Greta van der Rol

The Abrolhos Archipelago must be a treacherous place at night. Henrietta Drake-Brockman said “Having seen the islands, it is not difficult to imagine an unforeseen wreck on Noon Reef or Morning Reef, at night, in moonlight.”

The Batavia was wrecked on 4th June 1629. The man on watch mistook white water for the glimmer of moonlight on the white caps. Ninety-eight years later, on the moonlit night of 9th June 1727, the Zeewijk met a similar fate.

Understandably, the survivors thought this was the same place the Batavia was wrecked and the group of islands was accordingly named the Pelsart Group. In fact, it is well south of the Batavia’s resting place in the Wallabi Group.

There are certain similarities with the Batavia disaster. Most of the people on board made it to land – this time, tiny Gun Island – but unlike the Batavia, they were able to find some fresh water. As with the other Dutch wrecks, the longboat was sent off to Batavia to fetch help but never arrived. When October had come and gone, the survivors decided no rescue ship was coming. As ever, they were a resourceful lot. Using material from the wreck of the Zeewijk and wood from local mangroves, they build a twenty meter long boat which they called Sloepie. They even loaded a pair of guns on her, in case of pirates. The endeavour took four months; In March 1728, eighty-eight men set sail for Batavia. Eighty-two arrived. When you consider the Zeewijk’s original complement was two hundred and eight, this was a considerable achievement.

Two other things are worthy of mention; two lads found guilty of sodomy were marooned, each on his own lump of coral. Homosexuality was not condoned in Dutch society at that time. The captain of the Zeewijk who made the journey to Batavia in Sloepie, was found guilty of the loss of his ship and falsifying the records. He lost his position and his material assets.

I didn’t buy the 'wedding dress' specially for the wedding.  No, indeed. It has its own history, some might even find this a little bit spooky.

You see, not too many months after I moved to Melbourne, one of Pete’s business associates invited us to attend the opening of an exhibition at the art gallery.  It was to be a gala occasion, in fact the Governor of Victoria was to officiate.  It’s not our sort of gig, really, so we asked this fellow what we should wear.  Ladies, he said, should wear a cocktail dress and men lounge suits.  Well crumbs.  I didn’t have a cocktail dress – except that red one and it didn’t fit me any more.  So I did the rounds of the big shops in Melbourne looking for something suitable without success.  Then somebody at the office said she’d seen a nice outfit in a boutique just down the road in the Paris end of Collins St, Melbourne’s haute couture Mecca.  I went down and had a look, although I did hesitate at the door. This was a designer’s own little shop, certainly not the sort of place I usually frequent for my off-the-rack purchases.  But I girded my loins and ventured within. The outfit was the right size, a sort of off-white brocade material, a straight skirt with split down the back and a separate top with three quarter sleeves and buttons with loop fastenings.  It cost a lot more than I’d normally pay for a dress – but it WAS a sale price and I’d already struck out in the department stores. And the event was next week.  So… I bought it. Then I had to buy shoes and a matching bag.  They were on special, too, but all up, I paid probably three times what I’d normally pay.  The evening arrived and Pete and I changed into our glad rags at a hotel in Lygon St, the only room we could find at short notice.  Then we caught a cab down to the Art Gallery. We soon discovered the only cocktail gowns and lounge suits were worn by Pete and me.  As it turned out, we could have worn jeans and runners and not been out of place.  We were a bit self-conscious for five minutes and then we thought - what the hell, we look good. 

Pete’s mate?  He turned up (eventually) in a pair of slacks and a sports jacket.

Back at home after our Big Night Out I put the suit back into its plastic pack and hung it in the ‘infrequently worn’ section of the wardrobe. You know what I mean - the bit down the back where you leave the clothes that seem to have shrunk or are just the *wrong* colour for this season or the wrong style. But you can't bear to get rid of them. And there it stayed, gathering dust with the red cocktail dress and a number of lovely summer dresses that I was sure I'd fit back into some day. But I’d actually put the dress on at work to show the lady who had suggested it.  Everybody agreed it was a wonderful dress and a couple of people asked me if I was getting married.  There you go.  Four years later, I didn't have to rush about buying a wedding dress - I already had one I'd prepared earlier.

