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  Johann engaged two carpenters as assistants. He listed his purchases of building materials in a black-covered diary with gilt-edged pages. This diary was small enough to fit in a shirt pocket and became stained with water or sweat.

  After a farewell service at St Andrews Cathedral in July 1891, the carpenters and their building materials set out from Double Bay, Sydney in an old collier schooner, the Grace Lynn. The two missionaries, Albert Maclaren and Copland King, were to join the ship in Cooktown, where they also took on a horse. Johann sent a letter from Cooktown to his wife towards the end of July:

  My Dear Wife,

  We arrived here this morning in this beautiful place of the far north of Queensland among the high mountains where the black natives are at home. I had a stroll through the town this afternoon. It looks rather pitiful to see the poor Black Gins playing about the street half naked with their little ones on their backs naked as they were born. In particular I could not help taking notice of a three months old, sitting on its mother’s neck, holding itself on to its mother’s curly hair…

  His diary records that when they set out again, they were immediately becalmed. The Reverend Chalmers visited their ship while they were at anchor that night. (Chalmers was known as the Dr Livingstone of Melanesia and was later eaten by cannibals.) Next day at noon, they passed the Barrier Reef, and it was ‘very rough’ until the New Guinea coast was sighted.

  They were again becalmed and finally towed in by the Governor’s steamship Merrie England to Samarai (‘this beautiful island’ he calls it). In a letter to Annie he says that while waiting off Samarai:

  we were visited by the black natives. They came to us in little boats (or canoes) and brought us some coconuts, shells, yams, and grass for our horse and we paid them back with some tobacco and bread. They were very jolly fellows, they did sing and dance for us very near all naked.

  Like many of his letters to Annie, this was signed ‘I remain yours truly husband John E Lehmann’.

  After leaving Samarai they ran aground at East Cape. A letter described a ‘near wreck … we ran onto a reef in the middle of the day and after being on it 10 hours, we accidentally floated off. She bumped very heavily several times and I thought she was going to break up…’ They reached Chad’s Bay and were becalmed for two days in stifling heat. Their dog became sun struck and a carpenter shot it with a revolver.

  They sailed the final 25 miles (40 km) and anchored within rowing distance of the future site for the mission station. Johann started work on a punt. When the horse swam up onto the beach, the natives ran away in terror calling out ‘Big pig!’ – a detail I heard from Archbishop Hand (ninety-nine years later). Johann ‘witnessed the purchase of about 25 acres of land for 30 or 40 pounds of tobacco, tomahawks, shirts, flax etc’. This was the grassy plateau of Dogura. It was considered healthier than low ground with its ‘bad air’ (the Italian mal’aria) associated with malaria. (When I visited there, I discovered ‘Dogura’ meant ‘cannibal battle ground’. This was why it was unoccupied land available for the missionaries.)

  A letter to his wife, dated August 23 and not in his handwriting, may have been written for him by one of the other carpenters:

  We are anchored about 400 yards from the shore where the native village is situated… We have to pull across every morning to work in a boat. The natives are very friendly. We get plenty of coconuts from them. We drink the milk from them and it is better than water. We built a large punt to unload the vessel. We started to build the church last week. It is a very large building … with a verandah 12 feet wide all around, and a tower and cross and belfry … is to be built on the top of a very high hill which is nice and level as a bowling green … We have over a hundred naked savages both men, women and boys digging the holes and clearing the grass … there is one large river of splendid fresh water. We have a swim in it every evening … We are all in good health … one of the sailors is laid up with fever, he got it the first day. The weather is very hot here. I can only wear my flannel shirt on in the day and we can’t bear the blanket on at night… yours truly J. E. Lehmann.

  The ‘good health’ mentioned in the letter was short-lived. The elevation of the site did not protect the missionaries (or my grandfather) from malaria. Malaria was to cause the death of dozens of missionaries across New Guinea.

  Johann’s diary records that on August 24 for the ‘first time’ he visited a ‘native built house’. Johann was a meticulous craftsman and would have admired the neat lines and tightly woven palm leaf walls of the native house, several of which I saw more than 100 years later.

