That Summer at Boomerang

by Phil Jarratt

  In the absence of the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, the fiery young prohibitionist and theologian, Dr Everard Digges La Touche, offered up a thundering prayer for the fallen, concluding with a rather pointed reminder about the ongoing campaign of the Council for Civic and Moral Advancement to honour the sacrifices of the men at the front by outlawing alcohol in all its insidious forms. There was considerable throat clearing from among the red-faced dignitaries, so recently removed from the bar.

  ‘Strike me lucky,’ boomed a raucous voice from the public terrace. ‘Give that man a drink for gorsake!’

  There was much laughter from the lower stands, but of the dignitaries, only McIntosh laughed out loud, being a man not given to restraint. At last everyone was seated and the championships could begin.

  More than 7000 spectators cheered themselves hoarse as the junior 50-yards-handicap heats got the carnival underway. Isabel had never heard such a din. ‘By jingo,’ Claude yelled in her ear. ‘What’s it going to be like when Duke swims!’

  Junior race at Domain Baths, 1920. Photo by Sam Hood, courtesy NSW State Library.

  But the crowd regained its composure as the program worked its way through club and country heats and the springboard diving. By the time the musical lifebuoys novelty event began, many of the dignitaries had repaired to the bar once more, from which place there was a lot of noise and a few risqué remarks as the waterborne version of that old party favourite, musical chairs, was played out, with keen young swimmers representing the Sydney clubs vying to claim a lifebuoy each time the band stopped playing. Soon the crowd was clapping along with the vaudeville tunes being massacred by the military band. McIntosh, a tankard of beer in one hand and a cigar in the other, was lustily singing along, as though he were in a box at the Tivoli. From other parts of the top terrace there was a chorus of tut-tutting. The pillars of the swimming community had never seen a carnival quite like this.

  But then there was near silence with the realisation that the 100-yards championship of New South Wales was just moments from starting. The men in the bar hurriedly returned to their seats. Isabel could see in the distance people perched high on the diving tower now, while others had climbed onto adjacent roofs. There were even people camped on a narrow strip of sand outside the enclosure that the tide had just revealed. Nowhere was a vantage point unused. One by one the finalists stepped onto a boat to be rowed to the starting board. First the teenager from Melbourne, Ivan Stedman, then B.G. Page from the Randwick club, Billy Longworth who had missed the Stockholm final through illness, and Albert Barry, the NSW record holder for the distance.

  There was much applause as the Australians mounted the starting board, but a second wave of cheering took over as the two Hawaiians stepped onto a second boat and the crowd realised that Duke had taken the oars from the oarsman. The crowd erupted as the humble champion rowed himself to the start, he and George both smiling and waving to the packed stands.

  ‘He looks very fit,’ Jeannie shouted to her daughter. This was something of an understatement. Although Cecil Healy had described his friend as ‘lanky’ and lacking the classic islander looks of Alick Wickham, the Duke Kahanamoku who presented this hot January afternoon in Sydney was a spectacular athletic specimen, of whom it had been written:

  I never saw a man with a finer torso. His shoulders are wide and well muscled. His body tapers neatly to the small waist, with the perfect muscle lines so often shown in statues of Greek athletes. His legs above the knee are thick and perfectly round, the muscles not standing out in relief, and no ridges of muscle showing. His knees are exactly in proportion to the thighs and the well-shaped calf, neither too light nor too heavy. These legs, like his powerful arms, make a perfect driving machine for his swimming stroke. The most extraordinary development, however, is that of the Duke’s pectoral muscles, the breast muscles that pull the arms down as they are pulled down in a swimming stroke. These muscles stand out in high relief. They are, I think, developed to about three times the thickness of the pectoral muscles of the average trained athlete. It is something like the very unusual development of the breast muscles of a duck or a quail, heavy but fast-flying birds. It is hard to beat a man like the Hawaiian, bred from generations of swimming ancestors, and living almost as much in the water as on dry land.