The Zuytdorp’s story started in August 1711. After a horrendous journey down to Cape Town, it set off on the last leg of its journey from Table Bay on 22nd April 1712. It never arrived. And no survivors reached Batavia to tell the story. It was speculated, of course, that she’d met her fate but her resting place wasn’t finally found until centuries later. A young stockman found some artefacts in 1927 along the high cliffs overlooking the Indian Ocean south of Shark Bay; those very cliffs that Pelsaert and Jacobsz saw as they sailed for help after the Batavia was wrecked nearly a hundred years before. Those cliffs now bear the name of the ship that lies at their base – the Zuytdorp cliffs.

It was not until 1954 that the identity of the wreck was established. The sea is relentless there, bashing into the cliffs over a ledge of rock that juts along the shoreline. The cliffs extend for hundreds of miles and only two small ‘beaches’ offer a relatively easy way of getting to the top, anywhere from thirty meters to two hundred metres above the waves.

Was it coincidence that the Zuytdorp came to grief just adjacent to one of those two small beaches?

We know a lot of people made it to shore. In a cave just below the top of the cliff there are signs of a huge fire – hot enough to melt metal. Like many people involved in a shipwreck, the first thought seems to have been to get drunk – and maybe, also, attract another ship sailing up the coast to Batavia. But the Dutch mariners had learned to fear those cliffs and would not approach by choice, and no record exists of any such bonfire being sighted.

It would not have been easy to get frightened people off the ship and to safety in a pounding sea. Archaeologists say the ship would soon have heeled over when she hit the reef. It is rare indeed for the sea to be calm enough for divers to go down.When they did, they found a carpet of silver strewn over the seabed where the treasure cases had spilled their contents.

It’s possible that like all the other wrecks, a longboat was dispatched to get help from Batavia. But if it occurred, in this case the boat never arrived.

Nobody knows what happened to these unfortunate people who survived the wreck. Traces of them were found inland, where they had attempted to search for water. But as several Dutch landing parties had discovered, this part of the coast is barren and waterless. Some speculate that they merged with local aboriginal tribes but what little circumstantial evidence has been produced is hotly disputed.

Another fascinating mystery.

The Batavia wasn’t the only Dutch VOC ship to be wrecked on the West Australian coast. In all, four wreck sites have been found and a fifth ship is assumed to have met its fate on the Abrolhos. Not bad, that; of the five wrecks, three ships hit the Abrolhos.

Every one of those wrecks has an intriguing story attached. Maybe not so blood-thirsty as the Batavia but fascinating, nonetheless.

The Batavia sank in 1629. The next VOC ship to be lost was the Vergulde Draeck (Gilt Dragon) which sank in 1656 just north of Perth, capital of Western Australia.

Seventy five survivors reached the shores of Australia in a boat. The ship’s captain sent the under steersman Abraham Leeman and six other men, in the ship’s boat to Batavia to seek help, while the rest remained on the continent. Once again showing the remarkable endurance and courage of these early sailors, the boat reached Batavia six weeks later. The governor (by then van Diemen) sent out two ships to search for the wreck and rescue the survivors. The expedition only compounded the disaster. Three of the men landed on the Southland to search became lost in the scrub and were never seen again; a longboat carrying eight men was smashed in the surf with no survivors. No sign was found of the sixty eight folk from the Vergulde Draeck.

Van Diemen hadn’t given up. In 1658 other boats sailed along the coast both searching for survivors and mapping this unknown continent. Traces were found of the folk from the Vergulde Draeck on the beach in the vicinity of the wreck and some ships claimed to have seen signs of cultivated crops. During one such foray along the South Land, that same Abraham Leeman and a crew of thirteen men became stranded in a violent storm on one of the islands scattered not far off shore along the WA coast. The ship they’d been on, the Waeckende Boei, sailed off without them. They had been marooned.

