Dismissal

DAVE’S DREAM

Monday, 30 September 1946

It had to be done, we said, sitting there at the table, looking into their eyes. We told them how it came about and whatever else we thought they should know. The Japs. The war. The bomb. The need for further tests. We took them right through it — the evacuation and the build-up over the last few months. The target fleet offshore.

Then we asked for questions, but no one said anything. Nix. A whole bunch of them at the table just sitting there, absolutely still, but staring at us.

So after a bit we used a blackboard to show them how far away their island is from anywhere. We told them about the winds, the fall-out, and so on, and how all these things fitted together. We showed them Dave’s Dream with the bomb crew under its wing and some big photographs of the blast — goat pens, camera towers, palm trees ripped apart, frigates upended in the cloud of gunk. Stuff like that. We told them about the Russians and the need for total secrecy. We told them over and over, plain and simple, why they couldn’t go back to Bikini Atoll. They’d been dealt a lousy hand by the powers-that-be, but there it was. Kaput! Over and out.

Some of them began squinting at the photographs, right up close, this way and that. They passed them around, pointing, whispering away in their own language.

That isn’t Bikini, they said, after a while. Our lagoon isn’t all messed up like that. It must be some other place. We want to go back to the place we left. Our home.

They made the facts we were putting in front of them sound like fairy tales. To the islanders, talk about atomic power, a new force in the world, didn’t mean a damn thing. We have power too, they said. We know our island. Show us a feather on the beach and we can tell you what will happen that day. Breakers on the reef let us know what the next day holds. They went on for a while about stuff like that, but it all kept coming back to one big thing: we want to see our island again. As it was.

So we told them what it was like when the bomb went off. To make it easy for them, we told them it was like looking at the sun. A big flash! A day so bright it could make you blind! But that meant nothing to them either. A bright day is good, they said. We are used to looking at the sun. We know how it can be done. And one of them held three fingers up to his face.

We told them about contamination. You can’t see it, but when the cloud of gunk comes back to earth, it leaves a kind of curse. It’s there all day — when you’re fishing, eating or sleeping. It’s there all the time. It rots the flesh; it eats into your bones. It’s like getting old too quickly, we said. You get weaker and weaker. You can’t stay where you were because it’ll kill you.

They were craning forward but they couldn’t seem to take it in. We know how to live, they said. And we know how to grow old and die. A man must accept his fate.

The long and the short of it is that they simply couldn’t believe what we told them. They couldn’t believe that anyone would do such a thing, not to their island.

So, after a while, we were left with nothing more to say. The maps and photographs lay about on the table, on the floor. We looked at the notes we had taken and at each other. We were talking to them at cross-purposes and nothing seemed to make any sense. The more we stared at the photographs and the maps and the zigzags on the graph paper, the more we ourselves could scarcely believe it.

Somewhere in the pile of stuff in front of us was a story that had to be told but we couldn’t seem to get it out. Maybe no one could bear to listen to it or knew enough to make it clear. We made some progress with them later on, of course, but after that first meeting all we were left with was a general scratching of our heads, a feeling that we had a long way to go, and a few rough notes someone shoved in the file.

Report of Simon Dacey to the Micronesian Resettlement Authority: Appendix III

A TOUCH OF TREASON

Tuesday, 31 August 1954

The interview room contained a table and two straight-backed chairs. A filing cabinet stood in the far corner, its metal frame warmed by slats of light from the room’s only window. Afternoon light. Although the hour of the day, the length of the interview, seemed to be of little concern to the man from security, scribbling on his pad from time to time as if the spools on the tape-recorder at his elbow, whispering away as they slowly revolved, couldn’t be entirely trusted to capture everything.

The interviewer completed another note, peered at his machine for a moment, quickly checking the amount of blank tape remaining, and returned to the point he had been pursuing for the last half-hour with an air of increasing dissatisfaction. ‘The question is quite simple. Can you think of any reason why a code name is next to your address on the list Petrov brought with him?’

