Fishing for Stars

by Bryce Courtenay

  The likes of Joseph Abraham Minusi and most of the earlier island politicians who tried to work for the benefit of their own people are all but gone. Joseph, for instance, died on a civil service salary at the age of forty of a stroke, some claimed brought on by overwork and disillusionment.

  Perhaps I am becoming reactionary in my old age, but Joe and I were so very keen on independence. In our opinion, with a few honourable exceptions, the islands were full of jumped-up white men earning too much and doing too little for it while they looked down their noses at the indigenous people, who we honestly believed deserved better and would do better on their own for their own people. Nobody has a monopoly on brains and Uncle Joe Scholarships were meant to create a lively and intelligent population. Nobody worked harder than Joe to bring it about. A black bloke born in the South, he knew what it was like to be regarded as inferior. If they ever make a model of a good man, they are going to use Joe as the template.

  However, at dinner recently Joe lamented, ‘Nick, if yoh converted all da aid and da handouts into cash and loaded it onto one dem landing craft we bought for salvage and left it on da beach, any beach, on any island state, in twelve months all dat money gonna be in da hands of da same folk. Ain’t gonna be no paint foh schools, money foh books, food foh kids, med-dee-sin in da clinics, running water in da village, no pay foh nurses, teachers, doctors.’ He sighed a special heavy Joe sigh. ‘I ain’t got no patience lef’ for da muth’fuckers running da islands. Saffron, she gonna go live in Australia, ain’t no use her stayin’ in New Guinea no more. It fucked, man! Da rascals, dey running da streets and da politicians, dey got dere hand in ever’ pocket. She cain’t make no diff-fer-rence, like she brought up to do. Me, I gotta stay, I’m Uncle Joe. I cain’t walk away from mah people. I gonna cry just thinkin’ ’bout mah poor kanaka people, man!’

  Right from the very beginning Anna had seen little or no value in starting a business in the islands. She had a number of sound reasons for this decision, the foremost being that she didn’t want a partnership with me, or the three of us. She also claimed that unless the business was self-contained and earned most of its income on the islands, such as our shipping line and the building and employment company she’d enabled us to create, a venture manufacturing for export simply wouldn’t work. The reasons she gave for this were that labour was unskilled, the infrastructure inadequate, the shipping unreliable and the position of any of the islands too remote. While she’d toyed with the idea of mineral exploitation in New Guinea, the big Australian companies such as BHP were already there and she couldn’t hope to compete, although, I would eventually discover, she held a large bundle of shares in Bougainville Copper Limited, for many years the world’s richest gold and copper mines.

  But all this changed in 1975 when Anna finally persuaded Gojo Mura to move from Japan to the New Hebrides. The little artist had kept faith with Fuchida-san and painted the two hundred and thirty-seven specimens for the yakuza boss’s Butterflies of Japan, a major entomological study that brought the oyabun a great deal of credit among butterfly collectors throughout the world, as well as legitimate status among the Japanese scientific community and finally a major natural-science award from the Japanese government.

  Anna visited Japan at least twice every year on business and after a couple of visits managed to persuade Gojo to visit the island, where he stayed with me for a month at Beautiful Bay, spending each day collecting and painting insect specimens.

  Despite being employed as Fuchida-san’s resident artist, Gojo Mura had never settled down in his own country. The many years as a ghost had left an indelible mark on him and he continued to feel alienated and a stranger in his own country. The initial visit became an annual event, and when he’d completed painting Fuchida-san’s Japanese butterflies Anna persuaded him to move permanently to the island by creating a small silk-screen business producing sarongs, T-shirts and silk scarfs for the tourists beginning to come to Port Vila in increasing numbers.

  Gojo’s beautiful butterfly designs were an instant success and Anna, never able to leave a good thing alone, initially took a dozen hand-painted butterfly scarves to her designer boutiques in the Ala Moana Mall in Honolulu, where she priced them as couture items under the fashion label Gojo. They sold out almost instantly. She then bought from Germany the machinery to set up a small textile plant to create butterfly prints on silk which were sent to a designer house in Paris to be made up into evening gowns and as the lining of couture garments. These were sold in her Honolulu outlets, initially to wealthy American and Japanese tourists. By limiting distribution to Honolulu and Paris the Gojo label soon acquired a reputation among high-fashion cognoscenti.

