by Juliet Wills
‘Why so much fuss over a few stones when nobody seemed
to make a fuss about the dead—my comrades . . . the woman . . .
the little baby?’ he later wondered. It was supposed to be a night of accolades, instead it was a night of accusations. The guest of honour would miss most of his own party.
As the next step of the investigation, Military Intelligence worked at tracking down pilots Leon Vanderburg and Heinrick Gerrits.
On 17 March, urgent telegrams seeking their whereabouts were transmitted across the country. Vanderburg was in an air force ward at Heidelberg Hospital in Melbourne, where he was, in the end, to spend six months before being discharged with a bullet still in his semi-paralysed leg. When Military Intelligence officers arrived in the crowded ward, they demanded to inspect his few remaining belongings. He willingly complied and they found nothing. Vanderburg was very sick, suffering from his leg wound, loss of blood, dehydration and burns. Doctors
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advised he was not up to questioning for more than five minutes.
Captain Proctor of Military Intelligence in Melbourne conducted the interview. He asked Vanderburg if he had seen the package.
The invalid replied that the only time he had seen it was when it was handed to Smirnoff in Java.
‘Did you know what was in the package?’ Proctor asked.
‘No,’ he replied, ‘but Captain Smirnoff told me it was of very great value.’
‘No doubt that intrigued you?’
‘Of course,’ Vanderburg replied.
‘Tempted you, even?’ the investigator pressed.
‘It would be tempting to any man,’ Vanderburg retorted.
Proctor then asked what happened to the package at Carnot Bay and Vanderburg repeated the story of van Romondt losing it in the water.
‘Did you go through the luggage of the dead passengers?’
Proctor accused.
Vanderburg was horrified at the inference. ‘I did, sir. We needed bandages, nappies, water, food. Also, I wanted to identify the dead and obtain mementos for their relatives. This is why I went through the luggage.’
‘What is your relationship with Richard Bessenfelder?’
‘Who?’ Vanderburg asked.
‘Brother Richard Bessenfelder of Beagle Bay.’
‘The man who rescued us?’
‘Yes.’
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‘He was a nice man. He rescued us.’ Proctor paused, clearly wanting more information. ‘We talked about living in that godforsaken place. He told me he didn’t mind it, that he felt he was doing good things for the Aborigines. I told him about Java and the war. That kind of stuff.’
‘You speak German?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Did you give him anything in return for rescuing you?’
‘No, I did not. And I’m sure he’d be horrified at what you’re suggesting.’
‘The diamonds could not have disappeared. Either one of
the people on that plane or a member of the rescue party must have taken them.’
‘Well, it wasn’t me,’ Vanderburg said, his mind running
through the passengers and crew of the Dakota, trying to work out who it might be.
The investigators were no closer to finding the whereabouts of the package. Proctor reported to Richardson, ‘Although the interview was not held under the best of conditions, I am firmly of the opinion that Vanderburg spoke the truth. He is a young boy with no trace of guile or deceitfulness, and is believed to have been perfectly frank.’
Intelligence Officers in Adelaide interrogated Gerrits, who also said that van Romondt had attempted to retrieve the
valuable package but lost it in the water. When questioned, van Romondt verified the story.
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In light of the information, Major Martin wired Intelligence in Sydney on 18 March and advised them to begin diving
operations at the site of the crashed Dakota at Carnot Bay as early as possible. It was also recommended that if van Romondt admitted to dropping the parcel, then, providing he was fit to travel, ‘he be flown back to Broome to indicate the precise point where he threw the package overboard’.
Smirnoff still had doubts about his passengers. He contacted van Oosten on 23 March, suggesting Gerrits and Vanderburg had been put on guard by the army’s direct approach. Van
Oosten made note of Smirnoff ’s concerns: ‘as they were very closely associated during the journey from the wreck, he
[Smirnoff ] does not attach very much importance to the
similarity of their stories.’
To the Dutch owners of the diamonds, the Olberg and Davidson families of N.V. de Concurrent, the gems hardly seemed to matter. Fires blazed across Java as oil refineries and the port burned. The local radio station broadcast its last bulletin, signing off ‘Until better times’. Japanese soldiers wearing caps cycled into the streets as the locals tried to come to terms with the end of Dutch rule. Families were evicted from their homes, all banks and European schools were closed, and the entire male Dutch population was interned. Ironically, it was Japanese Samurai mercenaries who had first helped seal Dutch control
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over the nutmeg trade and the Spice Islands of Indonesia almost 300 years earlier.
Frans Olberg broke his back defending an airstrip during
the Japanese invasion. The Japanese took over the hospital where Frans lay with his back braced and turned it into a POW camp.
