking back I suppose it was a bit risky.’
Having to stay in the one spot at the bottom of the sea required her to be anchored there by not one but two weight belts with as many lead weights as could be crammed onto it. Once, the trio arrived at the water for a day’s prospecting, set up the boat and climbed into the wetsuit, then Marge realised she’d forgotten her weights.
‘Well I’m not going to waste a day,’ she thought to herself. Being a practical woman, she looked around for a suitable alternative. ‘One of the girls had a shopping bag and length of electrical cord in the back of her van. I filled it with rocks and tied it round my waist with the cord and jumped in. It worked – kept me secured to the bottom,' she laughed about it, but her mother, quite sensibly, was horrified when told about it. ‘Yes, she wasn’t too happy about me being tied to a bag of rocks at the bottom of the sea,' she laughed.
I asked her how the trio of daring girls decided who kept what. It was all very democratic.
‘We had a system. At the end of the day we’d make three piles of the stones and draw straws.’ Simple as that. ‘Never saw a shark, but the sea urchins would go through the wetsuit like butter. I had a medical file an inch thick. Blood-poisoned knees, blood-poisoned fingers. Mind you,’ she mused, ‘I’ve never had anything else go wrong with me.’
This prompted me to ask her about other creatures she may have come across lurking in the ocean, particularly if she’d seen or heard of someone who may have seen the giant octopus of my story. She looked at me sideways at little, and I gave a shrug and told her the story. She shrugged after listening politely but looked blank and suggested that it might have happened: ‘A lot of strange things happened on those islands, certainly.’
Marge wasn’t born on Flinders but lived ‘all over the place’ before moving here as a teenager in 1950. ‘Mum made us move here. I had to go back to school and I wasn’t too happy about it.’ Eventually she married into one the island’s oldest families. ‘My husband’s great-great-grandmother came out here 1853, I think it was. They had the light at Goose Island and had nine or ten children. Quite a lot of their descendants are still around, I can tell you,’ she said. But with so few people on the island today, what did she see as its future?
‘Farming will go on, but tourism is important too.’ She paused a little before continuing. ‘But not too much of it. I think people are happy to have tourists, so long as everything stays the same. We want them but not too many.’ One doesn’t get the sense that she has much to worry about in terms of things changing too quickly.
A cloud passed over Vansittart Island, or Gun Carriage as it used to be called. Both of us paused and watched the colour of the dist
ant hillside change from a vivid green to a slate grey, and then back again. I couldn’t resist holding up the glasses once again to the house over on the island in the distance.
‘No one used to care about views before. People bought houses for work, not for views,’ she said. ‘When my husband died I was on the farm by myself for fourteen years. Fourteen years battling drought and feeding stock all on my own. Then I said, “I want to look at the sea,” so I built this place and now I can see it every day.’
Does she miss her farm? ‘You spent as much on it as you made on it. It wasn’t very profitable,’ she said with the only hint of bitterness I heard in her voice.
As I headed away from Marge’s house, I swung the big white car north towards Flinders Island’s interior, to explore its lesser-known, eastern marshlands. Immediately the road became rougher, the country sparser and less inviting than the lush paddocks I had passed earlier. It’s flat country here, with ageing signs indicating places with names like ‘Nelson’s Drain’ and ‘Reedy Lagoon Road’. Nothing, however, was evident to mark their existence besides the sign itself. Only the occasional house, blinds drawn, passed by my window. Marge had told me this was the place of the early soldier settlement plots, packets of acreage offered to returning servicemen after the war, some fertile and eventually profitable, most not so.
‘Besides,’ she had told me, ‘you had to know what you were doing. Lots of them were from the city and couldn’t make a go of it.’ Eighty-thousand acres of eucalypt had been cleared out here. The result is a kind of half-landscape, like a place prepared for the site of some great project that was never built.
Signs for a rubbish tip passed me, and a couple of old car bodies stood sentinel at the entrance. I followed roads to dead ends, then reversed back before turning around. It was low, so a view was hard to come by. One lane wound its way through some unmolested scrub before opening to a small clearing where a strange A-framed building had been erected. I stopped to investigate.
Through a filthy window, a small room with odd pieces of furniture could be seen. A couple of peeling wildlife posters and books were scattered and the door was ajar. Looking around guiltily, I pushed it open. I paused and called out. A shuffling sound made me start suddenly. Behind me no less than a dozen wallabies had appeared from nowhere, nearly surrounding me in a half-circle, obviously inured to the generosity of humans. I had nothing to offer. I made an absurd clicking-sucking noise that I hoped would assuage their disappointment, then manoeuvred my way past them to check out the back of the house.
A downpipe coming off the roof stopped just above the ground and a large, putrid pool of mud had formed under it, its edges curled up in broken flakes of filth. I turned to head back to the sanctuary of the car. Again the wallabies, their numbers now increased, stood expectantly between it and me. They seemed tame but kept their distance, staring at me silently, whether pleading for food or begging to be removed from this strange place, I could not tell.
Not wishing to run any kind of marsupial gauntlet, I executed a ridiculous doubling-back manoeuvre, distracting them before a dash to the driver’s seat and a slam of the door. I started up and drove away. In my rear-view mirror, they gathered, watching my departure, ears pricked, hopeful to the end.
Feeling oddly spooked, I was anxious to get back to the more well-travelled roads. Checking the map at an intersection I looked up to see a familiar vehicle pass by, the driver lifting the mandatory finger.
‘No!’ I exclaimed with incredulity to no one but myself. ‘Not again.’
Since my meeting with ranger Wayne a few days before, I had come to realise one of the island’s great unwritten laws, that on any given road on any part of the island, at any time, day or night, there is a roughly forty per cent chance Wayne Dick will be driving along it.
