There’s a 90 per cent chance people coming here will die, will drown, 10 per cent they will make it . . . it’s good, it’s peaceful, it’s a good country, rich country. But don’t come on boat like me . . . It’s no different dying in Afghanistan or dying on a boat.

Abbas Nikzada, abattoir worker, Kilcoy, Queensland,
formerly a passenger on the Palapa

Full up: The voyage of the Palapa

DAVID MARR AND MARIAN WILKINSON

WHEN THE RED DOT first appeared on the horizon, no-one stirred. They had been disappointed too often in the days since their engine failed to be roused by the sight of a ship in the distance. One boat had already sailed by, ignoring them. Australian planes had circled overhead, but left them to wallow in the sea. The shape they saw on the horizon was so small some of those on the KM Palapa thought it might be another boat like theirs, crammed full of people making for Christmas Island. But when that small red dot turned into a cargo ship, people climbed onto the roof to wave and shout.

Khodadad Sarwari said: ‘There was nothing left for us in this world if the ship goes past.’ Sarwari, a teacher, sat jammed between his wife, their three children and his brother on the boat’s flimsy upper deck. The family was fleeing the Taliban. So were most of the people on the Palapa. By now they were exhausted, ill and thirsty. Most had spent the last few days vomiting. They had faced death the previous night in a violent storm, which they believed they had survived only by a miracle. Now a cargo boat was bearing down on them. ‘We were telling the children there is hope because we didn’t want them to give up, to collapse. We were praying God would save us. Then when it was getting closer we saw it was huge and there was a big sign on it written: Tampa.’

The great hull slid past. ‘All of a sudden people were screaming that they are not going to rescue us,’ said Sarwari. ‘We were extremely hopeless.’ These were the worst moments of their whole ordeal on the ocean. ‘Now we were not thinking about this world, but preparing ourselves for the other world. The most terrifying thing for us was to see our children, at their age, dying. But after ten minutes the boys were saying it’s getting closer and again there was hope.’

The cargo boat had stopped and was edging back towards them, sheltering the Palapa in the lee of its enormous hull. When a long metal stair was lowered, the people on the Palapa finally knew they were saved.

Rajab Ali Merzaee, an Afghan medical student, watched two sailors come down to the foot of the stairs. ‘They were two very strong men. Very lovely, very good persons.’ The sailors called out to them to leave their belongings behind and allow women and children to cross first. Men who tried to disobey the order were thrown back onto the Palapa’s deck. Any luggage they had in their hands was thrown back, too. The Palapa was rising and falling on the swell. Already battered by the storm, the boat began losing chunks of deck and railing as it slammed into the Tampa’s hull. The lines kept breaking. The sailors on the stair timed their moves, reaching over to pluck one or two survivors from the deck each time the Palapa rose on the swell. This went on for two and a half hours.

Sailors carried little children, the sick and terrified up the long metal stair. The rest formed a long, slow queue. When these filthy men and women reached the Tampa’s deck, they were searched very thoroughly, counted twice and had a number written on their arms with a black marker pen. One of the sailors told Rajab Ali Hossaini they had been expecting to take about eighty survivors on board. ‘When people were coming eighty, one hundred, two hundred, three hundred, they were wide-eyed looking: what is going on, what sort of boat is this with people just coming up?’ Even the survivors were amazed that so many had been packed onto the boat. ‘That’s bloody smugglers: even the smallest space, they used that one for the sake of profit,’ said Hamid from Kabul, one of the last men to leave the Palapa. ‘They play with human lives. They don’t care about human lives. They care about their money.’

Up on the deck of the Tampa the survivors were praying, crying and laughing. They had a future. They would reach Australia. They would see their children grow up. Several times on the Palapa over the last three days they had given themselves up for dead. ‘Now we were smiling, we were telling stories, we were thanking God we were saved,’ said Merzaee. But there were those among the survivors who wondered why they had been put through the ordeal of the last days. Why were they left to drift? Why were they not saved once those Australian planes saw them? Why were they made to endure that terrible storm? Sarwari asked himself, ‘Why people were so heartless not to rescue us?’

