GORDON

‘You get paid a quid a year for it,’ Johno laughs, handing me a mug of tea. ‘Don’t be shy.’

‘I’m not being shy,’ I tell him. He’s trying to talk me into joining the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles, the militia up here, while we’re having a billy, hanging about camp waiting for our hoisting engine to arrive for the rig. But it’s a difficult issue for me. I wasn’t even allowed to join cadets at school.

‘There something wrong with you?’ Johno’s not shy about much at all. And he’s not knocking me either. He’s genuinely interested. He’s a good bloke. I like him a lot.

So I’m straight with him. ‘No, there’s nothing wrong. It’s that my father wouldn’t be happy if I did any sort of military service.’

‘Oh, righto. Fair enough,’ Johno nods, pouring himself a brew, ‘and that’s your business, too. But you do realise you’re going to have to do some kind of service, get ticked off the list, don’t you? Unmarried and twenty-one, you’re expected to get the national service training at least. They’ll catch up with you and you’ll be shanghaied back to Townsville or Darwin to do it. It’s not like you’re in a protected occupation here.’

‘Aren’t I?’ I nearly drop my mug. I’d assumed this sort of exploration work would be considered essential industry – because it is. I say: ‘Bull.’

‘No, mate, no bull,’ Johno laughs again. ‘But if you join up here with us, then you can tick off your obligation – and have some fun at the same time. It’s only target practice out on the rifle range and a few marches now and again. Nothing too cracked. I enjoy it.’

I know he does. When he’s in town, first thing he does after drinking is get back out bush again. He goes out with his militia mates, hunting feral pigs with this bloke called Sven, a Norwegian giant who only ever wears a shirt on NGVF parade or when dancing at the club, and is otherwise a metallurgical chemist. Cracked. The Territories attract some interesting people, and I know I would have a great time with that mob doing just about anything. Except military training.

‘Anyway.’ Johno screws up his nose, the way he does whenever he’s got bad news for you, like the native labourers aren’t turning up for work because they’ve gone fishing, or the hoisting engine for our rig is going to remain on the docks indefinitely because the local witch doctor is blessing it. But he says now: ‘I reckon it would be a good idea to make yourself handy with a rifle.’

‘I am handy with a rifle,’ I tell him, a bit browned at the suggestion I might not know how to look after myself. Dad gave me my own .22 when I was ten, and taught me to get a rabbit for myself, for necessity. I can hit dinner between the eyes at fifty yards. ‘But why should it matter out here?’ I ask Johno. You don’t need to shoot anything to eat well in this country: food really does just fall off the trees.

Johno gives me that look, the emu blink that says, Shit, you are a kid, before he says: ‘There’s a war on, you dozy bastard. Don’t expect the blackfellas to fight off the Krauts for us if they decide they want their colony back. They don’t owe us anything, Brockie.’

‘It’s true.’ Rico, our carpenter, joins us, rolling a smoke. Rico Micallef: he’s from Melbourne, via Malta, and he’s been taking contracts in New Guinea for even longer than Johno. He says: ‘People here have long memories, and I don’t blame them. I was down in Kokopo when the RAAF planes came and dropped the bombs on those villages – the payback for them killing those copper prospectors. Remember that, Johno?’

‘Heard about it,’ Johno says.

And I say: ‘What bombs?’ They’re having me on. Not unknown for them to string me along with a tall one – man-eating pythons, giant face-sucking leeches, flying pigs, et cetera.

‘Bad business.’ Johno looks into his tea, not having me on. ‘These two idiots, poking about where they shouldn’t have been, going into a women’s hut, and then everyone’s shocked when they get speared. The RAAF rains jam-tin bombs down on the villages along the coast at Kokopo in response – the wrong villages too. It was pretty disgusting.’

‘Oh. Right.’ Christ.

‘Yeah oh right. So you see, Brockie, it wouldn’t take much for them to turn Nazi on us if the opportunity arose. You know, the Krauts treated them better than we do, the Lutherans getting their kids in school and that. We give them one school, three miles out of town at Nordup, and start interning the Lutheran missionaries. We give them bugger-all in return for all we take.’

