Coasts of Cape York

by Christopher Cummings

  “Mr Jemmerling, did you choose the name?” he asked.

  Mr Jemmerling shook his head. “No. But I think it suits her, don’t you?”

  Willy did. “It’s a great name.”

  “I gather that all the aircraft in the flight had names starting with ‘P’,” Mr Jemmerling explained, “Pterodactyl, Peregrine, Predator, Panther and so on.”

  Willy now noted that the Pterodactyl had the registration letters VH- PTY on the fuselage, plus the World War 2 RAAF roundels used in the Pacific: a blue ring with a white centre, the red dot having been painted out to remove any possibility of confusion in the heat of combat. He had read that in the early stages of the war with Japan there had been a number of tragic mistakes when pilots or anti aircraft gunners had seen the red and fired, thinking it was the red roundel of the Japanese.

  Willy took a photo, then walked forward to rejoin the others who were being introduced to the pilot and co-pilot. The pilot was an elderly man with white hair and a straggly moustache. His name was Mr Johnson. The co-pilot was a young man in his twenties with dark hair and a ready grin. He was called ‘Hec’ but Willy did not catch the rest of his name.

  From the short discussion that followed Willy understood that the members of the crew were permanent employees of Mr Jemmerling and that they usually worked at his museum and airfield in New South Wales. Hec was gaining experience on the ‘Catalina’ and was keen to qualify on all the old ‘Warbird’ types.

  The bags were loaded in and then they climbed aboard and were shown to their seats. As he climbed aboard Willy experienced a small thrill and imagined himself back in the war, about to take off on a desperate mission. Having toured the plane he was familiar with the interior layout. A short corridor led off on his left to the steps leading up to the flight deck. On the left of the corridor were a galley and a toilet. Directly opposite was a saloon with a table and bench seats. Aft, on the right, were two small cabins with bunks. These were built around the machinery for operating the retractable undercarriage. Both cabins had large square windows. Beyond that a ladder led up to the wing. A tunnel in the upright part of the fuselage which connected with the wing had small windows on either side and there appeared to be a small hatch in the upper surface of the wing. That intrigued Willy and he determined to ask about it at the first convenient opportunity.

  Behind the sleeping cabins was a larger cabin with two rows of seats, eight in all. Each had a porthole next to it. Behind that the fuselage stepped up to the aft section where there were rectangular hatches in lieu of Perspex blisters. This time Willy made sure he was seated on the port side. ‘The sun will be shining on what I am looking at,’ he thought, having been on the starboard side on the previous ‘Catalina’ flight.

  Marjorie seated herself across the aisle from him and Stick behind her, next to Andrew. Mr Beck was invited to sit up on the flight deck with Mr Jemmerling. Willy’s parents sat in front of him and Mr Hobbs and Norman sat at the rear. Harvey acted as loadmaster and went along checking they had their seatbelts done up. He then gave them a safety brief, making each one put on their lifejacket and then re-stow it. He also showed them how to open the rear hatches and where the inflatable life rafts were stowed.

  Once that was done he went forward to the flight deck, then climbed out to remove the wheel chocks and to check that the motors were running properly. As the motors kicked into life Willy experienced another spurt of excitement. Once the motors were going and after the usual pre-flight checks (Willy could see the flaps and ailerons being moved) Harvey climbed back aboard and closed the door. He then went forward into the saloon.

  The ‘Catalina’ began to move. Through his porthole (which he wished was much larger) Willy could see the undercarriage legs and wheels. It fascinated him to watch the tyres bulge on the bumps and how the undercarriage legs moved up and down as the plane rolled across minor irregularities in the bitumen. These movements became even more pronounced as the aircraft began its take-off run. There was the usual bouncing and swaying and attendant anxiety as they roared along the strip. Then they ‘rotated’ and suddenly lifted off.

  As the ground dropped away below him Willy watched with interest as the undercarriage was retracted out of sight into the wheel wells on the side of the fuselage. It confirmed him in his opinion that amphibians were just the most useful type of aircraft, even though his rational mind told him they paid a penalty in terms of fuel and payload because of the weight of the extra machinery.

