by Juliet Wills
Later that day, Palmer joined Robbie and Mulgrue at their camp, carrying the plate of diamonds, some still wrapped in tissue paper. It was hard to talk or think about anything else but the diamonds on the plate. They examined them. Some
were huge. They thought about counting them but decided
there were too many.
When Jack went to return them to the salt and pepper
shakers he said some didn’t fit. They looked at the pile of leftover diamonds on the table. Robinson later said Jack could have fitted all of the diamonds back into the containers but he was willing to play along with the game. ‘You’d better take these as a souvenir of the Japanese raid. Goodness knows you’ll
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never be able to use them if we are invaded by the Japanese,’
Jack said.
All three agreed the normal salvage fee was 20 per cent, so at the very least Jack deserved a portion of the find.
Jack gave Mulgrue a heaped teaspoonful of diamonds and
Robinson a few more. Sitting around idly in the shade of a native blackberry tree, smoking cigarettes and drinking sweet tea, they discussed what they would do with their share. Jack said he knew a man in Perth who would dispose of them for him.
Mulgrue asked Palmer if he could trade a few of the smaller ones for large ones to send to his family. Palmer picked out five big ones.
Gazing at the largest of his diamonds, Mulgrue said, ‘I’m going to give one to my boy in the war and one to my wife.
The rest I’ll try and sell to a Chinaman in Broome.’
Suddenly realising that he had given Mulgrue some of the
largest gems, Palmer asked for them back, offering to replace them for a spoonful of smaller ones. Mulgrue begrudgingly returned them in exchange for a greater quantity of lesser diamonds. He was annoyed, but put them in his bag anyway.
After a little more conversation, Palmer and Robinson moved away and began muttering between themselves. Mulgrue was
sure they were planning something behind his back. Sandy
blight still robbed the old man of vision, the discomfort adding to his sense of frustration. The damp bandage provided a little relief, but without being able to see what was going on he had
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a sense of being left out. He went over to the pair and asked accusingly what they were up to.
‘What’s it got to do with you?’ Jack rebuffed. ‘You never found anything!’ Jack thought Mulgrue was being ungrateful.
‘I thought you could spare another one for the lad,’ Mulgrue asked. ‘I mean these little ones won’t fetch a tenth as much as the big ones.’
‘If you don’t want the diamonds then give them back. I need the bigger ones. I thought there were more of them,’ Jack replied.
Mulgrue went to his bag and took out the diamonds. He
walked back to Jack and flung them onto the enamel plate.
‘They’re just trouble anyway,’ he said, and stalked off angrily.
‘I suppose you want mine back, too?’ Robinson asked. Jack reached down and picked out the larger ones, leaving the smaller ones. ‘You can keep those—they’re only dusters [very small diamonds],’ he said.
Palmer was blasé about the diamonds and left them lying on a camp table, some falling into the sand as he moved his enamel mug or shuffled his belongings. It annoyed Mulgrue that the beachcomber could be so irresponsible with such an important find.
On the following day, Mulgrue and Jack made their peace.
Mulgrue was sitting at his table when Jack walked over carrying the enamel plate. He scooped out a handful of small diamonds and put them on Mulgrue’s plate. ‘Present for you.’
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Mulgrue looked down at the diamonds, everything still
blurry. He pushed them across to Robbie. ‘Pack them up for me, will you?’ The Canadian said he would look after them for Mulgrue and put them with his own share.
‘You won’t say anything about them, will you?’ Mulgrue
urged. ‘No one will know we have taken a few.’ The other two agreed.
Mulgrue then advised Palmer to hand in the remainder of
the diamonds to Major Gibson and claim a reward. But Jack had decided to travel to Perth to sell the diamonds.
The next morning Jack left on foot for Broome. The Eurus was still well stocked with supplies and Jack offered Robbie and Mulgrue the radio, two bags of sugar, tinned food and eighteen bags of flour for £30. The lugger was thrown in for free. The three men shook hands on the deal.
Taking his diamonds with him, Palmer headed off through
the bush towards Beagle Bay. As soon as he was out of sight, Robbie sifted the sand where Jack had proudly shown off some of his booty and found twelve diamonds.
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AN ATTACK OF
CONSCIENCE?
An attack of conscience?
Jack Palmer combed his hair and smoothed his moustache, then wiped his grubby hands on his shorts. Sitting on the long shady verandah of the old Magistrate’s Residence in Broome, he waited for Major Clifford Gibson to see him.
Palmer clutched his rucksack to his chest and smiled at the thought of the reaction he might get. He hoped the major
would swallow his story. He had just found them, he reasoned—
salvage, finders keepers, etc. Why, he should get a medal for handing these in now!
He wanted to join the military, to help fight the Japanese, and surely they wouldn’t turn him down. Most people, including the military in Broome, were expecting an invasion.