I take a moment to consider our position a bit more carefully. My position specifically. I’m sitting on a log outside a tent, in a jungle, somewhere on the northwest tip of the Gazelle Peninsula in the middle of the Bismarck Sea, only twenty miles crow’s flight from Rabaul, but twenty thousand years from civilisation. In front of me sits our derrick, the eighty-five-foot mast of our rig that will hold the drill rods, which has been constructed with the assistance of native labour, when they could be bothered, or when they’ve run out of tobacco. We’re waiting for them now to haul two tons of hoisting engine along a track that’s as muddy as it is steep, through forest that dense it could close over again come the next shower. Why? So that we can make a small consortium of professional gamblers and petrol-station owners unbelievably rich.

At a rough estimate, on this island there are maybe fifty thousand blacks. Who would really know how many there were? There are not more than two thousand of us, in the town, including Chinese shopkeepers. But here, right here, there is me, Johno and Rico, and a boilermaker who, like the engine, hasn’t turned up yet.

I spill my tea as I realise: Bernie can’t come and live here. I don’t want her to. I can’t guarantee her safety. I won’t be able to look Mr Cooper in the eye and say she will be all right. Because I won’t be with her to protect her should we have a situation. Once we start drilling, I’ll be gone fairly solidly for six months, till we get down twenty-five hundred feet or so, into the basalt capping stone the Anglo-Eastern maps tell me we’ll find or till the rainy season bogs us, and after that, if the core samples are promising, I’m to keep on down to six thousand feet, before starting on another hole, and then another, and possibly another until a decision can be made on where to spud the wells. There’s my three years laid out. How am I going to tell her?

‘Didn’t mean to put the wind up you.’ Johno gives me a nudge, spilling my tea some more. ‘You can pay me back on the rifle range, ay? Since you’re so handy.’

‘Yeah,’ I say. I look at the back of my hand, brushing the drops of tea off my knee, and I’m not sure what sort of a shot I’d be if a situation happened right now. The knuckle is still that tender in a grip. I have enough trouble with a tennis racquet. So I stare at the fire, and put in a good effort at ignoring the idea that I might have made a bit of a mistake coming to New Britain.

I’m sure I hear a twig snap behind us. But as I go to look over my shoulder all I see is a wagtail hopping about on the ground near my bedourie. She’s just like the ones at home, only maybe a bit bigger.

‘Don’t worry, mate,’ Johno says. ‘Newton’s second law of thermodynamics is always there for us when no one else is.’

‘What?’ I don’t understand the joke.

‘The perpetual contest between chaos and equilibrium,’ he says, not joking. He tosses the dregs of his tea at the coals. ‘War and peace,’ he says. ‘There’s no escaping it. It’s only natural. Everything is, isn’t it, until we decide we don’t like it for some reason. We like beautiful volcanic islands until they explode, we like a nice fire until it burns the house down. We like German engineering until there’s a war. We like guns until we get shot. It’s only perception. Everything creates as much as it destroys – humans, volcanoes, trees, ants, bacteria. Everything.’

He points up at the sky. There’s a harpy eagle circling high above us. Then he thumbs over at the derrick: ‘We make a clearing in the forest here for the rig, destroy a whole heap of shit for it, but that makes a place for small birds and wallabies to forage, and it makes a place for that eagle to forage too. Who’s the bad guy there, mate? Everything’s a shitfight, if you think about it, right down to the atomic level. Everything’s good. And here’s as good as anywhere for a good old shitfight, isn’t it? Keep your eyes and your mind open, ay? You’ll be right.’

I’ll have something to wonder about for the next thousand years at least. This is why I like Johno. I think he’s probably a genius. I look over my shoulder again. The wagtail’s still there, hopping about, and as I look at her this time, I remember I saw one go a kookaburra over territory once, out at Blackie’s Camp. Fearless. She won, too.

Johno’s on his feet now. The sound of the natives’ singing is coming up the track, and I’m quick on my feet, too. A train of bamboo litters is arriving: they’ve got all our gear. When I see they’ve brought up the load of our rods as well, I can’t wait to get into the drilling. With any luck, we’re going to get the rig going this arvo. And Johno is right: it’s only perception, isn’t it. Suddenly, I wouldn’t be anywhere else.