Australia had known for days that the 20-metre Indonesian fishing boat with an ancient engine, a rickety upper deck and an incompetent crew was on its way. The Palapa was bringing the biggest load of asylum seekers ever to set out for Christmas Island, Australia’s tiny territory sitting below Java in the Indian Ocean. The island was crowded with people who had arrived on boats in the weeks before. There had never been such a crush of asylum seekers. More were on the way.

Over on the mainland, Australia’s immigration prisons were full. So when the Palapa got into trouble on the crossing, some ruthless Australian bureaucrats took it as a godsend. Somehow, these people could now be sent back to Indonesia. For over 20 hours, rescue authorities in Australia did nothing effective to help the people on the Palapa except harass the Indonesians to take responsibility for the problem. That delay put the lives of 438 people in terrible danger. In the end, Australian rescue authorities had no choice but to put out a call for the Palapa’s rescue. The Tampa answered. But Australia was still determined these people would go back to Indonesia.

What followed was a crisis that for a time engaged the attention of the world.

Assadullah Rezaee had hesitated when he arrived at the wharf with his wife and three children at about 2 a.m. on Thursday, 23 August. There were six buses ahead of them and more kept arriving. ‘When I saw the boat and when I looked at the people I thought I better turn back. But other friends told me, it doesn’t matter whether I go now or stay behind and try again, the agents won’t have a better boat for you. It will probably be worse than this.’

Rezaee, a farmer from the Afghan province of Ghazni, had paid US$11,500 to get his family to Australia and had been promised something better than a fishing boat. Rezaee showed his chit and was told to take his family to the crude upper deck. They couldn’t stand: the roof there was only a metre or so above the deck. As people poured onto the Palapa, they couldn’t move at all but sat, squashed together, with their knees under their chins.

Hamid had travelled from Jakarta with two Indonesian soldiers on board his bus. More men in uniform were waiting at the wharf. ‘The smugglers and the police officers or the soldiers were rushing around and trying to offload us as quickly as possible and putting us in those boats because they were saying that the guards or the security that they were dealing with, their shift would change when the sun rises.’ He had watched officials giving the smugglers a hand all the way from Kabul. At Jakarta airport, the smuggler guiding Hamid’s party had not even taken them through immigration. ‘It looked like all the Indonesian police and military were cooperating with him because they took us outside the terminal and there were Datsun vehicles already available for us.’

For a month Hamid had waited with thirty Afghans in a villa in the Jakarta suburbs. Around them were other villas where asylum seekers were waiting, like them, for boats. One night they were moved to a hotel, where the smugglers took the last of his money and put him on a bus with a ticket, a bottle of water and some biscuits. He had no other food. ‘I was told the destination is very close and we would get there very quickly.’

The buses brought them all to Pantau, a little port near the surfing resort of Pelabuhan Ratu, on the southwestern coast of Java. Hamid climbed aboard the first boat he had ever been on in his life. ‘I saw boats on television or in movies but in Afghanistan it’s a landlocked country. It doesn’t have boat or ship.’ Like nearly everyone on the Palapa, Hamid could not swim. By torchlight, he discovered he was on an old, wooden tub. Someone was working on the engine and there was an ominous sound of hammering from beneath the deck. This was not the modern ship with individual cabins he had been told to expect. He assumed the Palapa was taking the people still pouring on board out to the real ship waiting somewhere in deeper water. Then he overheard one of the smugglers talking to the Indonesian captain, who was holding a box—in fact, a compass—in his hand. The smuggler said: ‘You going straight ahead and there’s no other island in front of you; any island comes in front of you, that would be Christmas Island.’

