Montebello, p.12
Montebello, page 12
I was subpoenaed to appear as a character witness at his conspiracy-to-murder trial in Sydney’s District Court. I was called to the witness box, gave my name and occupation, had my presence noted and immediately negated by the prosecution, and was asked to stand down. The trial proceeded for another three days, enlivened by the court appearance, squawks and coos of Robinson’s and Green’s newborn baby.
At 6.25 a.m. on the day that Alan Robinson was to be acquitted of the conspiracy-to-murder charges, he was found hanged in his cell in Long Bay prison. A twisted bed sheet was tied to his cell window. He was dressed only in a singlet and underpants. There was no suicide note.
It can be said confidently that Robinson would have been acquitted. This is because Patricia Green was found not guilty, and the judge had directed the jury: ‘It takes at least two people to conspire. If you acquit one defendant in a conspiracy charge you must acquit the other.’
While I digested this ricochet in the drama, I had a coffee outside the court with Robinson’s stunned legal team and his daughter Sandra Bright. No-one thought for a moment that he’d committed suicide.
As his barrister said, ‘He was a vain man, with a proper sense of drama. It’s hard to imagine him going out in his underwear. At this optimistic moment, after all his drawn-out court battles had ended and he faced freedom, why top himself now?’ The barrister went on, ‘Alan also had verbal diarrhoea – he constantly expressed himself through the typewriter in his cell. It’s totally unlike him not to leave a note.’
Libel laws prevented the publication of the defence team’s suspicions about his death. I felt helpless and frustrated. At the inquest, the coroner, accepting the police version, said no evidence had been presented to suggest anything other than suicide. True enough, but who was it that had gathered the evidence?
Maybe fiction is a conduit to the truth. I began writing my next novel, Fortune, immediately. I set out to make one of the two lead characters an underwater explorer whose life falls apart after he finds a sunken treasure in a Dutch shipwreck. My character’s name is Don Spargo. The final chapter features the death of Spargo at the hands of unnamed people in a Long Bay gaol cell.
It took thirty years for the Tryall/Alan Robinson ricochet to stop. My family and I had moved to a small New South Wales coastal village. Collecting the newspaper from the general store one morning, I noticed a florid, heavy-set, middle-aged man who looked familiar. He was buying his paper, too. He gave me a stare as we tried to place each other.
After a few days I remembered his flushed face glaring angrily from newspaper photographs. I also recalled him looking fixedly at me when I was in the District Court witness box at Robinson’s trial. He was one of the detectives who’d arrested Robinson in the Northern Territory. Following a Royal Commission into the State’s police service, the Special Breaking Squad had since been disbanded in disgrace and its leading members forced into early retirement.
One day we brushed elbows in the store’s doorway. ‘Morning,’ said the ex-copper. He grinned and murmured something else as the shop door swung shut behind me. ‘Pity about your mate.’
I was curious to find out what became of the man who had begun this chain of events off the Montebellos in 1622, the Tryall’s skipper, John Brooke.
It seems that despite making a navigational error of ten degrees of longitude and steering his ship on to the Tryall Rocks, he escaped censure. Notwithstanding his first mate’s evidence to the contrary, Brooke blamed incorrect mapping, was given the benefit of the doubt and the command of another British East India Company vessel, the Moone.
Shortly afterwards, the Moone was deliberately wrecked off the coast of Dover. This time Brooke was held responsible and spent two years in prison before the case was suddenly dropped and he was released. Rumour spoke of quantities of silver changing hands.
24
The Witness
In these days of the perpetual teenager, when people cling to adolescence until their thirties and beyond, it’s instructive to consider the young adulthood of men like Pat Coverley, who spent five years in the vicinity and aftermath of nuclear bombs and war.
As a nineteen-year-old sailor with the occupying forces in Japan, Able Seaman Patrick Coverley saw the devastation in Hiroshima. Two years later, in 1952, he was sent to the Montebello Islands for eight months and observed the detonation of Britain’s first nuclear bomb, then served a second term in Hiroshima, then two tours of duty in the Korean war. This was all by the time he turned twenty-four.
