A New Place

by Andrew Wareham

  “I’ll be glad to go back. Will you come, Ma, or would you prefer to stay back here?”

  They had never discussed exactly what was to happen after the war, preferring to take one step at a time. Jutta herself was not certain that she wished to go back, to live without the company of her Ned in the land where she had loved him.

  “Maybe, George. Perhaps I will do better in the plantations here. I have the garden and much to do in the house, and I can go into Cairns every week… I think I might do better here, George. We shall see. There is no need to decide yet. Perhaps I shall come up with you and see whether I still wish to live up on the Gazelle. It will not be the same…”

  “It will be your choice, Ma. Whichever you prefer, there will be the money to do what you want.”

  George was almost embarrassed by his last comment. The war had made him rich, he found. Ned had left a respectable fortune and George had almost by accident found himself using it to make money from the influx of American and federal Australian funding as the armies had flowed into Queensland. He had bought into new enterprises and factories supplying the quartermasters and armourers of all three services of both nations with the materials of war.

  The Hawkins plantations supplied sugar and distilled rum by the thousands of gallons and manufacturing plants in Cairns produced glycerine from copra brought in from the Islands. He had quarter and half interests in smelters working iron and steel and copper from the local mines, as well as shares in the far larger coal and iron mines further south. He had bought into transport as well, owning a fleet of heavy trucks working the roads from inland.

  Prices had risen under wartime demand and profits had come almost in unwelcome amounts – it was easy to feel like a profiteer. He had paid his taxes in full, which made him a rarity among the wealthy of Queensland but had also given him a paradoxically good name among them. He had been invited to contribute to the party and could expect to be looked after in the future, if he remained in Cairns. He had the opportunity in fact to enter state politics, and so enrich himself much further; if he refused that possibility and went back to Kokopo, he would still retain an amount of goodwill that would be of advantage to him in his future in the Territory.

  He had not expanded his business interests from any plan or desire to become rich – he had simply found that running a pair of sugar plantations, each of which had a competent manager in residence, had demanded too little of his time. He had seen the need first for an increased supply of rum for the enlarged Australian Navy and then for the army in the Territory; he had set up a distillery, more to fill the shortfall in supply than to take a profit, but had found himself building a substantial surplus of cash there and so had bought a couple of heavy trucks to supply reliable transport for his own products, which had led to accepting contracts with other suppliers who were desperate for road shippers… Once the haulage business was expanded and running and with its own manager in place, he had been asked to use his Territory experience in dealing with the copra that was being landed in greater quantities than before the war, due to the loss of the processing facilities in Lae and Rabaul. One step had followed the next with an inexorable logic; known to be a successful man of business, he had been begged to get involved in mining and metals, the need for which was massively greater, due to the war.

  He had been asked to sit on various committees concerned with organisation of the State’s administration to meet the needs of the war; he had used his common sense mostly, having discovered that most of the committee members had been appointed for having the ‘right’ family and no other talents at all. He had gained a reputation for being ‘a keen and perceptive industrialist’; he had been entertained but thought it was now time to get out and go back where he felt he belonged.

  “’In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king’, Mary. Trouble is, there’s always the chance of some bugger with two eyes coming along. Best we should quietly steal away from Queensland and go back home, which will no longer exist and will have to be made from scratch in all likelihood. I’ll be comfortable there. Ned is old enough to be safe from the illnesses there, pretty much. The little one will be right too, still at breast when we get home.”

  “The sooner the better, George. Will you sell everything down here?”

  “Some of it. Keep the plantations, for sure. We need some place to run to if it all goes bad up in the Territory; when it goes bad, I should say. Your father will know what is best to sell out of, what we should keep. Do you think he will want to go back to Rabaul?”

  She did not know; she would ask him.

  Mr Tse had no doubts, he told Mary; he wanted to return to Rabaul, to the town where he had been a major figure and which he wished to rebuild to provide a refuge for his extended family, some of whom would have undoubtedly survived the turmoil of the war.

  He explained all to Mary, to be passed on to George.

  “I have heard from my brother, who was located in Nanking but managed to flee just in time. Your brother, my son Joseph, did not escape, he believes. I had thought none of the family there would have survived, am glad he came away, and with his wife and children, he tells me. He has sent letters from Formosa, which is now called Taiwan, it seems. He will wish to come to Rabaul, I believe, and that can be arranged. It would be difficult to obtain entry to Queensland, but Rabaul will be an easier nut to crack.”

  Mary agreed with her father, knowing how he would proceed, and with some idea of just who he would bribe.

  “What of my other brothers, sir?”

  “The eldest, Li Peter, has survived the war and now has the rank of lieutenant-colonel. My brother tells me that Li Peter has made some ties with the Americans and expects to be protected in Taiwan, remaining probably in the forces of the Kuomintang as an officer known to Chiang Kai-Shek; he will become a general, of course, completely loyal to the Generalissimo as the Communists will have nothing other than a bullet for him. Paul remains in England for the while. What he will do is unknown to me; I suspect he will remain as a scientist in one of the universities. He has never told me what he is researching – he has sent letters twice yearly which have been remarkably unrevealing. Some sort of weaponry, I do not doubt; perhaps even this atom bomb. There will be a need for his skills for many years to come because it seems as likely as not that Russia and America will go to war with each other as soon as this current business is brought to a formal end. I hope one of the young men will set up with a family before too many years are passed – I need a successor. If they do not, of course, then your Ned will stand in my shoes one day.”