  ‘Half man, half duck’, the smiling Hawaiian superstar waited at his mark on the starting board for the crowd to settle. On the starter’s ‘go!’ he hit the water cleanly and stroked away rhythmically, but it was Stedman and Longworth who took the early lead while Duke’s progress seemed almost leisurely.

  ‘Come on, Duke!’ shouted Claude. ‘Get a bloody move on!’ He looked apologetically in the direction of the Letham women, but they were too lost in the moment to have heard his indiscretion.

  Duke poolside, 1913. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

  At the quarter mark Duke and George were back in the mix, and as they approached halfway, Duke seemed to slip into another gear, his powerful arm action raising him up, while the famous kick began to churn the murky water. The crowd began to roar as Duke took a clear lead and started to pull away, George and Albert Barry trying desperately to stay in touch. Isabel was on her feet cheering as Duke touched the finish board and immediately raised an arm to the crowd, George a length or two behind him and Albert another length away.

  The men embraced in the water as they waited for the timer to slide the numbers into the slate. Bert Barry’s NSW record of 56 3⁄5 seconds, set a year earlier, would surely be smashed, but by how much? Eventually the numbers went in. First a five, then a three, and the crowd erupted again. Duke’s own world record of 54 3⁄5 seconds had fallen. The rest of the numbers went in: 53 4⁄5 seconds, a new world, Australian and state record, taking four-fifths of a second off his own record and two and two-fifths off Barry’s.

  The huge crowd was stunned by the performance. This man was a superman. There could be no doubting that now. On the megaphone Freddie Williams tried to tell them as much, but in his excitement stumbled so badly over pronunciation of ‘Kahanamoku’ that he simply gave up. The carnival continued, but the crowd followed its progress as if in a daze. Billy Longworth beat Tommy Adrian over the half mile. The Hawaiians performed an encore and easily won the 220-yards relay. Duke was presented to the crowd again, and then it was over.

  The dignitaries were back in the bar, making a lot of noise again. Speechless, Jeannie, Isabel and Claude filed out and began the long walk back to the Quay.

  Writing in The Referee, Cecil Healy summarised the mood of elation:

  One hundred yards in 53 4⁄5 seconds! And over a straight-away course too! ‘What do you think of the Duke?’ one swimmer has impetuously questioned of another, as if eager to anticipate the query he knew instinctively was on the tip of his fellow enthusiast’s tongue, when meeting for the first time since the decision of the 100yds State championship on Saturday afternoon. Invariably the person addressed has paused momentarily before replying, in order to search his mind for some superlative calculated to do justice to his feelings of wonder and admiration aroused by the performance of the Hawaiian. ‘But it is beyond comprehension!’ Well might such an ejaculation be excused, nay, even expected, of those who were not actual eyewitnesses of the feat.

  The Bulletin reported:

  Saturday at the Domain Baths was mostly Duke Kahanamoku. He won the 100yds Championship and the Relay Race (the only two events for which he entered) with the ease of a master. He was responsible for the light comedy of the carnival, the crowd finding much that was mirthful in the megaphonist’s futile efforts to pronounce his surname. When not otherwise featured he tore up and down the baths in a skiff. His turn lasted, practically, from 3pm to 5pm. The remarkable feature of Kahanamoku’s swimming is its effortlessness. His long arms plough through the water, and there is no splash; his vast feet revolve beneath the surface and leave it almost unmoved. One realises his speed only when
it is noticed that world-famed performers are being easily out-distanced.

  The shadows were long as the ferry pulled into the Manly wharf. As they alighted, Claude gave Isabel’s hand a quick squeeze and disappeared into the night.

  ‘Strange boy, means well,’ said Jeannie, almost absent-mindedly, as they crossed the dusty street to catch the tram. It was too late for the Creamy Pony door to door, so they would have to hope that Father had got over his mood, looked up the ferry timetable and driven over the hill to meet them, otherwise a tiring day would end with still another exertion—the trek over the hill to Freshie with no lantern. But neither Jeannie nor Isabel wanted to think about that possibility as the tram clattered its way through the village to the lagoon. The day had been too wonderful, too exhilarating, too exciting to even contemplate ending it like two waifs in the night.