Pat Coverley, at time of writing a jovial eighty-three, lives in Mosman Park, Western Australia. During our first conversations he was recovering from having more than a litre of fluid drained from his lungs after surviving a quadruple heart bypass operation. He counts himself lucky. Most of his shipmates died young, of various cancers. That he is still alive makes him an exception among Montebello bomb veterans.
He’s not given to overstatement. In the cheerfully taciturn tradition of teenage Australian servicemen, his nuclear experiences tend to be overshadowed by memorable events involving food, beer and sport.
‘We weren’t told anything officially about what was going on – only rumours that an atomic bomb was going to be exploded in the Montebellos. We had no idea what part we were to play until we actually arrived at Onslow (then the nearest mainland port),’ he told me. ‘Once we were in Onslow there was no secrecy about it. Everybody in town, all the locals, knew about the bomb.’
He had his twenty-second birthday on HMAS Wareen, a week before Operation Hurricane. ‘We had a sweep on what time the bomb would actually explode. The eight a.m. blokes won the money.’
When he got there he was transferred to a refrigerated lighter, the prosaically named MRL 252, and another cargo barge, MWL 251, which supplied the British units and the Australian navy and air force personnel in the islands with their food and water supplies, and their mail from home.
‘We didn’t feel too many emotions – it was just a job we had to do. Most of us had spent time at Hiroshima and seen the destruction there. Even so, we weren’t unduly worried. Being young, you didn’t think of the consequences. We just went about our daily duties. We were up there for eight months and worked like navvies. One day I cut my foot on coral and had to have a tetanus injection in my bum in Onslow hospital. It was very hot but we were all too afraid to swim because the ocean was alive with sharks.’
He brings up the subjects of food and drink. ‘We ate well but we didn’t have a proper cook so we had to take turns at cooking and mess duties. No-one was any good at gravy or apple sauce. At one stage our fridge broke down so we had to throw all our perishable food overboard. Luckily fish were plentiful, so we did lots of fishing. All the sailors finally got so sick of eating fish we complained about it. Then we had kangaroo for a change. The Captain of MWL 251 went across to the mainland and shot a couple of kangaroos and brought them back on board.
‘We were issued with one bottle of Swan Lager every night. It cost us nine pence. The Poms opened a marquee on Hermite Island and sold cans of warm Tennents Lager. We Aussie sailors had never seen beer cans before, or drunk warm beer for that matter.
‘At no stage were we aware it was a dangerous assignment or what the health repercussions might be. There were no safeguards in place. We weren’t issued with any protective clothing or special gear. On the day the bomb was exploded we were wearing the usual shorts and toeless sandals – no shirts, hats, sunglasses, et cetera. No special allowances were made for us, before or after the bomb blast.
‘They called us up on deck to watch. No cameras were allowed. We weren’t told to turn our backs or take any safety precautions. We didn’t shower after the explosion, or wash or destroy the clothes we’d been wearing. We weren’t told anything about radioactivity and its physical effects. There were no lectures or any other information about the fallout.
‘We were on the closest group of ships to the island, but the RAAF were even closer. They were actually sitting on the island before the bomb went off. Their toilets were on top of the sand hills and they saw the explosion from the lavatories – the best views on the island.
‘At the moment of ignition there was a flash as though a match had been struck in the dark. Then it went up like a huge bundle of smoke, more like an enormous bushfire than a mushroom shape. It took minutes for the huge roar to reach us, and even longer for the sound to abate.
‘After the bomb went off we carried on normal duties as though nothing had happened. The Poms went their way, we went ours. We took our orders from Bob Menzies and Australia, not the Poms. We sailed back to Onslow to load materials for Fremantle, and then returned to Fremantle a month later. No extra pay was involved. We even missed out on being in a tax-free zone by a couple of degrees of latitude, which didn’t help morale.’
