Line of Fire

by Ian Townsend

  From the top-floor windows of the Coote house at Sulphur Creek, Diana was able to see the town and its wharves on one side, and the green-covered volcano that the Europeans called Matupi, and the Tolai called Tavurvur, on the other.

  Out of sight on the southern side of Blanche Bay, opposite Tavurvur, was another volcano that didn’t look like one at all. It was a low, flat island covered in grey-green casuarinas. The Tolai people called it Rakaia, ‘the volcano’ (or, more strictly speaking, ‘the spirit that makes the volcano’), but to the Europeans it was just a quarantine station and a place for picnics.

  Rhoda, Peter, Dion, Diana and Philip Coote at Haus Rakaia, the Burns Philp ‘house on the hill’ at Sulphur Creek, before the 1937 eruption

  (Diana Martell collection)

  Haus Rakaia (National Archives of Australia)

  The Burns Philp house at Sulphur Creek had been built for prestige by the German shipping company Norddeutscher Lloyd for its own company directors, back before the Great War, when Rabaul was in German hands.

  ‘It was two storeys and up on long, longish stilts in front,’ said Diana, showing me a sepia photograph of the unusual house. ‘It had big grounds, lovely gardens, and in the grounds there was another house, which was used as the guesthouse. So, when the Burns Philp people came, they stayed there.

  ‘Mum was quite good at entertaining them. Mum had a flair that way and she always had quite a lot of staff.’

  They included house servants who cleaned, cooked, washed, and tended the garden. People who would never think to have servants in Australia were encouraged to have at least three when they came to Rabaul. The New Guinea Administration even published a handbook for newly arrived families, stating that the ‘average bungalow home requires from three to five native servants; the essentials at any rate are the cook, laundry boy (in many cases a casual employee) and the house boy’.

  An enormous variety of plants could grow in the fertile volcanic soil watered by tropical storms, and with nothing much to do in the house, the white wives spent a lot of time gardening.

  Rabaul was renowned for its gardens. One of Rhoda Coote’s best friends was Sarah Chinnery, the wife of the government anthropologist, who kept a diary.

  When taking friends around the garden I rarely use the botanical name but say: ‘Mrs Coote gave me the seeds of this beautiful bauhinia — it has flowers like large pink apple blossoms. Mrs Coote also gave me the euphorbia, a cactus with a candelabra of bells that plop when you squeeze them.’

  Apart from the tropical gardens and native servants, Rabaul might have been any other Australian town. There was a horse-racing track, restaurants, hotels, a golf course, botanical gardens, a picture theatre and a swimming pool.

  Diana Coote went to the Australian public school in Court Street when she turned five; there she saluted the flag and sang ‘God Save the King’. There were picnics on Vulcan Island and sailing on the harbour. It was a wonderful place for a child to grow up.

  In 1936, the rest of the world seemed remote and vaguely unreal. The price of copra had hit rock bottom, but the shipping companies still traded and made profits. In the midst of the Depression, life for the Europeans in Rabaul, even the planters who struggled financially, remained relatively comfortable. The only things that made people uneasy were the regular earthquakes, which the Tolai called gurias.

  At Sulphur Creek, Rhoda Coote’s garden seemed particularly shaky. Unknown to her and probably everyone in Rabaul, Sulphur Creek wasn’t actually a creek. The hill on which the house had been built was the rim of a small volcano whose crater had been flooded by the sea. Beneath Rhoda’s glorious garden was a vast magma chamber that connected Sulphur Creek with the Tavurvur and Vulcan Island volcanoes.

  One hundred years earlier, Sulphur Creek had erupted, spitting lava bombs, and although the Tolai told stories about eruptions, they were just stories, surely. The hill on which the house was built was just a hill.

  In fact, the Europeans called the Coote house at Sulphur Creek the House on the Hill, but the local Tolai called it Haus Rakaia, ‘the house of the volcano’.

  CHAPTER 10

  One cannot look at it a moment without being struck at the natural strength of the position in a military point of view . . . [there is] water in it for the navies of the world to anchor in, perfectly sheltered from all winds.