  Isabel linked arms with her mother. Jeannie was never one for public displays of affection, but in the dark corner of the tram, she quickly kissed the top of Isabel’s head.

  ‘Oh, my wee one,’ she whispered. ‘Not so little anymore, I fear. There’s so much to learn in a summer, my girl. How are we all expected to cope with that?’

  Isabel lifted her head and looked quizzically at her mother.

  ‘Your friend, Duke, is a man quite like no other,’ said Jeannie. ‘You must respect that difference, but of course you know that.’

  ‘Yes, Mother, but I’m not quite following you.’

  ‘And when will he take you on the board again?’

  ‘I … I don’t know, Mother.’

  Jeannie smiled at her daughter, but it was an uneasy smile. She said: ‘We live in a camp, my darling. It’s not even big enough to be a wee village. Everybody knows everything.’

  The tram pulled up slowly in front of the gas lamp beyond the lagoon bridge. As they climbed down, Isabel could see Father standing by the auto puffing on his pipe. He looked straight at her but showed no sign of recognition. Perhaps he was thinking about the war.

  Chapter 16

  You Can’t Smash Records Every Time

  Cecil Healy’s eyes came to rest on the relatively small headline buried on page 50 of Town & Country as he trawled through the myriad newspaper reports of the first ‘Kahanamoku Carnival’ at his small office at The Referee: ‘Outrages at Broken Hill—Picnickers Shot by Turks.’ He read on:

  The shooting of a number of picnickers by Turks occurred near Silverton, Broken Hill, on the morning of January 1. The train in which the picnickers were travelling was composed of two brakevans and 40 ore trucks, and there were 120 passengers on board. When the train was about two miles out of Broken Hill an ice cream cart was noticed on the northern side of the line close to the fence. A red Turkish flag, about 18ins square, was flying from the cart and two men were seen crouching behind a bank of earth … They had rifles in their hands which they fired at the train, and continued to do so until it had passed them.

  Amidst the glowing reviews of the record-smashing Domain Baths carnival, had no-one but he noticed that the war was suddenly on their doorstep? Cecil took the short walk to the tearoom and put the kettle on the stove. Despite its healthy sales figures, The Ref did not waste money on hired help. It was every man for himself in this smoky, blokey bolt-hole. Lost in thought, Cecil didn’t hear the whistle of the kettle until another reporter called: ‘Wake up, Cec! Water’s boiled.’ He made a strong pot of Bushell’s, sweetened a cup with three laden spoonfuls of sugar and returned to his desk.

  Taxi rank outside Cochrane’s Hotel, Darling Harbour, 1910. Photo courtesy State Records NSW.

  The news had been slow to get out of Broken Hill, a mining outpost that The Bulletin had recently described as ‘a place where strange things happen … sort of an outlaw town’. While that was undoubtedly true, the New Year’s Day tragedy was no less shocking. Four picnickers had been killed and seven seriously wounded. In a later shootout with police, one of the Turks was wounded and the other killed. That night an angry mob burned down the German Club. Meanwhile, as young Australian men enlisted with the Australian Imperial Forces to join the great adventure ‘Over There’, the architects of the war had identified Germany’s ally, Turkey, as a primary target. Once the Turks had been crushed, the Dardanelles would be freed up for military passage and the Kaiser would be on the back foot. The Turks in Broken Hill didn’t know what they had unleashed.

  But this was only Cecil Healy’s idle speculation. The newspapers at large were far more interested in Kahanamoku’s amazing kick than they were in some gunplay at the edge of civilisation. And Healy, too, had to shrug off the doom and gloom and get to the Domain, where the Hawaiians had agreed to a lengthy interview prior to the second carnival, an evening affair. But first he must write. He pulled two sheets of fine copy paper from his desk, slipped a carbon between them and wound them into his red Mignon Number Two index typewriter and began his swimming column. Purchased in Berlin in 1906, the Mignon, with its changeable type-sleeve and index plate, was a fine piece of machinery with which Healy could write in German simply by changing plates. Not that he would, not now. In fact, he would have exchanged it for a British one were it not such a gem of a machine. He began to type.

