Line of Fire

by Ian Townsend

  The vein is often enveloped by white silicon dioxide, or quartz. At Wadnaminga, Jack had been tunnelling through a reef of gold and quartz — well, not much gold, as it had turned out.

  Kalgoorlie is on another ancient volcanic plain, but the rising water there deposited much greater veins of gold in the Golden Mile. Jack was hoping for something similar at nearby Bardoc when he and Willi registered five claims and started digging.

  It’s important to understand the volcanic origins of gold if you want to find gold, and during the Depression thousands of people migrated to the volcanic goldfields between Kalgoorlie and New Guinea. One of them was a young geologist who was to play a role in the stories of both Marjorie Manson’s family and Rabaul.

  Norman Fisher had just graduated with a degree in geology from the University of Queensland, which was lucky because geology was one of the few professions in high demand thanks to the high price of metals like gold. Mount Isa Mines offered him a job.

  Fisher was soon sent from goldfield to goldfield, to see if he could find any mines worth buying. What he found was a madhouse.

  In 1933, Tennant Creek, like Wadnaminga and Bardoc, was Australia’s wild west. A lot of desperate men were trying to make a living in country that was baking hot in the day, freezing at night, where the ground was hard and dry and mostly barren. If there was any water, it came from bores deep underground, highly mineralised and tasting terrible. Thirsty young men drank anything but the water, and the small gold-mining settlements became dangerous places.

  On one field, Fisher was watching a group of miners playing cards and drinking rum in their tent when a row broke out.

  ‘The next thing,’ said Fisher, ‘a chap rushed out calling out, and another miner was following him with a revolver, a sixshooter, going Bang! Bang! Bang!’

  The young geologist hid behind a tree, watching the two men chase each other through the scrub firing shots for the next hour, until a policeman arrived and managed to calm them down. No charges were laid, although one man had been shot in the shoulder.

  Rather than being scared off by his experience on the goldfields, Fisher was impressed. He was only 24, and when he returned to life in an office at Mount Isa it seemed far too slow. When he saw a job for a geologist on the New Guinea frontier, he took it. His colleagues thought he was crazy. Norman Fisher thought it’d be an adventure.

  Fisher was a tall, athletic man whose two loves were tennis (he was the Mount Isa tennis champion when he was there) and rocks.

  New Guinea in the early 1930s was a frontier for white men, as wild as Bardoc and Kalgoorlie, with the added attraction of palm trees and jungle instead of desert. It was paradise for a young geologist, and another gold rush was underway at a place called Morobe on the New Guinea mainland.

  New Guinea’s economy revolved around gold and coconuts. Coconut oil had been in demand since the Industrial Revolution, for making things like soap, candles and explosives. All you needed to make a fortune seemed to be a Pacific island, cheap labour and lots of coconuts.

  During the late 19th century, in what was to be a last grab for colonies, the big British, Dutch and German trading companies pressed their governments to claim islands in the Pacific. In 1883, even the colony of Queensland tried to annex the southern half of eastern New Guinea as a colony for Great Britain, but Britain said no. The following year, Germany annexed the eastern and northern part of New Guinea, including the island of New Britain, and Great Britain then changed its mind, annexing the south-eastern part of the island of New Guinea in 1888 and calling it Papua.

  Germany gave its New Guinea colony to the Neuguinea-Kompagnie to operate for profit, a country to be run as a business, but it turned out to be too much for one company to manage, so it was handed back to the German Government in 1899.

  New Guinea remained a German protectorate until the First World War, when Australia sent troops to capture it in late 1914, just after war had been declared in Europe. The Australian military was in charge of New Guinea until the League of Nations gave it to Britain, which let Australia administer it.

  On 9 May 1921, Australia took over the civil administration of the Territory of New Guinea. No-one asked the native New Guineans what they wanted, of course, but that’s the nature of colonisation.

  The upshot was that Australia inherited Rabaul, the well-planned garden capital of New Guinea, and made it its own. Rabaul was a real prize. The Germans had built grand buildings, botanical gardens, even a tram system. They’d gone to a lot of trouble to establish coconut plantations around the coastline, and wharves and storage sheds lined the deep sheltered harbour, ready to ship the dried oil-rich meat of the coconut, called copra, back to Europe.