  It was a beautiful clear morning, as it usually is around Mareeba, except in the ‘wet’. The ‘Catalina’ climbed away to the east, then banked to the left., Willy now took out his Air Navigation Chart and folded it to the correct area before looking out again. He was able to see the town of Mareeba off to the left and then got an excellent view of the Kennedy Highway and Aunty Isabel’s farm. He pointed this out to his mother and said, “I hope she’s watching.”

  “She is. I can see her,” Willy’s mother replied. Willy looked more carefully and just made out a tiny figure standing beside the farm house. Even from a couple of thousand feet he saw her arms waving. He lifted his hand to wave back, then felt silly. ‘She won’t see my hand from that distance,’ he thought.

  The farm slid away underneath. The ‘Catalina’ flew across a range of hills covered with savannah woodland. The railway from Cairns to Mareeba was easy to detect. So was the Barron River. The aircraft’s course then took them north east across forested hills and areas of plantation pine trees. The bulk of a large, conical mountain covered with jungle slid by on the port side. Willy decided that it must be Black Mountain. ‘Also called Mt Harris,’ he noted. He looked at the massive bulk of it and shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t like to be flying this close to it if there was any cloud,’ he thought. Then he remembered the rumour of a plane crash on it back in World War 2. ‘I wonder if that story is true?’ he thought. After his recent experience near Castor he wasn’t keen to go looking in the jungle.

  The ‘Catalina’ came out over the Coral Sea just south of the town of Port Douglas. Before take-off it had been explained that they would only fly at a couple of thousand feet, accepting the turbulence as part of the price to be paid for a better view. This early in the day there was virtually no air movement so the flight was nice and smooth.

  Willy now tracked their route on his chart, naming places as they went. The mouth of the Daintree River was very obvious and he was able to look back along its winding course to locate the small town of that name. Then huge jungle-covered mountains reared up to port. The massive bulk of Thorntons Peak was easy to identify and just looking at it made Willy shudder. On the south side of the mountain was the wreck of an aircraft, the result of a tragic crash years before. Even though he knew roughly where to look he was unable to detect any sign of it.

  ‘This is a dangerous part of the world to fly in,’ he thought. ‘Or at least in bad weather.’ That crash had been in daylight but with thick clouds. ‘When I am a pilot I will be very careful,’ he told himself.

  More mountains slid by, then the very prominent Cape Tribulation. Willy undid his seat belt and leaned over Marjorie to see if he could spot the reef on which Captain Cook’s ship HMS Endeavour had nearly come to grief in 1770 but he was unsure which of the isolated reefs that he could see was the one. Out to starboard the Great Barrier Reef was now clearly visible. Beyond the reefs was the dark blue of the ocean, marking the deep water beyond the Australian continental shelf. Willy found it fascinating to actually see the things he learned about in Geography at school.

  He now ticked off the recognizable features as they slid by: Bloomfield River, Cedar Bay, Weary Bay, the Endeavour River and town of Cooktown. ‘Traveling at nearly 300kph certainly makes the landscape slide by quickly,’ he mused.

  The ‘Catalina’ turned slightly to starboard and the rugged shape of Cape Bedford slid by. Next came the seemingly endless white beach and sand dunes leading up to Cape Flattery. Willy knew they were almost pure silica sands and rememb
ered Capt Conkey saying that many were hundreds of metres high. He also noted that the Geography teacher had been right about another thing: the dunes that were not fully stabilized by vegetation had ‘blow outs’ with main central part of the dune moving ahead of the ends. ‘Crescent dunes in deserts, barchans I think Capt Conkey called them, are the opposite, the ends leading as they blow downwind,’ he thought.

  The ‘Catalina’ banked to the left around the rugged shape of Cape Flattery and then tracked north past a whole series of rocky capes and sandy beaches. As they did Willy saw his Geography assignment appear in real life: a rocky cape, then a swampy creek mouth, then a sandy beach. The mouths of any creeks further north all ended in a sharp curve to the left with a sand spit on their southern, seaward side. ‘How interesting!’ he thought, his camera clicking frequently.

