THE OPIUM SMUGGLERS A True Story of our Northern Waters by Ion L. Idriess, published 1948 How “true” is this “True Story of our Northern Waters”? I have given this question some thought over the last week since finishing the book, one I first read in 1954 when I was just a thirteen year old boy growing up in Maryborough. It was my favourite book at the time, and I read it several times. It certainly fired my imagination and gave me an appetite for damper that I was only able to satisfy with my Mother’s help. I was unable to make the sort of fire with hot embers in our back yard described in the book to cook a damper in so Mum made a damper in a casserole dish with a lid on inside the oven of the stove in our kitchen. Yes, I thought about the “true” nature of the book lying awake night after night in my bed beset with asthma and sciatica, pondering the question after reading information about “Jack" Idriess and his writings I found on the internet, and on “Dick”, his best mate in the book and in real life, Richard Albert Welsh, born in Cooktown June 1894. The book tells the story of two young men from Cooktown in the years just before WWI, Ion Idriess (known by his nick name “Jack” in the story) and his best mate “Dick” who sailed as deck crew on a pearling lugger, the “Nancy Bell”, fishing for trochus shell along the edges of the Great Barrier Reef. Unknown to Jack and Dick when they leave Cooktown heading north the skipper of the “Nancy Bell” has plans to intercept (steal) a drop of opium from a Chinese liner meant to be picked up at sea by a Japanese lugger. Reviews and commentaries I read on the internet of Idriess and his writings made the point that in personal or autobiographical books he presented as non-fiction, such as “The Opium Smugglers”, Idriess followed the truth “most of the time” to quote one commentator. Although I could not find one review online written on “The Opium Smugglers” I did read reviews of other titles. So, I know from what I read that in writing books like this Idriess took facts that were true and sliced them into slivers that he re-arranged to suit the narrative of his stories, not necessarily in the same sequence he may have taken them from real life time. He did the same with his characters, juxtaposing them against other situations and memories to weave a new tapestry in his dramatic narrative. His characters may have come from other times and places, but real nonetheless, as they find their place in this story, the likes of the three Aboriginals “Big Paddy”, “Little Paddy” and “Billy”. The crew of the lugger “Nancy Bell”, the Filipino skipper “Cross-eyed Joe” and the two Malay divers, Alor San and Ah Matt, most likely were based on real life characters Idriess would have met in his life, men who sailed pearling luggers around the northern coasts of Australia between the two world wars. He may well have met those three strong characters who crewed the “Nancy Bell” in Cooktown but it is just as likely he came across them or their like in other northern ports, at another time, allowing him to mould their personalities and identities into the three men we meet in the book. Cooktown existed, just as Idriess describes it in the book, and his mate “Dick” was born in Cooktown and grew up there. Idriess was living in Cooktown when the story took place, in the years shortly before WWI. The fishing of the shallow trochus shell beds on the Barrier Reef Great happened, just as Idriess described it. Lizard Island was always there, as it is still today. The Japanese (and others surely) smuggled opium along the routes followed by the steamers of the day that plied the shipping lanes along the eastern Australian seaboard in the early years of the 20th Century. The character of the Japanese crewman dropped by the black lugger on Lizard Island, to keep an eye out for the Chinese steamship that dropped the opium, is certainly a very interesting personality, an extremely resourceful and skilled bushman as well as a seaman. I would think Idriess might have created this man from an amalgam of stories he would have picked up from tales told of men who did just as this man would have done; Japanese divers, fishermen and smugglers landing on the northern coasts, pitting their wits against the likes of Police and Aboriginal tribes. The book contains an interesting though brief glimpse of Cooktown in the years before WWI, showing a small town with a vibrant and colourful mixed racial population- Europeans, Aboriginal, Chinese, Japanese, Malay, and other SE Asian. Idriess writes a dramatic account in this book of the death of folk heroine Mary Watson, her baby and one of her Chinese servants in 1881, fleeing from Lizard Island in a cut down steel tank after an attack by Aborigines, one of the great heroic episodes recorded in the 19th Century history of northern Queensland. The story is well told, gripping really, ideal for what was written as a “boys’ book” in 1948. However the real beauty of the book for me is in the language, the crafted words, the lovingly descriptive mind pictures Idriess paints in his prose of the Barrier Reef, the landscape and seascape of Lizard Island, the colours and life of the northern Queensland he knew so intimately. I enjoyed the minute detail Idriess devoted for example to describing how the Aboriginals tracked the wily Japanese crewman from the black lugger on Lizard Island, and how on occasions he managed to outwit the three Aboriginals from the “Nancy Bell” as well as Dick and Jack, themselves very experienced in Australian bushlore. If we accept the timeline of Idriess’ life created by his biographer, Beverley Eley, one apparently still incomplete, but makes no mention of the adventure on the “Nancy Bell”, then we would have to regard the story most likely as being an invention on Idriess’ part. So, is it a true story? Well, no, evidently not literally true. Most likely it would not have happened exactly in real life as Idriess wrote it in his book, though I suppose it could have happened as it was told. All the pieces Idriess wove together to make the fabric of the plot existed, most if not all taken from real life Cooktown, and its real people, though including a few from other places and at other times, combining it all to become the inspiration for his story. And it is surely an idealized adventure Idriess gave us with his story, just as we would have expected, with its happy ending, no? Idriess intended his readers take the book as “A True Story of Our Northern Seas” and I for one am happy to leave it there. So let us give the last word to “Jack”. Dal McGuirk Auckland 24.07.2018