  Healy pushed through the final yards of the last lap of his training session, carefully monitoring the progress of his training partners as he neared the finish wall at the Domain Baths. He checked his stroke and held his kick to allow John Ure Smith, manager of the Hotel Australia, to finish with him.

  ‘By Jove, that’s excellent, John,’ he exclaimed, reaching out a wet arm to the hotelier as the others of the small group finished. ‘Got me on my toes now, old son.’

  ‘I hardly think so, Cec,’ said Ure Smith, as Healy hoisted him out of the pool. ‘But thank you for the confidence boost.’ Healy shook hands with all of his swimmers as they reached for towels and robes and headed for the change rooms. The Domain Baths was a flurry of activity, as final preparations were made for the second carnival of the NSW Championships, with young Kanakas cleaning leaves and other mulch off the surface of the water from a skiff, while other workmen moved tables and chairs back and forth and young women sponged surfaces and mopped floors. The baths were closed to the public, but Cecil Healy’s training squad was not ‘the public’.

  ‘Please leave the area immediately, by order of the police.’ The command crackled over the speakers at maximum volume and stopped Healy in his tracks. ‘Yes, Cec, that means you, brudda.’

  Recognising the voice, Healy looked up towards Freddie Williams’s megaphone position on the terrace and saw a dark man with a flashing white smile waving at him in slow motion. Healy shook his head and laughed as the voice boomed forth over the megaphone again: ‘You in big trouble, brudda. You better get up here with me and Freddie before you land in jail.’

  Upon climbing the stairs, Healy discovered that the Hawaiians had spread chairs around the announcer’s booth and sat cracking jokes with Fred Williams and Bill Corbett of The Sun. Healy offered greetings all around while trying to hide his annoyance at the presence of Corbett. Since the next edition of The Referee was five days away and the next edition of The Sun a matter of hours, whatever revelations came out of this supposedly exclusive interview were going to be a scoop for the daily, not for him. But you could not tell a man like Duke that being obliging was somehow wrong. Such a notion would have been incomprehensible to him. So both reporters settled back with their pencils and pads and took notes (Corbett taking down every word in Pitman’s shorthand) as Duke held forth about swimming and surfing.

  Surf shooting is a new pastime here, but for us it is as old as the hills. In fact shooting on a board and in a canoe may have started further back than body-shooting. But here, oh my. You have hundreds more surf shooters at work in one day around Sydney than we see in a week, or perhaps a much longer stretch of time at home. But I think the old island has the pastime at greater perfection, which is only to be expec
ted considering its antiquity with us … There are numbers of high-class surf shooters in Honolulu, and some white people among them, but, as with every other game, a few can do better than the great majority. It’s with the few I am delighted to be.

  Healy, having heard Duke wax eloquent about surfboard riding in Stockholm, was not surprised by his friend’s ability to ‘talk story’, but Corbett was spellbound by the monologue. Not a speechmaker, Duke had the ability to address small groups of people in such a compelling manner that every person present would believe he was addressing them alone. Gone was much of the beach-boy pidgin of his casual conversation, and the faltering delivery of his reluctant public utterances: in its place a concise, deliberate patter, informative and authoritative, but modest almost to the point of self-deprecation. For those who knew, it was the voice of Big Bill Rawlins, who had taught Duke more than Kamehameha and McKinley High ever could.

  When he finally could get a word in, Healy turned the conversation back to swimming, asking about the ear infection that had been troubling Duke since his arrival. ‘It’s a problem I have whenever I travel to water I’m not familiar with, Cec. I’ve had the doctor clean them out and I’ve got me some ear plugs, but when I race I only use one. I want to hear that starting gun.’