  On August 30 Johann wrote again to ‘My Dear Wife’. This letter is in his hand writing with his Germanic spelling. The difficulties of building on the site are becoming apparent:

  We commenced to build the house last week, but we have not been able to do much as we are waiting for the materials … it is rather difficult to bring the materials to the site where the building is to be built. It is about 15 minutes walk down to the sea shore and in one part of it very steep … The place is surrounded by high mountains … There is but very little timber about here. We scarcely have enough wood to cook our meals. We are staying in a house which we had built by the natives of young timber and grass, and is large enough for 3 carpenters, one cook and 2 missionaries … We commence to work at half past five in the morning and [have] one hour at 8 for breakfast. From 12 to 2 is dinner time and then we leave off work at 5…

  The natives are helping us carry the timber etc. both men and women. But the men are working by themselves and the women work by themselves and in every way they are very decent in their clothing and behaviour.

  The stereotype of ‘the hundred naked savages’ in the letter written for Johann contrasts with his own observation of segregated and decently clothed native workers.

  His diary records removing timber from the seashore and unpacking galvanized iron. On September 1 the horse was unable to carry lumber up the steep slope (‘Horse not ben strong enough’). The following week Carroll, one of the assistant carpenters, used obscene language (‘upseen languige’) and struck Johann in the face. Carroll left the job and went away on the Grace Lynn. (Years later when he passed Annie in the street, he stared in the gutter.)

  There are the last two pages of a letter from Annie, probably received by Johann on 17 September. Her letter is in a confident hand with a few minor spelling mistakes, which I have corrected:

  … It is a great pity as you did not join the Lodge before you went away. It takes all that I can save to pay doctor and medicine. May is getting better. Her nose and mouth is very sore yet she had to have all hair cut off. There is lots people sick … Same as May. I am not all right as I thought you may expect something next year [a very matter-offact announcement she was pregnant with my father] … It was flower service today. I sent Annie [Annie called her daughter Agnes ‘Annie’ – this was a surprise to me] with a bunch of roses and other flowers … Otto say[s] you are gone, he sometimes point[s] down the street. No more at present.

  I remain your affectionate

  Annie Lehmann

  Hoping to hear from you soon.

  A British naval steamship, the Royalist, visited and probably delivered this letter. A barely legible letter of Johann’s dated September 18 mentions that electric lights from the Royalist were used to illuminate the village and twelve natives went on board. He wrote (much more graciously than she had): ‘I am very glad you with child’. (My father was to be born nine months and two days after the farewell service at St Andrews Cathedral.) This is his last letter that survives.

  Next day he was ‘taken sick with bronchitis’. Three days later he started work again ‘but very weak and unwell’. Successive diary entries record his work, with ‘unwell’ circled on several days.

  Desperate about the lack of progress, the head missionary Maclaren lost his temper with my grandfather, then apologised. Johann’s diary records that he began work on the ‘native chapel’ on November 2. The �
��native chapel’ was an unplanned attempt to get something built quickly before the wet season began. An old photograph shows a thatched roof, logs laid end to end for walls, no windows and an open gap at the front for a doorway – in effect a Melanesian roof on top of an American log-cabin. Perched on the edge of the escarpment, it had magical views across the Coral Sea. On November 10 Johann and the main body of the mission left. Copland King had malaria and went with them. Maclaren remained and celebrated matins and evensong in his chapel until he died of malaria a couple of months later.

  A sick carpenter at Samarai, whom my grandfather helped, paid him with native ‘curiosities’ (grass skirts and an intricately carved oar inlaid with mother-of-pearl). He sailed for Cooktown on the schooner Myrtle. His last diary entry – in pencil like all his diary entries – states ‘Friday 19th’, but records nothing else. He now had malaria. He was briefly hospitalised in Brisbane, then continued on to Sydney by the steamship Aramac. An account by Arthur Kent Chignell Twenty-One Years in Papua states:

  one of the carpenters was carried unconscious from the ship to his home in North Sydney, and there next evening he died.

