Freddie knew that this pledge was a protest against the big brewery in Sydney founded by German immigrant Edmund Resch. He had seen the old man’s photo in The Mirror: a dapper white-bearded gent who had lived in Australia for over fifty years. Herr Resch had handed the business over to his two Australian-born sons and, in a very public effort to prove his patriotism, promised to make-up to full pay the wages of all his staff serving with the AIF. But Edmund’s generosity did not save him. The Mirror kept up a determined campaign to have him arrested and, soon after, Freddie read how Edmund, aged seventy-one, was taken from his harbourside mansion on Darling Point and sent to the internment camp at Holsworthy, in the bush near Liverpool.
Despite fewer bookings from overseas guests, life at the hotel continued much as normal. With some of his previous vigour and zeal for publicity returning, Adam Fox drew up plans for a large civic dinner at the hotel in December to raise money for the war effort and boost community morale. The mayor and the federal member of parliament were to be the guests of honour. There was a rumour that renowned English contralto Clara Butt, currently on tour in Australia, would make a guest appearance to perform ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, the rousing patriotic song that Sir Edward Elgar had composed especially for her powerful voice. Anticipation was at fever pitch in the upper Blue Mountains and everyone at the Palace, including Freddie, was kept busy sprucing up the hotel for the big day.
A week before Christmas, Freddie was working in the garden when he saw two army officers from 41st (Blue Mountains) Infantry arrive with their driver and march into the lobby, where they were greeted by Mr Hawthorne. It seemed they had an appointment to see the general manager and Mr Fox.
Freddie did not mean to eavesdrop on the conversation in the GM’s office, but it was hard not to overhear the angry, raised voices. Fox stormed out shortly afterwards and Freddie caught the words ‘speak to my solicitor’.
Mr Hawthorne explained the whole thing to Freddie the following day. The two officers had come to inform them that under the War Precautions Act the Palace was ordered to cease all trade with any businesses in Germany or any German-owned companies in Australia. This trade included the Hydropathy Establishment’s importation of mineral spring water, shipped every two months from Baden-Baden.
As it happened, Fox had already sourced an alternative supplier. The costs of shipping and insurance from Europe had become prohibitively expensive as German U-boats targeted merchant shipping. The previous year a small brewery in the nearby town of Lithgow had begun bottling spring water as a medicinal tonic and Fox was happy to give the locals his business. Freddie now stacked up the barrels of Lithgow mineral water in the basement where the German mineral water barrels had once been stored. Even so, Fox resented this kind of interference in his affairs. He sought legal advice and was told there was nothing he could do: the War Precautions Act conferred extraordinary powers on the government that could not be challenged.
In the New Year, the newspapers continued to bombard their readers with grisly tales of German atrocities in Belgium and France. Over breakfast Angie would read out the headlines from the Sydney Morning Herald and ask her father which bits interested him the most. She knew he wanted to hear any news he could about Jacko and Ben’s battalion training in Egypt.
From April 1915 the papers were full of reports of the Australians fighting and dying on a peninsula called Gallipoli. Angie read out loud the eyewitness account by the war correspondent Mr Bean of the first day of the ANZAC attack. Australians stormed ‘tier after tier of cliffs and mountains apparently as impregnable as Govett’s Leap’ and occupied enemy trenches ‘like a section of the Blue Mountains, full of winding gullies’. Freddie listened solemnly as he ate his boiled eggs. Angie also read out the lists of men killed in action. She and Freddie said nothing to each other, sharing in silence their dread of finding a familiar name.
One day in early May, as Freddie was working down at the sheds, he saw Chef Muntz at the back door of the kitchen beckoning urgently. ‘Come, come,’ he said in a loud whisper, trying not to attract attention from any of the other staff. It was mid-afternoon and most of the kitchen hands were on a short break following the lunch service. When Freddie stepped inside the warm kitchen, to his surprise he found Dr Liebermeister standing by a bench, looking exceptionally agitated and grim.
‘Coffee?’ the chef asked.