  Mary had not considered that possibility, was not entirely sure she approved. It might be better for Ned that he became wholly Digger rather than half-Chinese. She drove back to the plantation to confer with George on the possibility.

  “You’re right, Mary. If he became head of the Tse family, then he would have problems with the Administration – just another mixed-race, neither one thing nor the other. If he is simply Ned Hawkins, well, that’s what he is, another Digger. You know what Australians are like, love.”

  She did, still had to steel herself to the occasional slight in Cairns. There were clients in the hairdressers who did not approve of using hair dryers that had serviced a Chink before them and others who expected to stand in front of her in any queue in the stores in town. Not too many, it was not a daily occurrence, but it was to be expected always. Fortunately, the town was small; she was known to the police as the rich Mrs Hawkins and suffered no prejudice from them, the opposite in fact. Her car was given right of way by any policeman directing traffic and she could park where she wished. The Hotel was open to her while it might have looked askance at any other Chinese woman crossing its threshold, and the managers of the stores all knew her and welcomed her trade. She suspected that she might not have enjoyed life in Brisbane or any of the big cities where she would not be known.

  The war ended officially, and George made enquiries of the procedure for citizens of the
Territory wishing to return home. He was surprised to be informed that the garrison of Rabaul was showing no signs of surrender.

  Rabaul had been heavily fortified and had been used as headquarters for the Japanese in the whole of the South West Pacific. Intelligence suggested that the Japanese had dug in, carved out tunnels that could be deep defence points and that they had a mass of artillery and a number of armoured vehicles, mostly small tanks. They would have been a costly invasion and the reaction had been to bypass them. The rest of the Islands had been taken and Rabaul had been left in isolation, cut off and irrelevant but still powerful. The town and its surroundings had been bombed every day that the weather had permitted for the previous thirty months, but there were still many thousands of Japanese soldiers in occupation. The bombing and an eruption in ’44 had flattened the town, but the Japanese appeared to be underneath it and in shelters and tunnels all the way around the coast; they would still be hard to invade, and the Gazelle was fertile, could probably feed them for many years until the shortage of protein in the diet weakened them too much.

  Ned’s contacts in the army told him that there were unofficial talks in progress. Fred Higgins, still no more than a major-general in Intelligence, having offended too many more senior men by insisting on presenting them with reality rather than falling in with their illusions, had the inside information.

  “The Japs don’t want the disgrace of surrendering without a fight, George. Better to die than simply to give up. They’re being offered the chance to fight for us instead. Not the Australians or Poms but for the Dutch. The Dutch East Indies had a strong resistance during the war and they managed to liberate a fair amount of their own territory and don’t want the Dutch back. The Yanks and the Poms are fighting the resistance already and the Dutch are busy back home building an army to come out and take back their colony. The Japs can go as mercenaries, if they take the bait. No need to spend too much money on them – they’ve got rifles and ammunition and basic light weaponry of their own. The Yanks and the Poms want to go home, they’ve had a gutful of fighting in the East Indies, so it makes good sense to use a Jap army.”

  “Will it work, Fred?”

  “Who cares, George? It gets the Japs off our backs, and for free. That’s all we want.”

  “How soon?”

  “Days now, mate. The Japs will surrender, officially, and go off into prisoner-of-war camps, which will mostly be their own barracks. Feed ‘em up for a few months and then send ‘em away, a shipload at a time. A year or two and they’ll all be gone, no questions asked. For the while, some of them will work on labour gangs rebuilding Rabaul and some of the places on the Gazelle.”

  George said no more – he was within reason sure that he could organise a number of those labour gangs to his own convenience. They would need roads, for sure, and a few hundred Japs with shovels, all for free, would be useful. They could rebuild the wharf at Kokopo perhaps, and the Oil Products copra processing plant and some of the cocoa warehouses and fermenteries. All would be necessary to the creation from almost nothing of a working set of plantations.

  “What about an airstrip, Fred?”

  “First priority, that will be, George. Don’t know where – probably a distance from the volcanoes. There’s a new one since last year’s eruption; they’re calling it Vulkan, it seems. The Administration will decide where to locate the strip.”

  “Directly under Matupit, bloody near a certainty, Fred. In the harbour, close to hand and just where the first eruption will close it.”

  Fred did not argue – he had experience with colonial bureaucrats.

  “Have you thought about going into politics, George? I could give you a few introductions at State and Federal level.”

  “Generous offer, Fred, but I’m rich enough already. Anyway, Queensland politics is too dirty for my taste, and I’ve got a Chinese wife – you think I want a part of the shit that would generate at every election?”

