Long Way Place (Cannibal Country Trilogy, Book 1)

by Andrew Wareham

  “Keys, Master, putim one pela long pocket bilong yu. Narapela i stap long bigpela Master Urquhart.”

  That was easy enough to understand, Ned thought – keep one key himself, always in his pocket, the spare to be held by Urquhart. He began to wonder just how safe a place it was – there was too much of guns for his liking.

  He had worried about languages, had sufficient problems speaking English to the satisfaction of the bosses, but it looked as if this Pidgin would be easy enough to learn. Over the years he found that he had been more or less right – with goodwill on both sides the trade pidgin was simple to use, Police Motu less so, but impossible only for the idle, the stupid or the arrogant, which included a very large proportion of the expatriate community, officialdom especially.

  “Kaikai bilong mornin’, Master – you laik wanem?”

  Breakfast, what did he want? Ned thought carefully, reasonably sure that what he asked for was what he was going to get, every morning, unfailing

  “Paw-paw, toast, apricot jam, coffee?”

  Poki nodded, put his hand out and asked for five shillings, he must buy paw-paw from the local market and coffee from the Company store. Bread and butter and sugar and jam would come from the kitchens, no worry. Did Ned want tinned milk as well?

  “No, don’t like it. What should I say, ‘mi no laik’?”

  “Mi no laikim ‘em, Master.”

  Another thing Ned did not like was to be called ‘Master’, but there was nothing he could do about that he feared.

  There was a hardwood wardrobe and a large chest-of-drawers in the bedroom and his clothes had already been put in their proper place, boots neatly set out in a line, hats hanging from pegs, shirts on hangers, all in precise order, colours together. Ned memorised the location of each set of items – he felt he should be good, memories of Cook in Micheldever surfacing.

  He went outside, Poki at his heels and pointing out the boundaries of his territory, a garden some thirty yards by fifty with a straggly hibiscus hedge blocking the boy quarters out of sight. There was a single gum growing and very little else at this stage of the Dry. If he was going to make drawings of the local flowers he must first grow some, it seemed. A few minutes of laborious conversation established that he wanted a decorative garden, not sweet potato, which would have made sense, but coloured flowers, which was bloody peculiar. Ned became the Flower Master from that moment.

  Poki had dealt with stranger requests in the past and this one would simply mean sending his two younger sons out into the bush over a few days – they could find plants in plenty there, not so many in the Dry but enough to make a start. He would secure the young gentleman’s comfort in any way he could and if he wanted flowers, no worries, that was what he would get. Whilst on the topic of furnishing house and home with all he needed…

  “Yu laikim meri, Master, or nogat? Suppose yu laikim liklik monkey, em olrait.”

  Ned quickly translated, double-checked that he had heard Poki correctly, assured him that he definitely did not have any use for small boys. Grown-up girls were, however, a different matter.

  Poki shrugged, he had worked for a missionary as a young man and nothing surprised him when it came to the predilections of the Masters. He had arranged for his younger brother’s second daughter to come up from the village where she had been a fraction careless with some of the boys and no longer commanded a high bride price. She would be quite happy to warm the young man’s bed and live a life of luxury for a year or two.

  Raka was summoned and presented to Ned, dressed village style, bare to the waist, fourteen or fifteen years old and with an elegant sufficiency to display. He was much in favour, as was she, having expected a much older and less vigorous seeming gentleman. She moved into the second bedroom, peering into the empty wardrobe and cupboards and wondering what they were for – her total clothing consisted of two laplaps and one meri blouse for Sundays.

  Ned was achingly aware that he had been short of home comforts for some considerable time – Cairns had much in its favour but was very short of commercially minded young ladies. There had in fact been none he had been prepared to risk, the availables all Abo and well-worn and located at dockside and reputed to carry every disease known to sea-faring man. Raka was handsome and, it transpired, both enthusiastic and sufficiently knowledgeable to keep him well entertained. He opened his purse-strings next day and sent her trotting off with her aunty to the trade store at Laloki village, a start to filling the empty spaces in her bedroom furniture.

