There is a photograph in the voluminous collection of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra that haunts me, and it isn’t because the photograph itself is graphically violent or depicts an obvious scene of drama. In fact, the image is grainy and indistinct and one can only just discern the presence of an unknown number of fellow humans. The effect then, is not immediate without knowing what lead to this snapshot in time being taken.
But first, a brief diversion: My paternal grandmother grew up in Tasmania, and when she was going to school in Bridgewater in her teens, she was familiar with a family by the name of Piesse. The Piesse family had a horse and ‘jinker’ which the children, including my grandmother, would sometimes run behind on the way to and from school. One of the Piesse children was Ted, or Edward, to use his proper name. Gran probably played with Ted’s sisters more than Ted himself, but she was familiar with him nonetheless.
Fast-forward a few years to December the 8th, 1942, and the photograph mentioned previously, which can be viewed here (this will take you to the website of the Australian War Memorial). It is a blurred image of a group of men, probably no more than a dozen, though it is difficult to separate them, perched precariously on a raft in the ocean between northern Australia and what was then Portuguese (East) Timor.
The men on the raft were survivors from the Australian corvette, H.M.A.S. Armidale, which had been sunk off the south coast of East Timor by Japanese aircraft seven days previously. Survivors of the sinking were distributed on a motorboat, a whaling boat, a carley float, and the raft cobbled-together from debris. Able Seaman Edward Stanfield ‘Ted’ Piesse from Bridgewater, Tasmania, after just twelve months in the Royal Australian Navy, was unlucky enough to have been assigned to the raft onto which another 25 men were also clinging. Whilst the motor boat and whaler eventually made their way to safety, the carley float (which held 21 men of a Netherlands East Indies contingent of soldiers, mostly Javanese) and raft were swept in a different direction, until the 7th when a search aircraft spotted the latter and took the photograph. It was the last time these men – whoever they were, for Ted Piesse may have succumbed to exposure by then and slipped into the ocean to be eaten by the sharks that stalked them – were seen alive. A full search by multiple aircraft and naval vessels failed to find any further trace of either the carley float or raft. Able Seaman Piesse was officially declared to have died the following day.
I find it difficult to explain the poignancy I feel when viewing and thinking about that poor quality photograph. The ‘family connection’ is certainly a very tenuous one, for I don’t think that my grandmother kept in touch with the Piesse family after she moved to the mainland when school finished, so they and Ted were more acquaintances than good friends. The loss of the Armidale and two thirds of her crew was by no means the greatest suffered by the R.A.N. during the Second World War, nor was the sinking a turning point or tactically significant.
But there is something immediate and tangible about knowing that this grainy snapshot is the last record of the lives of a group of fellow humans. They vanished, leaving no body for friends and relatives to claim and grieve over. How they must have felt their luck had changed when the aircraft spotted them and flew low over their position. And how devastated they must have felt when it or another failed to return. Luck, hope, despair: all of this seeps, when one thinks about it, from a grainy photograph.
[References available on request].