Living up to his reputation for omnipresence, the man indeed seemed to be everywhere. Having taken so long to meet Wayne Dick, I was now convinced there must in fact be several of him. How else was I to explain watching him passing me in the opposite direction driving out of town one afternoon, only to see him chatting to a man in shorts beside his truck, parked in its place outside his office a short time later? I attempted to explain this phenomenon to the cafe girl with short red hair to whose coffee I was now addicted, but she simply gave a warm smile, and offered me a muffin, just baked, straight out of the oven.
26
JOHN THE PILOT
‘Just over this next ridge … I think,' said John Duigan as we bumped along a paddock in his ageing but reliable four-wheel drive, through a couple of gates, up a steep incline and down a ridge near his property at Emita on Flinders Island’s west coast. There was what looked like a small quarry high up on a hill with a fine view over the ocean towards the west. A gathering of nondescript mechanical detritus was scattered over a wide area around us. In the centre was, unmistakably, what John, fit as a fiddle in his eighty-second summer, had brought me to see: torn sheets of painted yellow metal, a rudder fin, bent aluminium poles, indeed the unquestionable remains of a very small and very wrecked aeroplane. ‘Yes, there she is,’ said John. He should know. He was the one who wrecked it.
Everyone on Flinders Island, it seemed, knew everyone else, but with some people, the rule is more thickly applied. Simply everyone knows John Duigan, the man long-famous for flying over it in his ultralight aircraft. For years, John and one of his hand-assembled ultralight machines were a common sight in the skies of Flinders. Until, that is, the day it all went horribly wrong.
Not that you’d know that talking to John. Were it not, one suspects, for the tyranny of years and an extremely sensible wife, Helen, who, after all, nearly lost both her husband and her son in one of John’s contraptions, his enthusiasm to head aloft would be little diminished. As it was, he was more than happy to indulge me in the tales of his recent glory days.
Aviation runs deep in the Duigan blood. John was slightly too young for the Second World War, but his older brother became a highly decorated Wing Commander in the RAF, flying for the entire duration of the war without, said John, ‘managing to get himself shot to pieces’. In 2010, the original Duigan aviation heritage was celebrated when he was asked to participate in the centenary celebrations of his famous father who, with little more than a tool kit and a copy of Aero magazine, managed to design, construct and fly the first powered aircraft in Australia in 1909. Its replica hangs today in the foyer of the Museum of Victoria in Melbourne.
Energetic and enthusiastic, John made a fuss of my visit, showing me books and making tea while Helen chatted and got on with some Sunday afternoon ironing.
‘We came here for six months. That was about thirty years ago,' she said. From an initial acreage of several thousand, they were now down to a just couple of hundred. ‘Five thousand fine Merino sheep, we used to run,' he told me. ‘This was a soldier settlement, and a boggy one, but we managed to fix it up. You see?’ he said, distracted from his adored topic of aviation long enough, and pointing down the slope running away from their veranda. ‘There’s the remains of my airfield!’ I peered down and could just make out what was once a windsock, hanging limply from a forlorn pole in the middle of a grassy paddock where nothing looked like it had landed for some time.
Although primarily an island flier, John was not averse to long hours in the small cockpit, having famously completed a trip to Central Australia and back in his newly built Savannah ultralight, becoming both a local and national celebrity with newspaper interviews and television features in the vein of ‘and now some more of those magnificent men and their flying machines …’
‘A year ago I made a major boo-boo, you see,’ John told me as Helen pressed heavily into a linen napkin and slowly and silently shook her head. ‘I’d been told about these new vortex generators,’ continued John, a little conspiratorially. ‘Bloke in Queensland convinced me to get them. They attach to the leading edge of the wing, you see, and give you an extra three or four knots, and this bloke just said, “Stick ’em on
according to the directions” …’
Just the most barely audible ‘tut’ from Helen …
‘Anyway, it seemed to go all right when just I was in it, but, um, that wasn’t the case when my son got into the seat beside me.’ John and Helen’s son Nick, also a pilot, is a well-known television identity, one of the affable hosts of a successful fishing show called Hook, Line and Sinker. His father came close to seriously denting his career.
One sunny January afternoon, keen to see for himself just how effective these new wing devices his dad had been going on about really were, Nick had strapped himself into the second seat of the Italian-built Savannah as his father revved the little engine and began to move across the paddock.
‘We took off,’ said John, ‘but for some reason, I couldn’t climb.’ The newly altered wings with the added weight of an extra body were clearly not working. John freely admitted the mistake he then made, one that could so easily have ended in tragedy. ‘If I’d been thinking straight,’ he said, ‘I would have put it straight down again in a paddock. Instead, I thought I could reach a point where the ground fell away and gave me about 300 feet clear underneath me. Then I could put the nose down a bit, get the speed up and make it climb.’ He paused thoughtfully as a burst of noisy steam emanated from the hot iron in Helen’s hand. ‘Unfortunately,’ he continued, ‘we hit the ground in between.’
It had taken John two years to assemble his aeroplane from the kit, then take it on a marathon flight to Central Australia and back without the slightest trouble. But it took just a fraction of a second to destroy it in a paddock next to his house, almost killing himself and his son.
The aeroplane had hit the ground and flipped onto its back. In the impact, John ‘headbutted’ his son’s jaw, breaking it in several places, and knocking him out. ‘I can remember looking down and seeing my left foot pointing backwards,' he said, sending a shudder through my squeamish constitution. Despite the shock and mayhem, with his bleeding, unconscious son hanging in his straps beside him, John’s brain had nonetheless been able to function, although he can’t remember much of it now.
The Forgotten Islands Page 16
