Information about the book
The Cassedy Connection
I never met my grandfather. He died nine years to the day before I was born. What I knew of him was pieced together from conversations with my grandmother. She delighted in the opportunity to evoke his name or field a question about his life, and I did not once hear her utter a bad word about him.
When asked why she kept knocking back suitors in the four decades of her widowhood, she said, 'None of them ever came close to Bryan.' His death was the greatest tragedy of her life, but she seldom indulged feelings of self-pity. She became a bulwark of wisdom, compassion and patience to her five children, and, later on, a source of fun and wonder to her grandchildren. When she died, the family lost its figurehead.
We gathered in her garden on the day of her funeral, steeling ourselves against the encroaching sadness of final farewell. I left the stilted conversation that caged in our grief and walked through her house, drinking in every detail of a place I would never see again. I paused in front of an old cedar-wood bookcase where my grandmother had arranged her most prized photos. Amid all the weddings, Christmas dinners, birthdays, graduations, grandchildren and great-grandchildren were pictures of Bryan. They were sundry keepsakes of a life of staggering high achievement.
Here was Bryan at the foot of a satellite whose construction he oversaw, moments before a rocket launched it into outer space; here he was in a park in Leningrad at the height of the Cold War, the delegate representing Australia at an international space conference; here he was in Maralinga, the distinguished scientist observing the atomic-bomb tests; here he posed for his official photograph as director of Australia's Antarctic Division; and here he was looking like Errol Flynn, the decorated squadron leader with moustache neatly clipped and hat rakishly angled.
I had never felt as remote from my grandfather as I did at that moment. There were no photos of him holding a baby or laughing with his children or smiling with his bride on his wedding day. He was on his own in all of them, but for one exception.
The photo was smaller than the others, discreetly placed at the edge of the bookcase. It captured my grandfather later in his life standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a man of similar age and proportions, both of them dressed in dark suits and ties. A wintry background of leafless trees and cloudy sky scarcely dimmed the quiet enthusiasm each man exuded in the other's company. I picked it up in the hope that closer inspection might put a name to the man whose life was sufficiently exalted to share space with my grandfather. I took it out of the frame and flipped it around. On the back, my grandmother had scrawled a name in pencil: Hiram Cassedy.
Cassedy. The very sight of the name called forth images formed in my youth. In my mind's eye, I could see a party of emaciated castaways covered in tropical ulcers gathered on a beach, a full moon lighting up the crashing surf. A bare-chested Timorese man moves among the group clutching a fistful of Dutch guilders. A radioman, malaria-ravaged and undernourished, crouches alongside an enormous transceiver, frantically scribbling an encoded message on the back of a corn leaf. Nearby, a crucifix fashioned from palm branches tilts at an angle above a freshly dug grave. And, standing slightly apart – his face bearded and gaunt, his clothes torn and filthy – is my grandfather. In one hand, he clasps a letter sent from the Japanese Army demanding surrender; in the other, he holds a torch. Later that night, my grandfather would meet Hiram Cassedy, the lynchpin in an event that most believed defined my grandfather's life and some thought ended it prematurely.
The photo I held was taken years later, on the occasion of his second encounter with Cassedy. It was a rare souvenir honouring a rescue mission of such implausibility that the Allies covered it up in the hope of using it again. When the press eventually reported the event, the story was lost in a war filled with like tales of bravery, heroism and despair.
I placed the photo back in its frame and drew it close. The key to understanding my grandfather lay at the heart of this photo and in understanding the event it commemorated. I placed it back on the bookcase and returned to my grieving family. That was when I decided to go to Timor.
❖ ❖ ❖
Everyone who has travelled to Kupang in West Timor has heard of the Lavalon Bar. It sits above a beachhead that pushes into the aqua waters of Kupang Bay. The building is rectangular and runs perpendicular to the busy esplanade at its back. There is no bench to serve drinks, just plastic chairs arranged around five tables. A corrugated-iron roof propped up by thin blue posts, a fixed wall whose doorway leads into a private room and a wooden fence on the bar's seaward side are all that protect patrons from the weather. Otherwise, it is at all times open to the elements and the public.
The Lavalon serves the dual purpose of watering hole and tourist centre for a steady legion of adventurers and backpackers. Foreigners come here for everything – a ferry ticket to the island of Rote, accommodation at the adjacent hostel, free wi-fi, a bottle of Bintang – and the place draws some remarkable people. On any given day, you might find a tattooed Australian surfer talking Rotenese breaks, an American yachtsman sailing the Indonesian archipelago or a Dutch ethnographer returned from fieldwork in Timor's mountainous interior.
Only a handful of locals ever come inside. Most are middle-aged men with teeth stained red by betel nut. They hawk textiles, defunct 20-guilder coins, bullet casings and other relics from an age when this region was part of the sprawling Dutch colony known as the Netherlands East Indies (NEI). The owner, a former Javanese film star named Edwin Merrick, takes a commission from each item sold. Edwin walks about his bar shirtless – eyes peering over trademark spectacles, face slightly obscured beneath a shallow-peak cap – making sure glasses are kept full. He beckons me over to a table the moment I push through the yin-and-yang-shaped saloon doors.
'Selamat pagi,' he says, pouring out a glass of Bintang and drawing up a chair.
We spend an hour talking about the war beneath a ceiling fan that squeaks through the thick air. At one point, he waves to a wall of faded photos of gun emplacements, pillboxes and caves built during the Japanese occupation. 'If you like,' he says, 'I can arrange a guided tour.'
I am more interested in following in the footsteps of the group my grandfather led out of Kupang on the day the Japanese invaded.
'Where did they go?' he asks.
I reach into my bag and pull out a map. 'A village called Kapsali on the northern coast.'
Edwin leans forward, intrigued. 'You have come at the right time,' he says. 'This village cannot be reached in the wet season. Too many rivers.' The line on the map that marks the route my grandfather took causes Edwin to click his tongue. 'Travelling over Fatule'u is very dangerous.'
'What is Fatule'u?'
Edwin points across the choppy waters winking in the sunlight towards a mountain group on the far side of Kupang Bay. 'Fatule'u means 'forbidden rock',' he says. 'Better to take a car down this road.'
He traces his finger along a line on the map that follows the half-moon curve of Kupang Bay and turns north up the coast. 'I will arrange a driver and guide to meet you here tomorrow at first light,' he says, standing up to fetch another bottle.
'Why so early?'
'The roads you are travelling are rough. It will take you a full day to get to Kapsali, maybe longer.'
I look back across the bay towards those jagged peaks. Before the outbreak of war in the Pacific, my grandfather trained among a small group of men chosen for their leadership, intelligence, self-reliance and endurance. But nothing he learnt in his training prepared him for the horrors that lurked beyond that mountain.