Freddie nodded. ‘Yes, thank you.’
What was this all about? Such a gathering was highly unusual. Freddie and his two colleagues had never had much reason to speak to each other in the past. The hydropathist was clearly the social superior of the cook and the handyman, and the chef regarded his own station loftier than Freddie’s. Their relations were always polite, civil, formal. So why the sudden outburst of hospitality?
‘Have you seen today’s paper?’ asked the doctor, clutching that morning’s edition of the Herald.
In the rush for school, Angie had not had time to share the daily news with her father. Freddie shook his head.
The doctor held up the headline. It read: LUSITANIA TORPEDOED OFF IRISH COAST.
The doctor read out the story. A German U-boat had sunk a British luxury cruise liner off the coast of Ireland. Nearly twelve hundred lives had been lost, provoking outrage around the world. The German government had not improved matters by declaring a public holiday to celebrate the sinking and trying to claim that the ship was carrying munitions.
‘People are very angry, as you can imagine,’ the doctor told his colleagues. He had been on the phone that morning to a medical colleague in Sydney who described how German shopkeepers in the city had had their windows smashed when the morning papers hit the newsstands.
Muntz nodded. ‘My brother Hans heard about a worker at the local biscuit factory in Alexandria who was beaten unconscious – just because his name was German!’ He then told them about the Anti-German League, a fast-growing patriotic association with over thirty branches across New South Wales, including one in Penrith. ‘Trouble has been brewing up here for some time,’ Muntz continued. He was a paid-up member of the golf club in Blackheath. Until recently, one of his regular golfing partners had been a German fellow named Alfred Marx who ran a real estate agency in Katoomba. A business competitor who had signed up with the AIF wrote an angry letter from his training camp in Liverpool to the local newspaper asking ‘why this German should be allowed to trade while other Australian real estate agents were away fighting’ and demanding that he be interned.
‘It turns out others shared this opinion,’ Muntz told them. ‘Last week the police decided they had received enough reports of “suspicious” and “disloyal” behaviour to have Marx arrested and sent down by train to Holsworthy. His business is now boarded up and the golf club has cancelled his membership.’
Dr Liebermeister was particularly aggrieved by his own shabby treatment as a registered doctor. Two months earlier, the professional body for Australian physicians had cancelled the membership of all German-born doctors.
‘It is only a matter of time before they arrest us all,’ hissed the doctor, his glasses flashing in the bright lights of the kitchen. I hear there are literally thousands of internees held in this prison camp in Liverpool. And they lock people up there without a proper trial or any kind of legal defence. It is a disgrace.’
‘We live in difficult times,’ said Muntz philosophically, handing his countrymen fresh cups of coffee. ‘I know Mr Fox will do everything in his power to protect us, but it is clear that anyone German is being watched – even Australians with German backgrounds like you, Freddie, and Freya. I know that the police do their own surveillance, but they also listen to what other people have to report. Neighbours, co-workers, friends. So be careful who you talk to and what you say.’
The three men sipped their coffee in silence for a few minutes. They agreed to keep their ears out for any nasty rumours and to meet again in a week or so. Freddie thanked them both for their trust and, with a heavy heart, went back to work.
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Angie saw the change in her father. He became distant and distracted, and when he was tired, his right hand shook ever so slightly. He gripped the arm of his wicker chair out on the cottage veranda to hide the tremors but Angie saw and noted every little thing. But if Freddie seemed weakened by the family’s isolation, Freya had become possessed with a fanatical, almost manic energy. She spent every hour from dawn to dusk in her studio, working with the curtains drawn and the door shut tight. On the one occasion that Angie had ventured inside with a message from her father imploring her to come and have a bite of lunch, Freya had angrily dismissed her.
‘How many times do I have to remind you to knock?’ her mother shouted, as she hastily shut the door in her daughter’s face. In the brief moment that the door was ajar, Angie had glimpsed a large canvas: an oil painting as far as she could tell, but not in her mother’s usual style.
