How I Became the Mr. Big of People Smuggling (15 page)

‘We'll talk next time,' I told him. ‘I'm having a break now, a well-deserved holiday. Girls and I are going to Darwin, then I'll be back home.'

We stopped at a roadhouse for lunch. As usual, Ingrid and I were debating about something. On the wall a television played with
the sound turned down. Ingrid was speaking but I lost track of her words, because I saw a refugee boat in a wild storm. Up until then, I had always imagined the boat trip they took as a fairly simple calm-water crossing. The footage showed the boat rear up and surf into a cliff, and people on the rocks above, throwing lifejackets and floats down to people in the water who were clinging to bits of timber. Waves were smashing into the jagged cliffs and I did not think anybody would be able to survive it. Ingrid and Sally turned around to watch. We sat silent while women and children clung to bits of debris and the waves smashed into the sharp rocks only metres away. Someone threw a rescue rope but it was useless.

‘How can your country do this?' asked Ingrid.

I would have argued with her. It was not my country, it was some other country. It was someone who put these people on an old boat with only enough fuel to get to Christmas Island. It was some war lord in a far-off place who had burned their crops. But twenty-seven people drowned and I could not answer her because those twenty-seven were Lucy, or Tariq, or Noroz.

You know we didn't go to Darwin. We went to Palmenter Station. By the time we got there it was coming up to the wet, and the build-up is never a time for making good decisions. We drove in and Spanner was there trying to organise things with Cookie and Simms and Charles because Newman was about to arrive with the next import. Except there wasn't a muster. No one had contacted the muster crew so although it was chaos it was a different sort of chaos to the usual muster.

There were forty-seven in the group. Newman was expanding. He said it was because two of the boats ended up landing at the same time but that was nonsense, he was wanting to bring in more. It took four days of chopper flights to get them all to the station but there was no raucous crowd and trucks weren't coming and going and there was less dust and it was altogether a better time.

We were completely unprepared for this. Every room was full. There were young kids in this lot too, something we hadn't had before. Simms put the women and girls and all the kids in the stationhouse but Sally insisted we put the families together. She crowded them into the two-bed dongas and moved some of the men across to share a dormitory in the stationhouse. It felt wrong to have men staying in the stationhouse. There were people everywhere, milling and moping around. Waiting. Waiting for us to do something, whatever it was that was next. Cookie was short of food to feed them all and we had only three vans that were working, and one of them was mine. Charles had returned from Melbourne with only one because the warehouse was locked up with no one around. He had spent several days visiting backpacker lodges but
it was out of tourist season and he only managed to find one van for sale, so finally, not knowing what else to do, he came home to Palmenter Station. Whoever had been running the warehouse part of the operation had gone. Presumably they had given up waiting for either Palmenter or the money to arrive. What I hoped, at least, was that after a while they had simply locked up and gone and there would be no questions or difficulties because of it. However I told Charles there had been a problem and that was why I had gone to Melbourne, and I was sorry there wasn't time to tell him before he left on the collection run, but in future he was to go nowhere near the warehouse. I might have given him the impression that some heavy shit went down, that I had sorted it, that I was big-time and Palmenter's right-hand man.

I was running the thing from the office. As fast as I could produce papers, more people would arrive. All the time it was people wanting something. It was so noisy, women in the kitchen and kids running up and down the hall, shouting, crying, or men sitting in the lounges, waiting. Waiting. That was the thing underneath all the noise and talk, people just sitting and waiting.

Hardly any of them spoke English. Once, a couple of years before this I had suggested to Palmenter that we could print them a list of useful words and I even suggested some English lessons.

‘Waste of time and effort, Son. Ship 'em in, ship 'em out. One thing you gotta learn is that these are low priority people,' he said. He said ‘low priority' as if he was describing a sick dog.

I got Ingrid and Sally to look after groups of them in the canteen. Ingrid taught them English and Sally helped her with the kids. With everyone in the canteen, that got them all out of my hair and gave me time to think.

I went to see Spanner.

‘What we gunna do?'

‘Fuckin' chaos all right. Two vans and the bus, we could send some off and bus the rest, several trips.'

‘Put 'em on a cattle truck and ship 'em south.'

He laughed. He thought I was joking. I probably was, but I am sure we could have got one of the cattle trucks back to do it.

‘Three vans. There's my one.'

‘Why did you come back?'