Asbestosis actually worried Pat Coverley more than nuclear fallout from Operation Hurricane. To insulate heat and muffle noise, the lagging around the pipes and tanks on his various vessels was made of packed asbestos fibres. ‘I wondered how much of that stuff I breathed in over the years.’
‘I’ve stayed in touch with other blokes present that day, not that there are many left. Over the years I’ve gone to lots of their funerals. Cancer related, from radiation. I’ve heard that the English marines and sailors who’d been sent to the Montebello Islands were dying like flies.’
‘The first of us blokes to die from cancer was Phil Smith, a navy diver. Immediately after the blast he was ordered to dive on the Plym bomb site to retrieve the mooring cable. The navy wanted the cable back. He didn’t live long after that.’
Private Sydney Baker was a young soldier at the time. His unit in Perth was paraded and asked whether any volunteers wanted to go ‘somewhere warm’. Syd Baker stepped forward and found himself building barbed-wire fences around nuclear test sites on the Montebellos.
Radiation ‘safety precautions’ consisted of the soldiers being paraded on the beach each evening, ordered to strip off their clothes and discard them, being marched naked into the sea, and then re-kitted on the beach.
Nevertheless Syd Baker survived nuclear radiation. In March 2007 the elderly atomic bomb veteran was still living on the Pilbara coast, at the Indee Station camping ground, when tropical Cyclone George, a Category 5 cyclone, struck the coast with wind gusts of 285 kmh (180 mph), demolished his hut, crushed his spine, lungs and ribs, and killed him.
When Pat Coverley was a nineteen-year-old sailor in Hiroshima in 1950, he was taken to the target area by Australian soldiers. Their base was situated on a flattened area near where the bomb exploded. ‘The place was devastated, completely crushed. I’d never seen anything like it.
‘It poured with rain in Japan and we were very cold and uncomfortable because we had only our tropical uniforms. But we were all happy to be there and hadn’t a thought about the bomb or radiation. The food was very good, mostly hot English food, not Asian. There was a bar called Hiro House where the boys played snooker and darts. We named a park Anzac Park and we sailors played footy against an army side.
‘Everything was cheap. The goods on the ship had to be rationed though, due to the sailors’ generosity to the Japs. Especially the women. The soldiers and sailors paid girls to dance with them, and to do everything and anything else. The women welcomed us with open arms but the Japanese men weren’t very friendly.’
Atomic Fallout, official magazine of the Atomic Ex-Servicemen’s Association, has a photograph in its June 2001 issue of sixteen of the eighteen members of the Australian Rules football team from the Occupation Force in Japan ‘relaxing after the game’ in 1947. The footballers look suitably muddy and exhausted.
The photo caption says: ‘The game was played on a field within the contaminated region of Hiroshima. Thirteen of the sixteen players are now dead from cancers of radiogenic origin.’
In estimating the possible hazards of ionising radiation, it is clearly necessary to assess the effects of radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons, since this sort of general environmental contamination is of recent origin, has been of uncertain significance, and has led to concern in the minds of many people.
The physical characteristics of ionising radiation and the amounts of human exposure to it are at present more accurately known than its biological consequences. These exposures may involve the whole body uniformly, or may be greater for certain organs or tissues, as when radioactive material is selectively concentrated in them.
Tissues of the embryo, of the bone and bone marrow, and of the gonads are of particular importance. Irradiation of the embryo may lead to abnormalities of development or may prove fatal.
Irradiation of the gonads is able to bring about changes in the hereditary material; and these may be transmitted to subsequent generations if the irradiation is received before or during the years of reproductive activity.
Exposure of gonads to even the smallest doses of ionising radiation can give rise to mutant genes which accumulate, are transmissible to the progeny and are considered to be, in general, harmful to the human race. As the persons who will be affected will belong to future generations, it is important to minimise undue exposure of populations to such radiation and so to safeguard the well-being of those who are still unborn.