  It was a lucrative hobby for Anna and gave Gojo an income way beyond anything he could hope to spend with his modest lifestyle, even after maintaining his ageing parents in Japan, and he used it to establish a college for the arts that would ultimately attract students from throughout the Pacific. Gojo eventually built himself a small but beautiful home hacked out of the side of a cliff, not quite as austere as the one he’d occupied as a radio operator at Guadalcanal, but a place that brought him happiness and the peace and quiet he craved.

  For Anna’s fiftieth birthday he created a tropical butterfly design to which he added a single exquisite scorpion and then printed a special bolt of silk, sufficient to make her a pair of silk pyjamas and matching peignoir. When he presented this truly gorgeous sleepwear ensemble to her, he pointed to the tiny scorpion and said, ‘Anna-san, true beauty always contains an element of danger, and that is what men crave the most in a beautiful woman.’ This was delivered with a lovely innocence, and although he blushed as he made this observation, he spoke as an artist expounding on the meaning of art and beauty, without the slightest sexual connotation. Gojo had once confessed to me that while he worshipped the idea of feminine beauty he thought that the sexual act could only tarnish what was truly exquisite. I often wondered if he sensed that Anna’s beauty remained untarnished. He also confessed that he had never felt the slightest desire for intimacy with another human; Gojo, it seemed, was one of those rare humans with a profound admiration for beauty but with no sexual drive whatsoever.

  Anna was delighted with this beautiful gift, which, as it turned out, was to have surprising consequences. The morning after her birthday she came bouncing out of the bedroom onto the verandah at Beautiful Bay, resplendent in the long, flowing and absolutely gorgeous peacock-blue silk peignoir. ‘Nick, I’ve just had a great idea!’ she announced. ‘Boys’ pyjamas!’

  Looking up from the morning paper I remarked, ‘Well yes, boys have been known to wear pyjamas.’

  ‘No! You don’t see it, do you? Scorpions!’

  ‘No, I’m afraid I don’t. Scorpions? What about scorpions?’

  ‘Boys’ pyjamas featuring scorpions! Oh yes, and other nasty creepy-crawlies. Little boys love that kind of thing. We could have sheets and pillowslips. That’s it! We’re going into natural fibres.’

  ‘Cotton bedspreads?’ I said, adding my two bobs’ worth while gently sending her up.

  ‘Yes, yes, bedspreads as well!’ She danced around me excitedly looking very beautiful, the silk of Gojo’s butterfly and scorpion peignoir rustling provocatively as she moved. ‘I’ll order the machinery from Germany as soon as I get back to Melbourne,’ she said with the absolute certainty that was so typical of Anna.

  And that’s how the Kreepy Krawley Klothing Kompany came about. Anna seemed to reserve a special love for what came to be referred to as 4K, and she built a new factory for it on the island, thinking of it essentially as a hobby. But the project was most annoyingly a success from the outset. I say annoyingly because I had expected it to fail. ‘Mothers buy kids’ pyjamas and bed linen and they’re not going to cover little Johnny from head to toe in insects that sting, itch, bite and kill,’ I’d declared in an attempt to dampen her enthusiasm for what was patently a foolish idea, adding the immortal words she’d no doubt been hoping to hear, ‘Darli
ng, this time you’ve got it wrong. As Kevin would say, it’s a goddamn cockamamie idea.’

  But it wasn’t. It seemed that there was a readymade market for good-quality children’s cotton nightwear and bed linen. Cheap synthetics had come to dominate the market for kid’s sleepwear – hot and uncomfortable in summer and dangerous to wear near radiators and open fires in winter. Interesting designs in natural fibres that breathe were avidly sought out by well-to-do parents at the high end of the market. Little boys in every language pleaded and cajoled until their parents or indulgent grandparents bought them Kreepy Krawley pyjamas and bed linen. In an amazingly short time the 4K logo became the measure of success in international children’s marketing and was stocked by emporiums such as Macy’s in New York, Harrods in London, and Le Bon Marché in Paris.