The question wasn’t simple, but the tape between the spools kept slithering smoothly onwards, connecting the vanished world of then — the random bits and pieces comprising what had been said and done in the years before Petrov defected — to the make-believe world of now, where any account of what had taken place had to assume an acceptable form in the mind of officialdom or be condemned as a lie.

‘So what’s your answer?’ The man from security was insistent. ‘Why is the code name Dutch next to your address?’

Simon Dacey glanced at the list of names again, and at the perplexing word. Dutch. This, like the other so-called code names on the list, was typewritten, but the address of the Institute of Pacific Relations had been added by hand. In thick black ink. It was followed by another handwritten note, pencilled in as if it were an afterthought: San Francisco Conference.

He leaned forward, as if trying to extract meaning from the list. This was not the moment to step out of line or be argumentative. Simon had only to think of poor Alger Hiss to be reminded of that. Seconded from the US State Department to act as Secretary-General of the Conference, Alger’s plea that he had never passed secrets to a Soviet network had led eventually to his conviction for perjury. He was still in gaol, probably. Things would have gone better for Alger if he had been polite to his accusers, and made a show of being helpful.

‘Dutch,’ Simon murmured. ‘Means nothing to me.’

The man from security moved on. ‘Why were you at the Conference?’

‘In the aftermath of the Jap retreat, people like me at the Institute had expertise to offer about the status of various islands in the Pacific region.’

The chinks of light from the window slats were a reminder to Simon that somewhere outside, beyond Sydney Harbour, lay the Pacific Ocean and all the other-worldly islands and atolls scattered across that vast mosaic, the source of his early enthusiasms, the scene of his post-graduate research. That part of his life, at least, couldn’t be faulted.

‘The Indonesian archipelago,’ he added. ‘Timor. New Guinea. The Micronesian islands. Former colonies. I was attached to the Secretary-General’s staff at the San Francisco Conference, not as a diplomat, but as an expert adviser.’

‘Bikini Atoll?’

The man from security kept coming back to that too — Appendix III to Simon’s report to the Micronesian Resettlement Authority. The report that had taken so long to prepare all those years ago lay on the table between them, the yellowing foolscap pages held together by a rusted bulldog clip.

Dave’s Dream, he had called it, that section of his report. It was a way of spicing things up, he had thought at the time, as he hammered out the report and all the attachments on his portable typewriter at the base camp on Guam. It would add an extra dimension to the graphs and statistics, a human touch.

Staring at the dog-eared front page of the report now with its various underlinings and asterisks — question marks in the margin signifying doubt about certain passages — it struck Simon that he might have revealed too much. Alger Hiss had been convicted because the copies of official documents passed to his main accuser had matched the typeface of Alger’s portable Woodstock. A faulty keyboard or some other flaw in a man’s past could be enough to drag him down.

‘Bikini Atoll?’ the man from security repeated. ‘Monte Bello? Truk? Well before Hiroshima, the Americans knew that sites for other atomic tests would have to be found. Does that bear upon the presence of your name on Petrov’s list?’

‘My name isn’t on Petrov’s list.’

Impatiently, the man from security reached across and pointed. ‘You were working at that address in Sydney before Petrov defected. You were the only person from the Institute who went to the San Francisco Conference. There’s a clear connection between you and the person code-named Dutch.’

‘A connection depending on a pencilled note that could have been added afterwards. By anyone — at any time.’

The interrogator (for Simon had come to think of him as that) leaned back, hands behind his head, smiling affably, as if trying to present himself — for a moment — as a friendly chap. ‘Don’t misunderstand me. There are all sorts of names on the list. Journalists. Writers. The editors of literary magazines. Businessmen who have been to the Soviet Union. We’re just trying to clear up who sits where.’

Now it was Simon’s turn to smile. ‘Before the Royal Commission into the Petrov affair completes its work. The witch-hunt.’

The hands were back on the table beside the file. ‘We want clear answers so that innocent people won’t be dragged in and named unfairly.’

‘Of course you do,’ Simon agreed. ‘Which is why you need more than a pencilled note to prove that I’m the one called Dutch.’