The last buses arrived. As people climbed on board they were handed flimsy life jackets, bottles of water and bags of sliced bread. Many had brought supplies of their own: biscuits, water, dried and fresh fruit. Twenty-one families with 43 children plus luggage were eventually packed onto the temporary upper deck. The youngest child was one. On the main deck below were 350 men travelling alone, many far younger than they pretended to be. A couple of dozen were only boys. At about 4 a.m. the smugglers drove off in a car, the crew kicked the motor into life and the Palapa headed out to sea. The boat rolled in the chop. The crowded decks filled with diesel fumes. People were soon vomiting.

For as many as 300 of the people on the Palapa, this was a second attempt to reach Christmas Island. They had set out a month earlier from the same port on a voyage that should have taken only 36 hours. Four days later they were still searching for Christmas Island. The captain had only a compass to steer by, and was blind in one eye. The seas were very rough. They gave up and headed north, running aground a couple of days later on a muddy beach at Bandar Lampung on the tip of Sumatra.

Tired and sick, they were taken by ferry across the Sunda Strait— as it happens through the port of Merak—and by bus back to cheap hotels in Jakarta. Many had picked up scabies on the boat. Some gave up at this point and disappeared. The rest had returned in the curtained buses guarded by uniformed Indonesians to take a second chance on an even more crowded boat, the Palapa.

Captain Bastian Disun stayed at the wheel all day. The weather was good. They expected to arrive at Christmas Island the following afternoon. Few had much of an idea of what to find when they got there. They knew Australia was a prosperous Western democracy. ‘I also knew about the Queen,’ said Khodadad Sarwari. ‘And that most people were from a European background and the language they spoke was English.’

They could not be blamed for having a vague idea that Australia was deeply committed to human rights. Years of hard diplomatic effort had gone into selling that message to the world. For decades, Australia had positioned itself as a leader of United Nations campaigns against racism, poverty and oppression. ‘They were telling the world they are helping the humanitarian work and helping the refugees and accepting the refugees and that a lot of refugees and migrants they are coming to Australia,’ said Wahidullah Akbari, the son of a Kandahar shopkeeper, who set out alone at the age of sixteen to make his way to this safe haven. ‘We thought we would receive the same treatment.’

Some were already on the road when smugglers sold them the idea of Australia, a more reliable and less expensive destination than Europe or North America. They could, of course, have stayed in Indonesia or the camps of Pakistan and been safe from the Taliban. But in Australia they could begin new lives. So trucks, shops, fields, gold and carpets were sold to raise the US$5000 or so to deliver these farmers, teachers, students and labourers to Australia. Little children were cheaper. The smugglers extorted what they could— the last few dollars—to give children a place on the boats.

At the end of the journey they knew there was a camp where they would be held for a time. The smugglers had told them this, but the prospect of three or four months detention was no deterrent for those who believed Australia would accept them as refugees. Even if that process stretched into years, it would be worth it in the end.

‘Our future would be secure, would be better. It doesn’t matter how bad it is, it would be better than the war in Afghanistan,’ said Rajab Ali Merzaee. He had the high cheekbones and oriental eyes of the Hazara people, the underdogs of every Afghan regime. The province of Ghazni was his home, but he had studied medicine for four years in the more peaceful north. He spoke a little English. His family had a small shop which barely made them a living, but his father had a patch of land he sold to pay the smugglers. Merzaee said that had he known what his father was planning, he would have refused to go. But the deal was done before he knew of it. Merzaee and his wife crossed the border, waited in Karachi for about a month, then flew to Jakarta. By the time they boarded the Palapa, they had been travelling for two months.

Everyone on board the Palapa claimed to be Afghan, apart from six Sri Lankans and three men who admitted they were Pakistani. As many as a hundred of the passengers may also have been Pakistanis posing as Afghans. This was a common problem in the refugee world: they speak almost the same language and look very much alike, but Pakistanis have very little claim to be accepted as refugees. They were trying to rort the system in order to emigrate. But the 300 or so genuine Afghans on the Palapa had every reason to believe that at the end of this journey Australia would welcome them. They were on the run from one of the world’s worst regimes.