  Work was less amusing.

  Murdoch, the creator of the Papuan Rubber Company’s Steam Plant – he knew that was its name because there was a shiny brass plaque above the door - had obviously been an outstanding fitter and turner able to work in brass, bronze, iron and steel with equal facility, but he had not been a steam engineer. He had produced from memory a copy of the machinery he had seen on a Burrell or Foden traction engine, a Foden, Ned thought, recognising the general shape of the boiler, but he had had no real understanding of the function of the various parts or their relationship one to another.

  He sought an immediate interview with the boss.

  “It won’t work, Mr Urquhart. The wheel will turn, but there will be almost no power on it – I doubt if you could get more than a single grindstone off the belt. It will ‘ave to be stripped down and remade, much of it simply thrown away. I can give you a steam generator within a month but a power take-off to run machinery will need the rest of this year.”

  Urquhart was irritated but not especially surprised.

  “He was a drunk, but Mr Fitzgerald thought he was a ‘character’ and was sure he could produce a working machine suitable for ‘frontier conditions’. Could you salvage the working parts and transport them to a plantation wharf to make a loading derrick?”

  “Yes, sir, but it would cost at least as much as a new, purpose-built piece of equipment bought from down South and could not be as efficient. Best would be to cut our losses, sir.”

  “Which would leave you with time on your hands and little to do, Ned.”

  “I can work petrol engines, sir, and strip a jenny. There are carts that ‘ave wheels and bearings, and other pieces of machinery as well, I expect, ‘ere and on the other plantations.”

  “Could you run a plantation, Ned?”

  “In six months from now I will be able to, sir.”

  “I’ll take you up on that, Ned. Have a look at our generator here, will you, first thing. The power output fluctuates every night and we don’t really know how to fix it.”

  An hour to clean the dust filters on the air and fuel intakes and the petrol engine ran smoothly. Thirty minutes to replace the belt to the generator and then two hours to discover the spare brushes and set them correctly and they had a working supply of electricity, bright clear lamps that attracted every bug on the Papuan Coast. The fly wire rang to the thuds of rhino beetles clumsily flying into the windows and falling onto their backs on the ground to spend half the night buzzing and flapping to turn themselves upright, those that were not caught by the house-boys.

  “What do they do with them, Davy?”

  They were sat by the bar, digesting the welcoming dinner – corned beef hash with rice and local vegetables, adequate in quantity at least – quietly chatting with the dozen or so of assembled whiteskins, his neighbours, acquaintances and friends for the duration.

  “The sods! They cut holes in the trunks of coconut palms and put them in there to lay their eggs. Three months and there’s a hatching of grubs as big as my little finger.” He displayed the digit in question, just in case Ned did not know what he meant. “Then they thread them on a thorn and toast ‘em and eat ‘em!”

  “A delicacy, Ned,” Richard gravely confirmed. “They say they taste better than prawns, which is, more or less, what they are, land not sea, obviously. However, I ain’t going to find out!”

  “And the palms get diseased and produce half what they ought to because of the damage done to them.”r />
  The work was easy and Ned’s efforts were deeply appreciated. Murdoch had made a lot of noise and had flapped and fussed from dawn till dusk but had produced almost nothing while Ned quietly progressed around the compound, stripping and repairing everything mechanical that he came across, as willing to replace the wheel on a barrow as to rebuild the big derrick in the main stores. It made a change to have a working set of machines at base.

  Two weeks before the Wet was expected, give or take a month, it was not a reliable phenomenon, he took a horse and cart out to the plantation at Brown River, a day’s trek on which he was accompanied by two police boys assigned from the small force at Laloki.

  “Not a good idea to travel on your own, Ned, not with a box of tools on the cart and a horse that could feed a village for a week. Add to that, you’re a bit stringy but there’s a couple of meals on you as well. Watch your back, especially in the Dry Season when food gets short.”