  — Captain C.H. Simpson of the British warship HMS Blanche, describing Simpson Harbour in July 1872

  In May 1937, when the ground started shaking unreasonably and spilling the gin from glasses, there was no-one in Rabaul who could explain what the sudden increase in earthquakes meant. The only one who might have was the geologist Norman Fisher, but he was in the goldfields at Wau.

  Even in the Bainings, the ground shook so hard coconuts fell from the trees. Mercia Murphy had been living at Lassul with her mother, Winifred, and stepfather, Ted Harvey, for three glorious years, but in early 1937 she turned 18 and it was time to leave the rather lonely plantation and make a life in the outside world.

  Before she caught the steamer to Australia, Ted Harvey took her into Rabaul and hired a pinnace for ‘a last hurrah’ around the harbour. Mercia took her camera and recorded scenes of interest at the charming little island called Vulcan: the graceful casuarina trees on the beach, a lake in the middle of the island fringed by a grove of tall pines and looking more European alpine than Pacific-island tropical. She snapped a photograph of the quarantine station’s doctor standing on a wharf built over a sunken ship. Another shows the scene across Blanche Bay and has a note on the back: ‘View of three extinct volcanoes, New Britain.’ One of those extinct volcanoes was Tavurvur.

  When Mercia visited Vulcan Island, the quarantine station doctor might have described the strange happenings. At night, there were unexplained growls. Trees that were on the shore were suddenly lapped by water, and on the other side of the island the shore had crept further away.

  After Mercia’s visit, the doctor asked New Guinea’s director of agriculture, George Murray, to come and take a look. The island seemed to be tilting. Murray noticed that ‘a casarina [sic] tree which had been well above high water mark was particularly noticeable as being about twelve inches below water level, and the shore line seemed to have tilted’. He returned to Rabaul to make his report. ‘My final remark was, “it came up in a night and might go down in a night and I would suggest that life buoys be hung round the verandah rails of the buildings where they would at least be ornamental, but would not be required if the island went up instead of down”.’

  Murray’s colleagues thought he was joking.

  After her last hurrah around Simpson Harbour, Mercia’s time at Lassul was at an end and Ted Harvey, although he wouldn’t admit it, was heartbroken. Mercia was happy, clever and enthusiastic; as good a daughter as a man could wish for, no doubt reminding Harvey in quiet moments of a child left behind in London when he was, well, about Mercia’s age. (Best not to dwell.) Mercia had been a stabilising influence on Ted Harvey; she called him Father and he called her Merce. He drank less; he was kinder to his workers. In short, he was a better person when she was around.

  Mercia had been on the plantation during the worst of the Depression years, when copra was hardly worth selling. In those years, Harvey concentrated on his gold mine, which ended up being lucrative enough to bring Mercia’s uncle, Wyn’s brother Cedric Consterdine, out from Australia to help manage the plantation. For all his faults, Ted Harvey was a generous man. He’d also given a job to a man he’d known for years, an Australian Patrol Officer (a type of roving public servant called Kiap in pidgin), Bill Parker. Parker’s health was failing him. Harvey took him in.

  By 1937 they’d survived the bad years, and with the economy improving, Cedric had taken a real job with W.R. Carpenter managing a plantation across St George’s Channel on New Ireland.

  When Mercia left, Wyn began to fall apart.

  Life on a copra plantation could be a lonely and unhealthy one. Malaria was a constant companio
n, kept at bay with quinine, but not always. Alcohol helped people cope and also made things worse. Harvey didn’t have a stable personality to begin with. He could be moody, abrupt, sometimes wouldn’t speak for days, and then Wyn couldn’t get him to shut up. Mercia and Cedric had moderated the worst of his behaviour, but with them both gone, Harvey fell back into indulging his eccentricities. Wyn began to drink, and Harvey began to see her drinking as a symptom of her problems, not his.

  At the end of May, Wyn persuaded Harvey to take her into Rabaul, hoping a weekend in civilisation would help them both. Harvey had a load of copra to be shipped, and they caught the copra boat into town.