  What made Rabaul so commercially attractive was its volcanoes. Its jewel was its harbour, a volcanic caldera. One thousand four hundred years ago, a volcanic eruption much larger than that of Krakatoa in 1883 emptied a massive magma chamber and the volcano above it collapsed into the void and was flooded by the sea.

  It created the perfect harbour, sheltered on all sides, so steep and deep that ships can berth close to shore. The volcanic soils surrounding it and the wet tropical climate were perfect for coconuts, as well as cocoa and rubber.

  In the 1920s and early ’30s, Australia continued the German work of building Rabaul into a major Pacific trading post. The volcanoes that surrounded the harbour weren’t a problem then; they were covered in vegetation and looked extinct. There’d been an eruption in the 1870s, but no-one apart from the local Tolai remembered it. There were steamy hot springs, but there was no sign that the volcanoes would come to life again.

  Unfortunately, two of the world’s most dangerous and unusual volcanoes guarded both sides of the harbour entrance, and they were only sleeping.

  When Norman Fisher sailed into Rabaul on his 25th birthday, in September 1934, he would have been struck by the volcanic nature of Blanche Bay, the telltale signs that he was inside a gigantic volcanic caldera.

  On the northern flank of the bay he counted five volcanic peaks. He’d done his homework and knew that in 1767 British explorer Philip Carteret had named the largest three volcanoes the South Daughter, the Mother and the North Daughter. The local Tolai people call the Mother’s twin peaks Kabiu, meaning breasts.

  Below these peaks were smaller volcanoes. One that stood out as Fisher scanned the shore was Tavurvur. This is the volcano that he would later discover had erupted as recently as 1878 and sent bombs of lava hurtling towards the town. In 1934, Tavurvur’s green mantle hid its true nature, although its name might have been a warning: in the Tolai language Tavurvur means ‘the hornet’s nest’.

  In 1934, though, none of the volcanoes looked particularly threatening. Norman Fisher’s ship passed tall rocks in the centre of the harbour called the Beehives, or Davapia, the eroded remnants of the original volcano that had collapsed onto itself during that violent eruption 1400 years earlier.

  As the Burns Philp–owned Macdhui approached the wharves and sheds that lined the shore, Fisher would have seen Rabaul at its best, ringed by greenery and with bursts of red and purple bougainvillea and white splashes of frangipani between the buildings and over the rooftops.

  Fisher’s first job was to investigate the discovery of gold in some of the more remote parts of the Territory. The copra business was in a sad way. The price of copra, like just about everything else, had collapsed, and in the mid-1930s the plantations were on the brink of financial ruin. Like Jack Gasmier back in Australia, the planters had gone looking for gold and sometimes found it.

  One group of planters was panning in the creeks of volcanic Tabar Island, finding enough gold to pay the wages of their native workers but not much more. On the remote Baining coast west of Rabaul, Jock Maclean on Rangarere plantation found both gold and iron.

  ‘Maclean thought that this was the world’s greatest deposit,’ said Fisher, who disagreed. Still, it sparked a rush and most planters in the Bainings, with little else to do and large native labour l
ines to pay, went into the mountains and staked claims.

  One of them was a man called Ted Harvey, who owned the Lassul plantation on that wild stretch of coast, later to become the home of Marjorie Manson.

  Harvey and his current wife, Winifred, had bought a sluice and pans and found gold in a creek that ran down from the steep Baining Mountains behind the plantation homestead.

  Fisher arrived in Lassul Bay by boat one morning, with the sun barely breaking over the hills. The sea was flat and the mountains steaming. The pinnace came as close to shore as it dared, and Fisher was carried the rest of the way.

  Ted Harvey, in his white suit, came down to the beach, offered a hand and then led the way along an overgrown track through the thick scrub, where the temperature climbed. By the time they reached the homestead verandah, they were both drenched in sweat. Winifred had prepared slices of pawpaw, and Fisher downed a glass of punch from a bowl on a table, which set him coughing.