What was her mother doing in there day after day? Freya of all people, who hungered for daily walks in the bush, shut up in her hot, dark studio all day long? Whatever it was, Angie knew better than to ask. And she noticed that her mother returned to the cottage every night exhausted but also calmed by her long hours of work, which was something to be grateful for, at least.
Her parents were not the only ones to suffer. Angie had already endured a whispering campaign at her school when Robbie died, not to mention the nasty notes in her school bag and elbows in her ribs at assembly. To her credit, the headmistress, Mrs McMahon, had put an end to that round of torment. Addressing the whole school, she made it clear that Angie was not in any way to blame for the death of Robert Fox and that no more bullying would be tolerated. But the hostility had only gone underground and was now fuelled by anti-German hatred. Freya and Freddie had never made a secret of her background and so Angie too was now tainted by the family’s Germanness. Micky Shales, the eldest son of the butcher in Katoomba, had formed an anti-German gang at school who chanted ‘Hun, Hun, Hun’ under their breath when teachers were out of earshot. And whenever Angie’s class discussed the progress of the war, she felt the eyes of her classmates burning into the back of her neck.
She did have one protector though: Simon Rushworth. A year above her at school, Simon made a habit of escorting Angie between the railway station and the school without ever formally acknowledging this was what he was doing. He was a tall, stocky, red-headed boy with big hands and broad shoulders. His father had been killed in a horse accident on their farm out at Hartley and his mother struggled to raise three sons alone. Simon now lived with an aunt at Mount Victoria. Shy, gentle and softly spoken, he reminded Angie of Freddie.
‘Hun! Hun! Hun!’ chanted Micky Shales and his gang one afternoon behind the toilet block after school as Angie came around the corner to use the bubbler. They were so busy flicking spitballs and hurling insults they failed to notice Simon coming up behind them. It took no time at all for Micky Shales to learn the power of Simon’s headlock and right hook as did several other bullies who limped away with split lips, aching jaws and sore shins.
‘Thank you.’ Angie stood on tiptoe and bestowed a small kiss on her protector’s cheek. Simon blushed and a confused smile spread across his usually solemn face. Little did Angie know that with this one act, she had sealed a bond of enduring loyalty for years to come.
But the cowardly torments continued. A week later, Angie found a letter in her school desk. It called her a ‘murdrer just like the Kaizar’ and ‘a Hun-loving traytor’ who had killed Robbie Fox so he would not be able to fight against ‘her Hun frends’. The crude handwriting was accompanied by an equally crude drawing of a girl with long dark hair, hanged on a gibbet with the words ‘YORE DEAD’. The letter made Angie feel sick and afraid but she decided, for her father’s sake, to keep it secret. She hurried home to the privacy of her garden, an island of peace and safety in a sea of hatred, where she could hide in her hedge, away from the hostile gaze of the world.
In November a great assembly of men on foot and horseback, dressed in blue dungarees with white canvas hats, arrived at the Explorer’s Tree in Katoomba bearing a banner reading: FIRST STOP BERLIN. These were the patriots of the Coo-ee March that had set out the previous month from Gilgandra, a town further west, and were marching all the way to Sydney, gathering fresh young recruits along the way to help ‘the boys at the Dardanelles’.
Freddie went down to Katoomba to watch the speeches and the flag-waving, keen to ensure his neighbours and colleagues could see how loyally he supported the war effort. Welcomed by the mayor, Mr James, the marchers raised their battle-cry of ‘coo-ee’ and headed into the main street of Katoomba for a civic dinner at the California guesthouse and a recruiting rally on the street afterwards. One of Freddie’s boys, Wally Garner, was among the twenty-one recruits who signed up that day. A bale of hand-knitted woollen socks was presented on behalf of the ladies of the Katoomba Red Cross Comforts Fund and the mayor’s wife, who had personally knitted ten pairs.