‘We may have more than you think. The notes you made at San Francisco. The report you made later to the Micronesian Resettlement Authority. Bits about the Monte Bello tests in Document J. Other stuff dragged out of the files, going right back to the start of your career, and what you said to keep your security clearance. Think about this! We have a source who saw you at a social function with Mr Hiss at the start of the Conference. You were heard to say that a diplomat must have a touch of duplicity in his nature.’ The man from security paused. ‘That’s an odd thing to say — I wonder what you meant by it?’

So there it was, Simon reflected, the familiar line of questioning — the San Francisco Conference; you and Alger Hiss. As if nothing else Simon Dacey had ever done mattered. Each question led inevitably to another, summoning up the distant conferees, the ghostly presences: Hiss, Evatt, Gromyko, and all the rest. It was so unfair! The San Francisco Conference had brought forth the United Nations. In the last months of the war a gathering of delegates from countries big and small had managed to change the world. How come he was never asked about that — the bright day when the Charter was approved?

The man from security wasn’t interested in things like that, Simon reminded himself. Now was not the time to flinch, or be flustered.

‘Your informant has it wrong,’ Simon replied, affecting an air of nonchalance. ‘I was at a social function when something similar was said, but not by me. By someone else. And I seem to recall that duplicity was not the word the speaker used. It happened at a cocktail party where the Australian delegation was housed.’

‘The Sir Francis Drake Hotel!’ The interrogator was leaning forward again, spectacles glinting, as if this might be his one chance to hack his way into the tent and get a few straight answers. ‘Let me know exactly what was said. And by whom.’

Simon shrugged. ‘It was quite a party. People from various delegations milling about. I happened to be alongside Mr Hiss when one of the Australians made a quip along the lines, A diplomat is a man with a touch of treason in his nature. That’s all it was. A lighthearted quip among diplomats. People laughed. At San Francisco, things like that were being said all the time. That quip even found its way into one of the social columns the next day.’

The man from security wasn’t interested in social-column claptrap. ‘The Sir Francis Drake Hotel!’ He uttered the name again as if it stood for all the trials and iniquities faced by the famous mariner, from Spanish plots at home to fleets in far-off places infested by termites and wood rot. ‘Now we’re getting somewhere!’ His voice cracked with contempt as he described the one he was looking for. ‘A man with a touch of treason in his nature!’

Hand-delivered to the ground-floor reception area of Phillip Street Chambers in Sydney’s central business district, the envelope containing Simon Dacey’s hurried note said simply: ‘For Roy Temple’. The words ‘Private and Confidential/Very Urgent’ had been added to the bottom left-hand corner of the envelope in a rough scrawl.

The receptionist covered the memorandum of advice she was working on by pulling the hood over her typewriter. Then, without further precaution, she hastened upstairs to the sanctum on the fourth floor where Mr Temple conducted his legal practice — behind a door marked ‘Roy’s Room’.

At a desk in that room the envelope was slit open with a silver paperknife and the note within quickly unfolded.

ASIO has been quizzing me about the Petrov papers and Document J — the Amerasia affair, Bikini etc. If we don’t get our stories straight they’ll pull us apart in the witness box. So meet me at Usher’s Hotel after work.

Simon Dacey

For Roy Temple, this unwelcome piece of intelligence lying on his desk top, beside the eviscerated envelope, had all the attractive qualities of a trapdoor above a deep, black hole. He walked to the window of his office and stared unseeing at the street below.

Unlike most of his fellow barristers on the fourth floor of Phillip Street Chambers, Roy Temple called the small segment of the building that belonged to him his ‘room’. The other barristers on the fourth floor had been ruffled, even annoyed, by this initially, because the long-established traditions of the Bar required that if a newcomer were fortunate enough to be admitted to Phillip Street Chambers, he would describe the fraction of the whole vested in him not as his ‘room’ or ‘office’, but as his ‘chambers’, so that all of those buzzing about the legal honeycomb would be united, to some extent at least, by adherence to a common understanding.

Chambers. A solid word. An appropriate description.