  Steady on, said Harvey. It’s not lemonade.

  Fisher’s head was buzzing as Harvey led the geologist and a long line of plantation workers through the fine homestead garden and onto a track leading into the wild jungle.

  Harvey’s claim was a disappointment. It was deep in the hills on a creek flanked by large boulders and fallen trees. Harvey had built huts so he could oversee his workers in some sort of comfort, and when he got there Fisher probably had to rest for a moment to recover from the trek and from breakfast.

  Harvey had his workers chipping rock from a hole in the hillside, crushing it with hammers and then sluicing the ore in the creek. The last traces of gold were extracted with mercury.

  ‘What I found,’ Fisher reported, ‘was a small amount of gold mixed up with a great deal of the Gazelle Peninsula rock.’

  Not that Harvey cared what Fisher thought. Labour was cheap. Copra was cheaper. Harvey’s costs of production were very low and even a small amount of gold was income.

  His best buyers were the Japanese coastal traders who called in from time to time.

  CHAPTER 6

  For a woman, it is an easy life, as the heat does not allow one to do very much and you have native boys who, when trained, are very capable servants. It is also a lonely life, as plantations usually have no near neighbours and so one must indulge in hobbies.

  — Mercia Murphy, ‘Life on a Copra Plantation’, The Argus, 1 August 1935

  There’s a photograph of Ted Harvey at Lassul plantation, taken by his stepdaughter, Mercia, around the time of Fisher’s visit, a couple of years before Marjorie arrived. Harvey is wearing the planter’s uniform: starched white pants and white cotton shirt, white shoes, a striped tie. No hat. His hair is wavy and thick, but cut short around the ears and at the back. He’s perhaps five feet seven inches tall and he’s standing in profile with one hand on his hip and the other holding a cigarette, speaking to one of his labourers.

  The caption on the back reads:

  ANYAM, personal servant saying ‘Good-bye’ to A.A.

  Harvey . . . ‘Champion’ (his Boss reckons) Gold Panner Off

  and Gold Dish washer. Handles mercury like a white man.

  Ted Harvey at Lassul Plantation, about 1936; the caption on the back reads ‘Anyam, personal servant saying “Good-bye” to A.A. Harvey’

  (photo by Mercia Murphy; Julie Harris collection)

  Anyam had served his indenture and was heading home, probably back to the Sepik region of New Guinea. Harvey had him working the gold mine and handling toxic mercury ‘like a white man’, which hopefully meant with extreme care.

  As with Marjorie and Dickie, who were to later share his grave, the evidence for Ted Harvey’s life is scattered and rare. Nothing survives in Rabaul, where he spent the last 20 years of his life, but here and there, on scraps of paper in archives and in letters, there are references to him.

  The photographs of him arrived one day with others in a small box that Julie Harris, a relative of Mercia, had found. The box included some faded photographs of Harvey and Winifred at their jungle gold mine. The photograph of Harvey in the jungle has faded so much he peers out of it as if behind a mist, but in all photographs he has a cigarette in hand and an air of authority in his stance. It hid a madness.

  His oddness might have been a combination of many things, such as the long exposures to mercury, quinine and malaria. Most planters were stubbornly independent and Harvey was more stubborn than most. Among the lonely plantations of the north Baining coast, where people sought company whenever they could, Ted Harvey remained a loner.

  Harvey, an Englishman who’d been living in Australia, had arrived in Rabaul in 1921 to work with the Expropriation Board. The Australian military had just handed the former German colony over to a civil administration and the Expropriation Board was set up to seize and sell all the captured German assets, including the plantations. The ‘Expro’ Board was staffed mainly by officers of Australia’s occupying force and by returned soldiers unable to stomach civilian life back home after the war.

  One visitor to Rabaul described them all as ‘truly unspeakable’; they seemed suited to isolation and drank heavily. Many, including Harvey, ended up buying the plantations they were helping to sell.