After the second attack on Broome the military command
in Perth were advised that the only option for Broome was a 166
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scorched earth policy; evacuate all locals, drove cattle south, and destroy anything that might be of value to the enemy. The aerodrome runways were mined with the object of destroying them if the Japanese looked set to land.
News of attacks on other Australian towns along the north coast added to the unease felt across the top end. Two days after the second attack on Broome, Katherine and Darwin in the Northern Territory were bombed, and the day after, 23
March, Wyndham was hit again. While Australia’s southern
capitals were kept in blissful ignorance of the extent of the attacks, it seemed to the residents in the north that their days were numbered.
Unconfirmed reports claimed Japanese submarines were using islands off the Kimberley coastline for resupply, and that Japanese commandos had been seen on the northern mainland. Long-range reconnaissance patrols by the 3rd Australian Guerilla Warfare Group were later sent to the north, but they found no official evidence of Japanese landings. Rumours of espionage and invasion ran rife. Some intelligence reports bordered on the hysterical (one of the nuns at Beagle Bay was accused of having a transmission set in her piano). Later, evidence would emerge revealing that the Japanese had been actively gathering intelligence in Australia in the lead-up to the Second World War and that incursions occurred along the northern coastline during the war.
The residents of Broome had good reason to be worried,
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with a complete lack of military personnel and equipment
making them extremely vulnerable.
So poorly resourced and understaffed was Major Gibson
that he had to cadge ammunition from visiting US air crews and salvage equipment from the wrecks of Dutch planes, like the radio he had sent Clinch to get
at Carnot Bay. He had just twenty troops under his command, armed only with rifles. He knew that a hundred armed Japanese soldiers could occupy
Broome with its current defences. It was clear that he was to receive little support to defend the north of the state, yet that was the job he had been sent to do. Major Gibson needed any man he could get.
When Jack Palmer entered Gibson’s office, it was more than a month since the Dutch plane had crashed at Carnot Bay.
Palmer stood to attention and gazed at the wall behind Gibson’s chair, declaring, ‘I want to enlist. I’ve walked 105 miles, all the way from Beagle Bay, to join up.’ In fact, he had hitched a ride with one of the brothers from the mission, but Jack was never one to let the facts get in the way of a good story.
Jack explained that as a beachcomber he knew the area like the back of his hand. Local knowledge was a skill much in demand—the military called on many locals in remote outposts to keep watch on the coast and report any unusual activity.
The reality was that the massive uninhabited coastline was almost impossible to police.
Gibson sized up the dishevelled bronzed beachcomber with
the short square jaw and bushy moustache. It made Jack feel
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uncomfortable—authority figures had always done that to him.
‘There’s something else,’ he said, clumsily pulling the salt and pepper shakers from his bag. The major eyed the shakers and wondered where this was going. ‘Thought you might be
interested in these,’ Palmer continued, fumbling with the base of one. He flicked it off onto the ground, spilling some of the contents. ‘Found ’em in a paper parcel in the wreck at Carnot Bay. The wrapping broke up in the water, but I managed to recover these from the shallow water.’ He poured the diamonds over the major’s desk.
The major stared dumbfounded at the fortune before his
eyes. Until this moment the diamonds had just been words in a telegram; to see them in the thousands, scattered across his desk, was something else. He paused for a moment. It was
Gibson who had sent Clinch out to search for the lost package.
He thought how strange the turn of events were for this small Australian town. In just over a month, Broome had become a virtual ghost town, complete with dozens of fresh graves, including small ones. German missionaries had arrived with a bunch of Dutch survivors who’d been marooned on a remote
beach, and now this grubby larrikin walks into his office and splashes diamonds nonchalantly across his desk as if they were sweets.
He watched as a few diamonds rolled onto the floor near
a large crack in the wooden floorboards, horrified that the man could be so careless with such valuable jewels. ‘Is this all of the diamonds?’ the major asked.
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Palmer shifted uncomfortably. ‘I was hunting dugong round Carnot Bay way and I thought I saw something in the water.
I reached down and picked it up but the wrapping all broke up into little pieces and there was these diamonds falling. You can imagine, I couldn’t believe it. I was trying to stop ’em from falling and picking ’em all up, but you know, well some were lost in the sand and the sea.’
‘Would you be willing to show us where this happened?’
Prior to joining the armed services, Gibson was Western
Australia’s chief prosecutor. He was trained to spot holes in people’s stories.
‘Sure. Sure. Well, I’ll try, but what with the tides and
everything . . . Well, it’s pretty exposed. Have you been up that way?’
‘I do not know the spot, no. You must have seen the crashed plane?’
‘Yeah, but I didn’t go near it. It’s sort of like a war grave, isn’t it? What with all those people, you know.’
‘You didn’t go near the plane at all?’
‘Nah, nah.’ Palmer shook his head as if he abhorred the
idea. ‘I’ll show you where it is, though.’
‘You weren’t tempted to keep a few for yourself?’
