Out on the Perimeter

So we (drummer clare ‘mooresy’ moore, bassist Stu ‘Thommo’ Thomas and guitarist Stu ‘Pez’ Perera and I) flew to Perth and stayed in a travelling salesmen’s hotel near the airport. Hookers were everywhere and traces of blow on the control panel of the lift. We made it to the airport again at nine the next morning and caught a small plane for a straight six-hour flight across the Indian Ocean. I read The Restoration of Capitalism in the USSR by an American communist author called Martin Nicolaus. Written in 1975, it follows a line from China and Albania when Stalin was great and there was a military coup after his death led by Khrushchev. Strangely, on the way to the airport we had heard an author of a new book on the Kennedys talking on the radio of the same thing happening in the United States in 1963. I believed it all.

I also started a book by W. Somerset Maugham called Ashenden. It is an espionage tale featuring an author recruited by the Secret Service. Must have been the inspiration for Jason King. We stopped to refuel at an airstrip in Exmouth where it was forbidden to take photos as there were American facilities nearby. We continued on for another three hours to the Cocos (Keeling) Islands.

We arrived at 3 pm local time and were greeted by our man in the Ocean, Ernie, who had a table laden with coconuts filled with punch. With little umbrellas in them. I informed him, without smiling, that I did not pollute my body with such poison, while the others ruined my game by grabbing their coconuts gleefully. We drove 200 metres to Ernie’s pad and then spent the day driving from one incredibly idyllic beach to another. This joint is outrageous and we were to be trapped here for a week!

The next day we took a boat to Direction Island. We called it DI as we were quickly old hands at being beach bums and it is a dumb in-joke about a piece of musical equipment. I was reassured about there being no danger of tsunamis as the water was so deep, then I noted a sign at the airport saying that the elevation was ten feet above sea level. We have been metric for many decades. Has it changed?

DI promised a ‘great rip’ we could swim in and that was ‘full of fish’. I had a mask and a snorkel. Again, I believed the world when I really shouldn’t have. A ‘great rip’?

There were no dogs or birds on the West Island, where we were staying. Home Island is where the Malays live. They were observing Ramadan at the time. There were feral cats and chooks and large land crabs. Apparently the land crabs can take out a chook. There are twenty-five other islands, which are uninhabited. Tony Mokbel should have come here.

We caught the ferry to Direction Island the next morning and set up camp in a nice clearing. I was feeling good. Then Clare Moore said, ‘It’s great, isn’t it. You forget you’re on a tiny speck in the middle of the ocean.’ My blood ran cold. I had put thoughts of earthquakes and tsunamis and hurricanes to the back of my mind and now I was presented with a vision of the very uselessness of our existence. I was then informed that the lagoon or bay we were sailing through was the mouth of a giant volcano and we were situated inside it. I laughed and looked forward to the day. Perhaps it would be my last. Again!

It was rather like Gilligan’s Island or any beach scene in the movie Age of Consent: staggeringly beautiful. No shops or cars or even roads on Direction Island, just the water, the coconut trees and the white sand. I raised the subject of us being stranded with the team and we decided that Stu Perera would get the coconuts, Stuart Thomas would score the fish and Clare Moore would build the shelter. My job would be to think of ways to communicate with passing boats.

We walked to the place where the rip was guaranteed to be. It was a sheltered inlet where a fast stream of water ran through at incredible speed. We swam out and flew along as if we had stepped onto a bus, gazing in awe through our goggles at the large fish and coral underneath. It was like a trip in a 3-D world. Clare Moore saw three sharks and a barracuda.

We spent the day underneath palm trees, swimming and relaxing. Idyllic. Clare went for a walk and saw the cove of thongs a friend had told us about. Every lonely lost thong in the Pacific has drifted towards this eerie graveyard of rubber footwear. And then we took the boat back to the West Island. There must have been something going on here. Life was too easy and people appeared too happy. I would endeavour, I decided, to root out their dark secret and inform the proper authorities on my return to civilisation.

We had our stage set up under a marquee in a little clearing opening onto a classic desert island lagoon-ical beach. The stage was bordered with coconuts and palm leaves. Warren Snowdon, federal member for Lingiari in the Northern Territory, was there to meet some far-flung constituents, and a member of the family who had owned and run the island until 1979 delivered an opening speech.

