Tamam Shud (11 page)

Evatt's speech had its effect. The referendum in September 1951 failed and the Communist Party was allowed to continue to exist. And presumably Australia got better at spying.

Where atomic secrets were concerned, the places to be were Maralinga and Woomera. At Woomera they probably were testing rockets. Deserts are useful for that sort of thing. No chance of a wayward rocket wiping out anything other than the occasional kangaroo or the inconvenient and unimportant native. Or, indeed, Australian soldiers who didn't matter, either. As for Maralinga, it was relatively near to Adelaide (in Australian terms, 300 kilometres to the west) and the British were planning on exploding something there with more bang than any given rocket, so there one could expect Russian spies to be positively swarming, like the serpents.

The main port for both Maralinga and Woomera was Port Augusta, which would have been full of unionists. On the wharf itself there were Painters and Dockers, Carters and Drovers, Waterside Workers Federation, Seamen's Union and Railway members, a lot of whom were Communists and all of whom knew how to keep a secret. If there were spies trying to winkle out atomic secrets, you would have expected to find them in Port Augusta, not Adelaide. But the train does take you from Port Augusta to the city and various commentators have thought that Somerton Man got off a train on 30 November. Was it a train from Melbourne or, perhaps, from the other direction? Was Somerton Man coming into Adelaide with a dangerous secret for which someone killed him?

It is quite possible.

Consider the links between Somerton Man and my father. Alfred Greenwood, a signaller, had just been demobbed and spent some time stringing innumerable wires across the Woomera Rocket Range. I have a black-and-white photograph of a tall pole with a signaller sitting on the cross piece and nothing at all in any direction. ‘The lone and level sands stretch far away.' My dad reported that the desert was hot during the day, cold at
night, and had more venomous ‘Joe Blakes' than he considered really respectable.

Soldiers from Woomera were allowed to go on leave into Adelaide. My father said that his beautiful tan – they all seemed to be clad only in shorts and boots – washed off in the harshly chlorinated brackish waters of the City Baths. They were the same baths where Somerton Man shaved his face and washed his body on his last day. He and my father may have passed each other in the locker room, noticed that each other was stylishly dressed (‘sharp') and perhaps stopped to exchange a ritual ‘g'day'.

By 1948, governments all over were reluctantly releasing the reins of the economy that they had gripped so tightly during the war. Rationing – which had managed to equitably feed Britain, probably for the first time ever and had actually nourished previously unimportant creatures like pregnant women and children – was increasingly exasperating to the people in general. In Australia, some things were still rationed, notably petrol, but rationing in Australia had always been looser, possibly because this is a big country and someone usually knows someone who can lay their hands on a bit of beef or a pound of butter. For a consideration. Or a favour. Australians do not react well to regimentation.

Rationing was one of the reasons why the American soldiers had been so envied and loathed during the war. ‘Over paid, over sexed and over here.' Not only were
they better fed by their canteens, which had unheard of delights like ice-cream, but they had luxuries like perfume and stockings, dear to the female heart. They also wore very spiffy uniforms, tailored and smart, while the battle dress of the Australians was, in my father's phrase, censored for my delicate ears, like ‘a wet sack full of spaghetti tied up ugly'. My dad used to do tailoring and alterations for his mates. He taught me to sew on a sewing machine, then gratefully handed over the worst job, replacing zippers, to me. He was good like that. No wonder I have problems with gender roles. He also taught me to skip. Boxers train by skipping. He was very adept, although he didn't know the skipping rhyme ‘Old Mother Moore' so I had to learn it in the school yard.

I heard a riposte when I was a child that I have just understood now, as I am typing. A Yank says to an Aussie, ‘We got all the girls' and the Aussie replies, ‘Nah, mate, you just sorted them out for us'. Ouch. However, the Americans also had glamour, money, Big Bands and Swing. My father loved their music. He loved their tailoring. He liked their accents and he never had any trouble competing for female attention. If he had seen Somerton Man in the baths and decided, on the basis of his tailoring, that he was an American, he would still have said ‘g'day'. Then Somerton Man would have gone on to his date with destiny, while my father went on to the Central Market for a cup of coffee with his old mate Killer.

It is still difficult to find out exactly what everyone was doing at Woomera Rocket Range but it certainly needed a lot of wires. My father, otherwise known as Sig. Greenwood A 2nd/1st Aust Line Construction Sqn, took home with him the battery's copy of
Underground Cable Notes
and
Aerial Line Notes
. (Both of them were issued by the Postmaster General's (PMG) Department and property of the Australian Signaller Training Battalion Bonegilla. If they are still around, I may have to mortgage my house to pay the overdue fines.) The booklets tell signallers why they are important.

Lines of Communication are Vital in War. One pair of wires may be carrying 12 telephone and 18 telegraph messages at one time. Any of those messages may be a matter of life and death. A damaged insulator, a pole knocked over or a broken wire may:

Isolate defence areas;

Delay urgent national work;

Silence a call for aid;

Interrupt important preparations;

Hold back a vital warning;

Imperil troops and civilians;

And give the enemy the flying start that makes all the difference.

Cutting lines of communications is the first duty of enemy paratroops and

Fifth Columnists.

Don't do the enemy's job for him.

TRUNK LINES ARE LIFE LINES,

FOR YOUR SAFETY KEEP THEM INTACT.

What did my father tell me about Woomera?

