James Bond – Borderless

By Vela Noble

A lone house juts out of the cliffs on Kangaroo Island, like a villain’s lair in a James Bond movie. Its floor-to-ceiling windows are marred only by salt spray and swallow poo. The receding orange cliffs set against a fierce ocean makes for a view even the stonemason called, ‘the best on the island’. I slink down into the backseat of our car and admire the azure downhill view of Cape Jervis, where the ferry departs. Today my dad, his partner and I are driving to our holiday house for a short trip planting trees. On the North Cape of Kangaroo Island, the fields of matted grass pocked with weeds make for a melancholic landscape. Having been ravaged by decades of farming, helping revegetate is the least we can do.

My bedroom on the island has large eastern-facing windows. This gives me a view of Boxing Bay, a beach only visited by tourists willing to brave the potholed dirt road. Bleached book spines featuring nautical adventures or “101 Guide to Prepping” line the bookshelf. Dusty DVDs, mostly starring Ben Stiller, have also been faded by the elements. A box reveals an arsenal of art supplies my mum ordered online. I unearth my mum’s fancy French Sennelier watercolours. They come in a navy carry bag with crisp brushes begging to caress a canvas. Staring at these items hits a nerve, but I tenderly place it in my backpack.

That same afternoon we plant some trees. We have around sixty to get through this trip, mostly bristly casuarinas and muntrie berry bushes. I gently pat around each seedling and send a prayer into the earth. After I have done the bare minimum, I do what I usually do every trip; I wander off. I decided to make the trek from Boxing Bay up the hill to the solitary lighthouse. Passing a droopily arching tree, I tentatively open my sketchbook and bring pen to paper. The earth and sky don’t like me much. Juicy fat ants keep biting me and my pale arms are getting fried. The drawing comes out horribly, so I shove the sketchbook away. Life isn’t just tough for me, but for everything out here. We once caught a monitor lizard so thirsty that it was licking a leak in our hot tub. We offered it a drink, from which it drank like a dog from a bowl. On the North Cape, you can often glimpse the grand wingspan of a sea eagle surveying the hills in search of prey, such as mice. Echidnas are a bit rarer to spot. They must have it tough too, for they could get mistaken for a chubby mouse. Everywhere I look, there’s subject matter pleading to be painted. It’s in the flattened fields where settlers heaved limestone into neat little rows, or in the sheep skull perched on the wire fence. Around halfway to the lighthouse, I see some abandoned machinery in the corner of a field. I attempt to sketch. Yet again, something isn’t quite right. So, I tear an angry gash with the pen instead. The overcast weather rolling in urges me to slouch on home.

A storm hits tonight. The windows in my room shiver under every gale. The little sprouts we had just planted are getting a brutal welcome to their new home, but at least the earth gets a drink. Below the house on the cliffside, a grove of wizened casuarinas grow sideways as a result of with this abusive weather. Somehow, they still grow. I teeter to the toilet in the middle of the night.

My mum took charge of designing this home and her dedication is apparent even in the bathroom, where a nifty hidden wooden panel pops out to reveal storage for toothbrushes and toilet paper. She passed away in 2020 and didn’t get to enjoy that hidden toilet paper compartment. Both here and at home, there is no escaping the memory of my mum. In the morning, the sun beams straight into my slumbering retinas. I had hardly slept. Dad cranking up the coffee machine doesn’t help.

“What are you going to do today?”

“More terrible art, probably.”

“Go for a walk. Look for some sea eagles. There’s so much to do out here.”

I walk down to the grove of gnarly casuarinas. A solitary sheep that strayed from the feral herd appears in front of me. It startles, the dags on its butt dangling with every leap. I follow it and reach a sandy spot on the clifftop. These trees survived last night’s storm, why can’t I survive this?

