That Summer at Boomerang

by Phil Jarratt

  ‘Sweet Jesus,’ said Freddie. ‘The lad’s trying to save his dad.’

  Claude was instantly on his feet and running to the water. He called over his shoulder to Freddie: ‘I’ll try to get out to them, you follow with the line.’ Freddie Williams was a legend in Manly and he was unaccustomed to taking orders from teenagers, but he soon had the belt on and was calling for helpers to feed the line out to him.

  Claude swam into the rip from an angle and managed to reach the boy before he had joined the man. He was just a little kid, terrified now at what he had got himself into. Claude scooped him up and held his face clear of the churning waves. ‘You’re okay, matey,’ he said over and over again. The boy whimpered and pointed out to sea where the man’s head could occasionally be seen as the swells subsided.

  As they drew closer, Claude saw that the man was unconscious. He looked towards the beach in the direction of the reel and saw Freddie churning through the water. The boy would survive, the man may not. Claude made an instant decision and directed Freddie to swim out to the man. ‘We’re okay,’ he called as Freddie swam past. ‘Do what you can for the other fellow and send the line back out for us.’

  The boy was ten-year-old Alfred Ferns. Claude had kept him above the water line for more than half an hour when they finally reached the beach. A group of lifesavers took Alfred from his arms and onto a waiting stretcher. Claude staggered towards the group clustered around the reel, and saw Freddie pull the threadbare blanket over the man’s face. Freddie looked at Claude and shook his head sadly. Then he moved forward and embraced the young man, rocking him back and forth for long moments. Claude fought back the tears so hard his head ached.

  In the afternoon Claude sat on the warm sand at Freshwater and watched Isabel trying to shoot on Duke’s board on the re-formed waves close to shore. She was getting better very quickly, but she still lacked the confidence she seemed to exude when Duke had pulled her to her feet and guided her from the waist.

  He had not spoken of the rescue to Isabel or anyone else, but when she finally came in, dragged the heavy board onto the sand next to him and sat down beside it, Isabel sensed an air of melancholy about her friend. ‘Do you miss him already?’ she asked, taunting him just a little. Claude did not respond.

  She reached out and touched his arm. ‘It’s okay, you know. I miss him, and I know I’m going to miss all the excitement around here, unless you liven up a bit!’

  Claude smiled weakly. He felt drained, but he picked up the board and started towards the water. ‘Sorry, Issie,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘Not feeling myself, but a few shoots will get the cobwebs out.’

  On the same day that the drowning at Manly and Claude’s rescue of Alfred Ferns was reported in the newspapers, Cecil Healy’s full-term report on the Kahanamoku tour was published in The Referee. ‘The first international amateur champion to appear in Australia has come and gone,’ he wrote. There were considerably more benefits from the tour than the 300-pounds profit that the Swimming Association had pocketed, he said. The record gate receipts for the carnivals:

  presuppose that a considerable number of people were persuaded on those occasions to view a natatorial function for the first time. On the reasonable assumption that the sensational happenings they witnessed thereat created a prepossessing impression, we can take it for granted that a large percentage of them will continue to evince interest in the sport, and possibly develop into swimming enthusiasts.

  As reports of the New Zealand carnivals began to filter in, it soon became apparent that Duke was working his magic on the other side of the Tasman Sea, too. ‘Duke Kahanamoku, the Hawaiian swimmer, has now placed every Australasian sprint record to his credit,’ the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

  By swimming the 50 yards course in Auckland last Saturday in 22 3⁄5 s he has beaten the previous best performance for the world, held by Alec. [sic] Wickham, by a full second, which, in the short course named, is a remarkable achievement. He has also secured the 100yds world’s best time, equalled his own world’s record for 100 metres, and lowered the 150yds Australasian record. As these results have been obtained under varied conditions, they undoubtedly stamp him easily the world’s best sprinter.

  While no evidence was produced over the coming months to support Healy’s contention that the Hawaiian tour would create a new wave of swimming enthusiasts, the new wave of surf-riding enthusiasts was in plain sight at Sydney’s beaches every weekend through the long Indian summer. At Manly and Freshwater, Bondi and Coogee, and down at Cronulla, the pioneer surf shooters found themselves sharing the waves with new recruits attempting to shoot on all kinds of bizarre homemade copies of Duke’s George Hudson sugar pine.