His father Willy set up an underground movement smuggling food to the prisoners until he was captured and interned. His business was taken over by the Japanese, who kept some family members on to run the company. The town and businesses
were looted by invading soldiers. Hiding under her bed,
Davidson’s wife gave birth to her fourth child on the day she was captured; the family was later imprisoned at Ambarawa, a women’s prison camp where fights regularly broke out over the meagre rations of food, and Japanese soldiers sought ‘comfort’
women. Olberg’s seventeen-year-old daughter Elly was interned with the Davidsons at Ambarawa.
As the families endured starvation, malaria, forced labour and beatings at the Japanese POW camps, the diamonds were the last things on their minds.
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DIAMONDS
GALORE
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THE OLD PEARLER
The old pearler
James ‘Skipper’ Mulgrue, a lean old man with grey hair, a well-trimmed moustache and withered but refined features, had been sweeping the verandah at Dysons store opposite the Continental Hotel when he heard the sound of gun fire over the bay at Broome on that fateful day of the Japanese raid. Known to the locals as Skipper, from the days when he headed his own pearling fleet, the 66-year-old had watched as a flying boat erupted into a ball of flames and had heard the distant sound of
screaming. Leaving the door of the store open, he had raced down to the foreshore where other locals gathered, watching as the Japanese wove in and out, picking off each aircraft one by one. When the planes had finished on the bay they headed towards the town.
Mulgrue had ducked into a slit trench near the hotel but
the planes had flown on towards the airstrip and continued 119
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firing. When the danger had passed
he went back to the foreshore and helped an exhausted Dutchman who had swum the long
distance from the flying boat to shore. The Dutchman had
pulled off his clothes to help make the distance, so Mulgrue took him up to the store and provided him with a drink and a change of clothes. Then Mulgrue drove up the long jetty, where dazed and injured half-dressed men, women and children stood shocked and confused, unsure what to do next. Even
though the Dutch had been his enemy back when he had fought in the Boer War in Africa, as a soldier he had admired their fighting spirit—and these people were young enough to know nothing of that war.
Modern warfare was very different from the man-on-man
battles Skipper Mulgrue had known during service in both the South African Boer War and the First World War. Somehow,
it seemed a fairer fight back then. The Japanese air raid was a blip, a passing moment of unmatched strength, but the war machines of the Second World War meant the airmen could
not know that their legitimate military targets were laden with civilians. They had not fired a single bullet on the town’s people.
Such were the great technological advances of the time that you did not look your enemy in the eye to know whether they were soldier or child.
Mulgrue guided a woman and child to the front seat of his car then returned to the jetty, directing three more men into his vehicle. When it was full, he took them first to get a drink and clothes and then to the hospital and airport. If they did
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speak English, they seemed in no mood to talk, so he too
remained silent.
Planes arrived and went, emptying the town of its people.
Anyone who had not managed to get on a plane by 2 p.m. on the day of the raid was advised to find their own way out. Nine American soldiers joined a civilian convoy of five trucks containing thirty men heading south to Port Hedland. When the road ran out, they pushed the truck through sand and
detoured around the saltwater marshes, eager to put distance between themselves and Broome. Others headed south on the lugger Nicol Bay.
While the Japanese had not wiped out the town, in the days that followed Broome seemed to die anyway. The fear that
Japanese soldiers might soon occupy the town had emptied it and robbed it of its soul. The dusty pindan streets lay deserted.
Before joining the exodus, Police Inspector Jim Cowie wrote an urgent letter to the Commissioner of Police on 5 March expressing the desperation he felt in the days following the air raid.
There was a good deal of panic in the town and people
immediately commenced to get away fearing an afternoon
raid. The bank officials were among the first to clear out as also Mr. Cowan, Clerk of Courts and Mr. Ferguson, Fisheries Inspector. Mr. Lawson, Customs Officer also went to bush
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some miles out and quite large numbers of Broome people.
Mr. Lawson has since returned.
That night it was announced that the Americans in town
would be all evacuated by planes, which were then arriving from South, and Colonel Leggo [sic], in charge of the American forces advised everybody to get out of town by morning, as he believed the Japs would be back to bomb it. This caused a general exodus and that night after the injured people were taken away by plane, Dr. Jolly who is also Resident Magistrate packed up and left the town taking all the Hospital staff and Quarantine Officer with him. They are said to be proceeding overland to Perth by car and no intention of returning, therefore the place is left without a Doctor or Hospital facilities . . .
Storekeepers have all closed up and most of them cleaned
out with what they could take with them by car.
