A Question of Honour

Somewhere off Sydney’s Northern Beaches, 2006

Easing backwards off the side of the boat, I begin steadily propelling myself down into the depths. The sea takes me into herself and I am free at last to roam this mysterious element that has always felt like home. Despite all the scuba equipment my breathing always feels more relaxed underwater. Suze—that’s my wife—says I must be part amphibian: she also insists I’m getting too old for all this, and my doctor agrees. But when I’m down here I feel no different than I did fifty years ago when I did my first dives with the Navy.

Suze stays up there in the boat, watching out for me, she says. Today more than ever, as this is the deepest dive I’ve ever attempted—sixty metres, twenty over the legal limit. Suze freaked out when I told her what I was planning, threatened to ring the authorities and have me stopped. The sea is not her element, she doesn’t even like going out in the boat, is a poor swimmer and would sooner die than plunge over the edge and down into the twilight gloom of deep water. Even looking down into the depths gives her the creeps, but she insists on coming out with me on these dives. It’s mostly moral support, we both realise, though she knows how to use the radio and has turned herself into quite a competent sailor—as much as anyone can without the calling for it. She brings a book, music, lunch and a glass or two of wine—anything to help distract her from where she is and pull through another afternoon on the water. That she puts herself through all this for my sake — perhaps this is the true calling — perhaps mine is nothing more than an unhealthy obsession.

I am searching for a wreck—in the past thirty years I’ve dived everywhere it is possible to dive up and down the Northern Beaches. Half our house and the whole of my shed are full of marine memorabilia—fine pieces of driftwood, some magnificent shells, dried and mounted fish (including a good-size shark that took a dislike to me back in ’75), a few significant remains of other wrecks—an eighteenth-century pewter tankard, a silver fob-watch and a bronze candelabra—these from the remains of the Hazlitt and the Jacobite that foundered in these waters the century before last. I suppose I should have handed these last ones over to the government, as they would have been worth a good deal on the market, or in a museum, but I never can bring myself to part with the things I find down there. I certainly wouldn’t care for the money I could get; and since I’m the one who’s taken all the risks I don’t see that the state has any right to them. They are for my boys and my girl when I go to Davy Jones’s Locker.

Which might not be far off, my doctor warned me after my last check-up: my blood pressure up and my HDL down—an accident going somewhere to happen, he says, staring meaningfully at my girth. But what the hell, I think: if your number’s up, it’s up—and that’s it—no matter how many egg-and-bacon breakfasts you give up. Or how many dives—he thinks I’m tempting fate with my underwater obsession, the risks of deep-sea water pressure and the variations when ascending and descending—am I crazy?

His question echoes in my head as I descend now at a suitably leisurely pace, breathing slowly. At about forty feet the clear green of the water starts to darken. At this point of the dive I always like to roll on my back for a few moments, to look up to the sunlit surface, to the bobbing white hull of our twenty-footer: one last look before the true descent begins—I guess it’s a bit like that last wave at the airport. The knowledge that Suze is up there waiting for me, keeping watch, this always gives me that extra bit of heart to plunge down once more into the twilit depths. Calm, that’s the key: it’s panic that kills underwater—we could do with some of those “Speed Kills” signs down here.

I’ve found many remains from other wrecks, but not a sign from the one I’ve been seeking for nearly fifty years, ever since I got the whole story on the baby Japanese sub that managed to escape Sydney Harbour in 1942, when the War came to Australia. Its torpedo was meant for the USS Chicago, but it missed, sinking the HMAS Kuttabul instead, killing twenty-one sailors awaiting their postings—one of whom was my father. I was seven years old, and never will I forget the navy officer’s wife who knocked on our front door next morning, and the sight of Mum sitting stock still and speechless after she left, staring at the kettle whistling on the stove, staring without seeing, then her whole body starting to shake uncontrollably before the scream started. I’ve never heard anything like that scream before and I hope to God I never will again. It didn’t sound like my mother at all—it didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard before.

Mum’s sister, Auntie Lil, came the next day to look after all of us—my brother Peter and I, and my sister Ruth. The doctor gave Mum a sedative and she didn’t come out of her bedroom for three days. Then Lil packed all of us up and took us back with her to Uncle Kev and the cows on their farm in Mudgee for a couple of months.