‘Hard work starts for you now.’ Rico slaps me on the shoulder, then picks up his tool belt. He’s counting the days till the end of his contract, about nine hundred to go.

I’m not. I’m thinking: yes. Work starts now. After all these weeks of planning, my job is finally about to begin.

One of the natives waves at me from under the weight of the boiler, calling out: ‘Ello, boss.’ But I don’t know which one he is. They still all look the same to me, these ones that come up and work for us: fuzzy gold hair, white smiles, brown skin and red sarongs.

‘Who’s that one?’ I ask Johno.

‘To-An,’ he says. ‘And he doesn’t give a shit about Newton’s second law of thermodynamics. He goes to church on Sundays, like a good little black boy should.’

Johno starts jogging over to the rig, calling out something in their Kua-Nua language, and I’m stuck, as I always am, watching the way he is with them. He’s been working here a long time, I know, but I’ve never known anyone to give the respect he does to a black, talking to them in their language, not pidgin. He laughs as easily with them as he does with me or anyone. He’s laughing now, scaling up the derrick with one of them, easily as he can scale a palm trunk, racing one of them, making me wonder if he is one of them. He’s not. He can’t be. He has a degree. From Queensland Uni, too. I suppose he’s just an anomaly I’m lucky enough to have coincided with.

‘Brockie!’ He yells down to me now. ‘Stop your dozing, mate, and get up here, will you?’

Three weeks’ drilling and my shirts have got tight from lifting and bagging rock. I don’t doze. I am either at it or unconscious, triple-checking the core samples in my dreams. The blue and tan bands of the pyroclastic strata here, the ash and pumice, are consistently showing we’re drilling where we should be. I’m confident, I’m sure I am, so I decide to head back to Rabaul to report our progress, to get permission to continue with this hole.

I have to go out with a native guide to get through the rainforest, and Johno arranges for To-An to take me. If he turns up. And he does, after a three-hour wait. Nine o’clock he wanders over, and I recognise him now by the chip on one of his front teeth. I’ve also learned that anyone would have trouble distinguishing one native from the other round here because they’re all brothers and cousins from just two families, and there are three sets of twins among them. They’re all mostly called To-Something, too, and all call each other to-lai, which apparently means mate, and does nothing to assist in their easy identification either.

‘Ello, boss,’ To-An waves, always with that smile suggesting he thinks the title might be a bit of a joke applied to me.

‘Hello To-An.’ I’m already walking, heading down the top of the pass, which has become known as the Slippery Dip after the loss of one of the rods – It slippy-slippy, boss. It did: all ten yards of it disappeared off the mudslide into the forest below, never to be seen again, not by human eyes anyway.

He says beside me now: ‘Him rocks speak you good, ay?’ Apparently I also look funny when I’m inspecting the cores, as if I am talking to them.

‘Yes, the rocks speak very good, To-An,’ I tell him, and he laughs – at me.

It would be good to have the language to tell him it might be funny but it’s true. I’m am talking to them, in a way, at least trying to work out what they’re saying to me. But the language gulf is too wide for anything much but instructions.

That doesn’t stop To-An trying to chat. ‘Looky him, boss,’ he’s saying next.

I’d rather keep my eyes on my feet in this mud, on this gradient, but I look up to where he’s pointing, in case it’s Ooga Booga, the vampire spider, or one of those flying pigs. But it’s only a wagtail, hopping along a liana vine ahead.

‘Him belong you,’ To-An says, and he’s not laughing. ‘Him follow you. Him you clan.’

My turn to laugh at To-An: I suppose he’s telling me this bird is my totem or some superstitious bull or other. Him doesn’t follow us any further down the pass, and To-An stops the chat with me. His face is blank. I’ve probably upset him. Well done, Brockie.

