Faith hurried homeward through the business
and shopping district. It was in absolute chaos. The streets were
filled with people, many frantically screaming out the names of
missing loved ones. Almost everyone was heading for the Stuart
Highway, on foot and in motor vehicles of every description. Their
progress was often slowed by rubble, smoking bomb craters and
debris from burning, bombed-out buildings. Several people were
taking advantage of the confusion and smashing shop windows along
the way, grabbing everything and anything they could carry.
As she neared her home, the crowds pouring
southward to the highway had swollen. Now she was being pushed and
jostled by an unruly mob bent on putting as much distance between
themselves and Darwin as possible. People were fleeing their homes
in their hundreds, with little more than the clothes on their
backs, leaving food cooking on stoves, uneaten meals on kitchen
tables and household pets to look after themselves.
Faith looked on in amazement as the terrified
faces of cosmopolitan Darwin rushed by. There were Europeans,
Malays, Timorese, Chinese, Torres Straight Islanders, Aborigines
and every conceivable combination of racial mixture. But there was
no sign of any Japanese. All but a handful of the Japanese in the
Top End had been rounded up and sent off to internment camps in the
southern states after the attack on Pearl Harbor. With emotions
running so high among the fleeing townspeople, Faith knew that the
few who had escaped arrest would be lying low to avoid any mindless
retribution. A horn honked loudly behind her and she jumped to
avoid a speeding truck as it hurtled south. The truck bore RAAF
markings and was full of airmen.
When Faith turned into the street where she
lived, it seemed peaceful compared to the mayhem on the main road.
She broke into a run, anxious to see if the house was still
standing. To her relief she saw it was. Only one house in the
street had been hit by the bombs but already it looked as if all
the others had been abandoned.
Faith’s hands were shaking as she turned the
key in the front door. But once inside the house, the orderly and
undisrupted familiarity of the old family home calmed her nerves.
She walked through to her bedroom and pulled a trunk out from under
the bed. Taking out her father’s Walther P5 semi-automatic pistol,
she loaded it with a clip of ammunition. Pausing for a moment to
look at the initials BB engraved in the steel at the bottom of the
grip, she couldn’t help remembering happier days when her father
had been alive. Then, thankful she had left a few clothes hanging
in her wardrobe, she changed quickly and taking the handgun with
her went to make some tea in the kitchen.
As she waited for the kettle to boil she put
the gun into a drawer in the kitchen table. Then she sat down and
prayed to God that wherever Joe was he was safe and sound and that
he would be home soon.
*
Just after dark there was a knock on the door
and Faith heard Sergeant Maxwell call out her name. She opened the
door. Maxwell looked exhausted. He stepped inside, quickly closing
the door behind him.
‘Be careful about any lights, Faith,’ the
sergeant cautioned. ‘Don’t want to show the Jap bombers where we
are, do we?’
‘I’ll make you a nice fresh cup of tea,
Sergeant,’ Faith said. ‘You look like you need one.’
‘No, I can’t stay’, Maxwell replied. ‘I must
be off. The boys and I will be going all night.’
Faith took the policeman’s arm and led him to
the kitchen. ‘Sit down,’ she said sternly, as she put the kettle on
the stove. ‘You won’t last all night without a cup of tea and a
sandwich.’
Maxwell sat down at the kitchen table and
took off his hat. His grey hair was soaked with sweat. There were
patches of dried blood on his trooper’s uniform. Faith knew he was
in his mid-fifties but suddenly he looked much older.
‘When I got back to the barracks they told me
they hadn’t seen you,’ Maxwell said anxiously. ‘I thought you must
have come home. I’ll take you down to the railway station later.
The Army’s organizing a train to take evacuees to Adelaide River
and Katherine.’
‘No thank you, Sergeant. From what I saw this
afternoon, I think I’d get trampled in the rush. Anyway, I want to
be here when Joe gets home.’
‘Then at least come over to my house. Mrs
Maxwell’s still there. She won’t leave either. She said there’s so
much to do here. The town hospital and the RAAF and Army hospitals
are already full of casualties brought from the Dutch East Indies
and Malaya. God only knows how we’ll cope with our own people.’