As that overloaded fishing boat chugged south, there was no end in sight to the Taliban. The World Trade Center was still standing; the war against terror was months away. These people were, indeed, refugees who had, according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ‘the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution’.

At about 9 p.m., Captain Disun handed the wheel to one of the three crew and went to sleep on the floor of the wheelhouse. Merzaee noticed the boat was being pushed harder. ‘He tried to move the boat faster and he wasn’t controlling it. The sea was rough and he wasn’t taking that into account.’ Twice before dawn the engine stopped, but the crew got it going again. ‘Everyone was asleep when they heard a big noise, a banging, then after that the engine stopped.’ When the crew went to look, they found the engine had worked loose on its mounting and, falling sideways, sheared the gears inside their casing.

The crew could do nothing. Two mechanics among the refugees climbed down into the bilge to look at the problem. The engine still turned over—that would keep the pumps running to the end—but there was no power to the propeller. It was hopeless. ‘The engine was from the time of Hitler,’ said Hamid, and there were no tools on board to do repairs.

At dawn on 24 August, after travelling for a little over 24 hours, the Palapa was dead in the water.

Everyone was now awake. There was pandemonium on the boat. ‘Everybody was crying and shouting and yelling.’ The captain burst into tears. ‘We all were crying. The rest of the people worried and we would expect that death would come any minute.’

After a time they calmed down. They prayed. When a ship appeared a few hours later, it seemed their ordeal was over. ‘We were screaming and whistling,’ said Khodadad Sarwari. They climbed onto the Palapa’s flimsy roof to wave their orange life jackets in the air and hold up their children so the sailors on the ship could see there were families on board. There was no doubt the Palapa had been seen: the cargo boat flashed a light as it passed, but it kept on sailing. The master of that ship had left hundreds of human beings to their fate, but saved himself and his shipping line an awful lot of trouble.

The Palapa’s captain assured them they were already in Australian waters, so they tore planks from the flooring of the upper deck and began to paddle. Four teams of five or six people paddled all afternoon. ‘I knew it was not moving the boat anywhere, but simply to give people a bit of hope,’ said Sarwari. Soon after dark they heard a plane overhead. They flashed the lights of the boat but the plane flew on.

In the morning, a couple of teams started paddling again. Then a few minutes before 10 a.m., a plane appeared. ‘We took all the children and women to the top of the boat and then we were waving for the plane,’ said Rajab Ali Hossaini. The plane flew into the distance, then turned and passed low over the Palapa.

By this time, the roof was jammed with people waving their life jackets in the air and shouting for help.

Barry Spencer, commander of the Surveillance Australia mission, ordered the de Havilland Dash 8 to make several ‘overflies’ of the little boat, which he assessed to be a Suspected Irregular Entry Vessel (SIEV). Spencer ‘had a look at it both visually and with the television camera and took photography of it—still photography. There were approximately eighty people on the deck, waving their hands and waving bits of material. The vessel was dead in the water, not moving at all, no mode of power.’ He radioed a report to the Canberra headquarters of Coastwatch, the civil agency that coordinates surveillance of the seas around Australia.

Though it was a Saturday afternoon in the national capital, the information flowed deep into the bureaucracy. The sighting of every fresh SIEV was also reported directly to Jenny Bryant, a senior bureaucrat in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and to the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (DIMA). The news came as no surprise to DIMA: the department had known the Palapa was on its way for almost 24 hours. Immigration was extremely concerned that there would be nowhere to put these people when they arrived at Christmas Island.

‘On 22 August we had the largest arrival ever of 359,’ said Minister for Immigration Phillip Ruddock. ‘That had followed closely behind a boat that had arrived on Christmas Island with 345 . . . We were moving people off as quickly as possible, but we were looking at possibly as many as 900 people. And the occupation levels at immigration detention centres were close to full capacity. We had 3600 people in detention at that time . . .’

News of the Palapa did not reach the Rescue Control Centre at the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) for two hours. ‘Coastwatch advised sighting of vessel 55 nautical miles west northwest of Christmas Island. Vessel appeared to have in excess of 80 people on board and seemed to be “dead in the water”.’