After an hour or so the forest opens out a bit. The gradient declines, too, as the ground firms and the palms reach a height of a hundred feet or more. Incredible. Another world. The village we’re heading to, Kabakada, is to the east, but my compass tells me we’re going due west; I have no idea where I am. I might be a competitive hiker, but this is not the gum forest I know. It’s so thick with vegetation. Giant lilly pillies and beech are a canopy beneath the canopy of palms, and under them is another canopy, mainly of fat tree ferns. There’s no sense of the sun. The light is a green mist in every direction, all day, and I don’t relax until we sight the coast, where we start following the mangroves along the North Road, the only road, travelling east at last.

It’s almost three by the time we get to Kabakada, which is the village To-An and all the brothers and cousins come from. We’ve been walking nearly six hours. It only looks ten miles on the map, but I know we’ve walked at least twenty, and you just can’t get any pace on in this humidity. I’m very glad to see the Southern Star jeep waiting for me at the back of the grass huts and frangipanis of the village. There’s smoke coming up from the women’s huts, but there’s no one else around. Must have gone fishing, further up the beach. The keys are in the ignition of the jeep; no one to pinch it either. What would a To-Something do with a jeep anyway? He wouldn’t be able to go into Rabaul, not without a pass from a boss, or the native police would wallop him, literally and conscientiously. I start the engine and tell To-An: ‘See you tomorrow, at dawn, when the sun comes up, here in Kabakada.’ And he laughs: ‘Yeah, boss.’ If and when it suits him.

I put my foot down on the accelerator. From here the drive to Rabaul is only twenty minutes, but I think I’ll probably do it in ten, I am that keen to see civilisation again. As soon as I’m through Tunnel Hill and on the bitumen, catching sight of the whitewashed town and tramlines of Malaguna Road, all I want to do is have a bath. After I’ve called Bernie. It’s the twentieth of May today. I haven’t seen her face for nineteen weeks. Please don’t let the wireless be out. Don’t let the line be booked out either.

As I drive through town, I look out across Simpson Harbour at Blanche Bay, at the shape of the volcano. Mother Mountain and her North Daughter and South Daughter are asleep behind Mount Matupi – the one that’s always steaming and groaning, always threatening to show how alive a rock can be. I want to go up there, as close as I can to the lava, when I have the time. It’s only three miles away, but I can’t even say when I’ll be back in Rabaul again, let alone organise a hike. How am I going to tell Bernie that? That I’m not keen on her living in this town while I’m away, that we will probably only get three months together out of every year I’m here, at an optimum. I’m concerned she’ll get cold feet about the whole thing. Maybe I shouldn’t say anything yet, wait until after the wedding. I can’t do that, though. Can I?

I turn into Casuarina Avenue, past the Pacific Hotel, the rum palace that’s always full of sailors and dockers, and some very interesting people that probably had to disappear from normal society not exactly by choice. There’s a brothel behind it up the top of Chinatown, where you can get heroin and Christ knows what else. But then the she oaks of this wide avenue open out into a flower garden, and I can see Bernie here, picking orchids on her way to buying some pork roasted in sweet red sauce from Ah Ching’s on Solomon Street. I can see her with a frangipani behind her ear bargaining for fish and pineapples with the marys, the native women, at their market called the Bung. I can see her picking passionfruit off the vines that grow up the stilts of the Commonwealth Bank here, an old Queensland bungalow that looks more like a holiday resort. And I want her here, I do, in this town that’s not much bigger than Nyngan, but it’s an amazing place. What if she just came up when I’m in town? In the rainy season. January and February it rains so hard you may as well really wear your bathers everywhere. Two or three months of amazement a year would be better than whole years of ordinariness, wouldn’t it?

But first things first. I have to stop into the Southern Star office to report that I haven’t buggered things up with the rig: we are drilling in the right place. The office is over the other side of the flower garden in Court Street, a smaller version of the Commonwealth resort. Mr Taylor, the chief of exploration, and the chief geo, Mr Roycox, are already having a gin sling on the verandah as I pull into the drive. It’s a tough life for some. I’m sure they do more important things than changing their shirts three times a day. I just don’t know what, apart from sometimes having a gin with Mr Komazaki, the Jap who owns the shipyards, ready to strike a deal as soon as we strike the black gold. In any case, town hours are unreal, especially for public servants, they work from nine till twelve, and then, after a nap, from two till four, yawning.

