BILLY TURNBULL

Greymouth Evening Star, 13 June 1936, Page 11

BILLY TURNBULL

CRUSOE OF HICI4S ISLAND. Mr W. Turnbull, lessee of Hicks Island, near Thursday Island, declares that a. Japanese sampan used his island as a depot for crude oil supplies, and that the Japanese stole some of his property. Residents of the island, he says, will have to use firearms if they are not protected. So Billv Turnbull comes into the news! Throughout the Coral Sea he’s known as the “Crusoe of Hicks Island.” A tall, thin Australian is Billy, with a drawl and a slow smile. He walks his tiny beach in whites and a clean white helmet, writes lan Idiiess in the “Sydney Morning Herald.” , , ~ Last time I was at Hicks Island it was with Jardine, son of Jardine of Somerset. In a little cutter we were cruising the Great Barrier Reef. Billy was in a daze, for he had found a sapphire mine! He saw visions of London and Faris, caught a glimpse of fair maids of many lands. The sapphires were all right, but very few and very snjall. A geological puzzle, for a time the occurrence intrigued the officials of the far-away Queensland Mines Department. One of the geologists had an interesting trip to inspect. Billy’s find. The sapphires were in blue clay among caverns of dead coral pushed up by the sea. A Queer place. We would go crawling through these liny tunnels and hear the moan of the sea coming from goodness knows where. It was a clammy feeling down there. We wondered what queer fishes must have chased one another through those subterranean galleries when that coral was being built down at the bottom of the sea. HIS CUTTER. Billy soon went back to his coconuts, his experimental sheep, and his garden. He could not knock out a crust with these alone, so he had a little cutter and at seasonal times used to collect trochus from the reefs, with an occasional lucky find of pearl-shell here and there. But Billy’s cutter was wrecked. Billy’s idea was to form an Australian coco- i nut plantation, and while the trees ! were growing to grow produce for < the distant pearling fleets of Thurs- < day Island.

it is a lonely group, the Home Group, a cluster of little islets about twelve miles from the mainland of Cape Y'ork Feninsula. No whites on the mainland, Billy’s only company a few nomad aborigines who would occasionally canoe across, and a South Sea Islander across on Haggerston Island, a few miles away. The nearest settlement is Thursday Island, about 100 miles north. In the soueast season there is brilliant sunlight and sparkling seas, but with the nor’west come the black squalls, the driving scuds of rain, and occasionally the howling cyclone. Billy’s little castle on the sea is a tiny house built on stilts. It is painted white and peeps out from among the dark-green mangroves on the tiniest of beaches. The high tides creep up-under the house, and with them comes an occasional big crocodile. These prowlers raided Billy’s pigsty, then one night they came in force, and the squeals of those suckers and sows and boar could hardly have been equalled by the howls in an imaginary Hades. To the splintering of breaking timber, the saurians smashed the sty, and all Billy’s piglets went screaming back to the beach in the jaws of crocodiles.

Billy used to sit on his back step and blaze at the crawling shadows of the brutes when they invaded ’ his fowlhouse. The fowls made nearly as much noise as the pigs. One night Billy rolled straight back into his doorway as a noisome bulk loomed up from the steps at his feet. He barricaded the door and smashed a hole through the floor to poke his rifle through. But the steps collapsed"under the beast as its claws scratched down the door.

BASH FOR JOURNEY.

Sir Hubert Wilkins was a guest of Billy's when Wilkins used his island as a base foi; his trip across the Peninsula. He got a beautiful collection of birds and butterflies from the island for some British museum. I hated the idea of those beautiful things dostin’ed for a museum, their song stilled for ever, their lovely wings no longer to flash under the kindly sun of the coral sea.

The island groups there are reef enclosed, their shores circled by mangroves, timbered with hardy timber and vine cluttered patches of scrub. Little hills, mostly rocky. Bligh, in his great boat trip, sailed past there alter he had got his first sight of the Australian coast at Restoration Rock. Hicks Island is the aboriginal “Spirit Island,” a sacred island where the spirits come and dance. In places among its hillocks are bare rock patches a quarter-acre or so in extent, gleaming brown under the sun. These bare surfaces are marked out in queer designs with stones enclosing the different spirit groups come to commemorate dances they danced when in human form on earth. Hundreds of , them dance there some nights on the anniversary of big festival seasons, according to the last of the natives. But the aborigines have died out on the island, as they almost have from the mainland opposite. And so Billy Turnbull comes into the news, still the Crusoe of Hicks Island. He has been having trouble with the .Japanese sampans. He and J together, in other yean?, have watched strange craft sail by his lonely island.- Watch sail glide past on moonlit nights that looked like a black shadow with moonlight glinting on a handkerchief. . But I feel it a shame, somehow; Billy is a nice, quiet chap, well educated, a kindly man. He would make a wonderful husband, and yet there he is all alone, for long periods, even without a man Friday.