  Claude West rides Duke’s board, 1916. Photo courtesy Warringah Library Local Studies.

  In March Isabel and Claude watched the Australian Gazette newsreel ahead of the Saturday-night feature at the cinema in Manly and, right after the amazing feats of stunt aviator Delfosse Badgery, there was Duke, riding the big surf at the Dee Why Carnival, and, just for a fleeting, flickering second or two, there she was—arms outstretched, riding a mountain of water on the shoulders of the Hawaiian superman. The organist in the orchestra pit hit a loud discordant note and her moment of fame was over.

  Later, when they stopped for an ice-cream soda on the Corso, Claude asked her if seeing herself riding with Duke up on the screen had brought the magic of the moment back to her. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, her voice dreamy, ‘ever so clearly.’ But in truth that moment had not gone away, and for Isabel it never would.

  Sydney’s Indian summer began to fade after Easter, and as the beaches became more sparsely populated and the cool nights began to close in, the newspaper headlines became correspondingly bleak. After months of making nuisances of themselves in Cairo brothels, the Australian and New Zealand troops in Egypt had finally been given their orders. The Turks must be taken out of the war to clear the Dardanelles for troop movements. The Australian and New Zealand force (christened ‘A.N.Z.A.C.s’ by their commander, General Birdwood) were to help achieve this by landing on the Gallipoli Peninsula and establishing a beachhead before joining the British in a full-throated assault on Constantinople.

  In mid-April the Anzacs boarded troopships at Alexandria and headed to their rendezvous point on the island of Lemnos. On the night of 24 April the transports slipped out of the harbour and delivered the troops to landing barges offshore from the cliffs of Gallipoli. At three thirty on the morning of Sunday 25 April, the barges hit the beach and the first shots rang out from the cliff tops. Soldiers dropped dead in the barges before their feet had even touched Turkish soil. The worst defeat in Australian military history had begun.

  By mid-December, when the order to withdraw was finally made, more than 7000 Australians had been killed in the eight-month Dardanelles campaign, but even as autumn gave way to winter in Sydney, with the slaughter at Gallipoli only into its first month, there was a solemn realisation that this was not some grand adventure in a far-off land, as they had been encouraged to believe. It was a fight to the death and our lads were falling like flies.

  As the terrible news sank in, there was a steady procession from the beaches, the surf clubs, the football fields and the race tracks to the recruiting office, but there was no spring in the step of these young men, no whistling and singing of patriotic songs. The mood was sombre, for each man knew he was only an even-money bet to make it home.

  On weekend leave before being deployed to Europe, Tommy Adrian stood outside the family shoe shop in his heavy khaki jacket and slouch hat and whistled to Cecil Healy. Healy crossed the street and greeted the young man warmly, as one always did in those uncertain times. A cold wind blew down the Corso, but the sun was shining and Healy suggested a body-shoot. The two champion swimmers plunged into the ocean at South Steyne and stroked for the green water beyond the break.

  When a set of waves came they swam for one tog
ether and sped side by side along the face of a large wave, their left arms held out before them, guiding them through the tricky course ahead. They finished the shoot and lay in the shallows, laughing at the sheer exhilaration of the act. Adrian looked at Healy and wondered how long it had been between laughs for him. It had been a long time for Adrian, that was for sure, and it might be an even longer time before the next.

  They stood and splashed across the sand bank like children, diving back into the cold and churning surf, eager for more.

  Epilogue

  Isabel

  After Duke’s departure from Australia, Donald McIntyre presented Isabel with a postcard image of Duke standing next to his surfboard at Freshwater, taken on the same January day she had first ridden tandem with him. ‘This is not too good a snap of Duke,’ he apologised. ‘But he has signed it and I thought you might like to keep it.’ She thanked him, examined it, then put the photograph away in the back of her journal with Duke’s letter from Melbourne and some photos someone had taken of her and Claude West chasing each other across the beach. These would be her mementoes of that summer at Boomerang.

