Crusoe Of The North

Billy Turnbull of Hicks Island

DURING April Mr. W. (Billy) Turnbull, lessee of Hicks Island, off Cape York Peninsula, announced that if Japanese poachers did not cease their activities in his part of northern Australia, residents would have to use firearms.

“Billy Turnbull is a tall, thin Australian, with a drawl and a slow smile, known throughout the Coral Sea as the Crusoe of Hicks Island,’’ wrote Mr. lon L. Idriess in the Melbourne Herald on April 22. “He is a quiet chap, well educated, and a kindly man. Together in other years, he and I have often watched strange craft sail by his lonely island.

“When I visited Hicks Island Billy had just found a sapphire mine, but they were very few and very small, and so he went back to his coconut growing and his ex perimental sheep and garden. His idea was to form an Australian coconut plan tation, and while the trees were maturing to grow produce for the pearling fleets of Thursday Island. He also had a cutter, and before it was wrecked used to collect trochus from the reefs, with an occasional lucky find of pearl shell.

“Billy’s little castle on the sea is a tiny house built on stilts. It is painted white, and peeps out from among the dark green mangroves on the tiniest of beaches. The high tides creep up under the house, and with them sometimes a big crocodile.

“It is a lonely group, the Home Group.

A cluster of little islets about 12 miles from the mainland of Cape York Peninsula.

No whites on the mainland, Billy’s only company a few nomad aboriginals who would occasionally canoe across, and a South Sea Islander on Haggerston Island a few miles away. The nearest settlement is Thursday Is., about 100 miles north.”