I shrugged. Why did I come back? Compassion? To hide the money? Because I was cold and lonely? To show off to Ingrid? Because I had nothing else to do? Because I missed Spanner? No simple answer.

‘Why'd you stay?' I asked.

‘Same reason.'

I laughed. At least we understood each other.

‘We could just piss off,' I said.

‘Can't do that. You seen 'em. Poor sods. And if we don't get them outta here soon the wet will break, be stuck here for a couple of months. Cookie's already short of food.'

These people needed our help. We couldn't abandon them here and to hand them in would condemn them to years in detention, and instead of being two weeks ahead of anybody looking for us, we would be right in the thick of it. I took charge.

‘Tell Simms to go out and shoot a beast. Two, a pig or goat as well. Least we can put on a barbecue and feed them well. Then Charles can go to Darwin to pick up some more vans. Give him some cash.'

‘Can't send him by himself. And he can only fit six on the truck, he'd have to do several trips.'

‘Well, we gotta get 'em away from here. It'll take a month to get enough vans in and by then it will be pissing down, so looks like we'll be stuck with at least some of them for a while. We could set up a couple of camps away a bit so if anyone comes the station doesn't look too much like a refugee centre. One up on the ridge and another down south, away from the river, like say down at Morgan's Well.'

I had thought about this before, the time when I was camped by myself and I had thought what a great place to set up a camp, have people stay. Right now it was the best plan I could think of. With ten refugees on the back of Bitsy we towed one of the old van bodies out to Morgan's Well. We took tools and timber and tarpaulins and rope and they knew exactly how to set up a camp. It took a bit of explaining and persuading but eventually they seemed to accept what was happening. We left them to it. Hopefully we would be back with extra food before the roads got too muddy. Cookie and Charles drove to Darwin to get supplies and as many vans as they
could fit on the truck. We offered work to two of the refugees, two who could drive and had reasonable English, so they went with Charles and would return with empty vans. If all went well we would have enough food and transport for everyone within two weeks and in the meantime hide as many as we could away at other camps.

It might sound as if this all happened quickly and easily, but in truth it was an uncoordinated shambles. We kept my van at the station and sent five south in another. Our third van had a bit of a mishap during driving lessons and became unroadworthy. We put up a second camp for another ten people, up on the ridge behind a large rock with great views across the riverflats. It was one of our more popular campsites. We called it Coffeehouse because we set up a stove inside an old van body we towed there, and there were table and chairs so it was a great place to chill with a view. Except that more beer got drunk there than coffee.

Spanner welded two extra sets of wheels onto Bitsy so she became an all-weather mud-loving crawler. There were six wheels side-by-side at the back and the diff had been welded so it was a bit unwieldy, but it would crawl anywhere. On hard ground it was just about impossible to turn and you had to be careful of trees and narrow gaps or big boulders or uneven ground, but to get out to Morgan's Well in the wet she was perfect. Later, Spanner bolted two couches to the back platform and it became our most popular tour. We didn't have to go anywhere particular because driving around in her was such a thrill.

The other popular activity was
Matilda
the land yacht, but I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here because all this happened a lot later and I was telling you about that muster. Non-muster.

I decided that we should stop calling them musters or imports and use the word tourists, but old habits die hard and, anyway, with what happened later it got too confusing to call everyone tourists, so imports it was. People used that as some sort of proof that we were treating them poorly, like cattle or goods, referring to them as imports, but that wasn't the case. Tour operators have always referred to their customers as ‘pax', an abbreviation surely just
as inhuman. Some even joke amongst themselves about ‘cattle' or refer to their coaches as ‘cattle trucks'.

That wet was one of the wettest ever. Charles and Cookie made it back in time but then the rains came and nothing would be coming or going for eight weeks. We were isolated but safe, and it was a happy place. We had thirty imports at the homestead. Ingrid and Sally ran English lessons every day in the canteen and some of them were real smart and learned quickly. Every second day Charles would drive Bitsy on a tour out to one of the camps, take ten from the homestead out to change places with the ten at the camp. Spanner worked on getting the vans ready. Charles had bought eight old vans in Darwin that Spanner wasn't happy with, fussy bugger that he was. He had plenty of time to check them over and fix any faults because we had decided it was too risky to send loaded vans south in the wet. Once on the tarmac they would be all right but there were several hundred kilometres of outback highway to cover before they got there. We all remembered those five who didn't make it.