  The policemen carried rifles but had no ammunition, which seemed rather foolish to Ned. Enquiring, he was told that he was senior officer, there was only a local sergeant at the station. The decision was his, none of the others would take responsibility or give advice.

  Urquhart, earmarked for a captaincy in the militia if it ever was formed and hence not available to the Constabulary, suggested that Murray was the problem. If policemen killed wantonly he was quite certain to hang them and deport their officer.

  “No concept of prevention, Ned – kill a couple of kanakas every few months and the rest get the message, that’s what I say! But Murray insists that you can only shoot in self-defence. There has to be a crime first, whereas if you shot them there would never be any crime!”

  Ned considered that proposition, decided that taken to its extreme it would be logical to shoot all of the local men, then none of them would ever become criminals…

  He issued ten rounds apiece to his pair of constables, watched them load and set the safety catch, warned them, colourfully, that if they shot first he would see them swing. They might use their rifles to defend him or themselves against actual attack, not otherwise.

  They saluted and promised to be good.

  He stayed four days at the plantation, stripping and rebuilding the few pieces of machinery there, the first maintenance any of it had seen. Henry, the manager, was quietly thankful, showed him the nursery garden he was developing on the side.

  “They won’t bloody admit it, Ned, but the rubber’s a dead duck, mate, not a hope of getting a return from it. There’s five thousand coconut seedlings here, look, and the same of teak. Half of this land is hillside, better for timber than copra. Too low for coffee, not wet enough for cocoa, so the options are limited. Best thing would be to grow local foodstuffs to sell in Moresby, only she ain’t big enough to provide a market, so, in reality, Ned, they’re buggered, unless we get a decent war. Copra provides glycerine for explosives and a dozen other chemicals.”

  “What about pigs, Henry?”

  “Good idea – who will buy their meat, and with what money?”

  It was an unanswerable question – there simply was no cash on the Papuan coast.

  “How do you go about setting up a coconut plantation, Henry? By the looks of it you need to have a nursery up and running years before you start the place.”

  “Most of the new plantations are owned by Burns Philp, so they’ve got existing nurseries on their old places. What they do, commonly not always, is buy out a piece of land down on the coast with a few hundred mature trees growing wild and fill in the gaps, then, over the years, they cut out the oldest trees and plant in straight lines. We can’t do that, because of the rubber trees. Best thing, if it’s possible, would be to run a swap with the local village – they get the existing plantation with any of the buildings they want to keep and can use the rubber trees for firewood and then plant their gardens in their place. Difficult to get hold of firewood up here, most of the local trees just don’t burn very well, so they might well be tempted to exchange an equal acreage, one for one. As for seedlings – buy some, start planting this Wet Season for our own, it’ll work out, more or less.”

  It all seemed very haphazard, but maybe that was the way of things up here – possibly it reflected on the sort of people who ended up here in the Last Place on Earth.

  The story was repeated on the other plantations – the rubber was a failure.

  “We should set out a nursery for coconut palms, Mr Urquhart – use some of the land down by the river, sir?

  “Mr Fitzgerald believes that we may be able to salvage something from the rubber yet, Ned.”

  It was obvious when he thought about it – Fitzgerald knew rubber, had never worked copra and would be redundant if the rubber failed. Therefore…

  “What do you have planned for me for the Wet, sir?”

  “The Administration has asked to borrow you for a few weeks, Ned, to lend a hand at the dock and at the water plant and with the town generator they want to set up. It would be good for us if you were to show willing. As well, you could put in some time with the Constabulary, learn a bit about the job – if you take a plantation down coast for us you would be useful running our own police station. Where there’s no RM close to hand the big companies will often pay for a small station and half a dozen constables and provide an officer, part-time, for them. It would do you no harm, either, put a few more quid in your bank account, reserve coppers aren’t paid but a police officer with a commission is.”

