by Juliet Wills
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monitored by the army, and Warrant Officer Gus Clinch was assigned to the mission to dispel any rumours of espionage.
The air raid on Broome had shaken all at the mission and
everyone was living in fear and uncertainty of what lay ahead.
It was hard to tell truth from rumour. Panic-stricken Aborigines had greeted Brother Richard in the bush, telling him Broome had been razed, nothing left. He was greatly relieved to learn this story had been an exaggeration, but then again, it was doubtful that this raid would be the last. Some had claimed the Japanese had landed; he hoped this was fiction too.
Cattle charged across the track and escaped through buckled wire fences which needed mending as Brother Richard walked past stone cottages to the parched field where the church lay.
Tropical fruit trees lined the perimeter of the vegetable garden which had provided for the full needs of the community until the influx. After mass, the Aboriginal children would go to work in the gardens, supervised by the women.
The tower on the church steeple turned a glowing pink as
the rays of the rising sun reflected on the crushed pearlshell surface. It was hard to imagine, in the serenity of the morning light, the chaos in the world beyond. When he had arrived from Germany in 1935, Brother Richard had marvelled at the beautiful ‘pearl’ church with its magnificent altar decorated with mother-of-pearl shells embedded in the plaster.
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Even the words around the tabernacle, Dominus Meus et Deus Meus (My Lord and My God) were cut from mother-of-pearl, framed by cowry shells. Completed in 1918, the church was an outstanding and unique work of art in one of the
remotest corners of the earth. It soon became a beacon to the raft of nationalities who travelled the coast: Malay, Manilamen, Koepangers, Chinese and Japanese pearlers, the original inhabitants—the Nyul Nyul people and the Bardi from further
north—as well as the Irish nuns and German brothers who had come from across the world to be there.
It was shortly after sunrise when the Aborigine sent by the man who had discovered Muller and Cramerus stumbled upon
Brother Richard and told him the news. He was unable to tell the Brother exactly where the plane had crashed, but pointed down the track on which the Dutchmen would be travelling.
Brother Richard went to his superior, Bishop Raible, who
was meeting with Gus Clinch. Brother Richard passed on the information about the plane crash, and Raible agreed that a search party should be sent out immediately. Clinch offered to join Brother Richard in the search. While Brother Richard organised the rescue team, Bishop Raible drove to Broome to advise the authorities. The RAAF and the Dutch East Indies Airline were contacted to organise an aerial food drop.
The brother organised a mule team with a spring cart within a quarter of an hour of receiving the news. He instructed Beagle
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Bay resident Albert Kelly to prepare a second mule team and follow in their tracks. Joe Bernard, a stockman and Aboriginal tracker who knew the area like the back of his hand, rode alongside. Brother Richard prayed he would find survivors as they set out through the rough terrain.
Meanwhile, an Aborigine from the camp was guiding
Cramerus and Muller up the track towards the mission. The two Dutchmen were in an extremely distressed state, suffering from dehydration and sunburn; they were barely coherent,
disoriented and confused, but the great anxiety suffered from not knowing if they would ever be rescued had dissipated. The long walk seemed less torturous.
When the spring cart came bouncing along the rough track
towards them, they knew their ordeal would soon be coming to an end. Cramerus and Muller were overjoyed to see the
smiling faces of Brother Richard and Warrant Officer Clinch, though they were too weary to show it.
Cramerus’s skin was burnt red raw and blistering from his exposure to the brutality of the intense tropical sun. Brother Richard cooked up some soap into a paste and caked this onto the sunburn, which offered some relief. Cramerus and Muller were fed and watered and directed towards the mission.
After repeated questioning by Brother Richard and Clinch, the two men were able to draw a few familiar landmarks that gave the Beagle Bay team the clues needed to pinpoint the crash site. Brother Richard and Clinch surmised that the wrecked plane must lie between two certain points. Their carts could
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not make it through the mangroves, swamps and sand of the coast, so Joe Bernard rode south on a mule in search of the survivors, agreeing to rendezvous afterwards with Brother Richard and Clinch at Bunda Bunda mustering camp, a little over forty kilometres south of Beagle Bay. About halfway to the mustering camp they noticed a low-flying aircraft heading north—possibly also searching for survivors. Within a few kilometres of the mustering camp, Clinch and Brother Richard met up with the other two men who had been sent on the exploratory mission, van Romondt and Brinkman. The two men had become disorientated and were heading back along the track towards the crash site. Clinch and Brother Richard fed the two Dutchmen and took them to the mustering camp, questioning them further on the exact whereabouts of the crash. There they waited—
both for Joe Bernard, who had travelled on horseback towards the coast, and for Albert Kelly and the second mule team.