This had always been the usage at the neighbouring Denman Chambers, and at Selborne Chambers too, and it was certainly the custom further along Phillip Street where the acknowledged leader of the Sydney Bar, Sir Garfield Barwick, attended to the flow of Bar Association business from a commanding position on the fifth floor of Chalfont Chambers.

According to rumour — ever-present in the tightly knit Phillip Street community — Barwick and John Kerr and other leading figures at the Bar had found a site near King Street, close to the Supreme Court of New South Wales, upon which a company to be called Counsel’s Chambers would soon be constructing an entirely new establishment.

Upon completion, those behind the scheme contended, communal areas and the hotch-potch of separate chambers within the new building would eventually resemble the pleasing diversity of the ancient Inns of Court in London — as a concept, if not as an architectural reality. This, of course, was bound to facilitate the preservation and enhancement of the many common law traditions that affected nearly every corner of legal practice throughout Australia in 1954.

To Roy Temple, talk of this kind, even using the word ‘chambers’, was an aberration, although those he met daily in Phillip Street Chambers and at the various courts in the city where he spent his working day weren’t aware of his disdain for archaic usage (including the citation of Latin maxims), because he wasn’t inclined to debate such matters. Roy’s sardonic quips about legal rigmarole didn’t count, of course, for they were in keeping with certain other traditions of the Bar: the use of irony and understatement, dry wit. His membership of radical clubs at university, his presence at meetings of the Communist Party before the war (mostly at the urging of his elder sister), were well behind him, and known to only a few of his contemporaries. In this, as in most other things, he kept his own counsel.

Roy had let it be known that his use of the word ‘room’ to describe his tiny fiefdom in the building was simply a hangover from an earlier phase of his career, his time as a public servant in Canberra. It served as a reminder that he wasn’t just a barrister but a man who had once led an entirely different life, in the same way that many of the returned soldiers at the Bar kept medals and photographs on display as mementos of another, earlier, more adventurous existence.

And so, Roy’s stance, a source of disapproval to begin with, had been gradually accepted by his fellow barristers. It wasn’t long before Roy’s deviation from the norm was being referred to with veiled respect, especially by the younger advocates. Freshly returned from a bruising encounter in court with an ‘irate judge’, or a ‘mad witness’, an up-and-coming barrister would often complete his version of the tale by confessing that he had finished up in Roy’s room for some quick advice.

Yes, Roy’s room was the place to look at a problem in a new light, or to come up with an overnight strategy, or to abandon several pages of verbose submissions in order to identify the only plea that had any real chance of winning the case.

Inevitably, it was said by some of Roy’s older and less generous colleagues in the building, referring more to his style of advocacy than to his well-groomed appearance, that ‘Roy Temple is a bit too smooth for my liking’. Indeed, an old grouch on the ground floor, who acted mostly for insurers, and was renowned for his scepticism about human beings and the dubious claims they made, had once been heard to describe the occupant of Roy’s room as ‘dapper to the point of being slick’, but utterances of this kind came mostly from those who had lost a case against Roy Temple, and felt that in some indefinable way their opponent’s win was due more to sophistry and subtle blandishments than to straightforward, manly argument.

It was generally understood by his fellow barristers that after law school in Sydney, and a few years abroad at Oxford, Roy Temple had spent a short period at the Bar before being seconded to the Department of External Affairs in Canberra. There, throughout the war years, he had worked in the Post-Hostilities Section of the Department under the former High Court judge and current leader of the federal Labor Party, Dr Herbert Vere Evatt.

A few at Phillip Street Chambers, being slightly better informed, or because they had known Roy from law school days, were aware that he had accompanied Dr Evatt to the San Francisco Conference as the war in the Pacific was drawing to a close. But even those who had taken more than a cursory interest in Roy’s career were inclined to assume that Roy’s love of the law, the cut and thrust of legal practice, had drawn him back to the Bar after the war was over. His experience in international affairs and the part he had played in drafting the Charter of the United Nations, it was said, explained the varying hues of some of Roy’s clients — people from Nauru or Christmas Island with claims against the British Phosphate Commission; or Indians with troubles in Fiji. Clients and esoteric claims like that probably added extra interest to Roy’s legal practice.