  It was to be a big social weekend. The steamship Montoro was arriving with its carnival of visitors. On Saturday Jack Trevitt, a well-known Methodist missionary on the Baining coast, was getting married, and on Sunday the Catholics would celebrate Corpus Christi with a procession. The wives of other planters would probably come to town to shop. The hotels would be busy. They could pretend life was normal.

  What happened to Ted and Wyn Harvey in Rabaul that tumultuous weekend isn’t known. It wasn’t recorded or, if it was, the record didn’t survive. It can only be imagined through the experiences of other people who were there.

  All had seemed well in Rabaul at the start of the week. Monday was Empire Day and Diana Coote and the junior choir at the public school in Court Street sang ‘The Golden Wattle’ and joined the whole school to sing ‘Rule Britannia’ for Judge Beaumont Phillips, who reminded the children that the Empire stood for ‘justice, a square deal, and playing the game’.

  By Friday 28 May, when the Harveys would have arrived on the copra boat, the tremors in Rabaul had become so bad that the houses were rocking on their stilts. After a sleepless Friday night, people moved into their yards, where they felt less like they were on a ship at sea.

  ‘I could not stay in the house, it rocked too much,’ wrote Rhoda Coote’s friend Sarah Chinnery, in her garden on Malaguna Road. Sarah was the wife of the anthropologist Ernest Chinnery, known to everyone as Chin. On Saturday morning, Chin had gone to Tavurvur to look at reports of big cracks in the ground and Sarah had driven around to the Ravuvu swimming pool near Vulcan Island. There, she happened to speak to Gottfried Furter, a well-known store owner in Rabaul who lived nearby. Gottfried had told her that in the middle of the night his house had shaken so much it had cracked down the middle; a wardrobe had fallen on Mrs Furter as she was sleeping and, when she’d crawled out from under it and tried to escape, the front stairs collapsed. She had to jump.

  Gottfried had politely waited until a decent time in the morning, seven o’clock, to phone the only official he thought might have jurisdiction over gurias: the Director of Agriculture, George Murray. He also told Murray that the sea in front of his house was getting hot. It was Saturday morning and Murray was stuck at the office, but he said he would drive around after lunch to take a look.

  In Rabaul, at one of the hotels, Ted Harvey might have been trying to calm Wyn’s already frayed nerves.

  It won’t last. Have a drink.

  Even so, Ted might have thought, as many others did, that one particularly loud bang was a collision between two lorries, and left the hotel room to investigate. But there wasn’t a lorry in sight, just people milling around who thought the same thing.

  He might even have been standing in the street when George Murray’s dusty administration Plymouth flew past on its way to see the Furter house and check reports that ‘something was up’ at Vulcan.

  Ted Harvey wouldn’t have been able to see the harbour from where he stood, but between the tall trees that lined the road, above the shopfronts, the sky that day was the usual pale blue of the tropics. The morning cloud had vanished and the afternoon storms were yet to build over the Bainings. Above ground, at least, everything seemed to be in order.

  He might have caught the eye of another planter. What’s going on?

  You tell me, mate.

  Just then, perhaps, the ground might have moved so violently that a parked car rocked on its springs. After the movement stopped there would have been some nervous laughter before everyone decided to ignore it as best they could.

  If Harvey had walked down to the harbour shore and onto the black sand, he would have seen something very strange. The sea suddenly went out several yards, like a tub being tipped, and then came back with a quiet rush so that Harvey would have had to have taken several steps backwards. Then the sea returned to its normal level, as if nothing had happened.

  Across the harbour, Vulcan Island, low and almost flat with its collar of grey-green she-oaks, may have reminded Ted of his trip with Mercia. Nothing had been the same since. The surface of the harbour shivered as if from some unseen breeze, or perhaps a predatory fish just below the surface.

  At the town’s golf course, on the far side of Sulphur Creek, the number five tee was shaking so much the ball wouldn’t stay in one place. On the number six, the golfers played on but had trouble standing.

  Not far from the golf course, at Haus Rakaia overlooking the town, six-year-old Diana Coote was playing in a downstairs room.