So Leeman did the trip again. Yes, that’s right. He sailed up along the coast and across the sea to Java in a small boat. This time, the trip took three weeks. Truly a most remarkable man.

What happened to the survivors of the Vergulde Draeck remains a mystery.

This is what a fellow writer said about my newly finished book, 'The Admiral's Choice'.  Just finished another ms by an unpublished author. I couldn't put the thing down except for sleep, meals and family conversations.

I was inspired recently to finish the book after having left it for many months. Yes, I wrote some brand new stuff - that exciting, pivotal part where all the threads come togather and form an explosion. But also resurrected work I'd written a long time ago and discarded. Sometimes writers are too close to their own work.

What's it about? I'm sure I heard you ask.

Well, the Galaxy has settled down. This is the sequel to 'The Iron Admiral', in which Allysha Marten, systems engineer, meets Grand Admiral Chaka Saahren. Allysha has inadvertently aided in the resurrection of a killer which could threaten the Ptorix, the dominant intelligent species in the Galaxy. That threat is averted but Allysha has not reconciled herself to the fact that the man she fell in love with under another name turned out to be the bane of the Ptorix - the man who killed her father.

Peace - or perhaps a cold war - reigns supreme. But Allysha still doesn't want a bar of Grand Admiral Saahren. He's at his wit's end to come up with some way of winning back her love. A few other people are interested in Allysha as well, for different reasons. The Galactic People's Republic, those who eschew the Confederacy's use of cranial implants, have developed a weapon. But they need Allysha's skills to get it ready for deployment. Allysha's estranged husband, Sean, is recruited to deliver Allysha into GPR hands. If he doesn't, he's dead.

The race is on. When Allysha finds out what her skills will be turned to, she faces mind-numbing choices. And Grand Admiral Saahren must make the hardest choice of all.

Coming soon to a web site near you.

…did all this happen? The Houtman Abrolhos archipelago is a straggling chain of islands for the most part barely above the water line, 30 miles or so off the Western Australian coast. Even now, it’s little known. Cray fishermen base themselves there in the summer catching season, including on Batavia’s Graveyard, now known as Beacon Island. There’s even an airstrip on the High Island (East Wallabi).

The satellite images on Google Earth show it all; the relative sizes of the islands, the shallows, the channel. Search for the Houtman Abrolhos and the Wallabi group.

Henrietta Drake-Brockman, in her book "Voyage to Disaster" describes the Abrolhos Islands. "The whole atmosphere of the Wallabis is one of elusive form, the spray cast up on the great reefs acts like gauze in a theatre, everything is remote and mysterious, sometimes enlarged, sometimes diminished, never altogether clearly defined. Having seen the islands, it is not difficult to imagine an unforeseen wreck on Noon Reef or Morning Reef, at night, in moonlight." (p272)

Back off a little. Where is Australia? There. A desolate, windswept coast, lined with cliffs that plunge into the sea anything from thirty to two hundred and fifty metres (about one hundred to eight hundred feet). The desert reaches the sea along most of that stretch. Endless ridges of ancient dune, covered with tough, sparse vegetation. Even the Aboriginal people didn’t go there much. If you're following on Google Maps, don't get the wrong idea from any bits of blue on the mainland. It's salt water.

Back off a little further. That’s Batavia up there (now known as Djakarta), through the Sunda Strait which separates Sumatra and Java. The longboat left the Australian mainland from North West cape (that last cape jutting north before the coastline turns irrevocably east. And then Pelsaert in the Sardam had to find these tiny specs in the ocean, all unknowing that murder and mayhem had been let loose and that two camps of Batavia’s survivors eyed each other across a few miles of ocean.

Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground, long heath, brown furze, any thing. The wills above be done! but I would fain die a dry death.

           The Tempest William Shakespeare





Somebody who left a comment on Die a Dry Death on Authonomy (you can read seven chapters there) said after reading three chapters, he could see why I used those words as the title.