  My family’s account is slightly different. When he arrived in Sydney, Annie had no idea he was coming back. She imagined he was still in New Guinea. When he disembarked from the Aramac, a stranger noticed him sitting on the wharf at Circular Quay, surrounded by his curiosities and toolbox, apparently helpless. The stranger arranged for a dray to take him across the harbour.

  My aunt Agnes, aged eight, was playing in the sunken front garden of the house in Walker Street, when she saw a dray pulling up. Her first reaction was to wonder why this black man had come to visit. His face, she said, ‘was brown as a penny’. Then she recognised her father’s toolbox. As he mounted the front steps of the house, he greeted all the children by name, as if to show he still remembered who they were; but he stumbled on Agnes’s name. He died the following day, 8 December.

  Frederick Felton, the hardware store owner who deplored his going on the mission, and the Reverend Alfred Yarnold who recruited him were the witnesses on the death certificate. This stated he was aged thirty-seven, and listed his mother as Agnes, ‘maiden surname not known to Informant’, who was Annie.

  I have a clear picture in my mind of Johann, a wanderer and idealist, full of curiosity, and open-minded. In a photograph he is a small man in a bowler hat, standing with three of his children outside his house, a black shovel beard almost down to his waist.

  My impression of Annie is less clear. I have seen no photograph of her. Her letter to Johann in New Guinea scolds him for not joining a lodge for medical insurance, the complaint of a romantic wanderer’s wife. When he died, she had to struggle with four young children, and a child about to be born. Working as a servant in a nearby house, she was given bread and a bucket of dripping, her family’s main sustenance for some years. As a young child, Agnes once had to beg at the railway station for matches to light the stove.

  In 1893 Annie arranged for a ‘KJ Read’ – the signature is unclear – to draft a letter asking for help from the Australian Board of Mission to clear the debt on the land. After Annie copied this letter in her own hand and sent it, she received a prompt reply from Alfred Yarnold, secretary of the Board, who two years earlier preached the sermon persuading my grandfather to go on the mission:

  Dear Mrs Lehmann

  I received your letter this morning and I regret very much that you were so unwise as to write it. Your husband was well paid for his work in New Guinea, and after his death you received a large sum as the balance of wages due to him…

  The letter went on to explain how a collection had already been raised to help reduce her mortgage. Yarnold was the father of AH (Tibby) Yarnold, the much-loved headmaster of Mosman Prep, who tutored me, aged eleven, in Latin and gave me two small books on archaeology. He awarded me as a prize Guerber’s Myths of Greece and Rome, which later inspired many teenage poems. I do not know if he knew I was the carpenter’s grandson.

  As well as annoying Alfred Yarnold with her demands, Annie upset the doctor who certified her husband’s death, BJ Newmarch. He reprimanded her for tenaciously holding on to her husband as he died, prolonging his life. She should have let him die in peace, he said.

  There was no widow’s pension in 1891. Annie had to get her children into jobs as soon as they were old enough. Agnes went to work at a young age in a steam laundry. The next daughter, May, started out as a domestic servant, became one of Canberra’s first tailors and had two daughters by different husbands. The three boys all trained as carpenters. My father’s first job was in an iron foundry, perhaps at about the age of twelve. This job lasted a week.

  Annie had paid off the mortgage on the Walker Street house by the time she died of kidney disease in 1918, aged sixty-one. No will was found and the three boys – Carl, Otto and Leo – continued living with their elder sister for some years. One day someone lifted up the linoleum on the kitchen floor and there was Annie’s will, leaving the house to Agnes. Agnes regretted this – ‘all the trouble it caused’. Otto and Leo married and only Carl continued living with her for the rest of his life.

  Agnes continued to work in a steam laundry until her late seventies. If her father had lived, she would have become a doctor, she said. In her early eighties, her old boss dropped in and asked her to come back to the steam laundry. She said no: ‘I’m an old age pensioner now’. She was a short woman, stooped and with a prominent nose, a long face and a small growth on her cheek, like a pink dewdrop sprouting two or three wisps of hair. She had a low widow’s peak that started only a few centimetres above her eyebrows. Her hangdog face lighted up with a smile as she let out a squawky laugh, which was often.