A boat dead in the water does not necessarily need rescue. Perhaps the engines are being repaired. Perhaps the boat will soon be under way again. Calling on all shipping to go to the aid of a stricken vessel is a dramatic gesture. It’s not done lightly. Were this an Australian fishing boat being paddled by its crew, or a lone round-the-world yachtswoman with an oar over the side, an immediate rescue might well have been called. But in the bureaucratic world of sea rescue, waiting to see what happened to the Palapa that afternoon was a justifiable response.

Four hours after his first observation, Barry Spencer was back over the Palapa in the Coastwatch de Havilland. The boat had drifted west and away from Christmas Island. Otherwise nothing much had changed: people were still rowing and jumping up and down on the roof waving life jackets. He stayed over the Palapa for at least half an hour, videoing the scene and taking more photographs. Spencer could see there were far more people on board than he first thought. He now put the number at ‘200 plus’. He also tried, without success, to raise the boat on the radio. But the Palapa had no radio—indeed no communication equipment of any kind. Spencer was running out of fuel and returned to his base on Christmas Island.

The Palapa was clearly in grave difficulties: drifting helplessly on the Indian Ocean with a very large number of people on board. A second Coastwatch report on the boat reached the Rescue Control Centre in Canberra early in the evening. It was a decisive moment, but no text of this report has ever surfaced. One summary reads: ‘Report from Coastwatch indicating vessel appears to be in distress.’ That would seem to require an immediate call to shipping to go to the Palapa’s rescue. A less urgent version of the same report was later supplied to the Senate: the Palapa only ‘appeared to require assistance’.

The Rescue Control Centre was worried enough to ring Coastwatch to discuss the Palapa’s predicament. Again, no notes of this conversation have ever been produced. The summary reads: ‘Coastwatch advised . . . the vessel did not indicate distress.’

In a formal sense this might be justified. True, passengers waving their arms is a recognised signal for distress, but there was no Mayday, no SOS. Yet rescue authorities knew this was not a vessel operating under the ordinary rules of commercial shipping. It was a smugglers’ hulk crammed full of human beings.

Australia put out no call to shipping that night, but did inform the Indonesian rescue authority, BASARNAS, that there was a vessel requiring assistance in its rescue zone. In 1990, Australia and Indonesia drew a line east–west across the Indian Ocean, dividing it into zones of responsibility. Christmas Island lay inside the Indonesian zone. The boundary simply recognised that Indonesia was ‘best placed’ to respond to emergencies in its zone. That’s about all. The agreement is a very slender document. Contrary to all that would be said over the next days and weeks by Australia’s leaders, the 1990 arrangement does not oblige Indonesia to carry out every rescue in its zone.

Sea rescue does not work that way. What matters first and foremost is saving lives, not which country takes charge of the rescue or looks after the survivors. Clive Davidson, chief executive officer of AMSA, explained: ‘The responsibility on all search and rescue agencies around the world is to respond comprehensively and completely to every search and rescue event, wherever they may be.’

Instead of seeing to the rescue itself, the Australian Rescue Control Centre concentrated its efforts on trying to whip BASARNAS into action. The last time it had gone to such lengths to pass responsibility for a rescue to the Indonesians was two years earlier, for a fishing boat with only half a dozen lives at stake. It knew only too well that BASARNAS, responsible for a huge archipelago full of fishing boats and ferries, was under-resourced and overwhelmed. Rescue Control Centre officers joke that BASARNAS ‘is great, one time in ten’.

The fax sent to BASARNAS alerting it to the Palapa ended, ‘Please confirm receipt of this fax by return fax.’ BASARNAS did not respond. At some point in the evening someone from Australia’s Rescue Control Centre rang the BASARNAS headquarters in Jakarta. Davidson said: ‘When we called the Indonesian search and rescue agency there was nobody that competently spoke English to talk to.’