Really the position is acute, as all essential services are at a standstill. No Banks are in operation, and, as far as I can ascertain the Bank Officers have taken all the money with them and do not intend to come back. We will be unable to pay Police Salaries here tomorrow.
The Hotel keepers are also talking of closing down and
getting away as there is now no defence for the place at all.
Large numbers of American planes came here last night
and, during the night evacuated all their men, and the members of the R.A.A.F. also have disappeared. They seem to have taken all machine guns and defence weapons with them, and the
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place is really defenceless, as most members of the Home
Guard have also cleared out.
The Police are doing what they can and are arranging to
get an old Motor truck and car in reasonable running order to take all out if finally we must go. However they will hold on to the last.
The whole town, or what is left of the people, are in a
more or less state of fear and expect bombing raid or landing of Parachute Troops at any time. Particularly do they fear the possibility of landing as owing to the position of Broome, in relation to the sea there is but one road out, and that, runs along the full East side of the Aerodrome and troops suddenly landed there would trap town people from getting out.
The most despicable feature at this time is the fact of the Doctor rushing away just at a time when he may be required, and it would seem that his doing so had considerable influence on others clearing away.
In conclusion I can only say that the Officials and others now left in Broome are living in a sort of helpless anticipation of future happenings now that all form of Defence is gone.
Streeter & Male and Dysons stores reopened a few days later; the owners had stayed in town fearing looting of their stocks.
But the ships that once replenished them stayed away.
Fears of invasion were not baseless, as some of those who sat in the comfort of the suburban cities of the south of Australia
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would later suggest. As so many cities across the South Pacific already knew, an air raid often preceded invasion. If the Japanese took Broome, then Port Hedland, Perth and Albany, the west coast of Australia would be Japanese.
Skipper Mulgrue had no desire to leave. He wondered if he had been numbed by his war experience or was just too old to bother. Where would he go anyway? His family were spread
out across the world. One son, George, was missing in Europe.
Another son, John, was fighting in Tobruk and a third, Patrick, had managed to get into the merchant navy despite being
only seventeen years old. They had followed in the family footsteps—at least the last three generations of Mulgrues had been fighting men.
Just as his father had before him, James Mulgrue had joined the Royal Warwickshires, a British Army regiment, fighting in the Boer War in South Africa and later in the First World War in India. Returning to England at the end of the Boer War, he had met his wife Lilian. The couple eloped, marrying in a registry office, but he was restless and they set sail for Western Australia. Soon after they arrived, they set up a store and post office amidst a scattering of wheat and sheep farms near a railway siding at Isseka, which also supplied wood to the nearest major town centre at Geraldton. It was hard, backbreaking work in the Australian bush.
Taking his wife with him, Mulgrue rejoined his former
regiment in India to fight in the First World War, and then in the Third Afghan War. Returning to Australia, in 1921 he
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moved his family north to the port of Broome after hearing from friends of the fabulous wealth being made in the pearling trade. The period before the First World War was Br
oome’s golden age. Labour was cheap and the price of pearl shell high.
The master pearlers had made huge profits and more than 400
pearling boats sailed the northern waters in search of pearl shell.
The Mulgrues had lived the high life in India during the
wars, and the notion of a life at sea combined with the image of the master pearlers in white suits and topees in their verandah bungalows was very alluring.
The pearl shell had been the economic backbone of Broome
since the 1860s, when seafarers noticed the beautiful pearl-shell ornaments dangling from the human-hair belts of the Aborigines.
At first they had sought to trade them, until they found a plentiful supply of their own by wading out into the sea at low tide. By the 1900s Broome was supplying more than 75 per
cent of the world’s mother-of-pearl, the pearlescent coating of the oyster shell used in buttons. More and more men were
attracted to the north-west, etching out a prosperous living on the remote coastline.
As coastal supplies were depleted, hundreds more came to
scour the depths and risk their lives in hope of finding their fortunes. The white pearlers used Aborigines, Manilamen,
Chinamen, Malays, Javanese and Koepangers to plough the
depths for the prized shell, and Broome evolved as a town like
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no other, a melting pot of cultures and anathema to those who had legislated at Federation for a white Australia.
It was a business based on hard work and luck, with the
prospect of riches uncertain. The indentured workers would return to their provinces wealthy men in their own right, but the wealth came at a cost—the death rate among divers was said to be as high as 20 per cent a year. The cemeteries were full of men who had died in the dangerous and laborious search for pearls and pearl shell in the shark-infested waters off Broome.
When Dutch authorities in Batavia, alarmed at the number
of deaths among Koepangers and Malays, cut the flow of labour from the East Indies, the pearlers paid blackbirders to fill the labour void. On dawn raids, armed with whips, guns and