  Poor little Gojo was constantly being forced to comb the jungle for more and more exotic insects. Anna immediately recognised that there was an equal demand for little girls’ sleepwear and she already had the artwork for hundreds of butterfly designs, to which, on each garment, she added a single bee and the BBBB logo was born, Beautiful Butterfly & Busy Bee. Using the same marketing template 4B soon captured the imaginations of privileged little girls everywhere.

  By the early eighties it became apparent that the island location presented production problems. While neither label was mass market, worldwide sales were nevertheless considerable and supplies couldn’t be reliably maintained with the current island infrastructure, freight shipping services and trained factory workers. Anna decided to keep her exclusive boutique silk design business, as well as the silk-screened local business in sarongs and T-shirts, on the island and to take the high volume 4K and 4B labels to Indonesia, where she proposed to build a state-of-the-art factory.

  This was how we indirectly became involved in Anna’s business affairs. Kevin, Joe and I, as well as owning the shipping line and a project management and personnel company, also owned Inter-Island Constructions Pty Ltd, the largest construction company in the islands. The two new companies were initially formed to build and run the harbour facilities and non-Japanese component of the processing factory as well as provide the staff for Konoe Akira’s zaibatsu and its Pacific fishing business. Once these were complete, we moved on to the various Japanese foreign aid projects. This, in turn, led to aid projects for other foreign countries who observed that no bribery or corruption was involved and that our projects were generally completed on time and on budget and that our management and personnel company, if required, could staff the facility and get it up and running ready to hand over to the local government. Now Anna wanted us to build her 4K and 4B factory in Indonesia and this was how I came to know about her property investments with Budi and Kleine Kiki.

  We also quickly came to learn that doing business in Indonesia isn’t for the faint-hearted, and but for Anna’s extraordinary sagacity, Inter-Island Constructions would certainly have been chewed up and spat out without even a decent burp to follow.

  Anna flew from Melbourne to Beautiful Bay to brief the three of us – Kevin, who felt suitably martyred by being forced to fly from Brisbane; Joe from New Guinea; and of course me on the spot. Anna began with a simple statement. ‘Nothing happens in Suharto’s Indonesia without the military being involved.’

  ‘What? Dey got a war going on?’ Kevin asked querulously. ‘I want yer to know I ain’t no fuckin’ hero! Dey got a war, I ain’t goin’. No way, man, I done dat once already, already. Da last time I was in dat cockamamie country da Japs shot my sweet ass right outta da water, and Nick, he found me on dat lonely beach where I’m half dead and got me concussion. First I gotta fly to dis cockamamie island, now Anna she want to take me into a fuckin’ war zone! Me, I’m a family man, I got responsibility!’

  ‘Kevin, will you shut up!’ I demanded. ‘I should have left you on that beach. Just shut your trap and listen to Anna.’ With Kevin present the meeting was getting off to the usual disastrous start.

  ‘Yeah, well I ain’t goin’ if dere’s a war,’ Kevin growled.

  Joe cackled, then rolled his eyes. ‘Anna, yo-all tell dat dumb-ass Irishman, he gonna use bad words dat ain’t respectful in front a lady he gonna have’ta deal with da big niggah, Joe “Hammer-man” Popkin. You tell him dat it don’t matter none dat I love him like a brudder, ’cos I gonna have no he-see-ta-shun to crush him like a bug.’

  Anna laughed. ‘How do you three ever get any business done?’ she asked.

  ‘By keeping Kevin in Brisbane, where he’s very good at making money and finding international freight business,’ I replied.

  ‘Yeah, man. Dat foh sure,’ Joe added.

  ‘Lemme tell ya somethin’ fer nuttin’. If it was left to dem two muthers, we’d be broke a hunnerd times already!’ Kevin retaliated, reminding us all of his business acumen, which, as I said before, was considerable. He was a natural trader and, if not quite in Anna’s league, his efforts had ensured that by the early eighties we were all extremely well-off.