  Through the early autumn Isabel and Claude continued to see each other when she was home from school, but their night at the Manly picture show was to be one of their last ‘dates’ as teenagers. Although they would remain firm friends throughout their lives, if ever there had been a romantic flame, it now appeared to be flickering out.

  Isabel and Claude shared the use of the Boomerang board until finally, over the winter, William Letham relented and built Isabel a beautiful redwood board, based on Duke’s design but much lighter and fastidiously sanded and oiled so that Isabel would not be splintered as she slid to her feet. By the following summer she and Isma Amor were regarded as the two most proficient female surfers in Sydney. Isabel had also begun aquaplaning on the harbour on surf-free weekends. The sight of this pretty young girl in her brief Canadian bathing costume being towed between the Heads at more than fifteen miles an hour by a motor launch thrilled Manly ferry passengers, and soon brought her a degree of notoriety, with photographs of her exploits occasionally appearing in the Sydney newspapers.

  Isabel began making summer excursions in Isma Amor’s car to the remote Peninsula beach of Bilgola, camping under canvas in the rainforest behind the beach. Isma, two years older than Isabel, was the only child of William Amor, one of Sydney’s leading engravers and medallists. A statuesque brunette who looked older than her years, Isma was doted upon by her wealthy parents, who had presented her with a car for her seventeenth birthday.

  Their weekend adventures on the Peninsula began to see Isma and Isabel labelled ‘daring young things’, but Isabel paid no attention to labels. As she grew older she resolved to follow the beat of her own drum, and she had known, since Duke’s boat had left Sydney harbour, that beat would very soon lead her to foreign shores.

  She left school at the end of 1915 and, partly because of her growing reputation as a sportswoman, secured a position as acting sports mistress at the exclusive Kambala School for Girls on the Tivoli Estate at Rose Bay, overlooking the harbour. Established in 1887, Kambala had more than 50 pupils when Isabel joined the staff, most of them from Sydney’s wealthy merchant class. The school motto, ‘Let the sun be your witness’, was indicative of the strong emphasis Kambala placed on healthy outdoor living. Isabel taught a variety of sports but specialised in netball (which she had played at Apsley) and swimming, and soon found she could supplement her income by providing private tuition for promising students at Rose Bay Baths after school hours.

  By the end of the summer of 1917–18, Isabel had saved enough money to buy a one-way passage to America, with a stopover in Honolulu. She had not heard from Duke, but nor had she written to him, not wanting to seem overly forward. She knew something of his whereabouts, however, from Donald McIntyre, who had been privy to correspondence between Charles Paterson of the Surf Bathing Association and Bill Rawlins of the Hui Nalu. Now that the United States had entered the war, Duke was doing his bit by touring with a troupe of swimmers to raise funds for the Red Cross. No-one seemed too sure when the tour would end, but Isabel was convinced (because this was what Duke had told her) that if she arrived in Honolulu, she would find him.

  She turned nineteen in May 1918, and had been of independent means and independent spirit for long enough now for her parents to realise they had no way of stopping her from going, even though the notion of crossing the Pacific for pleasure to them seemed utterly nonsensical, with half the world still at war and ships being sunk with regularity. (Passenger liners had to ‘black out’ at night, with portholes covered and lights dimmed.) However, Jeannie Letham, knowing what was driving Isabel’s travel plans, did attempt to convince her feisty and frighteningly self-assured daughter that she must have a back-up plan.

  ‘Father and I know what your first plan is,’ she said. ‘But if he’s not there or there is nothing there for you, then you must know what to do, how to take care of yourself.’

  ‘I do, Mother. Believe me I do,’ Isabel declared. ‘I will make my way to New York to see the shows, and then head back to Los Angeles to work in the motion pictures as a stunt woman or actress.’

  Jeannie sighed deeply and walked away. Father would have to talk to her.