‘I can help out too, Sergeant,’ Faith said
quickly. ‘Just tell me what to do. I’d go mad just sitting around
doing nothing waiting for Joe.’
The policeman smiled grimly. ‘Okay, but
you’ll have to be evacuated eventually, you know. Orders are
orders. In the meantime, I’ll take you up to the hospital. They
need all the help they can get. The power’s out over there and the
doctors are working by torch and candle-light.’ Maxwell wiped the
sweat from his forehead with a soiled handkerchief. ‘Where’s Joe,
anyway?
Faith poured boiling water into the
teapot and put the brew on the table to steep. ‘He took
Faraway
up to the northern island
missions ten days ago.’
‘Shouldn’t he be back by now?’
‘I expected him back before the
Zealandia
sailed. But
Faraway’s
an old boat. She’s slow
even with favorable winds and petrol is almost impossible to come
by these days.’
‘
Joe’s lucky
Faraway
hasn’t been commandeered by the Navy.
Most of the other private vessels on the Northern Territory coast
have been.’ The sergeant’s eyes narrowed. ‘By the way, is Koko
Hamada with him?’
‘Yes.’ Faith put sandwiches down in front of
the policeman and poured the tea. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘People out there have gone crazy, Faith.
They’ll kill any Japanese they see on sight. Now nobody can avoid
internment.’
Faith was horrified. ‘But Koko’s an
Australian. He was born here. I think even his father was born in
the Territory.’
‘That’s why we used our discretion in Koko’s
case when the government’s internment orders came through. But now,
it doesn’t matter that the Hamadas have lived here for generations.
They’ve still got almond-shaped eyes. In Darwin today that’s enough
to get your head blown off. For his own protection we’ll have to
arrest him. Everyone thinks that every Japanese in Australia is an
enemy spy.’
‘You mean you’ll put Koko in goal?’
Maxwell sipped his tea and picked up a
sandwich. ‘We can’t do that. The Territory Administrator ordered us
to let all the prisoners out of goal in case the Japs land. He said
if we didn’t, they’d be beheaded, or shot like fish in a barrel.
The blackfellas all went bush heading for their tribal lands and
the whites are all running for their lives down the Stuart Highway
with everyone else.’
‘What will you do with Koko?’
‘Hand him over to the Army, I suppose.
Although with the kind of discipline I’ve seen among some of the
soldiers here today, they’d be just as likely to shoot him as
anyone else.’
‘Do you think the Japs will
really
land, Sergeant?’
Maxwell shrugged his shoulders. ‘No one
knows. But in the meantime those of us that stay here have to do
what we can.’
‘How bad is it out there, Sergeant?’
‘It’s awful, Faith. There must be hundreds
and hundreds of dead and wounded, mainly the men from the ships and
the wharfies on the dock. Just about everyone who survived
panicked. Most of the airmen at the RAAF station and a lot of
sailors and soldiers have deserted. Even the staff at the leper
colony on Channel Island have run off and left the inmates to fend
for themselves. The blacks among them are planning to come over to
the mainland at low tide and head for their tribal lands. I hope
the Asian lepers have the brains to stay put. If they come over
here, they’ll probably get shot—by the Army if there are no
civilians left in town.’
‘Is the whole town on the Stuart Highway?’
Faith asked incredulously
Maxwell nodded. ‘Just about. Those with their
own transport took it, those without stole whatever they could lay
their hands on. They took cars, utes, motorcycles, bicycles,
anything, even the town dunny-truck. The highway is like a bloody
racetrack. There were even people on horseback. One of the blokes
at the station called it the Adelaide River Stakes.’
‘But they can only drive seventy miles,’
Faith said. ‘After Adelaide River, there are only dirt roads which
are impassable in the wet. What will they do then?’
‘Try and get on a train to Larrimah, I
suppose. But that’s only another two hundred miles or so on and its
far as the track goes. After that, I just don’t know what they’ll
do.’ Maxwell stood up to leave. ‘To tell you the truth, I don’t
care. I’m more concerned with looking after the folk who are still
here and what’s left of Darwin. Now, if you feel you’re up to it,
Faith, I’ll take you over to the hospital.’