The Australian Federal Police (AFP) were, however, worried about the fate of the Palapa. At about 3 a.m. Canberra time, the head of the AFP’s People Smuggling Strike Team rang Coastwatch ‘concerned about this vessel’ and was told the Palapa ‘has the right of passage until there are signs of distress’. Even then Australia would not leap to the boat’s rescue. ‘If there was a distress, would advise Indonesia.’

‘Dark came again and we were alone,’ said Khodadad Sarwari. ‘The plane did not come back. Then we lost hope. That was the hardest night we had on board because there were glimpses of hope and they disappeared.’

The sea had been rising all day. Video taken of the Palapa in the afternoon showed it already wallowing in a deep swell. Towards nightfall the weather turned nasty, and at about midnight the Palapa was hit by a violent storm. Waves began crashing across the lower deck. It was extremely dangerous. As the boat rolled, people scrambled to the high side of the deck, which then plunged the boat even deeper as it rolled to the other side. Everyone was urged to sit still. They tied themselves and their children to the boat with their clothes but the waves still threw them around the deck. ‘The skin was torn from our backs and arms,’ said Sarwari. ‘There was blood everywhere.’ Strangely, in all this turmoil, some continued to sleep, only waking to grab at something to stop themselves being washed overboard.

On the lower deck, the men tried to form a human wall in a futile attempt to keep out the waves. A hole opened in the hull. It was stuffed with plastic and someone sat on this crude bung all night to keep it in place. There were no buckets to bail with. The pumps were just able to cope, but needed all the power the generator could produce. There was nothing left to run the lights so all this horror took place in pitch dark. They could hear the storm above them, the boat groaning as the waves hit and, from both decks, shouts, cries and prayers. Hamid said: ‘We were expecting that any moment the sharks come and eat us piece by piece.’

The upper deck was working loose. ‘The nails were coming out that held the top deck in place,’ said Assadullah Rezaee. ‘The deck was moving and we thought it might fall from the boat. It was coming loose. The posts were held only by nails, no bolts or screws, only nails.’ Women and children tried to move down to the deck below but there was no room for them there. They had no choice but to stay as the flimsy structure plunged from side to side. Someone below found a lump of metal and bashed the nails back into place all through the night.

The Indonesian crew retreated to the wheelhouse. They had abandoned responsibility for the boat. Three or four times during the storm the young mechanics stopped the engine for a while to let it cool down. For a horrifying half-hour it would not restart, but the men got it going again. Without the pumps they knew there was no hope. In the wild emotions of those hours, these people of deep faith took the presence of children on the boat to be a sign that the Palapa might last the night. ‘Sometime my wife said it was so frightening and so difficult I would like to die,’ said Rajab Ali Merzaee. ‘But I said no. We understand if God wants to take the adults because we have done something wrong, but the children haven’t done anything. He might show them mercy.’

As the sun rose, the storm died. The refugees had faced death in that storm and feared the boat could not survive another night like that. They asked the captain where they were. He looked at his box compass and wept. He had no idea. They were furious with him for the deal he had done with the smugglers, for the shoddy state of the boat, for sailing with a wrecked engine. But what was the use? They would share the same fate. ‘The water does not make this judgment whether you are Afghan or Indonesian. The water will kill anybody. Indiscriminate.’

Canberra’s priority that Sunday morning was to bully BASARNAS into action. It was still very early in Jakarta, but a little after 8 a.m. Jakarta time the Australian Embassy sent naval attaché David Ramsay around to BASARNAS to ask firmly that the agency get moving. This had no result except to put a number of Indonesian noses out of joint, and make Australia’s dealings with Indonesia even more difficult over the next few days.

Barry Spencer took off again at about 7 a.m. Christmas Island time. Part of his mission that morning was to ‘relocate’ the Palapa and ‘advise Canberra of its position’. Though the stricken vessel was only 85 nautical miles from the island, it was two hours before the de Havilland was once more over the boat.