That same experience, shrewd observers were inclined to reason, also explained — and arguably justified — that unusual sign on his door: ‘Roy’s Room’.

So there it was. Roy Temple was different, but he was okay. To nearly all his colleagues at the Bar, Roy was courteous without being compliant; he was adroit without being slippery; he was knowledgeable without being too clever by half. If you appeared against him in court you were in for a hard time. He was one of the best.

That consensus suited Roy. He said little about the exact nature of his responsibilities during his time away from the Bar, or the circumstances leading to his return. He left the war stories to raconteurs, and many of those who came back to the Bar after war service were willing to oblige, recalling escapades in the Middle East, skirmishes in Timor and New Guinea, tight spots, lucky escapes, near misses. Others reminisced about the unusual characters they had chanced upon in far-off places, or held forth about the home front and the legendary Alf Conlan — known to many at the Bar from university days.

Some said Conlan’s pipe and the consequential smokescreen around him had played a part in his surprising rise to power. Having attached himself early on to the coat-tails of General Blamey, Australia’s great Pacific warrior, Alf Conlan had managed to transform a small research unit in the army into a so-called ‘Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs’. By a further act of bureaucratic metamorphosis — more smoke and mirrors, according to his critics — this became the Australian School of Pacific Administration, an outfit soon headed by Conlan’s loyal acolyte, John Kerr — another barrister-in-exile during the war years.

Sometimes, of course, in the front bar or the upstairs lounge of the Tudor Hotel, the oft-told lawyers’ tales took a more serious turn, focusing on the Japanese war trials and the part played by local advocates in exposing the enemy’s patent iniquities, before the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended it all. If post-war Russian intransigence or the Iron Curtain were mentioned, the group would look to Roy for an opinion. He was careful not to disappoint the congenial crew around him. He might refer to what he had once heard Gromyko say on behalf of the Russians at San Francisco, or to what Dr Evatt had said to Mr Stettinius or Adlai Stevenson in trying to change the American vote on the veto power.

Asides of this kind were usually enough to suggest that if Roy were at liberty to speak at greater length he would probably have much of interest to say, especially now, in the depths of the Cold War era, when belligerence by the communist powers and McCarthyism in the United States made the future seem unsettled. But soon, without any further effort on his part, the conversation would veer off in some other direction, safely deflected, leaving Roy to go quietly about his business.

Roy had contrived to say little about his work with the Post-Hostilities Section of the Department of External Affairs, but was that already a little too much? That was the question Roy put to himself from time to time, and it came to him again, this afternoon, as he left the window and sat at the broad desk in his room with Simon Dacey’s hand-delivered note in front of him. Would he be at all troubled by the note if he had made no mention of his work during the war years, the time he had spent at international conferences, his involvement in post-war reconstruction?

There might be less explaining to do, he concluded, less to be covered up, if he had maintained an absolute silence about his time with Dr Evatt and other members of the Australian delegation at the San Francisco Conference.

These were not the only queries that came to mind as Roy stared at his old friend’s familiar scrawl — this unwelcome postscript to the otherwise pleasant enough day. What would Simon Dacey do and say, if pressed? And how much had he said already? Since returning to the Bar, Roy had worked hard to ensure that his career sounded no more extraordinary than the careers of many others who had been caught up in the mayhem of the war years. This was not the moment to have his progress obstructed by ugly rumours, or by whatever a panic-stricken Dacey might divulge.

Roy’s separation from the Department of External Affairs in Canberra had been effected quickly and smoothly, and as far as he was aware only one or two people at a level just below the Minister or in the upper echelons of ASIO — the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation — knew of the allegations that had forced him out: the claim that he or one of his colleagues had copied top-secret cables concerning Bikini and, later, the British atomic tests on the Monte Bello islands in the Indian Ocean. Those copies had allegedly been passed on to a communist agent with links to the Russian embassy. Roy’s departure had been hushed up and that was how he wanted the whole thing to remain. Swept away; out of sight.