I rummage through my bag and realise I have my mum’s watercolours. I admire the glossy hues snuggled in their metal tins. It’s as if her dreams are laid to rest in this little plastic case. After my mum passed away, I suffered a psychotic break which impaired my ability to do art. Art had been my passion. Professionals tell me it’s not damaged and I’ll get better but, I have yet to see any proof of that. Seeing the dirty sheep posing right in front of me, I can’t help but have hope. This time I don’t draw, I paint. I pop open the water filled jam jar and bring the brush to the ultramarine. The blue spills onto my page. Next is the sky that’s freckling my skin. I am not just painting, I am soaring on wings and scurrying through the undergrowth on tiny paws. Like the almighty creator, I lay down the stoic earth. Before I know it, I have a picture. Hey, it turned out alright! Above all else, I was happy making it. That evening I showed the picture to my dad.

“That’s fantastic Vela! Why do you keep saying you’ve lost your art?”

He puts it on the stonemason crafted mantelpiece, next to a bowl of seashells and under the happy gaze of my mum’s self-portrait.

It’s a pale purple dawn when we depart. The white drop cloths draped over the furniture to protect them from the sun makes the living room appear full of ghosts. We putter down the crushed limestone road, the rumbling white dust proclaiming our departure to all the thirsty lizards and echidnas shuffling in the bush. I take a final look at the wind-bent casuarinas on the cliffside. I too, feel beaten down by life, by relentless winds trying to rip me out by the roots. The trees get tougher and tougher, clinging into that poor soil. It may not be the best conditions, but when I think about the harshness of life on Kangaroo Island, I realise there’s something I can learn from it. Something in me can thrive too. The North Cape has made me just that little bit tougher.

.Vela Noble is a South Australian artist who is currently developing her own indie games. She has many years of experience working in animation for Netflix and Dreamworks.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

Richard Hughes: The Reporter Who Inspired Ian Fleming

Death came to Richard Hughes a little over a quarter century ago — precisely on 4th January 1984. For his friends it was more than a personal loss, not just the occasional twinge of sorrow. It was a permanent bereavement. Richard Hughes was the foreign correspondent of the Far Eastern Economic Review from 1971 to 1983 and was one of Asia’s top-notch reporters.

Born to an Irish mother and Welsh father, Hughes combined Catholicism and Calvinism. Hughes was a pressman, complete and unassuming. He began his life with a writing job in the public relations department of the Victorian Railways. He soon joined the Melbourne Star (he was reported to be cracked, leaving PR for journalism is like running away from sea to go to school). Then he joined Sydney’s Daily Telegraph and was sent to Tokyo. Hughes reported the events of World War II. After the war ended, he continued reporting for other wars — particularly, the Korean War (1950-53).

His journalistic stints hovered around The Economist and The Sunday Times. Like all great reporters, scoops were his forte — the best known being an exclusive interview in Moscow with Burgess and MacLean, both British men who spied for the USSR. Later he shifted to Hong Kong and began writing his weekly columns.

Richard Hughes was more than a pressman. A towering personality who loved his job eminently, he was equally in the company of eminent people. Ian Fleming who was penning his James Bond thrillers was Hughes’ foreign editor and John le Carre wrote him into his books. Dikko Henderson of the Australian Secret Service in Fleming’s You Only Live Twice (1964) and Old Craw in Le Carre’s The Honourable Schoolboy (1977)are none other than Dick or Richard Hughes.

The life of Hughes as a reporter spanned many decades, most of which was spent in Asia. Hughes wrote extensively about Asia and his memoirs of those decades are chronicles of some important happenings in the continent. From hilarious events to the macabre ones, Hughes wrote about them and with great elan.

Hughes was an avid China-watcher and in most of his reports China figured prominently. Even the first report he filed on 16 October 1971, carried a commentary on Chairman Mao Zedong’s health and Lin Biao being anointed heir-apparent.

The year 1972 was, like 2008, the Chinese year of the Rat. Hughes wrote rather assertively: “The late Comrade Marx may not have heard of this celestial law of the animal calendar, and Chairman Mao himself does not refer to it in any of his manifestos; but stubbornly it persists, real and abiding, if non-ideological.”