Funny time was when we taught them Aussie Rules. They kept wanting to soccer the ball, or if they picked it up they would then throw it back like in rugby. Couldn't kick or handball for nuts. We played a continuous championship with four mixed teams and Spanner, Cookie, Simms and Charles as captains. Most afternoons there was a game. The team that lost got to change two of their players with the winning team so it was always a fairly close competition. After the match there was a barbecue dinner, or if it was raining too much we would crowd into the canteen and play pool and table tennis or some of them tried to teach us their card games.

By the end of the wet we were having a pretty good time and it was a shame to send them off, but we had to. I kept back Joseph and Chad, the two I had employed to go with Charles to Darwin. They were happy enough to stay and we needed more hands around the place. Also there was a young mother, Judy, who stayed on with her three-year-old boy. She helped out Cookie and later when there were more kids coming in we called her the governess and put her in charge of the homestead.

Of course during that wet I spent a lot of time in the office going over the books. I didn't play the games so much, I preferred to let the others do that so I had a lot of time looking through the accounts and records, searching the entire house and destroying anything incriminating. I couldn't think of anything else we should be doing.

We had so much money. I had spent some but not much of my million and I think Spanner had all of his, plus we had over half a million more that had come in since. I paid cash to everyone, to buy vans and food and fuel, and I gave ten grand to Cookie and Charles and five grand to Simms. Still the money kept piling up. I kept no records, but on the last trip alone, Newman had given me a bag with over two hundred thousand in it. I counted the money into envelopes holding fifty grand and some with smaller amounts. I hid these around the office. I didn't let people come into the office but even so I thought it was best to have the money in different hiding spots.

Ingrid and I moved in together. We needed all the donga rooms for arrivals and I could not explain to her why Palmenter's old bedroom was not being used. My excuse was that Palmenter might be coming back anytime, but she argued that it was unfair to leave the biggest room empty and if he did return we could simply move out for a few days. She did not know Palmenter. But then Spanner and I were the only ones who knew the truth. Palmenter was dead under the sand and never coming back.

Ingrid and I repainted and completely redecorated the room. Sally helped, and she moved into Margaret's room. We agreed it would be easier for one person to move out for a short time if ever Palmenter did return so we shifted all of his stuff in with Sally. The thought of Palmenter returning and happily accepting Margaret's room made me smile. Slowly I began to feel more comfortable in the house. Sometimes, with Sally in Margaret's old room and when there were no refugees, we were almost like a family.

It all seemed too simple. We waited at the station for Newman to rock up after the wet. He'd give us some people and a bag of cash and say see you next time. We'd put them in vans with a map and say see you later. There had to be more to it but I couldn't find it, and given that Palmenter had kept records and files of every import, neatly labelled by date, whatever extra there was couldn't have been run
from the station. Perhaps it was that simple. I think that is the thing in business. The best systems are simple and they run themselves and you sit back and count cash and wonder what else is it you are supposed to be doing.

After that wet Newman turned up with no people. He came straight to me and left Rob at the chopper and I was panicked into thinking he was planning a quick getaway, that perhaps he knew of or had guessed about Palmenter and I was in trouble. I was pretty sure that there was no love lost between Newman and Palmenter but you can never tell. I mentally planned my escape, but I didn't need to because Newman didn't ask after Palmenter or when he was due back or anything. He came straight to me like I was the man. He wasted no time in pleasantries other than looking at me hard, as if to say hello and can I trust you.

‘I've got a biggie. Hundred and fifty on their way.' He said it as if he had a big problem and I would be helping him out. You know, if you ask things like you are vulnerable, people can't help themselves. Clever.

‘Hundred and fifty!'

‘Yep. Women, children, oldies, the whole thing. Full rate. Can you deal with that many?'

What the hell. Here we go again, I thought. Spanner and I would say yes, then quietly disappear during the night. I laughed at the thought of Charles and Simms, of Cookie, trying to deal with, what would that be, six, seven days continuous chopper flights, a hundred and fifty people and no food and no vans. I would take Ingrid and Sally with me. Spanner could come as far as the roadhouse because there was only my van working. I'd drop him off with his million dollars in his backpack and I pictured him waving goodbye as Ingrid and Sally and I drove off: a thin potbellied man hitching a ride with a backpack full of cash and not much else.