And sure enough the danger seemed to be the forces of nature, the implacable fury of the sea. The first chapter is a prologue and then the next two chapters are all about the shipwreck and the attempt to get the people to dry land. Think about that.  The Batavia carried 341 people when she left Holland. When she hit the reef, the ship would have been carrying less people – deaths due to scurvy, desertions at Table Bay. But still, the number was probably around 330. The ship had two small boats; workboats used to ferry passengers and supplies. The longboat could carry forty people; the yawl, ten. That’s it. No lifeboats, no vests, no blow-up dinghies. But the boat wasn’t sinking; it was stuck on a reef. So between them, these two boats and some very brave crew did an amazing job getting people to two tiny islands.  By the time Pelsaert and Jacobsz set off for Batavia in the longboat, about two hundred people were crowded onto Batavia’s Graveyard, forty people had drowned trying to get to shore unaided (many people couldn’t swim) and forty-eight made the journey in the longboat. The rest were still on the wreck.

Some of these numbers are conjecture but even so, the point, I think, is made. Cornelisz and his cronies killed around ninety-six men, women and children. Sure, some were drowned. But at the hands of men, not nature. So the title of the book is ironic, if you will. Many of those who would ‘fain die a dry death’ – did.

Like many of us aspiring writers, I’ve been beta-reader for a number of other people’s books and I’m about to embark on another. Which led me to reflect on why I do it, what I look for and what’s in it for me?

Why is easy. I know how hard it is to get an objective third party to read my own work. I don’t want ‘this is wonderful’, I want constructive criticism to help me improve my writing. I’ve been privileged to have the benefit of that from a number of aspiring writer friends and I think it’s incumbent on me to return the favour. I have to say, too, I get a little thrill when my input helps. And if one of those books goes on to greater glory (like the Authonomy editor’s desk or *gasp* publication), I bask in its reflection, like a stage hand peeking from the wings while the principal actor takes applause.

What I look for is more difficult. Really, I don’t look for anything. I just read and record things that don’t work for me. I have my little list of ‘gotchas’, things that will always strike me. Two in particular stand out; incorrect use of ‘ing’ words and ‘there was/were’. Very often people will write things like ‘walking across the room he opened the door’. Er, no. You can’t do both those things at once. Whereas ‘walking across the room he smoked a cigarette’ is plausible. ‘There was/were’ is perfectly acceptable – but it’s often overused and just as often can be either omitted or the sentence can be rephrased to work harder using stronger verbs. Other things I’ll note are word repetition, word echoes, slips in point of view. But the real value in reading a whole book is you can see if the characters are well drawn and behave consistently; see if transitions are smooth, the story arcs flow and are complete; notice any parts where the plot doesn’t ‘work’. Etc. And those things you don’t look for, you just notice them.

What’s in it for me? After I’ve reviewed somebody else’s work I look at my own with a fresh eye. The ‘ing’ thing and ‘there was/were’ are so noticeable to me because I was guilty of them myself.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s great value in chapter by chapter crits to iron out the nitty-gritties. But the first three chapters does not a good book make. My great fear has always been to write a kick-arse first three chapters, leaping and bubbling down the hill – to end up in a meandering marshland of broken tributaries and a bog of cliché. And only a disinterested third party can tell me if I’ve got it right.

The first book I ever wrote is ‘The Iron Admiral’. I read it again just the other day, after not having touched it for the good part of a year. And I must say, I enjoyed the read. Very much. Sure, I tweaked a little. (I’m a writer. You always want it to be the very best.) But not much. So yes, I’m pretty happy with my work.

 Mind you, I thought it was pretty good when I finished the book maybe two years ago. I started writing it probably four years ago. I cringe a little at the memory. It reeked of Jedis and superior mental powers, all by other names, of course. All that got tossed out quite early, rest assured, never to resurface.

