I thought the old-style smugglers were very exotic. Some of them had rings in both ears and they all had that sparkle in their eyes that identifies the risk taker, the downhill skier, the parachute jumper. You can see it in athletes and in con men. It’s very attractive and totally unreliable but, as Phryne would say, inadvisable has never meant undesirable. Like my clients in the Magistrates’ Court, the smugglers put the sort of effort and brains into evading the law, which would have made them a good career if they had been obeying the law. But that always misses the point. They liked the danger, they loved the risk, they were adrenaline junkies. They told me three separate ways to slip into Melbourne Port without attracting notice from the authorities, all of them dangerous. A man called Rene, pronounced Reen, told my father how he had run the Rip at its height in a small boat. My dad asked, ‘Why run it? Why didn’t you wait until the tide turned?’ and I remember the flash of white teeth as Rene grinned and replied ‘Oh, but that wouldn’t be any fun!’
Australian sympathy has always been with the underdog and Australia, the Jewish Encyclopedia informs me, has never had a pogrom – one of the very few countries to be so distinguished. Australian soldiers in Palestine during General Allenby’s 1917 campaign made friends with the kibbutzim. They didn’t see the Israelis as major threats to world peace but as people who offered them tea and allowed them to join in the kibbutz feasts. One returned soldier I knew was very proud of his ability to dance the hora. The Jewish authorities in Jerusalem furthered the general good will by warning shopkeepers not to overcharge Australian soldiers for their souvenirs. By 1948 there were plenty of disaffected and bored unemployed Aussie soldiers, airmen and sailors who might not have minded stepping a little way over the line for a good cause.
I do not mean to say that Australian politics were clearly pro-Zionist or anything as simple as that. Chanan Reich’s instructive and thorough book Australia and Israeclass="underline" An Ambiguous Relationship details the endless bickering which went on in the United Nations, as well as domestically. Some of the denunciations of Israel by the Catholic church are disquieting to read, since this is soon after Hitler and they knew what the end product of such demagoguery could be. But basically, as a country, we came down in favour of the establishment of a Jewish state. Meanwhile, no one in Israel thought that the ‘sea of enemies’ was going to ebb any time soon, so there was a market, and where there is a market, there is a seller.
For a price. And for the delicious danger.
If I had been around at the time, for instance, I might have bought a biggish tramp steamer, say 900 tons – that’s a reasonable burden. For the purposes of this narrative I will call her Deborah, the name of a very strong-minded biblical general. I would take my SS Deborah up to New Guinea, where a word in the right ear might get me a lot of abandoned American army hardware for a song or two, which I would stow in the hold in crates marked ‘scrap iron’. (As a wartime souvenir, a friend of my dad’s brought back a complete Bren gun, broken down into components and shipped as ‘bicycle parts’. He said that he had captured it and therefore it was his.)
My SS Deborah would sail through most inspections because if Customs opened the top crates, all they would find would be oily bits of unidentifiable iron. Besides, Customs wouldn’t bother searching a tramp too thoroughly, because there were so many of them. Until recently, tramp steamers were the mail boats, carriers of small luxuries and cargo runners to many islands. When I got a job on one in the seventies, we carried mail and also videotapes, books, cosmetics, whisky, pharmaceuticals (like aspirin, insect repellant, disinfectants, not prescription or illegal drugs) and lots of not strictly necessary things, such as oil paints, pencils, ribbons, embroidery thread, dyes, pins and needles. Tramp steamers were like the pack peddlers of old, making life easier for the inhabitants of islands too small to merit visits from official ships. Now I believe that those islanders are supplied from planes but tramps were a fact of the sea for a long time and not, perhaps, excessively scrupulous about what they were carrying, or for whom.
After that I would take my SS Deborah down the coast and around Australia, then past Fremantle to Africa and thence to Israel. I would sniggle my way through the blockade and arrive in Haifa, which was under Haganah control from 22 April, where I would donate my armaments and my ship, starting the nucleus of an Israeli Navy. And I wouldn’t have been the only Gentile to do so. If the Adelaide Jews knew that Somerton Man had been smuggling arms to Israel, for instance, they would certainly have put the little commemorative pebbles on the grave of a righteous Gentile.
So could our Somerton Man have been a smuggler? That would explain the sand in the cuffs of his other trousers and confirm the idea that he might have been landed by dinghy, avoiding official attention, and walked ashore. It would explain his cargo master’s gear and the way his hands were unmarked, even though he was definitely connected to the sea. It would explain why he was sitting and waiting on Somerton Beach. He was waiting for a boat to fetch him. Like any smoker who is faced with an uncertain wait, he lit a cigarette to beguile the time and died, so gently that the cigarette went out in his mouth, and didn’t even singe his cheek or the collar of his expensive, snazzy coat.
But even if we conclude that Somerton Man was a smuggler, how likely is it that he was smuggling arms to Israel? He may, of course, just have been moving various precious cargoes through various dutiable ports but that theory doesn’t seem to be consistent with the manner of his death. Certainly, smugglers are sometimes killed because a crate of watches has gone suspiciously astray or because they are suspected of being a nark but Somerton Man wasn’t tortured or even roughly handled, which tends to be the first recourse of scoundrels. He was simply killed, efficiently and cleanly, in a manner more consistent with politics than criminality. In smuggling terms, that would seem to define him as an arms smuggler and if he was selling arms, where else other than Israel could he sell them in 1948?
Let us survey that rather grim and depressing year. In terms of conflicts, it began with the attacks on Jews in Palestine and their appeal to the United Nation leading to the 14 May declaration of the state and the consequent war. In February there was the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia but since the Czechoslovakians were selling arms to Israel, no one was likely to be smuggling them into that country. There was a civil war in Costa Rica and Tito had finally split with Stalin, so the Russian advisors were recalled from Yugoslavia, but in both cases there is not a lot of connection with Australia.
For most of 1948, the Russians blockaded Berlin and the Berlin airlift kept the city going. Dennis Pryor told me that the planes flew in one continuous stream, approaching, landing, unloading, refuelling and taking off. If a plane missed it’s landing it could not go around and try again. It had to land elsewhere because the planes never stopped. A remarkable effort. It lasted for eleven months, after which the Russians gave up and lifted the blockade. Again, an interesting story but not something that would have been considered terribly important down in the Antipodes.