The Army pressed every available railway
carriage into service with the night train taking evacuees
southward to Larrimah. Many were open flat-top freight wagons and
cattle transports. Soldiers had been assigned to oversee the
evacuation. But the orderly boarding of the train quickly turned
into a stampede when it became clear there wasn’t going to be
enough room for everyone. When things began to get out of hand the
officer in charge ordered the soldiers to turn back at gun point
any men forcing their way past women, children and the aged.
Most of the selfish louts were young fellows
but two of the worst offenders were older men. Both had the same
stocky build and wore filthy, ragged clothes. Long flowing hair and
unkempt beards made them almost indistinguishable from each other.
Each man carried a tightly packed canvas sea-bag swung over his
shoulder and used it to bludgeon a path through the crowded
platform. In their free hands both men carried .303 rifles. Their
belligerent progress toward the train was only halted when a young
Army lieutenant fired a shot from a pistol into the air above their
heads. The crowd quickly scattered leaving the men standing alone
with the lieutenant’s long-barreled Luger trained on them.
‘Who are you bastards?’ the officer shouted.
‘Where did you get those rifles?’
‘I’m Nick Horan,’ one of the men replied. He
cocked his hairy head toward the other. ‘This is my brother, Henry.
We’re croc-shooters. We’ve had these guns since before you were
born, sonny.’
The young lieutenant ignored the sarcasm.
‘Croc-shooters! Where’s your boat?’
‘Down in the swamp at Mindil Beach.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘Groote Eyelandt in the Gulf of
Carpentaria.’
‘Why don’t you leave Darwin by sea?’
‘Oh yeah. And sail straight into the arms of
the Japs, you bloody fool.’
The lieutenant would not be drawn. ‘From what
I’ve just seen,’ he said calmly, ‘you two shouldn’t have any
trouble forcing your way through a few Japs.’ He turned his head
slightly and shouted: ‘Sergeant?’
An armed sergeant stepped quickly to the
lieutenant’s side. The officer lowered his Luger. ‘Escort these men
out of the station, Sergeant. If you see them here again, blow
their bloody heads off.’
*
Aki Hamada had been sitting at her sewing
machine beside the window in her living room when the first
Japanese warplanes swooped down on Darwin. Her small, but
comfortable cottage stood on Myilly Point almost two miles from the
harbor. From the window, beyond her colorful garden of flowering
tropical trees and plants, she had a clear unobstructed view of the
invaders as they roared in over the ocean.
When the bombs had started falling, Aki
had rushed to the bedroom and taken cover under her bed where she
stayed until long after the second raid had ended. When she
eventually came out, she locked the front and back doors, then
returned to the sewing machine at the window and stared out to sea,
hoping that her son Koko and the ketch
Faraway
were a long, long way away.
Aki had been born in Japan in the small town
of Marugame on the southern shores of the Inland Sea. She was just
seventeen when she had met Hayato Hamada, a diver with the Darwin
pearling fleet who had come to Japan for a few months in search of
his origins. Aki and Hayato were attracted to each other the moment
they met. She was captivated by his easy smile, his happy, carefree
nature and was fascinated by his stories of the Australian tropics.
Hayato thought Aki was the prettiest girl he’d ever seen.
When Hayato had told Aki’s father he wanted
to marry her, her father had laughed out loud and said his daughter
would never marry a foreign pearl-diver and forbade them to see
each other again. But when Hayato told him Aki was already
pregnant, the only way for her family to save face was to consent
to the union, which they did on the proviso that the couple left
for Australia immediately and remained there.
Aki soon found Darwin bore little resemblance
to the idyllic tropical town that Hayato had described; its wild,
frontier lifestyle couldn’t have been further removed from the
quiet sophistication of the Inland Sea landscape from where much of
Japan’s ancient culture had evolved. However, through the years,
their love for each other and their only child had always carried
them through. But in 1937, Hayato had been killed by flying debris
when their home had lost its roof in the great cyclone.
Ever since then, although still an
attractive woman, Aki had become a recluse, living only for her
tropical garden and for the time Koko spent with her when
Faraway
was in port.