  The whole time they flew over numerous detached reefs and small islands, some rocky and others flat and covered with scrub. The outer edge of the main Barrier Reef was also a constant sight to the east. As they passed Barrow Point Willy felt himself becoming tense. ‘Cape Melville and Bathurst Bay are next. That is where out ‘Kittyhawk’ is. I hope no-one lets slip any clue.’

  As they rounded Cape Melville in a sharp turn to the west another worrying thought came to Willy: what if the wreck of the ‘Kittyhawk’ was visible from the air? ‘The wind might have blown the sand off it,’ he thought.

  To his relief the ‘Catalina’ did not follow the curve of the bay but cut straight across. Willy took a couple of photos and stared very hard at the area where he thought the wreck lay hidden but the distance and vegetation revealed no sign of it. His father pointed down and said, “That is Bathurst Bay. Did you know it is the site of the worst cyclone disaster in Australian history?”

  “No. What happened?” Willy dutifully asked.

  “Back in 1899 or thereabouts, a fleet of pearling luggers and schooners; more than a hundred vessels in all, took shelter there. This was before the days of radios of course so they had no warning that a very severe cyclone was heading for them. Most cyclones hit the Queensland coast much further south. It is rare for them to come in north of Cooktown, but this one did and it swept into the bay, driving the ships ashore and killing about 300 people,” his father replied.

  Even though he had been born and bred in North Queensland Willy had never experienced a real cyclone, only been on the fringes of them. The worst one had been the previous January when a particularly powerful cyclone had moved south past Cairns to make landfall south of Townsville. Looking down at the shallow bay he tried to imagine what it might have been like but could not really picture it. “Did any of them survive?” he asked.

  “A few,” his father answered. “I think about five ships. Some of the crews of schooners driven ashore made it to the beach, but most were drowned in the surf.”

  Andrew, who had been silent during this, now said, “The reports said there was a storm surge. A mounted policeman and his black troopers were camped half a mile, that’s about eight hundred metres, inland. He wrote that the surge was at least forty feet; about fifteen metres, high. That means that survivors of the shipwrecks would have had to contend with ten metre waves moving at fifty or sixty kilometres per hour in among the trees and bush. It was the highest storm surge ever recorded in Australia and washed up to five kilometres inland in places.”

  Marjorie was horrified. “That’s awful! You couldn’t swim in that,” she said.

  “No, you couldn’t,” Andrew replied.

  Willy noted the grim look on Andrew’s face and the almost haunted look in his eyes and then remembered that Andrew and Carmen had been caught in the cyclone the previous year. “Is that what happened to you at that Cape Bowling Ball last January?” he asked.

  “Cape Bowling Green,” Andrew corrected. “Yes it was. We had to tie ourselves to the tops of trees. The surge went right over the cape and even carried a fishing trawler across and into the mangrove swamps,” he said. He then explained how, in the age of the radio, satellite cameras and mobile phones, they had come to be caught in the storm.

  Stick, who had been listening, then asked, “Is that the same cyclone that Kirk and his mates got caught in when they were looking for that lost gold mine in the Mulgrave Valley?”

  “Yes it was,” Andrew agreed.

  “I hope I never have to go through a cyclone,” Willy said.

  Andrew gave a short laugh and nodded. “I don’t ever want to be in another either,” he agreed.

  Willy’s mother now interrupted by asking, “Willy, what are those islands down there?”

  Willy looked out, then quickly checked his chart. A group of five large, rocky islands was almost below them. “They are Flinders Croup,” he answered. “The big one in the middle is Flinders Island. The teardrop shaped one on its left is Denham Island and the long skinny one is Blackwood Island.”

  “Flinders? Did he come here too?” Stick queried.

  Marjorie cried out, then said, “Oh brother! You should pay more attention in school. Even I know that one. Flinders sailed right around Australia. He circumcised it.”

  Willy’s father stifled a guffaw and said, “The word is circumnavigated.”