  In 1927, Harvey bought one of the last to come up for sale, a third-rate plantation called Lassul, 70 kilometres west of Rabaul. The sale book said that half of its 512 hectares was planted with 17,000 coconut palms and 12,800 cocoa trees, and it came with a European bungalow, stores, driers, 73 native labourers, two horses and 35 goats. That wasn’t quite true. Many coconut palms had died from neglect, and most of the labourers had deserted, taking the goats with them.

  Harvey ended up buying the rundown plantation by default, but the events surrounding that sale shed light on the nature of Rabaul society at the time.

  Lassul was put up for sale by open tender, and only returned servicemen could buy it. Veterans who already owned nearby plantations put in bids. Charlie Peterson at nearby Guntershohe plantation bid £6500, and then Harry Geoghegan at Old Massawa offered £6700. After tenders had closed, the Custodian of the Expropriation Board, William Harvey (who was no relation to Ted), secretly slipped into the tender box a new £7000 bid from Peterson. William Harvey later said he was asked to do so by Peterson’s wife, Muriel.

  Anyway, the scandal was exposed; William Harvey was accused of taking kickbacks for all sort of other activities, and he was reprimanded.

  Peterson, who was still technically the highest bidder, was persuaded to surrender the title to Lassul, and Ted Harvey, who worked for the Expro Board, offered to take it quietly off Peterson’s hands.

  Not long after, Peterson was poisoned.

  ‘In the dock, charged with murder, stood Muriel Kathleen Vivienne Peterson,’ reported the Truth newspaper, ‘well-known beauty in Sydney society, the wife of Charles Albert Peterson, a New Guinea planter, who was alleged to have been murdered — done to death by one of the deadliest poisons — arsenic.’

  Also charged with murder was the local government patrol officer, John D’arcy Steele, a war veteran who’d worked with Harvey at the Expro Board and who’d one night drunkenly confessed to helping Muriel kill her husband.

  The judge threw the case out of court for lack of evidence, and Steele tried again to have himself indicted for murder, before killing himself.

  Muriel Peterson ended up running Guntershohe plantation by herself and would later become one of Marjorie’s friends at Lassul.

  When the deeds for Lassul finally came through, Ted Harvey signed an affidavit stating that his name was Alfred Arthur Harvey, born in Leeds, England, on 9 January 1888.

  His real name was Aaron Bedford.

  Aaron was the son of Israel Bedford, born outside Leeds in the village of Westerton and into a family of deeply religious farmworkers. Israel, however, had an independent streak and astonished the family by rejecting farmwork and joining the local police constabulary. Not long after Aaron was born, Israel moved his family to London and joined the Me
tropolitan Police Service.

  Constable Israel Bedford was an authoritarian at home and at work, determined to make his mark. He pounded the beat of central London, arresting thieves and rising through the ranks to eventually become divisional detective inspector of the London Met.

  His only son, Aaron, wasn’t impressed. As soon as he could, Aaron ran away from home, and on Boxing Day in 1905, just 17 years old, he eloped with 18-year-old Victoria Eugenie ‘Queenie’ Swan. They were married in the Church of St Michaels and All Angels, in Chiswick, with the church verger as a witness.

  Aaron signed the register Alfred Arthur Bedford, and put his father’s name down as Harry. Both Aaron/Alfred and Queenie claimed to be 21 so they didn’t have to get their fathers’ permission to marry, and who could blame them? Alfred’s father was a feared bobby and Eugenie’s father was a company sergeant major of the Royal Engineers.

  Seven months later, in July 1906, with Eugenie pregnant, the man she knew as Alfred Bedford stepped out of their home one day and never returned. Unknown to her, he’d changed his name again, to Alfred Harvey, and boarded the steamship China bound for Australia.

  Eugenie generously gave him 14 years to come home. In 1918, at the end of the war, she remarried, convinced her Alfred must have died.

  Aaron Bedford, who’d changed his name three times, was very much alive, but he did a good job of vanishing. Even today it’s hard to trace his movements during those first eight years in Australia. He arrived in Townsville, in Queensland, in August 1906 after disembarking in Sydney and probably taking the coastal steamer Yongala north. He drifted, not comfortable with society, a loner, unable to settle.