The asylum seekers had used that time well. They had begun to wonder if the Australians did not realise they needed rescue. Perhaps it was not a failure of heart. Perhaps the Australians didn’t know they were in trouble. They searched the boat for writing materials and something to write on. In the end they used engine oil on scarves. One of the English-speakers traced out the words and a man with a bit of sign-writing experience in Kabul finished the job. The banners were just ready when the plane appeared. One read SOS and the other HELP. ‘The plane went far and come back, far and come back,’ said Rajab Ali Hossaini. But then it left and again they were plunged into despair.

Australia could not delay a rescue any longer once those words appeared. Spencer saw ‘the people on board the vessel were holding up flags that read “SOS”, “Help” and were waving orange rags . . . it then became a marine search and rescue operation which was then handed over to the pilot.’

Australia’s Rescue Control Centre got the news ten minutes later, then spent another twenty hectic minutes trying to pressure BASARNAS—first by fax, and then through the defence attaché in Jakarta, calling him once again ‘to assist obtaining response from Indonesian search and rescue authority to coordinate response to incident’. At this moment, DIMA made an unprecedented attempt to interfere in a search and rescue operation, with a call to the Rescue Control Centre ‘asking if vessels that respond to Australian search and rescue broadcast can tow the stranded vessel to Indonesia’.

The call to shipping that might have been issued 18 hours earlier finally went out at 12.48 p.m., Canberra time: ‘Subject: Distress Relay. A 35-metre Indonesian type vessel with 80 plus persons on board adrift in vicinity of 09.32.5 south 104.44 east . . . vessel has SOS and HELP written on the roof. Vessels within 10 hours report best ETA and intentions to this station.’

Arne Rinnan’s response was automatic. He plotted a fresh course for the Tampa and calculated it would take four hours at full sea speed, 21 knots, to reach the Indonesian boat’s position. Then he acknowledged the Mayday. ‘We are on a voyage from Fremantle to Singapore via Sunda Strait,’ he told Australia’s Rescue Control Centre. ‘We have changed course and are headed for position of distress . . . Please advise further course of action. A Rinnan, Master.’

Rinnan was a salt-dried sailor with a sharp eye and a cocky sense of humour. He was one of the last of his kind to rise all the way through the ranks from deckhand to captain. After this voyage, only one more lap of the world awaited before retirement. At 61 he still cut a bit of a dash in a stiff white shirt and epaulettes. His bony Scandinavian face with a potato nose and a sweep of silver hair would soon be known around the world.

So would his practical, fractured English. But the recognition and honours coming his way so late in his career were not because Arne Rinnan was an absolutely exceptional mariner. He was a good man and a good sailor who had been a long time at sea driving cargo ships. He knew the rules and was not going to be bullied into breaking them. Rinnan was also backed by a determined company, for whom he had worked nearly all his career since joining the Wilhelmsen Lines Tennessee in 1958.

He did not seek permission from the line before changing course. He knew he was doing what the line expected, Norwegian law demanded and Australian rescue authorities requested: steaming to the aid of a vessel in distress. After two hours, he received a rather odd direction from the Rescue Control Centre: ‘Please note that Indonesian search and rescue authorities have accepted coordination of this incident.’ He tried and failed to get through to BASARNAS, yet this was clearly still an Australian operation because over an hour later a Coastwatch de Havilland Dash 8 appeared to guide the Tampa to the vessel, which still lay out of sight over the horizon.

Rinnan’s ship was a 44,000-tonne floating warehouse three city blocks long, with rust-red containers stacked six high on its weather deck. The Tampa was on a voyage through the East to China and Japan, on to North America and eventually home to Norway. On board was a crew of 27—Scandinavian officers and Filipino men— and a cargo of steel pipes, dried milk, food, timber and second-hand earth-moving equipment worth about $20 million.

The Tampa was not just a passing cargo boat. The Wilhelmsen Line had been a presence in Australia since the 1890s, when its ships began carrying wool to Europe. Its links with Australia were old and intimate. For most of the next century the Norwegian line was the third biggest shipper of Australian goods to Europe.