  There was an embarrassed silence. Willy saw Marjorie go bright red and knew it was because his parents were there. Their eyes met and she had to stifle a giggle.

  Stick then asked, “But isn’t Flinders Island down in Bass Strait?”

  Andrew answered him, “Yes. There is more than one.”

  Willy pointed out to port. “That great big curve in the coast is Princess Charlotte Bay,” he explained. He was now aware that the ‘Catalina’ had turned to starboard and was not following the coast but instead cutting North West across the chord of the semi-circular bay. ‘We are following almost the same track as when we rescued Jacob van der Heyden,’ he thought. That got him both excited and anxious. Irrational fears that he was about to re-live that horrible incident mingled with ghastly memories of the mangled corpse they had retrieved.

  Willy tried to stay calm but a ghoulish fascination seemed to take hold and he found he had to continually check their position. To do this he had to leave his seat to lean over and look past Marjorie to see the reefs to starboard. He identified Corbett Reef and then Grub Reef. ‘Won’t be long now,’ he thought.

  Willy’s mother noticed his behaviour and asked, “Is everything alright Willy?”

  “Yes Mum. It’s just that…just that this is where I saw that man in the sea.”

  His mother nodded and his father turned and met his eyes and said, “That was very well done Willy.”

  “Very scary,” Stick added. “Particularly that take-off in the big waves.”

  “It was all horrible,” Marjorie said.

  Willy could only nod and resume his seat as the western end of Hedge Reef slid into view. ‘Down there,’ he thought. ‘That is where we landed and then had to cruise up and down waiting for the tide and wind. It looks much calmer today.’ In spite of himself he strained his eyes to see if he could spot anyone in the water.

  Andrew stared down as well, then asked, “What happened to the young bloke you rescued, do you know?”

  “Jacob van der Heyden? No idea. Went back to Sydney I suppose,” Willy replied.

  “They never did find the blokes who murdered his mate did they?” Stick asked.

  “No.”

  “What was he looking for?” Andrew asked.

  Willy shook his head. “No idea.”

  “Treasure, I’ll bet,” Stick suggested

  “Oh treasure! Baloney!” Norman called from the back.

  But the word lingered in Willy’s mind as they flew on over the rescue area. ‘Was it treasure?’ he wondered.

  CHAPTER 17

  TO THE POINTY BIT

  Willy’s interest now focused on the coastline to his left. While the aircraft had been cutting diagonally across Princess Charlotte Bay the coastline had at first been so far away as to be just a vague line, half lost in t
he haze. Now, as they drew slowly closer, the details began to emerge and Willy was able to identify places and name them.

  ‘We are approaching the place where the ‘Beaufighter’ wreck is located,’ he thought. He took out his pencil and placed the point of it on the chart at the location of the wreck, then looked out to check their exact location. ‘Down there somewhere,’ he thought, staring hard at the bush and scrub in from a long, sandy beach.

  A movement beside Willy made him look up. Standing in the aisle and leaning over him to look through the porthole was Hobbs- Mr Jemmerling’s Man. “Where are we?” he asked.

  Willy felt an instant surge of anxiety mixed with suspicion. ‘Did he wait until now and then sneak over to see where I was looking?’ he wondered. For a second or so Willy flustered inside, his mind churning with options. Then he quickly but ‘casually’ moved the pencil point and placed it on the nearest major coastal feature that he could identify. “There,” he said.

  “Thanks,” Mr Hobbs replied, leaning across to look through the porthole after glancing at the chart. He then said, “I just came to ask if you’d like some afternoon tea?”

  Even though he really would have liked some Willy shook his head. “No thanks.”

  “If you change your mind there are refreshments in the saloon,” Mr Hobbs replied.

  To Willy’s relief Mr Hobbs moved along to speak to Andrew. ‘Creepy sod!’ Willy thought. Then he leaned across to stare out of the porthole again. He was sure he was looking at the right stretch of coast but could see no sign of any aircraft wreck. ‘This one is in among the beach dunes,’ he told himself. After looking around to check that Mr Hobbs had moved away and was not looking he lifted his camera and took two photos.