  North Sydney was becoming a second urban centre. Agnes was nostalgic for the brilliant night skies of her childhood. ‘Where has the Milky Way gone?’ she sometimes asked in her raucous voice.

  In one of her stories, Agnes, as a young woman, was picking a bunch of flowers in a field in North Sydney, and came across some boys tormenting a horse: ‘I let those rascals have it’. That evening she presented her bunch of flowers at a clairvoyant show, and the clairvoyant (closing her eyes and stroking the flowers) announced: ‘This one sure can rouse!’ The oldest son, Carl, engaged in spec building, in which he involved his younger brother Otto. Carl died in his early seventies of septicaemia, when he cut his foot, dragging an old sheet of galvanised iron through the streets of North Sydney. None of the brothers read books and all spoke with broad Australian accents. Although the neighbourhood thought they were ‘strange’, all Annie’s children had regular features except Agnes. Agnes was the ugly duckling of the family.

  Annie and her children harboured a grudge against the Anglican church. She sent my father to a Plymouth Brethren Sunday school where he was awarded a large red-bound, illustrated copy of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress for finding a record number of references to the coming of Christ in the Old Testament. How such a reluctant reader of books won this prize has been a source of puzzlement to me.

  One afternoon Agnes was describing how she was sticking pamphlets under front doors for the Rationalists’ Association – a group of freethinkers and atheists. ‘You mean the Irrationals’, my father kept interrupting her. When Agnes fell ill and we visited her in the Mater Misericordiae, a hospital run by nuns, she told us: ‘They kept asking what my religion is. I kept telling them ’eathen. Now look at this,’ she said, displaying a wristband on which a nun had neatly written ‘Heathen’.

  How can we judge grandparents? Johann, who became John, I admire for his open mind and love of nature, practical and impractical at the same time. Annie, the least sympathetic of the four, was dealt the worst hand at birth, coming from a poor family in Wales. Then as a widow with small children she had no family to fall back upon. She and her five fatherless children were ‘strange’. But she succeeded in a way my more cultivated maternal grandparents did not. William and Bella were spendthrifts from a privilege
d background and ruined their lives for no good purpose.

  Annie may not have been greatly loved by her children – it is unclear what their feelings for her were – but they did not have to fetch her from hotels, as my mother had to fetch Bella. Annie was living in a house she owned, free of debt, when she died, and left a will protecting her most vulnerable elder child – Agnes with her long face – who was unlikely ever to marry.

  Neither Annie nor her five children ever knew that the corner post of the ‘native chapel’ built by Johann miraculously sprouted after the missionaries left in 1891. It grew into a modawa or rosewood tree, and its leaf became the emblem of the Anglican Church in Papua New Guinea.

  Dogura is a 160 acre (65 ha) grassy plateau, backed by jagged mountains, and more than 60 metres above a black pebble beach fringed by coconut palms. The 1891 chapel survives only in old photographs. There is now a white-painted concrete cathedral nearby, completed in 1939. The cathedral of St Peter and St Paul is a simple Norman-Romanesque building with a red galvanised iron roof and two square towers – one tower is St Peter’s and the other St Paul’s. It is 52 metres long – longer than St Andrew’s Anglican cathedral in Sydney. There is also a large school.

  In 2014 I went on the annual Modawa Pilgrimage to Dogura – the only atheist pilgrim. Dogura has no running water or electricity (except at dusk when a generator is switched on for a few hours). There is no road in, and we set out for Dogura from Awaiama in the morning, in a dinghy powered by an outboard motor, a three-hour trip past denuded grass-covered mountains towering above beaches of black pebbles and basalt rock shelves at the water’s edge. Waterfalls glinted on mountainsides. Every mile or so a small canoe, carved from a tree trunk and with a flimsy outrigger, could be seen riding precariously on the swell.