It’s hard to describe the atmosphere in Sydney at the time, because, viewed in hindsight, nothing much happened to the civilian population. But at the time it seemed anything could happen, and probably would. We were on the brink of invasion, and anyone who could got out of Sydney.

They never found that baby sub, but as I grew up fatherless and joined the Navy myself, I became obsessed with the idea of finding it. As a Navy diver I was perfectly trained to do it, and I always kept an ear open for clues to its final resting place. From all the data I could get my hands on (which was far from easy) it seemed that either it was damaged in the attack and foundered somewhere along the coast; or it ran out of fuel after being separated from the supply ship; or having failed in their mission with little chance of making it to one of their ports, the crew blew themselves up in kamikaze tradition. Putting everything together it seemed the most likely spot was somewhere off the Northern Beaches, though amateur divers had been searching there for years and found nothing. Even if the Japs had blown themselves to kingdom come, there would still be recognisable parts of the vessel.

Of course, in theory it could be anywhere along the coast north of Sydney all the way up to Cape York. And there was also the chance that the sub had turned south after exiting the Heads, but this seemed a pretty remote possibility—the most natural thing would be to head for home. So I stuck to my original conviction and began combing the waters between Manly and Barrenjoey Head. In my earlier years I could only do this in the little time I had to spare from my Navy duties and the family, but I was fortunate enough to get postings in and around Sydney, so a fine weekend usually found me heading for Long Reef, off Collaroy. The kids used to enjoy the trips, if their mother wasn’t so keen, and since Northern Beaches is also a holiday town it worked out well to combine the two.

Now I take one last look up to the surface before flipping over and propelling myself down into the blue-green gloom. The water feels colder now the deeper I go; a few fish flash by, not reef fish, as we are miles out from Long Reef, but queer-looking things with bulging eyes and luminous spots on their bodies that reflect the light from my torch. And a huge dark shape I just caught in my peripheral vision. Gone, though, as soon as I turned my torch to where I thought it was. If it ever was there—for most of the surface light is gone now. I check the depth-meter on my wrist; forty metres. Time for a short halt in my descent, I think, it won’t hurt to take a few minutes for the pressure—you lying hound, I tell myself—you know it isn’t really an issue going down—the slow pace is its own natural adaptor. The truth is I still haven’t fully committed to the final descent—though Suze doesn’t know this—and I want to take a few moments to consider whether what I’m doing is worth the risk. Legally it’s not a problem, as I explained to Suze: I’ve done the extra dive course you need to go beyond the forty-metre limit; the main thing is to come up slowly and take enough breaks so your body can adjust to the lowering water pressure. The rest of it is mostly fear—to take that final leap into the unknown, even for an old hand like me—which is something I’m struggling with now as never before. And the dark shape I thought I saw is hardly helping—I could swear I saw it move.

Down here you can hear your heart beating in the watery silence, and your breath, of course, all your world seems to become the sound of your breathing in the scuba gear, the slow, regular respiration, the spurge of bubbles in front of your mask, assuring you that all is well, for if any of these were to cease … I check my oxygen: there’s plenty there and to spare for what I’m attempting, but my heart seems to be beating louder than usual, my breath coming faster—I must get that under control or I will chew through all the oxygen and have to abandon the dive.

I go through it all in my mind once more—why am I doing this? It’s not going to bring Dad back, or Mum: she finally succumbed to the inevitable last year, and I can tell you it wasn’t an easy passing. I always wonder if the trauma of ’42 had anything to do with it; she was never the same after that. But she was a fighter: she fought for us on her war widow’s pension, doing anything and everything she could to make ends meet … no—that’s not right: making ends meet always seemed to her a miserly way to live. Optima Semper (my old high school’s motto)—“Best Always”; that was the way Mum lived; she was determined that while she had her health and strength we should want for nothing, that’s why she never refused the cheques from Auntie Lil and Uncle Kev. But none of it was for herself: it was all for us—she felt so badly for us being raised without our father. I do believe she even considered raising him from the dead, for our sakes, as she began attending theosophy lectures and the spiritualist church in Ryde, a half-hour bus trip from our home in Parramatta. We would all have thought her nuts if she hadn’t had such a sure grip on reality: it was not some kind of mystical escape from pain she sought, but a way of feeding it into her worldly mission. And that makes me wonder if I’m not more my mother’s son than I ever thought—though I’ve never been religious.