We played from three-thirty until five—a long set. A bunch of eight-year-olds were dancing up the front. I told them their pocket money had been tripled and they could drive the police car whenever they liked and didn’t have to go to school. They gave a big ‘yay’ after every bit of shameless pork barrelling. I then told them they had to buy me a house to live in on the island. We stopped and had something to eat and then did another short set. The adults all started dancing madly now, kicking up the sand in the moonlight. It was quite pagan. We did a lot of Elvis songs and I tore up my voice. I scared those little urchins with ‘One Night of Sin’ right into their mooshes. They trusted me and asked, ‘How do you drive the old people crazy?’ as their parents cavorted madly all about. I felt cool, like Rufus Thomas.

Clare Moore was playing an electronic drum kit and liked it. I wanted to get a guitar with no head to go totally futuristic. I ate some baklava made from Cocos honey. It was, to use the vernacular, awesome.

I rose early, as you seemed to do there, five-thirty, and went down to the beach. Facing Africa beyond the rolling surf, I read Trotsky with my feet up, as the sand was swarming with scuttling crabs. I sat cross-legged on an old concrete block and learned some new and exotic terms of abuse such as ‘house broken gradualist’ and ‘bourgeois vulgarian’. I tried some out on the crabs. They ran off, comically.

The day would involve a trip around a few of the ‘islands’, some of them mere reefs or sand bars you could walk across the water to. We settled on a larger piece of land for a while. We went over our survival plans and noted that there was a lean-to shelter on the island, so Clare’s work was done. There were plenty of coconuts so Stu Perera’s work was also in the pocket. I traced a small ‘HELP’ on the sand for practice and a plane immediately landed to see if we were okay. That worked! All we needed was the certainty of our fish supply. Stu T. said he was yet to Google about that and would do so when we got back. We felt let down by his efforts and talked to him about it. He took the criticism on the chin and vowed to be more of a team player in the future. We were cool, though, as long as we remembered where this island was.

We motored to another island and snorkelled around a reef and another rip area. We got into the current and flew over hundreds of fish and spiny urchins and glimpsed some baby sharks hiding in the rock shelves. I swam away as fast as I could. It was very enjoyable.

Tonight we would feast with ‘the King’.

We walked over the hollow logs that serve as a fence to the household. The man I refer to as ‘the King’ is JCR (John Clunies-Ross). His family were granted these twenty-seven islands in 1827 by the Crown and ruled them until 1978 when they sold up to the Australian Government. They had their own currency and all the people on the island worked on their business, which, I think, was copra.

Clunies-Ross is a big and powerful fellow. We had visited his giant clam and angel fish farm another day. He was not there then but had left the radio playing to the clams in this strange outdoor aquarium next to the sea. Next door had been a drydocked boat on the grass that a beautiful young siren was turning into an art gallery facing the rolling waves.

The feast was plentiful. We sat on Victorian chairs in a verandah/patio area with two goats running around and crying as well as two cute kittens. We ate chickpea curry and chilli chicken wings and some squid and rice. Copious Melbourne Bitter cans were thrown across the table to other people. The cans were referred to as ‘soldiers’ (tax-free booze!).

All the people there were working on the island as teachers or kite-ski instructors or fishermen. Everybody had a lusty appetite. JCR is indeed like something out of a Somerset Maugham story. The big family mansion is on Home Island and he resides here in the town. His son, also called JCR, was also at dinner and I asked about the original JCR. JCR the elder brought out a framed picture of his father looking like a movie star (Lesley Howard?), standing, in a blinding white linen suit, with the very young Queen Elizabeth. It was 1954 and she visited the island on her honeymoon lap of the Commonwealth. She did indeed look very taken with him but JCR took it further and said, ‘She wants him! She’s thinkin’, Fuck it! I’m on holiday! She thinks he’s hot!’ Not many people can bring out a family photo like that.

The night went on with much light-hearted banter. A millionaire Perth businessman came over for a chat. He spends four months of the year on the island. He had spent the morning exercising in his gym while watching a video of David Byrne. He knows the man who now owns the ‘Big JCR House’ and says he is a ‘lovely, eccentric fellow’.

JCR junior told me of the annual New Year’s Eve party and how he and his father take care of fireworks, stringing them all across the lagoon. How would it be to know the land and the sea and the tides and the wind and the seasons so intimately? To have so much family history entwined in such a place?