During my Montebello research I discovered the preceding extract from the Report of the United Nations Scientific Committee on ‘The Effects of Atomic Radiation’, presented to the 13th Session of the General Assembly in 1958.
It was one of the first warning shots across the bows of the new craze. This nuclear business was serious, it informed the world. Listen, you women: irradiation leads to abnormalities of your embryos. Listen, men and boys: you might think you’ve escaped, you’re feeling hunky-dory, but radiation surreptitiously gets you in the balls. It messes with your genes, makes them mutant and harms future generations.
The world said tsk tsk and stocked up its nuclear larder.
25
Hiroshima Mon Amour
I’ve never been sure whether the reputation of Hiroshima Mon Amour, the famous film directed by Alain Resnais, rests more on its originality, its politically sensitive backdrop or its evocative title. It’s certainly a great title.
When I first saw it as an anti-bomb teenager I considered its images pretty gruesome. Viewing it again decades later as a Sydney Morning Herald film critic, I was struck by its graphic restraint. Of course the opening documentary-style footage of the bomb’s effects on Hiroshima’s citizens is still troubling. What is most disturbing is the matter-of-factness and ordinariness of the anonymous nuclear victims.
As Resnais and the screenwriter, Marguerite Duras, continually stress – and this is what is most disconcerting – is not the mutilated bodies you expect but the Japanese women’s hair loss. Everywhere, even in women who appear otherwise unharmed by nuclear radiation, their hair is falling out in huge hanks and handfuls. Impassively, the women run their fingers through their hair, which comes away in loose clumps and waves.
Does the film’s creativity still stand up? Back in 1959, international critics lauded its originality, especially the innovative flashbacks inter-cut into scenes to suggest flickers of memory. They named it as the most important offering of the French New Wave, quite an accolade in a year when France also presented Francois Truffaut’s The Four Hundred Blows.
The year was a big one for important films, including Alfred Hitchcock’s North by North-West, Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo, and Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder. Ben-Hur, William Wyler’s chariot-race epic with Charlton Heston, won the Best Picture Academy Award (and ten other Oscars as well). Oh, and Pillow Talk put Rock Hudson and Doris Day in bed together.
Politically? Even though it was fourteen years since President Truman had dropped the bomb, Hiroshima Mon Amour was excluded from official selection at the 1959 Cannes film festival to avoid upsetting the US Government.
It’s set in the partially rebuilt Hiroshima a decade after the war. Most of the film is a series of disjointed conversations on memory, forgetfulness and leave-takings during and after the tastefully erotic one-and-a-half-night stand of a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada).
Referred to only as She and Him, the lovers, both married to others, move between silent and stylised sex, naked shoulder-stroking and intense, jerky and repetitive dialogue. The woman talks over and over about the effects of memory. Though smitten by her beauty and anxious to continue the relationship, the man constantly interrupts her to say she’s wrong, lying or confused.
Resnais has the lovers meet for the last time at a bar called the Casablanca, an obvious reference to the classic 1942 movie. As the bar’s location is one of the film’s rare establishing shots, you presume the Casablanca allusion must have been important to him. Tapping into Casablanca’s reputation does come as brief sentimental relief. Although if he’s suggesting their post-nuclear troubles amount to a hill of beans, and that we should care for his elegant, angst-ridden lovers like we do for those earthier romantic souls, Bogart and Bergman, it doesn’t work.
The woman almost loses the viewer with her incessant talking. The man doesn’t have much to say (and thankfully not ‘Here’s looking at you, kid’) except he does have the film’s most repeated line: ‘You are not endowed with memory.’
As far as she’s concerned, he’s definitely wrong there. She’s over-endowed with memory. And these scenes suddenly work well: flashbacks to her younger days in Occupied France show her head being shaved in the classic war-time shaming punishment for an inappropriate love affair with a German soldier (who is later killed by an unseen Resistance sniper). Though she’s now a beautiful and successful actress, the disgrace and sadness of forcibly losing her hair (not to mention her lover) still weigh on her.