It was always going to be about an admiral and a conflict with an alien race, though. And a girl. I didn’t think about it at the time but really it was inevitable that I’d end up with star-crossed lovers. It makes me smile, now, when I think about my amazement – and yes, embarrassment, when I recognised I’d written a Romance!! I read ‘serious’ science fiction as well as fluff like Star Wars; Asimov was a long-time favourite, as was Arthur C Clarke and many others. These days it’s Jack Mc Devitt and Elizabeth Moon. I suppose, in reality, I read some romance books, too. But never the Mills & Boon types where the romance was the whole story.

Still and all, after I’d accepted that’s what I’d written, I went along for the ride. Certainly the characters in the book I read the other day are not the same as the ones I started off with. They’ve grown and changed and in parts of the story, they simply told me that’s NOT how it would have happened. He wouldn’t have done that; neither would she. I listened to my characters and I feel I’ve ended up with a good book.

And now I feel I can go and finish the second book, “The Admiral’s Choice’. They deserve to be together.

Have you ever noticed how often ‘Aliens’ (especially in the movies or the TV) are humanoid? They usually have two arms, two legs and one head, two eyes and they speak with a mouth. Or maybe four arms or legs just for variety. Check out Star Trek sometime. And what’s more, in Star Trek they can actually mate with humans and produce hybrid beings like Spock. Or so we are led to believe. Yes, okay it’s not always like that. But cast a glance at the Cantina scene in Star Wars I, or even the new arrival, the being in the new movie Avatar.

What’s wrong with that, you ask? Well, in a way, nothing. After all, we’re not talking intelligence here, we’re talking technology. Sure, you can have all sorts of aliens inhabiting other worlds. Look in a pond on mother Earth, or in the ocean trenches or in the deepest caves. Life abounds in all sorts of conditions. But not much of it uses technology. Take dolphins; acknowledged to be very, very smart with abilities (like echo location) we can only dream about. But I can’t see your average dolphin building a spaceship. To do that, it seems you need first the desire and secondly the digits to make it happen.

Enter the opposable thumb. Oh, and some brains. And suddenly all those humanoid aliens become a little more understandable. You need things like fingers to build machines. So smart lizards would fit the bill. Very common, your lizard-like alien – especially if it’s a baddy.

Okay, so there might be other ways of building technology that we quite literally cannot imagine. That’s not much use to a writer, is it? So let’s accept that our aliens will have to have some way of getting around (we call them ‘legs’ in our part of the universe) and some means of manipulating material (fingers, hands). But there are other issues. They’ve just found an ‘earth-like’ planet seventy light years away. That means lots of liquid water, a reasonable temperature range. Just one small catch, though; it’s three times the size of Earth. Can you imagine the effect of gravity on a planet that size? I reckon we’d have trouble walking. Unless we can invent some sort of anti-gravity suit.

And what about the air? What if there’s too much oxygen? Or not enough? Earth’s atmosphere hasn’t been the way it is now for most of its existence. Indeed, we need breathing apparatus if we go above a certain altitude on our own planet. So it’s pretty hard to imagine all those aliens in the cantina scene all comfortably breathing Tatooine’s air. Yes, I know some of them wore respirators or some such. But not very many.

Really, when you start looking at the difficulties the solution used by more and more SF writers makes a stack of sense. Bioengineered planets, terra-formed to suit humans. You’ll find them in Elizabeth Moon’s books and Jack McDevitt’s books among others.

I must say also that I find it difficult to imagine why the inhabitants of a planet like (say) Jupiter would ever want to come to Earth and do more than take a passing look. Always assuming, of course, the amorphous blobs living in Jovian storms subject to enormous gravity would bother to build a space ship.  So they get here and then what? Wouldn’t they be more likely to eye off Jupiter? Now this assumption puts paid to a lot of space wars. Why bother, after all?

Which is why the Ptorix (aliens in my book ‘The Iron Admiral’ evolved on a world similar to ours and live on worlds similar to ours. We are cosmic rivals trying to share a galaxy.

And the Ptorix don’t look humanoid. But they do have tentacles.