  ‘Well you’ll be happy to know there isn’t a war at present in Indonesia,’ Anna told us. ‘Business is booming. The generals who helped Suharto come to power are now in charge of everything except for what the Suharto family have kept for themselves. They are setting new standards in venality. The best way to work in Indonesia is to realise that this is a feudal system. From the lowest bureaucrat, traffic cop and railway clerk to the very top, everyone is corrupt and that makes it a highly predictable business environment.’

  ‘So, how will we build a factory in a corrupt environment we don’t understand?’ I asked. ‘It can be difficult even here on the islands where we know the ropes.’

  ‘We know the ropes,’ Anna replied simply, adding, ‘I’ll guarantee any overrun on your building costs and will personally do the necessary negotiations with my Indonesian business partner.’

  With these assurances, Kevin agreed to contract to build the factory, although we were surprised when Anna briefed us on the size she required. While it wasn’t my part to question this in the meeting with my two partners present, it seemed to be far too big for Anna’s 4K and 4B manufacturing requirements, even if the venture were to prove very successful.

  That evening in bed she explained the full extent of her interest in Indonesia to me for the first time and the fact that Budi was her gatekeeper and would have fifty per cent of the business.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said, ‘why would you give away fifty per cent when you could locate your factory almost anywhere and own the lot?’

  ‘Skilled labour is intelligent, cheap and plentiful in Indonesia,’ Anna replied.

  I remained sceptical. ‘That would be equally true of Fiji, Malaysia, Singapore or the Philippines, surely?’

  Anna laughed. ‘I thought we never discussed my business, Nick?’

  ‘Well mostly because we can’t. In the first place, I simply never know what your business is. You’ve just explained that you own half of Indonesian Kansas Fried Chicken and have a very significant property portfolio in Indonesia and I had no idea. But with this kids’ pyjamas affair I’ve seen it grow from the outset with Gojo and I suppose I’m interested. Besides, we’re building the factory and while it wasn’t my place to say so in the meeting today, it seems inordinately large, even if you achieve enormous international success.’

  ‘Well, that would be true if we were building it only for the two children’s sleepwear brands, but we’re not.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Budi has negotiated a four-year contract to supply the Indonesian army and police force with uniforms, well over a million units a year. I supply the factory and the capital and we each take fifty per cent of the profits. I run the kids’ sleepwear business as an adjunct and take one hundred per cent of those profits.’

  ‘But the capital outlay must be enormous, the factory building, textile plant, raw material. How long will it take to recoup your money?’

  ‘Roughly four years.’

  ‘So what’s the point?�
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  ‘Well, the kids’ sleepwear production uses the same machinery and labour, and the cotton is all part of a bulk order for materials needed for uniforms and in effect is paid for by the discount margins we receive from suppliers. It won’t cost me a cent to run 4K and 4B, other than shipping costs. I can produce high-quality natural fibre children’s sleepwear and bedroom linen, add a high margin of profit and still sell for less than any competitor who is likely to challenge me in the world market.’

  ‘But what if your army and police uniform contract isn’t renewed after four years?’

  Anna laughed. ‘Silly, that’s why we’re doing business in Indonesia. While Budi only holds a licence to supply the uniforms for the next four years, he also holds, in perpetuity, the exclusive permits required to import textile machinery into the country, a wedding gift from Suharto when Budi married the president’s cousin. At present the uniforms are made in five separate factories and no factory other than our own will be big enough to tender for future contracts. And if any of them plan to expand, they can’t import the machinery needed to be competitive. In four years’ time we’ll be in the black, and the army and the police force are not going to get any smaller . . .’

  I had always regarded Indonesia as an unstable business environment but Anna seemed to have anticipated everything. She never failed to surprise me. ‘So you’re in retailing and manufacturing, army uniforms and food. I guess they’re pretty safe long-term bets, but surely you wouldn’t want to do much more in Indonesia?’ I asked.