‘Sorry about that, Charley,’ he said when he got to the beach, ‘engine trouble again, I’m afraid. The bloody thing keeps packing up.’
‘It’s all right,’ I told him. ‘Don’t worry, Brett, it’s my fault: I call it the Charley Factor.’
We just about made it to Horn Island. When the engine was working we were zipping along, slapping through the whitecaps and getting thoroughly soaked by the spray. But as I was on board, it was no surprise when the outboard conked out again, and again, and again. It was the contact points on the spark plugs, they just kept failing.
‘Tell you what,’ Brett said when we had got it going for the fourth time. ‘We’ll get to Horn Island and see if we can’t find another boat to take you across to Thursday. I don’t want to risk it in this thing, not with the engine playing up.’
‘Sounds good to me,’ I told him. I was gazing across the bay now and there seemed to be quite a few small boats dotted here and there. We were bound to find something.
As it turned out there was this one large, flat-bottomed boat that looked quite official. Two young guys wearing coveralls were on board, Ben and Rob. They came alongside and we asked them if we could hitch a ride. They thought about it for a moment then Ben nodded.
‘Yeah, all right, mate,’ he said. ‘Where do you want to go?’
‘Thursday Island,’ I told him. ‘We’re on our way to Papua New Guinea.’
The plan was to fly out the day after tomorrow, although it wasn’t yet cast in stone. We had hoped to find a small boat to make the crossing but it is so cheap to fly these days that the small boats are no longer allowed to clear customs.
Perhaps it was just as well. Given my reputation.
Ben and Rob were operating what they termed a ‘standby-vessel’, which would attend the scene if any marine traffic ran aground, like a sort of first responder. There were reefs all over this area and we had to skirt them, crossing the strait in a zigzag to get to Thursday Island. The water was clear and blue, the sun high and the boat big enough so your bum didn’t feel as though you’d been given six of the best by some Victorian schoolteacher. Ben explained that with so much ‘hard stuff’ under the water, the area was notorious for boats running aground.
‘We hang around in case we’re needed,’ he said. ‘In the meantime we act as a lighthouse tender.’
The area was dotted with islands, thirty or forty of them, and there were plenty of lighthouses that had to be maintained.
As we closed on the dock at Thursday Island it dawned on me that the first leg of the journey was almost over. We had left the mainland behind and in a day or so we would be landing in Papua New Guinea. I wondered what it would hold for us. We had heard all sorts of conflicting stories and I could feel the butterflies (that seem to plague me) starting up again. I really do have to stop worrying about the future. One day at a time, Charley, just deal with what’s in front of you.
So I concentrated instead on the fact that we had a couple of days on this historic island. Having said goodbye to Ben and Rob, the four of us were on the dock looking up and down the road for any sign of a cab. But this was a very quiet place. There were few cars about and none of them were taxis. We had decided to transport our gear on foot when a car pulled up and a local woman wound the window down.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Where are you fellas going?’
‘The hotel,’ I told her, pointing into town.
‘Do you want me to give you a lift?’
‘Could you? That would be very kind.’
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I’ll take you two at a time.’
Her name was Louisa and she worked in local government. Her daughter Nancy was in the passenger seat and Louisa told us she was just out of hospital. Nancy had terrible taste in men apparently, and had been on one of the neighbouring islands with her latest boyfriend.
‘She should’ve stayed in Cairns,’ Louisa said.
Nancy’s latest squeeze had got so drunk he’d beaten her senseless and her mother had to have her airlifted by helicopter. They drove us to the hotel and suggested we come to the Grand tonight, a local bar where Louisa’s brother and uncle were playing in a band.
They played reggae music and it was quite a night. The music was good, the food was good and we had a couple of drinks. Louisa’s brother was a big guy called Milton. His ‘mob’, as he called the tribe he belonged to, administered these islands and he played an active role in politics. The way he spoke about his culture and how much had been stolen from the indigenous people, he reminded me of Kurt at Pormpuraaw.