President Nixon was visiting Peking early 1972. Hughes in his ingenious style commented: “The Chinese comrades have their own Maoist version of champagne, which was available in an alleged nightclub in a hutung behind the old Peking market as late as 1957; but the less said about that bastardized product the better for the Washington-Peking detente.”

In yet another of his weekly columns, Hughes described how Comrade-Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia (1922-2012) feared and distrusted the communists and the Vietnamese (Hanoi and Saigon alike) more than he feared or distrusted the Americans and the West.

Hughes’ oeuvre spanned from small little facts to great tributes. His piece on the death of Mitsugoro Bando VIII, the 69-year-old Kabuki actor, which he wrote in February 1975,was not only an homage but it carried an incisive analysis of the cause of this theatre personality’s death-eating fugu or Japanese globefish. Mark these details which Hughes had appended in his dispatch:

“Globefish poisoning is caused by tetrotoxin, usually found in fugu liver or ovaries, which can be far deadlier than potassium cyanide and causes violent paralysis. Since 1958, when a total of 289 diners suffered from globefish poisoning in Japan and 167 died, only licensed cooks have been authorized to prepare fugu dishes.”

Hughes was once expelled from the press galleries of both the Senate and the House of Representatives in Canberra because of his critical remarks about an irresponsible Senate vote against John Curtin’s Labor government. As he was re-seated after being exonerated in the galleries, he was not only delighted but gave this bit of information in his column that the Canberra press is one of the friendliest in the world.

Richard Hughes’ dispatches were not always matter-of-fact reporting; some of them were comical and conversational. One such backdrop was the lunar zodiac in which Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou were born.

Here is another account of Kim II Sung of North Korea (1912-94), who was speculated to have disappeared from public life owing to an incurable malignant neck cancer. Hughes wrote:

“Many of my barefoot spies in Peking and Seoul believe that when Kim II Sung sought medical advice in Rumania in 1974, he was told that he could expect to continue in public office for only two more years. This story certainly helps to explain his family-cult buffoonery and the controversial promotion of his 37-year-old son Kim Jong II as his successor.”

A September-1978 column of Hughes takes us to what happened in Indonesia in the late sixties — Ratna Sari Dewi, the one time Tokyo geisha hostess and the third wife of the late president Sukarno, denouncing the CIA for complicity in the abortive 1965 communist coup. In the same vein, Hughes wrote eulogistically about President Suharto: “He sought to retire Sukarno, the father figure of Indonesian revolution, with relative dignity and avoid humiliation of the man who had been the country’s voice for two decades. But Sukarno, that arrogant hypocrite, never gave Suharto credit for his characteristically Indonesian perception and generosity.”

No newspaper columnist can ever keep himself aloof from writing about newspapers themselves. So, when Hughes attended a reception of Shimbun’s 35th anniversary celebrations he was nostalgic about the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan and how it had grown to a strong 250-member association by 1946. In a similar vein, he argued in one of his reports in November 1981 that the world’s first daily newspaper was not The Times but the contest was between west and East Europe or Korea. Based on various sources Hughes resolved that The Leipziger Zeitung (Korea) was the world’s first daily newspaper.

Richard Hughes’ last column was on the charade by former Australian prime minister Harold Holt’s espionage and his submarine escape to China. He, no doubt, called him a patriotic Aussie and recalled their friendship from the debating days of Melbourne. This column was submitted on 15 December 1983 and after which he never returned to write those brilliant columns once again.

Hughes columns were hilarious and sensitive to prevailing situations. He touched those niceties of life which he could handle with great aplomb. Whether it was the slave children of old Shanghai, plunging pathetic, claw-like hands into vats of boiling water to prepare silk cocoons for spinning or the Teikoku poisoner who massacred a bank’s staff for a haul of US 80 dollars, Hughes’ columns were down-to-earth.

No wonder he was called the ‘barefoot reporter’!

Bhaskar Parichha is a journalist and author of No Strings Attached: Writings on Odisha and Biju Patnaik – A Political Biography. He lives in Bhubaneswar and writes bilingually. Besides writing for newspapers, he also reviews books on various media platforms.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL