‘What was the idea you spoke to Koko about
last night?’ Faith asked as she laid a plate of food on the table.
‘And what are the beer crates for?’
‘
I’m not going to get on that train
today, Faith.’ Joe said as he sat down to eat. ‘I’m going to
sail
Faraway
to
Queensland
.
I can join up in
Cairns or Townsville just as easy as in Adelaide River or
Katherine. And I’ll feel better having
Faraway’s
deck under my feet until the day I
enlist and get the serviceman’s debt moratorium.’
Faith gasped. ‘But it’s too dangerous, Joe.
There are Japanese airplanes and submarines all along the coast
these days. I know, I’ve talked to sailors off the ships at the
hospital. Don’t you realize how lucky you were to get back in
yesterday? Anyway, you said you’ve got no petrol for the
engine.’
‘HMS Beagle didn’t even have an engine when
she brought Charles Darwin here,’ Joe said defensively. ‘Besides,
these days I only use mine to get in and out of anchorages when
there’s no wind.’
‘Why would you go to Queensland? Western
Australia is closer.’
‘This time of the year the most favorable
winds are from the north-east. We should get to Cape York before
the trade winds are right on the nose.’
‘We,’
Faith sat
down quickly beside her brother and grabbed his arm. ’My God, Joe,
you’re not thinking of taking Koko with you are you?’
‘Yes, I am.’ Joe slammed his knife and fork
down noisily on the table. ‘This damn town has gone mad. And after
today, there’ll be no-one left here but strangers. There’ll only be
a few Yanks and a bunch of servicemen from the southern states who
think Darwin is a Godforsaken, malaria ridden hole they’ve been
sent to in order to kill Japs. As far as they’re concerned Koko’s
just another Japanese. Well, he’s my friend and after what’s
happened to Aki, I can’t just leave him here.’
Faith knew Joe’s mind was made up. She nodded
at the empty boxes on the floor. ‘So they’re to take whatever you
need to the boat, I suppose.’
Joe nodded. ‘I might as well take anything I
can use. As soon as we’re gone the looters will only take it
anyway.’
‘Well, you’d better get more boxes from the
shed,’ Faith said resolutely. ‘Because I’m going with you.’
‘You can’t,’ Joe protested. ‘You said
yourself, it’s too dangerous.’
They were interrupted by a knock on the front
door. When Joe went to answer it he found Sergeant Maxwell pacing
the porch outside.
‘Joe, I’ve just been over to Myilly Point.
There’s no sign of Aki or Koko. Any idea where they may be?’
‘No, I haven’t, George.’ Joe was surprised
how easily the lie rolled off his lips.
Maxwell shook his head. ‘God, I hope they
haven’t tried to go into hiding.’ The policeman took off his
broad-brimmed hat and ran a hand through his hair. ‘Sometimes I
hate this job, Joe.’ He was half way to his ute when he turned
around and called out. ‘We expect the train about midday. I’ll come
over with Mary around two this afternoon for Faith and the
kids.’
Joe walked back into the kitchen. Faith
looked at him disapprovingly.
‘I heard what Sergeant Maxwell said, Joe.
It’s hard to lie to our friends. I don’t know how you can do
it.’
‘It would be harder to betray Koko,’ Joe said
grimly. He picked up a box from the floor. ‘If you’re coming with
us, Faith, we’d better start putting a few things together.’
An hour later Joe left the house
for
Faraway
with two boxes,
filled to overflowing, perched precariously on the petrol tank
between his arms. He had to slow right down as he picked his way
across the scrub land near the mangroves. When he eased the bike
over the railway track he looked down at
Faraway
to see Sunday was already lowering the
dinghy.
‘We heard you comin,’ Boss,’ Sunday
called out excitedly even before the dinghy reached the shore. ‘You
come quick. Navy fella come to steal
Faraway.
’
Joe took the secondment notice down from the
mast as soon as he boarded. He read it quickly then went below.
Koko sat nervously in the main cabin. Sunday and Monday squatted at
the top of the companionway anxiously peering down.
‘What are you going to do, Joe?’ Koko asked.’
You said last night you had an idea.’
Joe sighed. ‘Up until five minutes ago, I
thought we could just shove off and head for Queensland. I was
going to join up in Cairns or Townsville. I reckoned if you have to
be interned it would be better to turn yourself in there. At least
you would have made it safely to an internment camp. Or if you
wanted to, you could have sat out the war somewhere with people you
know, perhaps at the mission on Croker or Elcho Island, or
somewhere like that.’
‘The Navy came a day too soon.’ Koko said
sadly, then he added resignedly, ‘I’ll come with you when you go
ashore, Joe. I’ll give myself up to Sergeant Maxwell.’
No one spoke for some time while Koko
pondered his fate and Joe re-read the secondment notice. The
silence was broken by Sunday. ‘Someone comin’, boss. Someone
comin’.’
Joe bounded up the companionway. An Army
truck was driving through the scrub. As it drew closer Joe saw a
five pointed star on the bonnet and knew it was American. The truck
drove down close to the shore then the driver jumped out, cupped
his hands to his mouth and called out across the water.
‘Is this the boat named
Faraway
?’
‘Yes it is.’ Joe shouted back.
‘Are you Joe Brodie?’
‘Yes.’
‘
Got something for you, sir.
Compliments of Captain Rivers.’
‘
What is it?’
‘
Gasoline, sir.’
Joe looked on in amazement as the driver
walked to the back of the truck, opened the tailgate, rolled a
forty-four-gallon drum off onto the ground, then drove away without
saying another word.
*
‘
You can’t be serious,’ Faith said
incredulously. ‘You can’t just sail off for Queensland when the
Navy’s already commandeered the boat.’
Joe picked up another box from the kitchen
floor to carry out to the motorbike. ‘Yes I can, Faith. And I’m
going to. The Navy’s not taking possession until first light
tomorrow. Now I’ve got fuel, we’ll be miles over the horizon by
then.’
‘
But there must be severe penalties for
doing something like that.’
‘
Like what?’ Joe said. ‘As far as I’m
concerned, when I came back to the boat there was no crew aboard
and I didn’t see any notice nailed to the mast.’
But what about Sunday and Monday. They’ll
question them.’
‘No they won’t. They’ll be gone too. They’re
from Croker Island. I told them I’d take them home.’
‘And what am I supposed to do? I can’t tell
Sergeant Maxwell and Mary that I won’t be on the train now.’
Joe reached out and took Faith’s hands in
his. ‘I know,’ he said gently. ‘That would give the game away. So
you’ll have to go with Mary and the children. I’m sorry. But it’s
probably best this way. And I’ll write to you at Uncle Richard’s in
Brisbane as soon as I can.’
‘
And what about you? What are you going
to tell Sergeant Maxwell?’
‘I’ll say I’m not leaving until I’ve taken
everything I want off the boat and the Navy have signed off on the
secondment and taken formal possession.’ Joe grimaced. ‘He’ll
probably see me running around with boxes on the bike anyway. With
any luck he’ll think I’m taking gear off the boat not putting it
on.’
*
The train from Larrimah arrived just after
midday carrying equipment and munitions for the Army. All the
wagons were open flat-tops except an old guard’s van at the end of
the train which was loaded with foodstuffs. It was late afternoon
before soldiers had unloaded everything. When the officer in charge
finally told Sergeant Maxwell that the women and children, who had
been patiently waiting on the platform all afternoon, could board
the empty guard’s van, the station was already dark under a
starless overcast sky.
As Sergeant Maxwell bade farewell to his
wife, Faith looked around the station hoping to see Joe. She was
just stepping up onto the small steel platform at the rear of the
van when he raced up.
‘Bloody bike ran out of petrol,’ he said,
hugging her tightly.
‘Are you all set?’ she whispered..
‘Yes.’
‘When will you leave?’
‘In an hour or two, I hope,’ he whispered
back, his lips touching her ear. ‘This overcast is perfect. It’s
almost pitch black. All I need is a little wind.’
The train shuddered, then began to move.
‘I’ll write soon,’ Joe called out as it
pulled away.
Faith went inside the van and sat down on the
floor with Mary Maxwell and a few other women and the children.
There was a dim glow from a lantern hanging overhead on a hook in
the roof. A sack was nailed over the only small window in the van
to prevent the light from being a target for enemy aircraft. All
the women had brought food and water and blankets to sit on, and
everyone began to settle in for the long hot ride to Katherine.
The train moved out of the station slowly,
picking up speed as it went along. After seven or eight minutes it
slowed down at the edge of town and came to a stop beside a water
tower, just as Faith knew it would. A few minutes later there was a
loud clanging of carriages and with a violent jerk the van started
rolling again.
Faith turned her head to Mary Maxwell. ‘I
think I’ll just stand outside for a moment, Mary.’ she
whispered.
‘What is it, dear?’ the sergeants wife asked
anxiously. ‘Are you all right?’
‘
I think everything has finally caught
up with me,’ Faith said, getting up from the floor. ‘I just need to
be alone for a while.’
The train was gathering speed when Faith
stepped outside onto the small guard’s platform at the back of the
van. She quickly closed the door behind her, then swung her legs
over the low rail of the platform and jumped from the van into the
scrub.
Joe and George Maxwell remained talking
on the platform station after the train left the station. Maxwell
told Joe that neither he nor any of the other officers had seen
either Aki or Koko all day. Joe lied again and said he hadn’t
either. But this time, judging by the way the sergeant looked at
him, Joe wasn’t sure if George Maxwell
believed
him.
When Maxwell climbed into his van to
return to the police station, Joe set off down the railway track in
the darkness towards
Faraway
.
As he approached the dark shadow of the dinghy which he’d left on
the shore high above the water line, he was startled to see someone
sitting on the gunwale of the little craft. When he drew closer he
was even more startled to see it was Faith.
‘What happened,’ he asked in amazement.
‘I said I’d get on the train like you wanted
me to, Joe,’ Faith said stiffly. ‘But I didn’t say I’d stay on it
all the way to Katherine.’
*
Faraway
lay in
dead calm water under a shroud of dense low cloud. In accordance
with the military blackout orders, not a glimmer of light was
visible from buildings on shore or from ships lying at anchor in
the harbor. Joe knew even the slightest sound would carry across
the still water and attract the attention of naval vessels and the
Army gun emplacements on the shore. Unable to start the engine, and
with no prospect of wind, his only option was to wait for the tide
to turn.
Just before midnight, ever so
slowly,
Faraway
began to swing
on her anchor chain. In the late afternoon Joe had carefully marked
the position of the other vessels in the harbor and charted a clear
course through them which he hoped he could follow out to the open
sea without mishap, even in total darkness. With the tide turning
at last, it was now or never.
Joe whispered to Koko to carefully lift
the anchor and told Sunday and Monday to raise the sails, warning
them that the slightest sound could betray them. When the anchor
broke free, Joe held
Faraway
to her predetermined course and with Faith beside him at the
wheel, the ketch ghosted silently out of the harbor on the ebbing
tide.
By dawn, she was nearly forty miles out to
sea, in the centre of Van Diemen Gulf, charging along at full
throttle and heading northward for Cape Don and the Arafura
Sea.
As
Faraway
thrust her bow through the emerald green
waters of Van Diemen Gulf in brilliant sunshine, it was still dark
two thousand miles to the south where the Prime Minister of
Australia anxiously paced the floor of his office in
Canberra.
Just four months earlier, fate had decreed
that fifty-seven-year-old John Curtin, a socialist, one-time trade
union leader, journalist and antimilitarist, should hold the
destiny of the nation in his hands at the very time when its
greatest fear—the dreaded invasion by the Asian ‘yellow
peril’—looked more and more like becoming a reality with every
passing hour.
In the short time since taking the reins,
Curtin had seen a staggering succession of Allied military
reversals resulting in the greatest threat to the tenuous hold of
Europeans on the continent of Australia than at any time during the
course of the nation’s entire history. Not the least was the loss
of the supposedly impregnable British fortress of Singapore and
with it the grim realization that the Royal Navy could no longer
guarantee Australia’s security as it had for over a hundred and
sixty years. Now the bombing of Darwin had brought the Pacific War
to Australia’s very shores and Curtin had been forced into
action.