In a way it was fitting - we’d flown into Sydney with its high rises, the Opera House and motorbikes. And with just a couple of days to go before we left, we were chatting to a man who traced his people all the way back to the Dreamtime.
5
Of Fish Tails and Tail Fins
THERE WAS STILL no definitive plan about how we were going to get from Thursday Island to Papua New Guinea, but if all else failed we could fly down to Cairns and take a commercial airline. A much better idea was to locate someone on the island who could fly us across, and that was what Sam was working on.
The locals call Thursday Island ‘TI’, or sometimes Waiben, which means ‘no (fresh) water’. For thousands of years this whole archipelago was the territory of the Torres Strait islanders - nomadic Melanesians who had three languages and today still speak a Torres Strait creole. During the Second World War there was fighting in this part of the world. After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, when America entered the war, both the Americans and the Australians had bases on TI. The Japanese did not bomb the island, though they did attack mainland Australia and Horn Island. We heard a story that they left Thursday Island alone because some Japanese princess had been buried here, but whether that was true or not depended on whom you spoke to.
We were introduced to Ina Mills, one of three island sisters who had carved out a career singing traditional songs all over the world. While we were with the flying doctors, Gil had told us that her brother-in-law lived on TI and that we really ought to try to see the Mills Sisters. As it turned out, Ina’s twin, Cessa, and their other sister Rita had flown to Cairns for a relative’s birthday party, but we did manage to meet Ina. The three of them had been singing together since they were children and didn’t stop performing until the 1980s. We found Ina at her apartment in a quiet suburb of the island township. She was a chatty and very funny eighty-one-year-old with white hair and glasses.
‘Are you really eighty-one?’ I asked her. ‘You look so much younger.’
‘I tell you what,’ she laughed. ‘For your programme I could be ten years younger.’
I thought about that. ‘Ina, we could make you any age you want.’
Ina told me the sisters had sung in London and France as well as New Zealand, and a lot of their music had been recorded. We shared the fact that we were twins and I told her how I’d arrived just before my sister Daisy, who came feet first because she wanted to push me out. Ina ‘popped out’, as she put it, just before Cessa, and laughing she told me that was great because it meant she’d always have a younger sister to bully.
She had been born on an island thirty miles away. One of ten children, she didn’t go to school until the age of seven, when she was brought over here to the convent. She missed her family - the only time she got to see them was at Christmas. But when the war came Thursday Island was evacuated. Most of the people went to the mainland but Ina’s father came over to take her home. She was delighted - instead of being in school she was with her family, and her only real contact with the war was watching the planes go over.
We were right at the tip of the Cape here, beyond it in fact, no longer on mainland Australia, and I thought it was the perfect place to make the crossing to Papua. While I’d been talking to Ina, Sam had discovered a local guy called Greg Wright who dealt in crayfish and was always flying back and forth across the strait. His plane could accommodate us if it made two trips tomorrow, so the next leg of the journey looked as though it was fixed.
Later that afternoon and feeling more relaxed, I took a wander on the beach with Claudio. He’d been so busy, what with filming and backing up the tapes, we’d not had much opportunity to talk, so it was good to catch up.
‘How are you finding it, Claudio?’ I asked him. ‘Are you enjoying the trip?’
He nodded. ‘I love the way we’re able to discover a country from the ground. Travelling the way we do, on the motorbikes particularly, we can just dive into the place, really get a feel for everything - the vegetation, the different places, the people.’
‘What about the other modes of transport?’ I asked him. ‘I mean, when you and I have been away before it was always motorbikes, wasn’t it?’
‘I like the bikes,’ he said. ‘But the other stuff is good as well - a Spitfire, an armoured car . . . I think my favourites so far are the electric car and the Zero bikes. I want one of those bikes, I can’t believe how powerful they are.’ He paused for a moment, gazing across the bay where the land climbed in a series of low hills. ‘New sources of energy like that, some other type of fuel for the future, it’s vital. We have to get away from our dependence on oil. Charley, for too many years I’ve made too many films about wars being fought where the root cause is oil.’