There was something so wrong about how it all happened: all the signs right under the bigwigs’ noses completely ignored. A Jap reconnaissance plane had been spotted flying over Sydney Harbour before dawn the day before the attack, twice circling the Chicago moored at Garden Island. It was written off as a US training flight. Even after the attack had begun the rear-admiral in charge wouldn’t believe it, scoffing at those who were trying to do something about it: “What are you doing, running up and down the harbour, dropping depth charges and talking about enemy subs in the harbour? There’s not a sub to be seen.” No wonder there was talk he was drunk—he’d been hosting a dinner party that evening attended by the Chicago captain, who was also “tight”, as the Yanks call it. It wasn’t until the second sub torpedoed the Kuttabul that they suddenly sobered up—too late for Dad and the others, though, and too late to catch that sub, though they did get the third one, and the crew of the first one blew themselves up, convinced they couldn’t escape (if only they’d known the odds in their favour).

The larger subs stayed off the coast for a month, harassing merchant shipping, attacking seven ships, sinking three and killing fifty more sailors. But the thing that really got to me when I was old enough to understand, was that this same rear-admiral insisted on the dead Japs being buried with full naval honours—for killing Dad and the other sailors defending us from aggressive enemy action. How were such things possible? It wasn’t about hating the Japs, although if I’m honest I would have to admit that I did, and with good reason. But it was a question of honour. I know that’s not a very fashionable idea these days, but it was a big deal in the armed forces in my time. I felt (and I was not alone) that the full naval honours they gave to the enemy were a great dishonour to my father and the other boys who died in the attack, not to mention my mother and all the other widows, fatherless children, and grief-stricken parents.

In his defence the rear-admiral said he did it in the hope that our prisoners of war would receive better treatment, and we all know how that ended. But to be fair to him: everything we consider normal gets turned upside-down during war, there is so much confusion, so much leaping into the unknown, so much that depends on seizing the moment, and peering through the fog of the present to find clarity: they say that victory goes to the one who manages this; the rest of us work in retrospect.

But still those full naval honours stuck in my craw. That’s why I’m here now, doing my bit to restore the lost honour of the victims: I can’t get those old diggers and sailors out of my mind, the ones I saw on my visits to Mum in the nursing home. Most were reluctant to talk about their service—back then you were just grateful to have returned in one piece—and if your mind was dead and your nerves were shot you’d never let on to anyone. But there were some who did: I can never forget an ex-Changi inmate who told me what happened to him during the collapse of Singapore, when he and some other Allied boys were recovering in hospital from injuries sustained in the fighting. When they got the news about what happened to the Australian nurses they literally went mad—charging up and down the ward (those who could, and even some who couldn’t) howling and screaming like stricken animals. That was the thing that did it for me, finally, because I wish I could forget what that sounds like. That’s what drove me on to take this leap into the gloom today—it’s for all of them as well as for Dad—even if it’s just to show that there was someone prepared to offer them something more than a bugle solo and a minute’s silence, a speech, and another televised parade.

Calmer now, my breathing normal, my heart back in its place, I upended myself once more and continued my progress down, down, down: through a school of jewel-bright jellyfish, feeling the soft blomp, blomp of them against my wetsuit, grateful for its rubber shield against the lapis-blue stinging tentacles. An increasingly oddball parade of startled fish darted out of my blinding torch-beam, some larger ones a bit bolder and less inclined to move out of my way—coolly regarding this visitor to their dark domain. Suddenly a great arm of bull-kelp leapt out of the gloom and slithered around my body, and I realised I’d reached bottom—in the middle of a dense kelp forest.

This was unexpected: all my research into the sea-floor at this depth suggested something more like a desert, not this lush jungle of leathery fronds. I stopped for a moment to check my oxygen—less than I would like—much less—my buffer had gone, eaten through by that nervous attack I thought I’d nipped in the bud. Checking my watch I realised I’d taken too long to descend. To be safe now I had about five minutes to look around before I had to head back to the surface. Damn! All those months of planning and preparation, all the years of training for this moment gone down the gurgler, for who knew if I would ever make it back here?