He certainly had no wish to be caught up in Dr Evatt’s recent confrontation with the Royal Commission inquiring into Petrov’s defection — an attack on ASIO involving accusations of fraud and conspiracy. Evatt’s turbulent court appearances, the slanging match initiated by the temperamental opposition leader, had filled the headlines over the last few days, foreshadowing worse to come.

But there it was — on the desk beside the slit envelope — Simon Dacey’s note. The agitated reference to being quizzed by ASIO about Petrov and Document J. Simon’s insistence that Roy meet him at Usher’s Hotel.

Typical, Roy reflected. Even in a crisis, at the very moment when everything might come tumbling down, Simon had to carry on like an old New Guinea hand by setting up a get-together in the bar of Usher’s, the stamping ground frequented by all the old New Guinea hands before the war — a place to swap their far-fetched and obviously exaggerated tales.

It wasn’t hard to visualise the scene that had probably taken shape in Simon’s mind when he hastily scribbled his note, a scene enlivened, no doubt, by more than a wee drop from the author’s trusty hip flask.

In Simon’s eye, there would be explorers, prospectors, plantation owners, captains of patched-up luggers — each with a foot on the brass rail of the bar, regaling each other with fresh tidings of unknown tribes of savage head-hunters, or close shaves after ambushes at Telefomin, or alluvial gold discoveries on the river flats at Bulolo, followed by another round of crocodile stories and innuendo about Errol Flynn’s buxom mistress at the Hotel Cecil in Lae in the early 1930s.

And somewhere in the background of the hazy scene, one was bound to catch a glimpse of a younger Simon Dacey himself, the intrepid anthropologist, about to venture forth on the Sepik River, determined to make his mark, kitted out in khaki.

The problem with that scene, Roy reminded himself, apart from being a nostalgic fantasy (now that Usher’s Hotel was patronised mainly by stockbrokers and accountants or visiting cricket teams), were the flawed perceptions that propped up the creator’s vision. Simon could never see things as they really were. He had lost his job with the Micronesian Resettlement Authority for laying it on too thick — he had been warned not to include the provocative Dave’s Dream section in his report, but to no avail — and it wasn’t long after the loss of that job that Simon had fallen out with the US team over his work in the Marshall Islands and Guam.

Today, it seemed, Simon was being forced to take another look at the root cause of his professional decline in recent years — the Amerasia affair, Bikini et cetera. Would he take others down with him if he were brought before the Petrov Commission? Would he crumble if cross-examined about the Institute of Pacific Relations and the Pacific School? What would he say about the people on Dr Evatt’s team at the San Francisco Conference? The names in Document J.

Roy grimaced. There was no way out of it. He had to find out what was happening at the Petrov Commission, what lay behind Simon’s note. Roy had spent much of his adult life gathering information for others. The time had come to assess the data on his own behalf.

Roy’s room was not the only part of Phillip Street Chambers with an unusual name. The senior clerk, Dudley Benn — commonly called Mr B — occupied a tiny office adjacent to the main reception counter on the ground floor. Dominated by a central desk, chock-a-block with cupboards and bookshelves, Mr B’s room was a crucial port of call for anyone within the building in search of scuttlebutt or news. It was widely known as the ‘blue room’.

Rumour had it that the windows of the room in question had once overlooked a single-storeyed cottage standing back from the main property alignment. For many years, this weatherboard dwelling, increasingly at odds with the office blocks piled up around it, had been occupied by a certain Dr Fiaschi, as an abode, and as a clinic.

Phillip Street at that time was the haunt of loose women, and the blue light above the entrance to Dr Fiaschi’s porch showed that he treated venereal diseases. By the time Roy arrived at Phillip Street Chambers, Dr Fiaschi’s cottage had been demolished and the streetwalkers had gravitated towards Darlinghurst, or moved on to Kings Cross, leaving only a ribald myth to excite the minds of those who stared at the old site. And so it was that the cubbyhole comprising Mr B’s domain had become the ‘blue room’, although some visitors, in moments of exasperation, when a brief that was supposed to have been left on Mr