The survivors at Carnot Bay lay motionless on the beach. That afternoon, the same ominous sound that had brought fear to their hearts just a few days earlier rose above the sound of the ocean—the unmistakeable drone of approaching aircraft. Soon two black dots appeared in the distance, flying very low in their direction. The planes weaved continuously from left to right as if they were searching. The group of exhausted men sprang into action. They did not intend to play target again. Instinctively
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they hid themselves in the bushes, pulses racing, anxiously awaiting the sound of gun fire.
Leon Vanderburg removed his white singlet for fear of being spotted and crouched face down beneath a large branch on the water’s edge. The planes circled as Vanderburg remembered how the water had protected him from bullets five days earlier. Now, as the planes approached he ducked under the surface and held his breath. Hoffman, Smirnoff and Gerrits were too far away to get to the water and had to rely on surrounding shrubbery to hide behind.
Eventually Vanderburg put his head up to breathe. At that moment, a plane passed immediately overhead and he saw
clearly the red, white and blue circles at the ends of the wings.
Smirnoff and the other men saw them too. It was the Royal Australian Air Force—they had been saved. Their pain dissipated as Smirnoff, Hoffman, Vanderburg and Gerrits leapt to their feet. Circling low over the beach, the pilots saw a frenzy of waving arms below them. Letters and packages fell through the air. The first short note read, ‘Help expedition of the mission post will be arriving at sunset.’ The second had more detail—
‘The rescue group will be with you tonight with food and
medical aid, much luck. Macdonald RAAF’—and the third
brought a smile to their faces: ‘Good luck and may the Japs rot in hell!’ The planes circled above and the men clearly saw their occupants wave before they left.
Adrenalin surged through their weakened bodies. The four
men dragged the packages up to the shelter and then tore them
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open like children unwrapping presents
at Christmas, gasping at their contents—water, fruit, meat, chocolate, coffee and even tobacco. It was a feast. Each man savoured the fluid inside the tins. Never had a drink tasted so good. Drawing back on their cigarettes and lying back in the sand, Hoffman reread the messages aloud and they all smiled. Smirnoff found it hard to believe that their ordeal would soon be over.
Thoughts fell to the little boy and Vanderburg walked over to where the baby had been left to rest away from the group.
As he neared he saw the child lying curled up under a tree in a clear sandy patch, his small thumb near his open mouth, the bandage on his foot black and red with blood and dust, his eyes closed. Peace had come with death. The rescue party would be too late to save Jo van Tuyn. Shocked, Vanderburg sat down and looked at the child, berating himself for not caring for him better. Had he died in the minutes before the planes appeared in the sky, Vanderburg wondered, or had they been so consumed in indulging their own desperate need that the time taken enjoying the packages’ contents had cost the child his life?
Smirnoff, who in the preceding days had tried so hard to
get the child to drink, soon joined Vanderburg and was moved to tears. The pilot gathered up the tiny body and wrapped it in a parachute. Holding the child tenderly in stiff aching arms, he limped down to the shore and tried to remember which
grave was Jo’s mother’s. Scooping out a tiny hollow, he lay the baby down and covered him with sand. The other three men
joined Smirnoff and they all knelt silently by the grave.
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The afternoon sky took on a strange neon-yellow hue as the fire of the sun sank towards the horizon. The men found
themselves gazing out across the ocean, drawing back on tobacco, battling conflicting feelings of relief at their impending rescue and dismay at the loss of the little boy. They did not see the shadow glide noiselessly towards them in the twilight. Hoffman jumped up with a yell. None of the survivors had ever seen an Aborigine before and they were alarmed, but the man smiled sympathetically and gestured at them to stay calm. In broken English, Joe Bernard told the group that others were on their way to help, then he went back to the Bunda Bunda rendezvous to report their location.
Clinch and Brother Richard filled water bags and set off on foot with Joe. They instructed Albert to follow with a mule cart as far as the tidal flats and soft sandy beaches would allow it to travel. No foot journey was easy through this harsh terrain but the group managed to make good time, despite travelling through the dark of night, and hindered by cloud moving across the moon. They arrived at the beach at around 2 a.m., to be greeted by the overwhelming stench of rotting bodies, made more pronounced by the still-hot weather. As the smell became stronger they could make out the silhouette of the plane on the beach in the moonlight. They were in the right place.
Brother Richard leant over the sleeping shape of Captain
Smirnoff and shook him gently. Half awake, Smirnoff heard the brother’s German accent and reached for his pistol, but the
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missionary reassured the captain and his fellow survivors of his good intention.
Using aviation fuel poured on to the sand and set alight, the rescuers boiled a billy and the survivors enjoyed their first cup of tea in a long time. Brother Richard listened quietly as the men recounted their ordeal. In the firelight he could see the trauma in the faces of the weary men as they told of the attack, of the mother and child who now lay buried on the beach, of the anguish of the pilot who had left his pregnant young wife behind, of the agonised screams of the young mechanic who lay for days on the beach, his kneecaps blasted away.
Warrant Officer Clinch walked down to look at the graves
on the beach. The whitecaps of the waves rippled on to the shore. As he gazed at the four mounds, Smirnoff limped up behind him and pointed at the smallest one. ‘The little boy.
