AustLit

'The Girl Camilla...'

'These are the last words of Pieter Schramm, murdered in an alley in the Chinese quarter of Batavia, Java. Only man to hear them is Tarl Cormack, Australian wireless operator of the steamer 'Sunda Warrior' leaving early next morning. Cormack attacks the assassins, but is too late to save their victim. To his horror and amazement, he is arrested on a charge of complicity in the murder and sentenced to fifteen years in a convict settlement.

'His messages to the British Consulate are unanswered - or undelivered - and eventually he finds himself at Niafuni, a lonely penal settlement on the New Guinea coast. Appealing to the Commandant, Julius Vandersloot, to have his case investigated, he is astounded to learn that he is known on the books at Niafuni as Ostakov, a dangerous seditionist, and that murder is not even mentioned on his papers.

'The Australian is forced to join the other four hundred prisoners, who are building a breakwater at the river's mouth. Surrounding the settlement are barbed-wire palisades hung with improvised bells and guarded by machine-guns. Determined to escape, Cormack watches and waits. One day, to his surprise, he is ordered to attend at the Commandant's house. It is not Vandersloot who has sent for him - he is away - but a woman. Vandersloot's niece - the girl Camilla!

'She tells him that, on the death of her father, she had come to her uncle at Niafuni, against the advice of her friends. Some time after her arrival an increasing number of coolie convicts started to arrive, and her uncle changed so greatly that she became alarmed at his moods and rages, and asked permission to leave. Vandersloot refused, and kept her there, an unwilling prisoner, for months. Then, in response to a letter she had managed to smuggle out, Pieter Schramm, a young man whom she had known and liked in Batavia, arrived. She imagined that Schramm would have her released, but he did not return. Cormack tells her of the murder. With Fanandez, a Portuguese, he and the girl concoct a plan of escape. One stormy night the two men climb through the wires and go to the house to meet Camilla.

'She leaves them in her room in order to get iodine to dress the wounds they received climbing the palisade. Time is everything. How long will it take her? Five minutes - ten? Cormack starts mechanically to count, then to doze... (p 781, July 1940)