Later that night, Angie lay in bed listening to her parents arguing in the next room. Freddie had started it all by talking about volunteering for the AIF. Freya begged him to put such a stupid idea out of his head. ‘I cannot believe you are talking like this! You want to abandon me and Angie? To prove what? That you are willing to die for this country so they will believe you do not love the Kaiser?’
‘I want to do it to protect you both, don’t you understand? If I join up, how can they accuse us of being unpatriotic? I will get paid a wage so you won’t go hungry, and when I come home with my rifle and my slouch hat, no one will be able to look me in the eye and say I am not a bloody Australian!’ This was followed by a soft, low sound Angie had never heard before. It took her some time to realise it was her father crying. There was no more talking after that.
Angie folded her hands and prayed for God to watch over her father and mother and make sure that Freddie did not have to go and die in the war.
CHAPTER 7
* * *
Lisa
Katoomba, May 2013
Lisa had opened a door on her family’s past and there was no turning back. Over the next few days, the Palace’s eager historian continued to send Lisa a string of emails beginning with: ‘Dear Lisa, I hope you don’t mind me sending you this but I thought it may be of some interest . . .’ and ‘Dear Lisa, Please ignore this email if you are too busy but it struck me that . . .’ She was taken by Luke’s strategic charm and considerateness. She was sure that this gently assertive but unthreatening approach got him through many more doors, backwards, than would any direct assault. Lisa had discovered that a similar self-effacing adaptability was the mark of a good photographer; to put her subjects at their ease, she adopted whatever social camouflage was needed to become invisible.
The most surprising email of all was one Luke forwarded from a man in Germany. Lisa had given Luke a selection of the best shots she had taken on her visit to the Palace to post on the hotel’s website as a ‘thank you’ for his time. Her only condition was a copyright acknowledgement. Luke then talked her into a short profile revealing the fact she was the granddaughter of Adam Fox. ‘It will make a nice touch,’ he insisted. She reluctantly agreed.
The email was from an Ulrich Kraft in Stuttgart. He said that he had been doing some research into his family’s past and found Lisa’s photos and profile on the Palace website. ‘I am planning a trip to Australia in June,’ he wrote, ‘and have some material you may find interesting. I have reason to believe we may be related. I hope you do not find this communication intrusive and might share my interest in learning more about the past. With sincerest thanks, Ulrich Kraft.’
A relative in Germany? Was that possible? Monika had never mentioned any branch of the family there. But then she had said so little about her family. Intrigued, Lisa replied directly to Ulrich’s email.
Dear Ulrich,
Yes, I am happy to meet up with you when you come in June. As it happens, I have just started to take an interest in my family history and welcome an
y information you are willing to share. I am doing some research of my own but have also been in touch with Mr Luke Davis who is writing an official history of the hotel my family built. I will introduce you when you come out.
Cheers,
Lisa Fox
‘Your grandfather did have a great interest in Germany and many things German, especially hydrotherapy and health,’ Luke reminded her when she emailed him about Ulrich’s message. ‘We know he visited Matlock Bath in England quite a bit. But he also went to Baden-Baden as a young man with his own family and, as you know, hired a German therapist for the spa.’
That night she rang her brother, Tom, in Canberra. He sounded alarmed at first to hear from her. ‘Gosh, I thought something had happened to Mum.’
‘No, she’s doing okay – considering,’ said Lisa. ‘She’d still like you to visit – if you can make time in your busy schedule, of course. Who knows how much longer her mind will hold out?’
Tom began making the usual excuses about his family and career commitments. She cut him off. They’d had this conversation already on more than one occasion and she had no interest in repeating it. ‘Look, it’s really up to you what you want to do about Mum. She’s not the reason I rang.’
There was a pause on the end of the phone. Lisa could hear her niece and nephew in the background, the usual resisting-going-to-bed rumpus. She heard Tom’s wife, Natalie, call out, ‘Can you ring her back? I could use a hand.’
‘I know it’s not a good time,’ Lisa said apologetically. ‘I just wanted to ask you something.’
‘What is it, sis?’ Tom’s voice softened a little, losing its defensive edge.
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