Yes, he remembered the cover. He also remembered the lettering on the seal ship label. ‘It was a blue label, deep blue to be exact. The vertical lettering HOLLAND SHIPPING. SOLOMONS at the top and at the bottom a space for the amount to be inked in and the word PAID. I’ll show you.’ He picked up a pencil and began sketching it for me. ‘A smudged postmark, I remember, the clerk in a hurry presumably and cancelling it when he should have hand-stamped it with a capital T and the amount due of ten centimes. Instead, it was left to the Post Office clerk in Cooktown to slap a Postage Due twopenny red and green on.’ And he added, ‘I was reminded of that cover only the other day, something I read in the Herald. A Holland ship in for engine repairs. It hadn’t occurred to me the company was still in existence.’
‘How long ago was this?’ I asked.
‘Last week, I think. It was only a short paragraph, and it caught my eye because it was headed “War Hero’s Grandson Sails In”. I read anything about the war. I caught the last two years of it, finishing up at Darwin.’
‘What sort of ship was it?’
‘An old warship. Landing craft, I think it said.’
‘Is it still here?’
‘Couldn’t tell you. It was only mentioned I think because of the name and the association with old Colonel Holland. He was one of the coast watchers on Bougainville. Stuck it there until the Americans arrived.’ He turned the piece of paper round so that I could see the sketch he had made. ‘There you are. That’s what it looked like.'
‘Unusual, isn’t it? And the way it came to me was unusual.’ He turned to a filing cabinet and began rummaging through a thick wad of letters.
‘You don’t happen to have any more of those ship labels, do you?’ I asked hopefully.
He laughed and shook his head. ‘Wish I had. I did well out of that sale. But if I’d had any more, I’d have probably sold them anyway. A man came here two or three months ago … Ah, here we are.’ And he handed me a letter written on cheap paper with a Mission address stamped on it in purple.
I am writing on behalf of Mr Minya Lewis, it began, and a little further down I found the information Keegan wanted … his mother died in Cooktown on February 16 of last year. Being her only son and his father not having been heard from since 1911, I am satisfied that he has right of possession to anything that was hers, and particularly to this letter which was in his father’s writing. She was apparently a very old woman and he found the letter in a box under her bed. As I believe there is some value in old stamps …
Lewis! Was this the same Lewis that Chips had talked about, the half-breed aborigine who had killed a man named Black Holland? ‘Can I have this photocopied?’ I asked.
He hesitated, then gave a little shrug. ‘You can keep it if you wish. I can’t see that it’s any use to me now.’ He asked me about the collection I had mentioned, and when I had satisfied his curiosity, he insisted on showing me some of his recent purchases. In the end I came out with a real bargain, a superb mint pair of the first issue Turks and Caicos Islands 3s. purple showing salt-raking against the background of a ship under sail; also a used set of the Papua New Guinea first issue of 1952, which attracted me because they were line-engraved and all of them different, the full set of fifteen stamps conveying a vivid picture of the strange primitive world that lay less than a thousand miles north-east of where I would be in two days’ time.
I must have been in that shop over an hour, for the evening rush hour had started when I reached the Ferry Terminal, intent on checking the docks to see if Holland’s ship was still there. But though the ferry I boarded gave me a good view of the docks, I saw nothing that resembled a landing craft, the ships all too big to be trading in the islands. It was dark by the time we docked at the quay again, a cold, blustery evening. I took a taxi across Pyrmont Bridge to Union Street, found a way into the docks and began searching the wharves on foot. My mood was quite different now, despite the wind and the bitter cold. Chance had presented me with a priceless opportunity, a ship I understood was bound for the Pacific islands. What more could I ask? I felt she must be there, and in the end I was proved right. I found her at last, up in the northern end of the docks, lying with her square stern close against some dilapidated sheds in a part of the docks that hadn’t been modernised, one of the Mark VIII LCTs, and she had HOLLAND LINE slapped across her rusty side in red.
There was no glimmer of light showing, and when I tried to go on board, I was shouted at by an old man with a beard who was walking a mongrel bitch as old and shaggy as himself among the empty beer cans littering the dirty quay. He knew nothing about the owners, wasn’t interested. The agents had given him the job, and as long as he was the watchman nobody went on board without written permission from them. The only information I got from him was that the engineers were still working on her.
I walked slowly the length of the vessel, recalling the cramped quarters, running my eye over her battered plates. She looked old and tired, which was hardly surprising, considering she had been built over thirty years ago. But at least the bridge housing looked well cared for. Her name, painted in black on the stern, was just visible below the flukes of the stern anchor: Perenna — Buka. The fact that Holland, after purchasing the vessel presumably from the Ministry of Defence, had re-named her for his sister started me thinking about her, wondering whether she had got my letter yet, if she was even now on her way to join him here.
Before returning to my hotel, I asked the watchman the name of the agents, and all the way back, walking briskly through the lit city with ragged clouds glowing red and the moon showing intermittently between their torn edges, I was remembering other nights of velvet humidity when I had stood on the compass platform of just such a ship conning her through the Molucca Straits. The things you do as a youngster remain incredibly vivid, and the more I thought about it, the more I was attracted to the idea of trying for a passage on the Perenna when the engine overhaul was finished. There was always the possibility that job prospects in the Solomons might be better than they seemed to be in Australia. But I knew bloody well the real reason was curiosity and the thought that if I could stay close to her brother, I might see her again, perhaps even be able to help her.
I rang the agents from the airport next morning, but was told the man dealing with the Perenna was out. Whoever it was speaking could give me no information about her sailing date, and when I asked whether it was Holland himself who had brought the ship to Sydney, he wanted to know my business and why I was making enquiries about her. In the end he suggested I ring again later and put the phone down.
By then my plane was being called, and once we were airborne I put all thought of the ship out of my mind, concentrating on Munnobungle and the notes in my briefcase. The sun was shining when we landed in Brisbane, and I spent most of the afternoon in the Kostas Polites office going over the details with Ted Cooper. We finally agreed that the auction should be in Brisbane on August 22, six weeks being, in his view, the minimum required to obtain full coverage for the sale in such a large area as Queensland. That evening he and his wife gave me an excellent dinner of mud crabs in a restaurant overlooking the Brisbane River, and the following day I went on to Townsville.