And I didn’t even know where to look, even which direction to go—right or left? Back or forth? Every way looked equally discouraging as I stabbed my torch-beam into the slithery gloom. If only I could get clear of the forest out onto the bare sea floor—it was unnerving in here, anything could be hiding, waiting for its next meal to wander by. I couldn’t forget the black shape I thought … no, I was certain I’d seen, and I felt my breathing start to speed up once more as its shadow grew in my mind. But I forced it out, thinking of Suze up there on the deck with her drink and her book, and visualising the baby sub of my mission perched on the edge of one those great underwater trenches—gateway to the true deep that never failed to thrill my blood with the cold, clear fire of adventure. This was the way I had always imagined it, and it calmed and inspired me now, just as it had always done. And unless I stayed calm there was no hope. I thrust my torch-beam to the right once more, and to my astonishment saw the glint of something metallic about twenty feet away.

I made my way cautiously, walking, easing my body through the mass of kelp branches, brushing aside the leathery fronds when they blocked my view—I couldn’t afford to lose sight of whatever it was reflecting in my torchlight. Just then the flipper on my right foot came up against something hard and heavy on the sea-bed. Bending down to examine it I found a large sheet of metal, half-buried in the sand, so twisted, rusted and covered in sea-scale I couldn’t immediately make out what it was. Struggling to free it from the sea-bed I noticed there were jagged shards along its edge, as if it had been torn away from something much larger. Excitement began to rise in me as I continued to search it for any identifying signs—my heart sped up again, and my breathing—so I took a moment to calm myself, taking a few deep, slow breaths till I felt my heartbeat returning to something more like normal, though it was still going faster than it should. Never mind, I told myself as I grabbed the thing by two of its great metal shards, I’d be out of here and back up to Suze and the surface in no time—hopefully as the conquering hero—to have something to show her to justify all the years of my obsession, all the aeons of her patience. Then I gave it an almighty heave that wrenched it free of its sandy grave. And there, once the cloud of sand settled, I played my torch-beam over the section that had been buried which, remarkably, was much better preserved than the exposed part: the metal still showing patches of lustre—even some remains of paintwork. To my amazement, my eyes traced the unmistakable outline of a Rising Sun—rusted and peeling off in patches, but still somehow proudly defying the forces of destruction and decay. Seeing it took my breath away, literally. I sucked hard on the mouthpiece to get the oxygen I needed.

So they had chosen sudden death over certain failure—so very Japanese of them—so very contemptible they thought our boys (and girls) for allowing themselves to be taken prisoner. You couldn’t help but admire the valuing of honour above life, but such a savage, strange code—a relic of the past that would, in three years time, be blown to kingdom come in a way they could never have imagined. The death of all honour, perhaps. Perhaps my mission was a bigger one than I imagined.

I checked my oxygen levels again—only seven minutes left—I would have to start ascending now in order to make it, and even that would be cutting it fine, for it was something, I well knew, that must not be hurried. But when I tried to pick up the piece of fuselage I realised it was way too heavy to get to the surface, even allowing for the salt water’s buoyancy. It was crushing to realise I had nothing—no memento to take back with me to show Suze and the world—and then I remembered the metallic thing that had reflected my torchlight. Flicking the torch on, I stabbed the beam back in the direction I remembered, and there it was, now only about ten feet away. I knew it was foolish, that I should just forget about it and begin my ascent. But who knew when, or even if I would make it back here? I took a moment to switch my oxygen onto rationing mode—Suze would freak if she knew what I was doing. But what else could I do? My legs were already heading for the glinting metal before I could stop them, pushing through the slithery kelp.

A hand-sized lump of bright metal … a sword handle, I realised, sticking out of the sand, samurai-style, with scrolls of intertwined gold and silver somehow managing to peek through sixty years of barnacles and sea-scale. I reached down to pick it up, drawing the blade out of its sandy scabbard. Like the piece of fuselage, it was relatively clean from its sojourn in the sea-bed, the steel flashing coldly as I played the light over it. The pure, simple lines of its crafting, the amazing lightness and perfect balance of it in my hand—I couldn’t fully appreciate this at the time because of the weight and resistance of the water—but I knew as soon as I grasped it that special thrill of holding a truly fine weapon. I would have my memento after all, and what more fitting than the commanding officer’s sword?

