PACIFIC

Random House Australia - ISBN 9781741665987

It is 1941 and young Jane Thackeray, together with her baby, has accompanied her husband on the dangerous journey from England to the New Hebrides where Martin has been offered a position as a missionary doctor.

The SS Morinda bucked and rolled her way through the swell of the vast Pacific Ocean, but the elements presented little danger. She was a solid vessel, an inter-island tramp steamer that had weathered many a storm, and today’s conditions were nothing to her.

Jane searched the horizon, barely visible beneath heavy clouds. The skipper had said they’d see the island any moment now but, although the rain had ceased, the steamy vapour still clouded her vision. ‘You’ll be surprised how quickly the weather clears,’ he’d promised her.

Then, miraculously, he was right. The haze disappeared, the sky became blue, and there it was, like magic, in the distance dead ahead. The island of Efate. Craggy mountains rearing abruptly out of lush tropical forest, breakers rolling relentlessly upon coral shores. And somewhere not yet visible amidst this dramatic landscape was Vila, the capital of the archipelago known as the New Hebrides.

Approximately 840 miles east of Australia, the Y-shaped cluster of the archipelago was made up of four main and sixty smaller islands. Efate, which lay to the south housed the capital of Vila, and it was from here that the dual colonial administrations of France and Britain governed the New Hebrides. It was Vila that was Jane and Martin Thackeray’s intended destination.

Theirs had been a perilous journey, fraught with the dangers of war. At night they had travelled without navigational lights, and there had been the ever-present threat of U-boat attacks. But thirty-seven days later, the SS Themistocles had arrived in Sydney, where they had travelled by train to Brisbane before boarding the SS Morinda.

Now, finally, they had reached their destination, and as Jane clung to the railings she felt breathless with anticipation. Martin was below, minding the baby. They took turns, and he had selflessly insisted she go up on deck for the first view of the island. He and Ronnie would join her, he said, when they came into port and the waters were calm. Then together, all three, they would view their new home.

The Morinda neared the promontory beyond which lay Mele Bay and the small protected harbour of Vila, and Jane gazed in wonderment at the beauty that unfolded before her eyes.

Endless groves of coconut palms and vivid green rain-forest stretched from the backdrop of towering mountains to the shore. Sandy beaches gleamed, blindingly white. And all was surrounded by crystal-clear water of the lightest aquamarine, broken here and there by shelves of coral reef.

Never had she seen colours of such intensity. It was as if the artist who had painted this landscape hadn’t bothered with a palette at all, but had simply dipped his brush into the paint pots, so unblended, so pure and stark were the contrasts.

Then they rounded the promontory into the broad sweep of Mele Bay where, to starboard, tiny islands guarded the harbour entrance and where, nestled beyond, lay the township of Vila.