Waves lapped at the gradually darkening beach, the sun was sinking, and squatting down on a couple of rocks we just soaked up the atmosphere. ‘It’s a pity it’s so difficult to cross the western half of Papua,’ I said.
Claudio gave me a thoughtful look. ‘You know I was there once before, don’t you? I shouldn’t have been, at least as far as the authorities were concerned, anyway.’
I squinted at him now. ‘Yeah, I did know,’ I said. ‘When was that again?’
‘Twenty years ago. I flew across the border to the Indonesian side to make one of the most important films I’ve ever made. It was called
Rebels of the Forgotten World
, about the Papuan independence movement.’ He was concentrating now. ‘To make it I had to fly to a clandestine airstrip they’d cleared for me on the Indonesian side of the border. They wanted me to come,’ he said. ‘They wanted someone to tell their story because while the international community looks away, what’s happening there is the same as what happened to the Aboriginals here in Australia two hundred years ago.’
‘I don’t know much about it,’ I admitted.
‘Not many people do, or maybe it’s that they just don’t want to. You see, originally the western half of the island was a Dutch colony. The Germans had the north and the Australians and British the south. After the First World War, Australia took over the German region and the whole eastern side of the island was administered from Canberra. The western half had been promised independence. As far back as ’62 the Dutch agreed to hand it over and the date was set for 1 December 1975. But in ’63 the Indonesians invaded. They have occupied the country ever since and they are repressive, Charley. Even to raise the Papuan flag is an offence for which they throw people in prison. 1975 came and went, of course, but on 1 December, many Papuans do raise the flag and most of them are in prison because of it. Only recently one man was sentenced to ten years.
‘When they invaded, the Indonesians tried to legitimise their actions by holding a referendum that they hoped would give them recognition from the UN. They hand-picked about a thousand village leaders and bribed them to back the invasion. It’s been a case of repression ever since and it’s ugly. People are being killed, people are being put in prison and it’s one of the stories the international community just doesn’t seem to care about.’ He got to his feet. ‘This is a travel programme and it’s fun of course, but we’ve been talking about what happened to the stolen generation of Aboriginals. The Indonesians are not going to let us into the occupied land with a camera and I think it’s important that we tell people why.’
He had a point. Claudio has always been a serious film-maker, he’s even interviewed Osama Bin Laden, and while this trip was about getting from A to B by any means available, it was also about what was happening in the countries we were travelling through.
The following morning Greg picked us up in his Toyota Hilux. We shook hands and I asked him if everything was OK for the flight today.
‘Sort of. We’ve got a couple of hitches with the plane, but nothing we can’t handle.’
My heart sank. ‘What does that mean?’
‘A little magneto problem, it’ll be all right.’
There was something about the laid-back way he was telling me, the easy drawling voice. Why did I think it wouldn’t be all right? Was it just me?
I’d woken feeling nervous. We were leaving Australia and all its familiarity and heading for a country I knew nothing about. I must say my chat with Claudio last night hadn’t inspired me any, although we had been talking about the Indonesian side and the chances of us getting in were remote.
On the way to his plant, Greg explained that there are two aspects to his business. One is dealing in locally caught live crayfish and lobster, the other in frozen crayfish tails that he brings from Papua New Guinea.
He runs a plane to and from Daru to pick up the frozen crayfish tails and it was from there that we were picking up a commercial flight to Port Moresby. Greg’s premises were right on the water, a series of wooden buildings housing storage freezers and a packing area, as well as a large seawater tank for the live crayfish. A pair of up and over garage-style doors opened onto the sea and Greg pointed out a white buoy bobbing in the distance.
‘We need really fresh seawater,’ he said, ‘for the big tank there.’ He pointed at our feet where a pair of pipes disappeared into the sea. ‘The other end of those pipes is out by that buoy,’ he told me. ‘We pump the water all the way from there.’