  Isabel put together an impressive portfolio of references from such luminaries as Clare Roseby, the highly respected principal of Kambala, Charles Paterson and Herbert Corry, head of the Cunard Line in Australia, whose children she had taught to swim at Rose Bay. She also wrote to her former principal at Apsley, who had married an American and moved to New York, where she now had a young family. Isabel offered baby-sitting services in return for accommodation and she was quickly accepted.

  She left for Honolulu and Vancouver on the Niagara—the same ship that had taken Duke back to Honolulu three years earlier—on 28 August 1918, choosing to wear the same silk kimono she had worn to Duke’s dockside farewell, although she had to top it with a warm jacket. The departure was considered worthy of a feature article titled, ‘A Sydney Seagull’, in Town & Country:

  When the Niagara leaves for America she will take an enterprising young Australian sportswoman with her. This is Miss Isabel Letham, of Freshwater, who forsakes her own country for moving picture work in America. Miss Letham will break in on a new side. She is finely athletic, can play most games, and rides well. But it will be for her work in the water that she will appeal to the Americans. Here she can put up some attractive ‘stunts’. She is an expert surf-shooter and a fine performer on the surfboard, with which she has interested so many visitors to Freshwater in the season. She manipulates the board in true Hawaiian style … The Freshwater mermaid is eagerly anticipating the joys of Honolulu. No, she does not hunger for the sights and scenes of Hawaiian beauty. She says: ‘Just as soon as the gangway is down when we arrive, I am off in a taxi for the breakers.’

  The Niagara docked in Honolulu on 12 September, and since it was only in port for two days, Isabel had to move fast. She found time, however, to engage with Mike Jay, a young shipping reporter for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, whose job it was to meet the liners at the dock and interview disembarking celebrities. Charmed by this attractive young woman, Jay had no trouble at all believing that Isabel was a major celebrity. Under the heading, ‘Australian Surf Champion Takes a Dip at Waikiki’, he wrote:

  Isabel Letham, champion surfboard rider of Australia and well known as a swimmer and fancy diver, is a visitor in Honolulu today. She is on her way to New York to fill an engagement. Miss Letham stepped off the gangplank armed with a bathing suit wrapped in a towel and called a taxi to take her to Waikiki beach. ‘This is my first visit here,’ she said, ‘and I’m just dying to get into this bathing suit and have a plunge at Waikiki.’ As far as features go, Miss Letham is the prettiest swimmer that has come out of Australia. As for diving, she is another Annette Kellerman. She expects to stay at least six months in Amer
ica.

  Mike Jay spent most of the next two days with Isabel and quickly ascertained from Dudie Miller at the Moana Bath House that Duke was still on the mainland, believed to be somewhere back east. Dudie gave them an address and telephone number for George Freeth in San Diego. ‘Brudda George will know where Paoa is,’ he said to Isabel. ‘Call him when you get to California.’

  If Isabel was upset by the outcome that she knew had always been a distinct possibility, she managed to hide it from Jay, who was handsome and funny and great company. Although he wasn’t a surfer, he rode canoe with her at Waikiki, piloted by David Kahanamoku, one of Duke’s younger brothers, and took her to restaurants and clubs in Chinatown. Months later they were still corresponding. ‘Dear Miss Lady,’ Jay replied to one of her letters.

  So you are to work in animal pictures. Don’t leave your bathing suit in the elephant trunk, or hang your hat on the rhinoceros (damned if I can spell it) tusk, or attempt to steal a plume from the tail of an ostrich. I might add—lucky animals … Now that you’re a movie queen you’ll be getting so many mash notes that you may not find time to answer my epistles, but don’t forget to drop me a line now and then just for fun.

  Isabel’s legend seemed to grow as she continued her Pacific crossing. When the Niagara docked at Victoria, British Columbia, the local newspaper reported the arrival of the ‘Australian champion surf-rider’, explaining that she had had to leave the ship unexpectedly in order to rush to New York ‘to appear in the movies in a feature play in which a surf-rider is the heroine, causing the film company to cable Miss Letham a lucrative offer’.

  In fact, she and a girl she had met on board had concocted a plan to travel down to San Francisco and enjoy the legendary nightlife that city had to offer before the money ran out. There was no movie offer, and the baby-sitting job in New York could wait.