Love in a Warm Climate

By Patrick Harris

Stories linking generations of a family as they fall in love, each in their way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Patrick Harris
• Release date: Nov 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9781519978028

Patrick Harris

Patrick Harris is a former soldier, academic, and corporate lawyer. He has worked in many industry sectors, inlcuding mining, insurance and energy supply. He now writes full time.

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For dear friends

Joan, Maureen, Sandy, and Rainey

Thank you for your unwavering support

One

Calley’s Wharf

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There was uncertainty as to when the wharf was built. Colonial government registers had no record of it. It seemed that no entry for the structure was ever recorded in any civil register, save the fact of its existence when eventually authorities became aware.

It was not as though the wharf – other than the question of its age, and on that issue, whether it counted under national heritage rules – had anything much to recommend it.

It did not have a necessarily pleasing aesthetic, even if the land on which it commenced its march into the bay was lush.

It was like any other wharf, a little larger than many, given its remote location, but no more or less ordinary.

One story was that the wharf was built for whalers needing a place to unload and process their huge catches. If true, that somehow escaped the historical record; and no evidence existed for processing facilities.

As a notable expert said, it was unlikely that whalers would go to the trouble of building a wharf to berth their ships, but not a place to process their catch.

In 1868, a claimant to the property of the wharf, together with an area of land providing access to and from it, said that his grandfather built it to unload what became a large sheep herd that was taken hundreds of miles inland.

Unfortunately for the claimant, he had nothing but his story to rely on.

No bills or receipts were tendered for the wharf’s erection; no supporting statements from parties to the claimed transaction; and no attendant witnesses to provide corroboration.

As to the large sheep herd, that no longer existed, either. The claimant said it was lost when prolonged drought hit them. And eventually they left the worthless land.

If there had been a ring of plausibility to the claim, it was lost in the claimant’s suspicious manner.

A prosecutor was tempted to lay charges of criminal mischief and fraud, but a more interesting murder case came his way.

Still, the claimant got no satisfaction, and soon disappeared into history.

When World War One came the navy thought that the bay would be of little use to it. Despite the surrounding hills offering natural protection for vessels at anchor, much of the bay was too shallow for anything but small ships.

Only a narrow, deep channel provided access, but it ended one thousand yards from the beach. And the wharf was pointed away from it.

The bay was more likely to be of interest to the enemy as a clandestine landing point. And with that assessment, the army posted a small contingent of soldiers at the bay, with orders to shoot anyone coming in from the sea. It transpired to be the Great War’s safest posting.

The one clear thing on the public record was that all of the land surrounding the bay was originally owned by the Crown, and sold in 1847 to Major Redmond Calley, Retired.

If Calley did build the wharf, then he neither sought nor received permission to do it. And the law of that time did not require him to do so. He could build whatever he liked on his own land.

Whatever Calley’s plans might have been, they came to nothing.

No other building was erected around the bay for those who built the wharf, so their accommodation could only have been in tents that were subsequently removed from the site.

Except for a solitary chair that was mysteriously placed on the wharf, no evidence of anything other than temporary habitation before 1870 was ever found.

Whatever might have been the fate of the man whose name was associated with it, the wooden structure measuring seven hundred yards in length was known as Calley’s Wharf.

*

Redmond Calley was born in 1800 to a senior manager of the British East India Company and a great-niece of a maharajah. It was a very long courtship, made all the more difficult by the prejudices of the Raj.

For Calley’s father it meant no further promotion, and no transfer to anywhere else. For his son, soldiering was the best option. Either that or a clerk’s job somewhere in India.

Subsequent to his training, in the twenty-six years Redmond Calley served as an officer, he shared in the spoils of war.

For someone born into his circumstances he considered himself rich, or at least rich enough to live out his remaining days in comfort.

The intention had been to buy a sugar cane plantation, a place that would serve the dual purposes of a home and business location.

Travel no longer interested him, save the journeys he would make to the nearest town for services, provisions, and other needs. Even then, he didn’t want to travel far.

As it transpired, the dream of an agricultural future did not fit available acreage in that part of the Southern Hemisphere’s version of the New World in which he felt most comfortable.

Sugar was a crop for the tropics; and after India, Calley had decided on a more temperate climate.

Neither did wish to travel for another two thousand miles to become a sugar cane farmer. An alternative investment had to be found.

In what Calley first thought of as the dumb luck of history – as he understood that, not being in the path of a bullet or cannon shot, the slash of a sabre, or thrust of a lance – he came upon the little bay by accident.

Breaking his journey for the night on his southward trek to locate good farming land, the intention had been to find a place to camp that was away from the main north-south route.

He needed a place to graze his horse, too, a need well-satisfied by the abundance of long grass on the bay’s foreshore.

At some time during the night Calley made a decision. He liked this place; he felt comfortable in its Arcadian serenity, and determined to make it his home.

He would build a fine residence on the highest section of the foreshore, far out of reach of the tidal range.

On the other side of the low hills protecting the bay there was farmland. He could be a merchant and supply farmers from the sea.

He might also develop a trade in selling their wool. And for all that, he needed a wharf.

If there was irony for a man who so loathed the sea, and becoming someone who intending using it for commerce, he did not then recognise it.

And in his rapture with this little piece of paradise he forgot the hard-won lessons of soldiering. Among them, he failed to properly survey the proposed battle-ground.

He understood that he needed to build the wharf before anything else.

And timber for its construction had to be transported by bullock-drawn wagons to the site.

And so the wharf began from the land.

Tough, water-resistant timber was delivered, and for six months a team of forty-five men, aided by more than twenty mules, worked on the land; and then in small boats and on a small floating platform to erect Redmond Calley’s wharf.

*

Julia Charlton was a spirited woman of thirty-three when she met Redmond Calley. She seemed not to care that nature had endowed her differently to most other women.

Like her parents she was unusually tall, standing five feet eleven inches, two inches shorter than her brother.

Even if she was taller than them, young men might still have been interested in Julia if she had been pretty, but she was not. She had the plain features of her father, while her brother had inherited the better looks of their mother; and she was very thin.

Her head was a mass of tight, reddish curls, the colour a distinctly coppery shade, unlike her mother’s rich, auburn