Victory surged through my veins like quicksilver, sending the blood rushing to my head in thick waves that dammed and built pressure relentlessly. The pain was excruciating—like my head was being squeezed in a giant vice. Then suddenly the dam burst and I felt myself rushing down a river-rapids into a lake of white light, where I floated and drifted on a raft of euphoria. Strange images flashed through my mind, like a crazy slide-show—scenes from my life in a disconnected yet heightened clarity, in colours uncannily vibrant to begin with, then slowly tapering off into black and white. Lost in this other-world of what I would later realise was my dying brain, I had lost virtually all awareness of my body—of the fact that it was marooned at the bottom of a hostile ocean, without captain or compass, easy meat for any lurking predator, even if the sea chose to spare me, or the aneurism didn’t kill me. The last thing I can remember was the image of my father in his Navy uniform, standing on the sea-bed in front of me, his arms stretched out to me, smiling proudly, all his bright blond hair floating around his head.

That was when I felt a massive tug at my waist, as my body was taken in a nightmare grip by something I couldn’t see. A darker darkness than even the ocean bottom closed around me—whether the jaws of my nemesis shark or the iron-sinewed tentacles of a giant squid it didn’t matter—I knew it was goodnight for me.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I woke up six weeks later in hospital, my body threaded with a spaghetti-mesh of wires and tubes connecting me to life-support. I looked over to a window framing the most intense blue sky I had ever known, with a perfect puff-ball of pure white cloud. Suze was staring out the window into the hospital garden, nursing a mug of coffee, her face grey with fatigue, her eyes dead to the vista before her. When I called her name the coffee mug fell from her hands, smashing on the floor, and for a few seconds she stood frozen, her eyes popping and her mouth open like one of my deep-sea fish. I wanted to laugh but my face wouldn’t obey, but I made a good effort at a lop-sided smile, she told me later.

It was another six weeks before I could go home (in a wheelchair) and three months of intense rehab before I could walk again. Without Suze there to get me through those hard days, I wouldn’t have made it. Not to mention if she hadn’t been in the boat that day, and hadn’t insisted on securing the winch-rope around my waist before she let me go over the side. With all the shock of finding those precious relics, together with the bleeding in my brain, I had forgotten about that life-saving precaution, and believed it was a predator that had grabbed me round the middle.

Yes, I have to admit I’ve been a bit sneaky not telling you this till now, but I thought it would spoil the story. And I didn’t want to look like a wimp. But Suze says don’t be so hard on yourself—you’re still overqualified for the reckless dickhead Olympics. I took that as a compliment.

And that wasn’t all she did. After the excruciatingly slow wait for me to be brought to the surface—she had to run the winch at its lowest speed so I wouldn’t get the bends (that would’ve finished me for sure)—imagine her horror to see a large shark-fin split the surface about twenty feet away, starting to make for my defenceless body like a precision missile. She describes it as feeling like the bottom fell out of her stomach. But she raced for the loaded .22 rifle I always keep in a spot under the gunwale, and took aim just as the beast was closing in.

Now Suze has always been a crack shot at a tin can, but if she ever points that thing at a living creature she shakes so much she can never get a clear shot. Not this day, though. She said she never felt so ruthlessly calm as when she emptied the magazine into that ten-foot bronze whaler. To this day we’re still not sure if the bullets stopped the shark, or if its tremendous bulk and momentum would have got me anyway, for instead of the body tumbling down into the depths, the beast remained at the surface, lifeless, weirdly suspended from the end of my right arm. At first Suze thought it had chomped on my hand, but when the winch pulled me over the side the dead shark came with me, impaled on the bright blade of a samurai sword.

According to the doctor, the paralysis rictus that seized my right side when I had the stroke must have locked the sword to my hand in a grip of steel. All I know is that even death itself couldn’t have made me let go of that prize, though I did end up donating it to the War Memorial in Canberra. It gives Suze and me, the kids and grandkids a thrill whenever we make the trip there, and I hope it’s gone some way to make things right for Mum and all the others. As for Dad—it always sends a shudder through me when I remember him standing there with his arms stretched out to me that day—waiting to welcome me into that watery rest-home for old sailors. Hope he’s not too mad with Suze for delaying my arrival.

Andrea Ockerby lives in Victoria. Her story “Long Live the Weeds” appeared in the September 2020 issue