Another fellow, Brett, talked of fishing in Bass Strait with waves as high as power poles and falling overboard and how you have to take off your waterproofs and tie a knot in the legs and blow them up so you can rest your arms on them. I’ll remember that. He had fished for crays all over the place and was now working the kite skis. (A few months later we heard he’d copped an errant kite ski in the goolies and barely escaped with his life.) It was a very interesting collection of people in a very interesting place. I left early, dodging a couple of cans as they flew across the room. Which, of course, had no walls.

The next morning we took the seven-thirty ferry (cost $2) over to Home Island. At one point during the colonial period, there were about 1800 people who had been brought or enticed here to work the Clunies-Ross copra plantation. Home Island was smaller but more populous and was very quiet due to Ramadan. The streets were empty except for the occasional golf buggy–type vehicle that rolled along. Each house had an outdoor cooking area and some kind of boat. The power was supplemented by solar panels and some wind generators were being installed. Was this the future? I could deal with it in this tropical clime with the soft sea breezes. There was one shop and a mosque. We met Paul at the school; he was to take us on a guided tour. He arrived with four Malay kids, who gave us a bit of commentary as well. Two girls, who wore head scarves, and two boys.

We drove to the Big House, the mansion built by the Clunies-Ross family and which is now owned by a man who owns most of the taxis in Perth. I asked the girl sitting with me if she went to this school and she said they gathered guava here from the trees in the grounds after school. She also volunteered that it was haunted.

We walked up to the house and Paul spoke to the lady of the manor. She took us inside, which scared the kids and was something of a privilege for the rest of us. It was a big two-storey mansion on the very edge of the sea, on a high point. It had an exterior of white glazed bricks that were made in Singapore in the 1880s. They made it look strangely modern.

Inside it had furniture everywhere and double doors opening from the entrance to a grand ballroom. Different wings were added at different times and the present owners have an idea to bring it back to some ‘original’ state. Deciding which original state to approximate might be a bit of a job in itself, getting materials and workers in would be another. On the lawn is a shipping transport container and its contents also spill across the lawn, including a small cherry picker. It was rather like a tropical version of W.R. Hearst’s ‘Xanadu’.

In the entrance hall, the wood panelling, in teak or jarrah, ran from floor to ceiling. The lady called to the man of the house, and he presently came down the stairs like the proverbial ghost. The children shrank back. He was a squat little bull of a man with a pot belly protruding over the top of his straining-at-the waist boxer shorts. He had a voice like a demon and a white moustache stained red at the lips by his roll-up cigarettes. He took us through his discoveries of the construction of the building, the strength of the foundations and how various renovations over the years had altered the original design. He was another rich dominant bull used to the sound of his own voice and getting his own way. We didn’t say much and the kids were in shock. He apparently sleeps most of the day and wanders the house at night. He does not look like Bela Lugosi though.

We walked around to the kitchen and he showed us a guitar he had played the night before, a semi-acoustic jazz box by Ibanez. He said: ‘It looks good; they gotta! Same with dames, they gotta look good to start with!’ We laughed. His wife added that she would keep him to that. All the while we were being bitten to death by mosquitoes. They didn’t seem to be a problem anywhere else on the island. Nature’s justice, cruelling the scene for those on Knob head. We heard a story of the last Clunies-Ross to live and rule from the Big House coming back for a visit during the 1990s. The one who charmed the Queen. He got off the plane in his white suit and took his shoes off and walked quietly around the streets of the West Island before taking the ferry to his former dominion on Home Island where the Malays greeted him warmly.

In the ride back in the bus with the kids, I told them I saw the ghost while we were there at the Big House. I said that I shook my finger at him and told him to go away. I said that he had a white beard and a shark’s fin. One of the girls told me she could speak English and Malay and also read her Koran in Arabic. She volunteered that she loved the West Coast Eagles and also had a soft spot for Geelong. She pointed out her house and said she lived there with her two brothers and sisters while her parents had moved to another house to look after another sister who was having a baby. She does the cooking and cleaning, with help from her siblings.

As we said our goodbyes one of the boys asked what the ghost’s face looked like. I felt stupid and said I was only joking.

We found a shady bench to sit on at the beach and ate some sandwiches, discretely, due to those behind the curtained windows not being able to eat between sunrise and sunset. We made some pasta and ate with Ernie and then went to the radio station where we acted stupid for an hour or so. As you do. It occured to me later that way out here we would have been half of the audience, the ones who were talking. Still, being pros, we observed all on-air formalities and the stiffness of broadcasting as we spoke of important things to the audient void. Indian Ocean wind.

© Dave Graney 2011