Across town, some families refuse to leave the homes they’ve worked for because they lack trust. They don’t trust the Northern Territory administrators giving the evacuation orders, they don’t trust their neighbours, they don’t trust the police, and they don’t even trust the Japanese to make it all the way down to Darwin.
But dawn comes as it always does and the sky is the colour of 19 February 1942, as it can only be once. In the Tiwi Islands settlement of Nguiu on Bathurst Island, fifty miles north across the sea from Darwin, Father John McGrath carries out his morning duties as head of the Mission of the Sacred Heart. A dry, hot day. Father McGrath says his morning prayers, has his breakfast, moves through the island mission where some three hundred Tiwi Islanders are working in the fields, tending to gardens, and younger missionaries are making their way to the island school. He laughs with the islanders. He believes in humour and the words of Matthew: ‘Whatsoever you do to the least of my brethren you do to me.’ He has lived with the Tiwi Islanders here since 1927. He speaks their language. Some call him ‘The Apostle of the Tiwis’. Others call him John. He will one day be called ‘grandfather’ by these people and, many years from now, they will bury him in the red earth of this paradise island, with the sons of the island’s oldest women taking turns to gently shovel the dug soil back over his resting corpse. ‘Nampungi,’ they will whisper. Goodbye.
The sound reaches the island first. The vicious snarl of that sound, the growl of it. The wasp of it. The tiger of it. A violent symphony of three-blade propellers slicing air and overworked engines spitting smoke. The Tiwi farmers lower their tools and turn their heads to the blue Pacific sky. Father John McGrath raises his head with them. He believes in things that take place beyond that sky, but he can’t quite believe this sight he now sees beneath it.
A great and terrifying swarm of grey and green and silver aircraft in arrow-shaped attack formation, red rising sun circles painted on the undersides of their wings, heading south-east to Australia, but also somewhere more specific and the name of that evolutionary wonder enters the mind of the priest. Darwin, he tells himself. And he runs across the mission yards to an administration room, where he sits himself down at a radio transceiver, call sign Eight SE, linked to a series of communication and navigation aeradio stations scattered across mainland Australia in a network called AWA, Amalgamated Wireless of Australia. He speaks urgently into the transceiver’s mouthpiece, sends a message to the AWA Darwin Coastal Station, call sign VID. ‘Eight SE to VID,’ he says. ‘Big flight of planes passed over going south. Very high. Over.’
And a scratchy radio reply is returned from a duty officer in the Darwin Coastal Station. ‘Eight SE from VID. Message received. Stand by.’
But Father John McGrath cannot stand by because his heart and his legs are telling him to run, telling him there is already something raining from the high blue sky that is tearing up the red soil of Nguiu settlement, something splitting through timber rooftops and stabbing through walls. Many years from now, around Father John McGrath’s grave, the oldest Tiwi women will speak of the priest’s bravery and goodness on that morning of 19 February 1942: how he cared for them and led them to shelter, shielding them with his own God-given life. Some will refer to that fire and metal rain as machine-gun fire. Others will simply remember it as war. A whole world war that fell from the sky.
NIGHT SKIES TELL NO LIES
Her mouth is dry and she longs for the mattress in her bedroom and she longs for the road out of Darwin or the train to Alice Springs or the saddle on Danny the colt who runs like the wind blows. Molly digs slowly. She digs for so long that the sun comes up over Hollow Wood Cemetery and the cemetery stones surrounding Molly and the hole dampen with dew. Soon the hole is deeper than Molly is tall. Aubrey stands at the foot of the grave watching her dig. His flask is empty but what he’s drunk in the past twenty-four hours will keep him staggering for a while longer.
During her fifth hour of digging, Bert’s blade strikes something hard that Molly mistakes for rock. She drives harder with the shovel and feels an object beneath the dirt break into pieces. Her right hand reaches deep into the soil and emerges into the morning light again carrying a handful of brown dirt and fragments of her mother Violet’s shattered shinbone.
Molly reels back against the southern wall of the grave, her eyes now finding a ball of white bone in the dirt, like a wildly struck golf ball just landed a foot from her boots. It’s Violet Hook’s right kneecap. She turns her head away and her stomach turns with it and she vomits in her mouth but there’s no breakfast or lunch in it, only fluid. She spits and she closes her eyes, face tucked in the corner of the hole.
‘Please, don’t make me do this,’ Molly screams.
‘Dig, Molly, dig,’ says Aubrey Hook, leaning into the grave.
Molly shakes her head. Molly grits her teeth.
‘It’s you who’s mad, Uncle Aubrey,’ she says. ‘It’s you who’s lost his mind.’
‘Dig, Molly, dig,’ Aubrey repeats.
‘I know why you’re doing this,’ she says, not turning to look at her uncle. She breathes hard. Sweat across her forehead, sweat in her eyes. Dirt across her arms and legs. Dirt beneath her fingernails. That circle