  ‘I remember looking up at the wardrobe, which was going like this,’ says Diana, sitting today in a sensibly stable brick home in suburban Brisbane, but rocking sideways to show me what the wardrobe in her memory was doing.

  ‘I was absolutely rooted to the ground, couldn’t move, and looking up at it. And Mum came charging, grabbed me and pulled me out, but I can still remember that wardrobe. The earthquakes went on and on.’ And so that Saturday they, too, moved out of their house and into the garden, where servants brought out sandwiches when Philip Coote arrived home for lunch.

  If they’d been on the verandah, higher up, Diana would have had a sweeping view of the harbour. There was hardly a breeze inside the caldera, but a solid afternoon storm was beginning to pull itself together above the mountains of Toma. Everything looked peaceful enough, despite the shaking.

  ‘We were still out in the garden, sort of getting away from the house shaking, when we heard this loud bang, a real bang, and we thought, “Oh, something’s happened.” But I don’t know they really thought much about the volcanoes coming to life.’

  Everyone in Rabaul was conscious that they lived inside the crater left by some ancient and monstrous eruption. The town was surrounded by volcanic cones, but, like the town itself and its inhabitants, they dozed in the tropical heat, unable to muster energy for anything too strenuous. People would talk about volcanoes, but no-one seriously believed that one might actually erupt. Like Mercia, everyone thought they were extinct.

  Back on Malaguna Road, Rhoda Coote’s friend Sarah Chinnery and her husband were also having lunch in the garden when George Murray arrived in his car and asked them to come with him to look at some strange phenomena. Since Gottfried Furter had reported his house splitting in half and the sea getting hot, other people had telephoned to report that the reefs around Vulcan Island had risen from the sea.

  Because landslides from the earthquakes had blocked the coast road to Vulcan, Murray’s driver took them up on the plateau and inland to Taliligap, circling around Vulcan to approach it from the south. They stopped on the caldera’s edge to look back across the harbour.

  ‘When I got out of the car a few miles from Rabaul to get a photograph of Vulcan Island,’ said Sarah, ‘the car literally danced on the ground.’

  Vulcan Island was normally a green jewel in the blue harbour, but now Sarah could see the sea was a muddy brown as far as half a mile from the shore.

  They drove on, passing villages with banana palms, sugarcane, bamboo and tall trees with orchids covering their trunks. Huts and a Catholic church were decked with flowers for the Corpus Christi Festival the next day. Reaching the coast road, they headed back towards Rabaul and came to a work gang clearing a landslide. Sarah got out of the car to take a photograph and an old man walked up to her.

  ‘Missis, place ’e no good. Stone ’e come up in water,�
� he said, pointing to Vulcan Island.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Sarah, but he grabbed her arm and looked her in the eye, saying again, ‘Place ’e no good.’

  At the time, it was unusual for New Guineans to touch Europeans in that way and the work crew was staring. The old man’s warning reminded Sarah of the Ancient Mariner and she hurried back to the car.

  They drove on, passing Gottfried Furter’s house that had now completed its collapse. Near Vulcan Island they stopped at W.R. Carpenter’s slipway, where a ship, the Durour, was being repaired. As it happened, two young engineers from the Durour had brought a small launch up to the jetty and were about to venture out to take a closer look at Vulcan. As Sarah followed them, the jetty began to shake so violently that she turned and started to run back to land, but her husband said, ‘Come on, it’s all right.’

  Reluctantly, unsteadily, she walked back to the launch and off they slowly motored. A native canoe with eight laughing men and women passed them, heading to exposed coral reefs to collect stranded fish. She could see several people walking on the reefs, and then another canoe with four people crossed their path paddling towards the island.

  The exposed coral was rotting in the sun and the stench was dreadful. Sarah began to take photographs. There was no wind, but the water was rippling and waves ran in all directions. ‘Turn back,’ she said, and the driver slowly turned the boat around. They passed a rock Sarah had photographed minutes earlier, and she saw it was even higher out of the water. A new rock had emerged beside it.