That it was bloody hot during the day, then bloody cold at night. That the stars in the night sky were as close as lanterns. That it was top secret. That the food was lousy but that was standard. There has been no army in the history of the world where the soldiers have appreciated the food. Caesar's legions bitched about Roman army food, though that does seem to have been
un cuisine horreur
. At least modern armies actually feed their soldiers, unlike those unlucky enough to follow Napoleon, who had to rob peasants or starve. But the unvarying army food does explain why my father never ate apricot jam again. He would leave the house when we were making it, too. He told me that any concoction, however dreadful, could be improved by adding vegemite, because then it tasted of vegemite. My partner David employed this theory at a particularly frightful choral camp, apparently catered by lunatics and famous for its fish-flavoured chocolate mousse. He possessed himself of a large bottle of chilli sauce and put it on everything,
so that it at least tasted of something identifiable, like my father's vegemite.

My father told me that the baccarat school he started in an idle moment had been very successful, until he had offended one of his fellow soldiers, who then stranded him out in the middle of nowhere all day. The sun was unrelenting and my father had only boots, shorts and a hat. No water or food, no firearm. He stood next to the pole he had erected and moved around it with the sun, either repenting his bad deeds or meditating revenge – guess which? – as he revolved slowly with the shadow. He said he ignored the passing snakes and they ignored him. He played word games in his head. And then the jeep came and got him and he was given water. I do not know what he did to his assailants because he would not tell me.

He told me that the best way of avoiding official notice was to carry a clipboard and look busy. He did this for days before anyone questioned him. He said that the persons in any organisation with whom you absolutely must make friends are the cooks. And he volunteered to build a tennis court in order not to go back on the wires. He had never even considered doing so before and he could not play tennis. But he built it and it was still there when he left. He often worked terribly hard to avoid doing what he was told. A trait I have, regrettably, inherited.

My father told me that every couple of months jeeps full of Important People would arrive in conditions of greatest secrecy, including radio shutdown and darkness, and poke their noses into the arrangements. They would be flown over the rocket range and then everyone would be told to say nothing whatsoever about anything and they would go away again. He also said that if you wanted to know anything about Woomera, you just had to go to the pub, buy a certain person a beer and listen. So much for security. The closest big city to all of these places was – you guessed it – Adelaide, an excellent place for a nest of spies, because, as I may have mentioned before, there is something odd about Adelaide.

So am I prepared to claim that Somerton Man was working for the Russians? It is, at least, a possibility. As part of the ABC's attempt to solve the case of Somerton Man, in 1978, there was an interview with a spook, which deserves consideration, perhaps for what was not said rather than what was said. The interviewee, John Ruffels, is a researcher working on the theory that Somerton Man was a spy. He comes to an interesting conclusion about the manner of his death.

My theory is that he discarded the book … was taken some place for interrogation, not strong armed or beaten but injected with a truth drug, sodium pentothal for instance ... An overdose was administered. Then in a panic or some sort of
standard procedure ... they cleansed everything of labels and [dropped him on the beach to die].

I shall speak later about the use of sodium pentothal and I don't think that the murderers cleansed the body of labels because the suitcase was label-less as well. I think Somerton Man rendered himself unidentifiable. If the Tamam Shud case is an example of the Funny People at work, they were very inefficient.

But then, we knew that.

Chapter Seven

'Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days

Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:

Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,

And one by one back in the Closet lays.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
, stanza 49

In a very Australian move, Somerton Man was buried by a pub, the Elephant and Castle hotel in West Terrace, Adelaide. The publican, Leo Kenny, was a well-liked man and a member of a well-known family, and the pub itself was the main port of call for the funeral trade, the pathologists, the police and the stonemasons, which I'd wager meant that they had very little trouble from the local toughs. It takes a rare form of suicidal insanity to attack people who can kill you without a trace, declare you dead, bury you and erect your headstone While-U-Wait. Police pubs are usually very quiet. Officers who really need a quick drink to face the world outside get
desperately intense about being interrupted. Even my clients at the Magistrates Court, not known for their quick wit or sense of self-preservation, were never silly enough to try to hold up a police pub.

The patrons of the Elephant and Castle took up a collection so that Somerton Man should not be buried as a pauper in an unmarked grave. The Salvation Army conducted the service when he was interred on 14 June 1949. ‘This man had someone who loved him,' said Captain E J Webb. ‘He is known only to God.'

Over the grave a headstone was erected, which says, ‘Here lies the unknown man who was found at Somerton beach 1st Dec 1948'. Thereafter, a woman was observed putting a red rose on his grave every year on 1 December. Police interviewed the woman and reported that she had no connection to the case but, frustratingly, they do not give her name. Later, observers noticed that pebbles had been piled on the grave, which is a way of marking a Jewish resting place, but Somerton Man was uncircumcised and therefore very unlikely to be a Jew. Though it is possible. Some Jewish children, trapped in Germany and sent to Christian institutions by prescient parents, remained uncircumcised to escape annihilation. But Somerton Man, who must have been born around the turn of that century, was too old for this to have been his fate.

Years passed without much more than a series of by now predictable headlines declaring that the body of
Somerton Man had been identified, followed next day by the news that he had not. Lost luggage was inspected without result and missing persons were either found or continued missing. Nothing. Finally, on 14 March 1958, the long-suffering Coroner, Thomas Cleland, came to the reluctant conclusion that he had to close his inquiry, saying, ‘I, the said Justice of the Peace and the Coroner, do say that I am unable to say who the deceased was. He died on the shore at Somerton on the 1
^st
of December 1948. I am unable to say how he died or what was the cause of death'. And that, for the legal system, was that.