  He was to become a manager and an officer, or so it seemed. Why not? It would make sense to move up a bit in the world. But that would mean learning how to talk like the bosses did, which would be a bloody nuisance to organise and remember. He must send for a book or two, he supposed, there must be some that taught people how to speak ‘proper’ English.

  LONG WAY PLACE

  Chapter Five

  The track down the valley to Moresby remained open throughout the Wet, high enough up the hillside to be above flood level and free of landslides this year, and that was just a question of luck. An earthquake, rare down here, could bring down half a cliff overnight. The thin vegetation was sufficient to hold the soil steady, the tall tree ferns particularly useful, it seemed, the clumps of grass covering the lower slopes spreading in this growing season as well. Ned rode the track weekly, three or four days in Moresby, the rest in the comfort of Raka’s arms at home. It was an easy existence, carefree and profitable.

  The commission as a police officer was offered and accepted immediately. He received half pay in return for being permanently on call, with the expectation that he would not be needed in Moresby but might be busy on occasion once he got out to his plantation. He was given a copy of the laws of the Territory and the manual issued to Queensland police officers and was told he could read them, if he could be bothered, but the general practice was to use them as reference if ever a problem arose. Common sense would normally do, his job would be to keep the peace not play lawyers’ little games.

  Most of his days he spent wharfside, maintaining the cranes and derricks and rebuilding the one fire pump which had been delivered five years previously and then dumped in a shed and left to rust. No ship had ever caught fire in Port Moresby, so it was obvious that none ever would and there was no need to worry about fire tenders, or so he was told.

  A month into the Wet and he met Murray, forced to stay in town because of the impossibility of trekking in the bush at this season.

  It seemed coincidental, Ned calling into Konedobu at the QM’s request and collecting an extra uniform belt, Murray happening to bump into him and inviting him to his office, just to make his acquaintance as he was in town at the moment.

  Ned’s first thought was that Murray was a typical ‘one of them’. An Edwardian gentleman, bearded and reserved, closed faced, tall, powerfully built with a sportsman’s muscles and sneering down at the lower class peasant in front of him. He had the plummy accent and the arrogance that said his dialect of English was the ‘right
’ one, that the ninety per cent of the British people who used different pronunciations were all wrong and, as for Australians, they were all beyond the pale. To his surprise Murray did not open the conversation by asking what was his school – that was their normal way of putting the plebs down.

  “A steam engineer, I see, Mr Hawkins. We need more of your sort here, sir, men who can do things rather than give orders to others to get them done.”

  “Thank you, sir, I like being here because of that – I like to be useful, sir.”

  It was a good response, unplanned and clearly honest.

  “Going to stay here long, do you think, Mr Hawkins?”

  Ned was immediately cautious, never commit yourself with one of them, you never knew what they might want.

  “Don’t know, sir, it’s early days for me, and the Rubber Company might not ‘ave another contract for me.”

  Murray snorted, pulled a letter from a tray on his desk.

  “They won’t, Mr Hawkins, because rubber is a failure and they have asked me to release them from their obligations relating to the land they have alienated, giving them permission to sell it, in effect. I will allow them to walk away from their contract, as well, in return for a payment to the traditional landholders – otherwise they will go bankrupt and we will get nothing at all. Three months will see them gone, I believe.”

  “Then that leaves me with no job, sir.”

  “Not if you wish to stay, Mr Hawkins. You have volunteered for our Police service, and not all do that, not by a long way, and you have started to learn Police Motu, and this horrible ‘Pidgin’, which I am intending to extirpate but is necessary for the while. I believe that both Steamships, who will probably buy out the Rubber Company, and Burns Philp are intending to move down coast and open new plantations in the expectation that the price of copra will rise eventually – either would be pleased to employ you, they need your skills, sir. I can have the word passed to them that they are quite free to recruit from the Rubber Company; it will not be seen as poaching.”