‘No, sir,’ Palmer replied. ‘Thought I’d do the right thing, it being a military plane and all. That’s why I’m here, and because I want to help.’
Palmer was clearly proud of himself for handing in the
diamonds and again asked the major if he could join up. Gibson
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looked down at the report on Palmer that lay before him. He had been rejected on a number of occasions due to medical problems, and while there may have been some holes in the larrikin’s story, at least by enlisting the man he could keep an eye on his whereabouts.
And so Jack Palmer was appointed a coastwatcher at
Gantheaume Point, looking out across the sea at the mouth of Roebuck Bay, where 120 million-year-old dinosaur footprints could be seen at low tide. The Japanese planes had flown over Gantheaume Point when attacking Broome a month before,
claiming so many lives. It would be Jack’s job to look out for planes, ships or any sign of enemy activity, and to inform authorities of anything suspicious. It would be a lonely job away from the close scrutiny of senior officers, the type of job that suited a beachcomber.
Jack left the major’s office pleased he had the job. He was disappointed there was no mention of a reward for the diamonds he had handed in. But Robbie had insisted there would be a big reward, so Jack reassured himself that this might yet come.
Major Gibson carefully returned the diamonds to the salt
and pepper containers, and immediately contacted army intelligence in Perth to find out what he should do with the enormous cache he now held in his office.
While Palmer was pouring diamonds over the major’s desk, the Dutch official van Oosten had been making his way back from
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Carnot Bay with Gus Clinch. It was Clinch’s fourth trip to the crash site. Van Oosten had been sent north by Dutch authorities on 10 April to search for the diamonds after interrogating the survivors of the crash. A gang of labourers was organised to conduct a thorough search of the aircraft. At the wreck site the battered plane sat in the sand like the remains of a beached whale. At low tide, using ropes and muscle, the Dakota was hauled clear of the sea, water and sand pouring from bullet holes and cracks in the fuselage as it was hauled above the high tide line.
Clambering aboard, van Oosten painstakingly searched every nook and cranny, sifting through the layer of sand that covered the floor of the wreckage, reaching into sand-filled crevices beneath the floor in case the package had dropped into a cavity.
His search yielded another few pieces of the tissue paper thought to have held the diamonds, and ten pieces of carton which, when put together, formed the sides of the packet that had held the wallet full of diamonds. But he found nothing more.
The search was meticulous and thorough—the group scoured
not only the inside of the plane but every inch of the beach for a couple of kilometres up and down the coast.
On the beach he found a few banknotes in the currency of
the Netherlands East Indies but no further trace of anything to assist the investigation, and the group returned to Beagle Bay. When van Oosten heard of a very high tide that had
flooded the coastline near the plane the week before, he
concluded that the package had been lost to the sea.
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On arriving back in Broome, he checked in with the major, asking about a rumour he had heard about a ‘John Palmer of the RAAF’ who was said to have visited the plane. But the major had b
een advised by Military Intelligence in Perth to keep word of the diamonds secret until they could be secured properly in Perth, so he advised that ‘Mr Palmer of the RAAF’
had not returned from Perth to Broome. Mr van Oosten left Broome on 21 April believing the diamonds were all still lost.
Three days after Palmer’s visit, Gibson flew to Perth to hand the diamonds over to Colonel Mosely of Military Intelligence.
Before his meeting with the colonel, he joined his wife and son for breakfast in Perth. Both were astounded when he poured a pile of diamonds onto a plate from blue salt and pepper shakers, swearing them to secrecy. Gathering them up, Gibson drove to the army barracks where Colonel Mosely took possession of the diamonds, later calling on the Perth head of the
Commonwealth Bank, Alfred Ward, who had already been
advised by the bank in Melbourne of the impending arrival of the package.
Broome police had notified the Criminal Investigation Branch in Perth, which instituted its own enquiries. Major Gibson confirmed to Perth police that the diamonds had been found.
He recounted Palmer’s story to detectives and told them that the military had the matter in hand.
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Police reported to Ward at the Commonwealth Bank that
they were not satisfied with Palmer’s claims. Ward communicated their concerns in a letter to the Governor-General of Australia. Ward wrote, ‘From reports received, the packet when picked up consisted of a leather wallet and the whole enclosed in a cardboard box and wrapped. If this be so, Palmer’s alleged statement that the packet, being water soaked, broke in his hands when picked up, requires some further explanation.’
Ward explained in the letter that van Oosten had recovered pieces of the box and wrapping from inside the plane during his search with Gus Clinch. He wrote:
The string and portion of outer wrapping, which Mr van Oosten is to produce to you, indicate that the string was pulled off without cutting and the paper wrapping torn. These facts, coupled with what the police now advise, point to the deliberate removal of the diamonds either by one of the passengers who hid the inner packet on the beach or by Palmer, who, when he learned that not only the police but Mr van Oosten were making enquiries, became alarmed and handed the diamonds to Army Headquarters with the story of having found them on the beach.