He died only a few hours ago,’ he said. The wind had blown a top layer of sand away and another storm would leave the bodies fully exposed to the elements. They would need to be reburied.
The rescue party were weary from their long trek but there was nothing on this shore that made any of them want to stay, and Brother Richard could see the survivors were in dire need of medical attention.
Smirnoff told Clinch of the valuable package he had been
given as he prepared for take-off from Java, but it seemed insignificant now, with the pain of death still weighing heavily on their shoulders. There was neither time nor inclination to
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search for it—if the men wanted to get out, they would need to use the cool of the morning. Clinch offered to return the next day with a group from the mission to search for the package and bury the dead.
‘Can your party walk?’ Clinch asked. Smirnoff ’s heart sank; three of the four survivors had serious leg, foot and hip injuries that would make walking any distance extremely difficult. ‘It’s a good mile or two, nothing but foot tracks through the scrub; we could not bring the horses nearer,’ Clinch continued.
Smirnoff nodded. At four o’clock on Monday morning they
set out in single file, guided by men who knew the rugged terrain well in spite of the sparse light from the shrouded moon.
Heavy mud and uneven ground ensured that every step would be felt by the wounded. Vanderburg used a branch to help
support himself, but before long the wound above his knee where the bullet could still be felt began to throb. It started to bleed again and the pain was excruciating. He managed to keep up, however, and even carried on an animated conversation with Brother Richard in German. Smirnoff mused on the irony that while Germans, Dutch and English were killing each other in Europe, on the far side of the world German missionaries were saving their lives. It only served to show the folly of war.
Having seen two expeditions fail due to lack of water,
Smirnoff expressed concern that there might not be enough for the trip. Clinch smiled. ‘Don’t worry; it’s all around you, three or four feet down. Of course, you need a spade to dig for it, and you need to know where to dig.’
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Joe Bernard pointed to the pandanus clumps as they moved
through the thick bush. ‘Wherever there is pandanus there is water,’ he explained, digging about a metre down. The men marvelled at the fresh water that seeped into the hole. From a shady broad-leafed tree he picked a soft yellowy-green fruit he called ‘gubinge’ and handed it to the men to try. It was surpris-ingly sweet.
It took almost three hours to travel five kilometres as the two men wounded by bullets limped slowly and awkwardly
through tall spear grass. Eventually they complained they couldn’t go on, so Smirnoff staggered up to Clinch and asked, ‘Just how far are we going?’
Clinch hesitated, then looked Smirnoff squarely in the eye.
‘About twenty miles. I know if I had told you this earlier some of you would never have attempted it. But the only way out from where you were is on foot. I had to get you going. A mile or so at a time you could attempt; the whole journey would have disheartened you.’
Despite his pain, Smirnoff agreed with the soundness of
Clinch’s psychology, but the men were little more than crawling by the time they reached Albert’s mule team. With great relief, Smirnoff and Vanderburg were helped up into the spring cart.
Brother Richard climbed up to take the reins and Hoffman
was squeezed in beside him. The cart was too small to carry all of them and Gerrits and Clinch would have to walk.
It was hard to see where the narrow track they were following led, but somehow the cart
managed to navigate through the
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sand, bush, potholes, termite mounds and mud to the mustering camp, the occupants feeling each bump reverberate through their aching bodies. At the mustering camp they were reunited with Dick Brinkman and van Romondt. They ate lightly and
rested, at last well away from the nightmare of the site of their ordeal and the odour of the dead.
It was 9 March and, typically, the day was hot. They decided to rest in the shade, building up their energy with more food and sweet tea. Any more exposure to sunlight was dangerous, particularly for Brinkman and van Romondt, so they delayed travel on to the mission until the afternoon.
Word of the survivors had travelled to Broome and well-
wishers had driven to the Beagle Bay Mission. From there they had begun to follow the route of the mule carts, hoping to meet up with the survivors and join in the rescue. However, since the track was not suitable for vehicles many had become hopelessly bogged and the progress of the rescuers was slowed by having to free stranded vehicles. Then, close to the mission, the mule carts suffered the same fate. A utility which they had freed moments earlier came to their rescue and the survivors and the rescue team were transferred to the back of the vehicle.
Together, they drove up the dusty potholed road to the mission in the early afternoon. Horses and mules grazed inside wood and wire fences and cattle roamed around the collection of stone buildings and ramshackle shacks. Aboriginal children ran alongside the ute, smiling and waving.
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Passing a green field of turf, Smirnoff remarked, ‘What a wonderful spot for an aerodrome. Why don’t you use it as a landing field?’ Brother Richard smiled. ‘Oh no, we don’t want to destroy the turf, we like to look upon this wide expanse of green.’
The ute bounced along the path, passed the white church,
and finally came to a standstill outside a whitewashed stone building. The men were greeted by nuns, who helped them