  “Fair point, George. One that I hadn’t considered. I should have. I know some of the coming young men in the Country Party, and most of them would have had no trouble working with Hitler. Better you keep your nose clean, like you say. I’d forgotten just how much money you’ve got – you can buy a politician or two if you need them, they come cheap enough. There’s a youngish bloke I’ll point in your direction, comes from the south-west of the state; Danish New Zealander originally. Put a few thousand in his pocket every year and he’ll remember to stay bought. Jo’s fairly bright and knows how to work and he’ll carve his way to the top while he’s still young – he ain’t much older than you. He’ll make sure the road to your plantations is kept up and that you can pick up the labour you need, even if he does no more.”

  “Could be useful, Fred. How much, do you reckon?”

  “Couple of thousand cash each year in a brown envelope and five thou’ to the campaign funds when there’s an election. If you ever want something big, talk with him and arrange a deal for it.”

  “No problems, Fred. How do I get the cash to him?”

  “One of the party workers will see you and make the arrangements, George. No problems there.”

  “What about you, Fred? What are you doing after this lot? Staying in the army, I suppose?”

  Fred shook his head.

  “No point to that, George. I could try but the odds are that I would be surplus to requirement inside a year; trodden on too many toes. No, mate! I shall take me pension in the rank and then organise a land grant up in the Territory – there will be chances for veterans to start up plantations of their own, or so it’s planned at the moment. If there are plantations without surviving owners, then I can reckon to walk into one. If there ain’t, then I can organise a loan or two on good terms from the Federal government and start up for meself. Advantage of being in Intelligence for a good few years, George. I know where half the bodies are buried in Canberra, and bloody near all of them in Brisbane. No problems in getting good treatment in my honourable retirement, George.”

  “No risk they’ll send a couple of hoons up your way, Fred?”

  “Too big a chance for them to take. They won’t kill me for fear I might have documents in the hands of lawyers in London.”

  “Fair enough, mate. If you end up on the Gazelle, you know whose door to knock on.”

  “No worries, George. You’ll be right as well. Your missus’ old man made sure that all of the papers were filed in all the right places after Ned died. While you were up the Kokoda Trail he organised probate on all four of your plantations and on all of Ned’s other assets. You’ve got solid legal title to everything. You can walk back in with no arguments that you’re occupying Crown Land.”

  “Good man, Mr Tse.”

  “One of the best. He put us in touch with people in China, helped us to set up an organisation there so that we know just about everything that’s going on in the Kuomintang. Did himself no harm and us a hell of a lot of good. The Administration will be given the proper word when they get set up again.”

  “You know there’s no Chinese left in Rabaul, Fred? Every last one was butchered in the days after the invasion of Rabaul. Some of them, and I don’t know how many, had got across to Port Moresby, and they will be the obvious heirs to their places in Rabaul. For the rest, there may be, probably must be, relatives in Singapore and Hong Kong and in mainland China who will have a claim – provided the land ain’t expropriated first. You know what the Administration is like – if they see a chance to steal from the Chinks, they’ll take it.”

  Fred shook his head.

  “Not much I can do there, George. I’ll pass the word, but who’s going to listen? The newspapers don’t give a toss for Chinks – they’re all into the Yellow Peril and will support keeping them from going back. Federal politicians? No votes in giving the Chinese back what’s theirs already. Business? Steamies and BPs and Carpenters are more likely to pick out the best bits themselves than complain that they should be given back to their rightful owners. The Admi
nistration won’t worry – they’ll all be new to the Territory and will be young blokes with empty pockets and a fortune to make; they ain’t going to be giving rich waterfront land back to Chinese who can’t pay their way.”

  George shrugged; it was much as he had expected. If any of the Chinese in Port Moresby had kept their money, or profited more from the war, then they could buy themselves a public servant or two and make their way back to their own property. Any others could whistle – they were not getting the land their families had paid for and developed over half a century.

  “Nothing I can do about it, Fred. I shout me mouth off too much and I’ll be in the Administration’s black books. Can’t afford that, not if I’m going to live up on the Gazelle. Have you heard any word of changes in how the Territory’s to be run?”

  “Not yet, George. There’s a rumour that this new United Nations that the Yanks have invented is going to be interested in colonies. Just a way for the Americans to do down the Poms, or so it’s reckoned generally. The British Empire ain’t going to last now, that’s obvious to every bugger except the Poms. They couldn’t defend it, so they ain’t going to keep it. It’s an American Empire now, provided the Russians don’t take over. India is going independent within a very few years – their army’s too big to argue with. The Poms needed Indian soldiers during the war; now they’ve got to live with the forces they created. There’s a Labour government in England and they ain’t going to fight India to keep it in the Empire. Once India goes, every other colony will want their turn; bound to happen, George.”

  “Yeah, but how does that effect the Territory?”

  Fred shook his head, uncertain for once.

  “Papua is a colony of a colony, being pretty much the creation of Queensland and New South Wales. The New Guinea side is a League of Nations Mandated Trust Territory, taken from Germany and handed over to the Poms after the First War. The League of Nations don’t exist any more and the United Nations might claim to be its successor; maybe. What it comes down to is a cock-up, George. I reckon Australia will end up in charge of both parts and will try to treat them as one for government. But this United Nations, if it comes to anything, will claim the right to poke its nose in. Maybe.”