‘Hello, young Brock.’ Mr Taylor stands and waves me over as I get out of the jeep: ‘I do hope you bring good news for us?’

His wireless voice is turned on full. This is not his first gin. I tell him, ‘I do,’ holding up my core-sample logbook. As I take the stairs and hand it over, I notice the houseboy cutting the lawn round the side, with shears: they work twenty-four hours a day. The inequity knocks me a bit sideways for a second, probably from being out of town for a while. But it’s the way the world works, and not my concern today. I reel off my facts for my bosses, that the composition of the pyroclastic overlayer so far matches the Anglo-Eastern data, and the bagged-up samples are to follow for their analysis. ‘Hm, hm,’ they nod, as Mr Taylor hands the log to Mr Roycox, who puts it on the card table behind him. They look a bit like Laurel and Hardy, only it’s skinny Mr Taylor with the toothbrush moustache and they both wear panamas rather than bowlers. I add, for what it’s worth, what I think might be one small discrepancy: ‘There’s some dacite apparent in the last few cores that I didn’t expect at this–’

‘Never mind that,’ Mr Roycox says with a clap of his fat hands. ‘Carry on down for the oil, lad.’ There’s my permission from my scientific senior. Chief geo: I don’t think he even has a degree. He’s certainly not interested in geology. It’s Mr Taylor who got my name from Professor Richardson, not Mr Roycox, some old boys’ connection from the Kings School. And the dacite doesn’t really matter, I don’t suppose – it’s just another type of igneous rock very probably splattered over the entire island at many and various times.

Mr Taylor puts his hand on my shoulder. ‘Will you join us at the club for dinner?’

No. I recognise that this offer is an acknowledgement of my efforts to make these men and their cohorts rich, but I don’t want to go their club. The Rabaul Club. It’s where plantation owners go to count their coconuts with the senior public nappers, in the traditional airconditioned atmosphere, so I’m told, of native boys waving palm fronds. As my father’s son I couldn’t accept an invitation to dine with bank managers. As plainly myself I can’t either, because I’m going to the New Guinea Club, two steps round the corner from here, where my trunk is, and where I’m going to have that very long bath after I’ve made my call to Bernie. The service to Sydney opens at four; it’s a quarter to now. I put them off with an appeal to their greed: ‘Thank you but no. It will have to be an early start for me in the morning. The sooner I’m back at the rig, the sooner we recommence the drilling.’

‘Good show,’ says Mr Taylor. ‘I knew you were our man the moment I met you.’

I’m not your man, I think, but as I say cheerio to them, I can’t say to myself whose man I am. My own? Not for the next three years anyway.

The afternoon sun just about quilts me as I pull into the drive of the New Guinea. There’s music already coming from the lounge, laughter coming up off the tennis courts at the rear, but I’m going straight round to the Weekender, where the accommodation is.

‘A room with a bath, young Mr Brock?’ the manager’s wife, Mrs Chittaway, smiles from the reception desk when she sees me. I must smell bad, too. But when she says, ‘A call to Sydney this afternoon?’ she’s frowning. ‘I’m sorry, pet, the afternoon service is cancelled today, terrific storms over the mainland. But the morning service is expected to resume as normal at eleven am tomorrow. Will that suit instead?’

No. That’s too late. I have to leave at dawn. You can’t do this to me. But Mrs Chittaway adds: ‘Ah, but I do have a letter for you, came a few weeks ago now.’

She fishes around under the desk, and I’m expecting it to be from His Majesty, catching up with me, for overdue national service. But it’s not. As soon as I smell Bernie’s White Lilac, my heart rate doubles. I don’t know why, but I’m suddenly convinced she’s calling it off, that it’s a Dear Gordon letter. Halfwit. It’s the first letter from Bernie. My first letter ever from my girl. I’m going to be excited, aren’t I. Open it here in reception. My hands are shaking as I read:

My wonderful darling Rock
I have absolutely nothing to tell you but I had to write to let you know that I love you, with every atom in me. I love you come what may. I love you always.

Bernie

She loves me. My mind goes into a spin, looping round every word, lost in the R of her Rock. I’ve never seen her name for me written out before. And she’s never said she loves me before.

She loves me.