Arne Rinnan was still half an hour away from the Palapa when he saw a mirror flashing an SOS. The Coastwatch plane guiding the Tampa was now running low on fuel and radioed that it was returning to Christmas Island. Where should he land the survivors, Rinnan asked? The officer said he didn’t know and the plane disappeared over the horizon.

The Tampa slid alongside the Palapa sometime after 2.30 p.m. From the bridge, Rinnan looked down on a ‘20 metre, grey coloured, wooden vessel in poor condition with damage to stern and superstructure’. The upper deck was crowded with people. Some were throwing documents into the sea. Rinnan positioned his ship to shelter the Palapa from a fresh breeze and a two-metre swell. He would remain on the bridge all afternoon manoeuvring the Tampa with its thrusters to try to keep the two boats together.

Complicating the rescue was the need to keep the Tampa’s aluminium ‘accommodation ladder’ well above the Palapa to stop it being smashed to pieces as the little boat rose on the swell. The survivors would all have to be lifted to safety. In charge of the operation was the first officer, Christian Maltau, a bluff young Norwegian with a short, blond beard. With him at the foot of the ladder was a very strong young engineer, Kai Nolte, who lifted the first survivor—a child—to safety at 3 p.m. The rescue continued all afternoon to the rhythm of the swell. Nolte said after a while, ‘This is just like fishing.’

The survivors had to leave everything behind. ‘It would slow the rescue operation if everyone was going to bring their bags and suitcases and plastic bags and whatever, and also we were afraid of pirates and concealed weapons.’ Anything they brought to the foot of the stair was thrown back into the boat. A third sailor came down to join Maltau and Nolte so one could rest while two lifted. ‘The whole operation went very smooth,’ said Maltau. ‘No-one was injured.’

When lines to the Palapa kept breaking, Maltau jumped across and coiled ropes around the whole wheelhouse to secure the boat. He had a look around. The Palapa was disintegrating and what he saw left him with profound contempt for the smugglers. The cheap Chinese life jackets the adults were wearing had no whistles or lights, and would not keep an unconscious person’s head out of the water. There were none for children. There was no galley— just a few scraps of food in plastic bags. From the wheelhouse he souvenired an old box compass. Apart from that there was no navigational equipment at all. ‘No sextant, no log, no charts, no nautical publications, no electronic navigation devices, no GPS. They didn’t have communication equipment, no radio, no nothing. So finding Christmas Island from their position—which actually was pretty close—would be like finding the famous needle in the haystack, considering also the strong westerly monsoon current.’

The smugglers wouldn’t even invest in a global positioning satellite (GPS) system to get their passengers to the island. ‘You can go to Radio Shack and buy a $150 GPS receiver this big and that’s all it takes.’

As the tally of survivors kept rising, Oslo upgraded the rescue operation from ‘fairly substantial’ to ‘major’. No Wilhelmsen ship had ever been involved in a rescue on this scale. By the time the last person left the Palapa at 5 p.m., the fishing boat had disgorged 26 females (two pregnant), 43 children (the youngest about one year old) and 369 men. Total: 438. Maltau judged the hulk impossible to tow, so it would have to be abandoned with all the luggage: the survivors would be left with literally nothing but the clothes on their backs. Lost on the Palapa were boxes, bags, backpacks, medicines, documents, toys, clothes and shoes.

Pacing hot decks under the tropical sun over the next few weeks, the survivors particularly regretted those lost shoes.

Footnote

This story is an extract from Dark Victory, by David Marr and Marian Wilkinson (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2003), which tells the true and tragic story of the Tampa rescue and the refugee ‘crisis’, which became a major factor in the 2001 Australian federal election.

Just 28 of the asylum seekers on the Palapa were eventually accepted into Australia. Some were accepted into other countries, including New Zealand; 179 were sent back to Afghanistan, where as many as twenty have been killed by the Taliban in their homes and villages. Others have died trying to escape again.