Last Nizam (9781742626109) (32 page)

Jah had a different perspective. To leave his heritage behind and become an Indian prince in the Australian outback seemed entirely natural. ‘Abu Bakar was a shepherd so I see no reason why I shouldn't be one,' he explained to an interviewer in 1984, referring to his ancestor, the first Caliph of Islam. Jah described himself as a wool merchant running a ‘very modern sheep farming station' even though he had never shorn a sheep and the
station's output was meagre at best. He also boasted of having ‘mining and mechanical companies'.
¹²

In reality his business acumen was as rudimentary as the dirt causeway he built across the Murchison River. It wouldn't take much to wash it away. Impervious to criticism, Jah justified his approach by saying he was putting money into the local economy – even if it was not being spent in the most efficient manner. ‘Jah used to tell us not to worry about getting paid,' remembers Ted McClintock, who continued to work on the station after it had been sold by his father. ‘He'd say: “When I get the money out it will come in bucket fulls.” I told him just a billy full will do.'
¹³

The down-to-earth attitude of men like McClintock appealed to Jah, whose wardrobe consisted of an Akubra hat, a dusty blue boiler suit and R. M. Williams work boots. ‘He got around in old clothes, he didn't put on the dog at all,' says Cess Blood, who worked as a station hand.
¹⁴
After the sycophancy of Hyderabad, where even his close friends dared not address him other than as ‘His Exalted Highness', Jah revelled in the fact that Australians cared little about who you were, where you were from or what you had. ‘I respect Western Australians more than anyone else,' he told a Perth newspaper in 1984. ‘They shake my hand, and say, “Hi Jah, how're yer doing?”'
¹⁵

The informality and the isolation, however, held little appeal for Esra. She was more at home in London mixing with friends, going to parties and keeping up with the latest fashions. As Ann Morrow narrates in her book
Highness
, Esra was appalled that her husband wanted to settle in Western Australia. ‘Rugged life as a farmer's wife, hearing the roustabouts bellowing “Jah” or “Charlie” whenever they wanted the Nizam outraged her sense of dignity.'
¹⁶
Looking back on those years after three marriages to Turkish women, Jah sees things differently. ‘No lady from Istanbul can live anywhere but Istanbul. I gave [Esra] 10 days before fleeing, she left on the ninth.'
¹⁷

As much as Jah enjoyed female company, his overriding passion was heavy machinery. ‘I like rebuilding earth moving and heavy industrial equipment like that,' he was quoted as saying soon after he arrived in Australia. ‘I take old bulldozers and strip them down and rebuild them like some other people make motor cars their hobby.'
¹⁸
There were plenty of opportunities for Jah to indulge in his hobby. Western Australia's economy ran on gold, silver, nickel and bauxite mining and there was a huge turnover of heavy equipment. There was also plenty of surplus World War II armament lying around the state that had been used for military training or converted for public infrastructure projects. Jah's pride and joy was a 75-tonne Fiat HD 41, one of only six imported into Australia and at the time the largest bulldozer in the world. What thrilled Jah even more was the fact that he had bought it for A$37,000 at a clearance sale when a new one would have set him back A$750,000. ‘I got a lot of pleasure out of fixing it up and I love driving it – it's a challenge to do properly.'

Scattered around the Murchison homestead today are the abandoned playthings of an Indian prince who preferred Caterpillars to coaches and felt more at home in the cockpit of a D9 than the
howdah
of royal elephant. A British-built amphibious tank that Jah intended to use to ride down the Murchison River to Kalbarri rests in the sand outside the old shearing shed. Another is permanently parked in a clearing next to the chassis of some old Jeeps. A 1938 Leyland Scammel tank-recovery vehicle fitted with an oversized radiator from a Perth bus points forlornly towards the machinery shed. Dozens of other vehicles and pieces of machinery, including an Austin Champ scout car and a ‘snow plough' Jah designed for tearing up tree roots, lie scattered over a one-kilometre radius like giant rust-coloured gravestones.

The station's new owner, Callum Roscic, has researched the progeny of every identifiable piece of machinery and can attach a yarn to most of them. His favourite story relates to how Jah
reversed his newly purchased amphibious tank off the flat-topped delivery truck, called out to the station hands, ‘Get in, boys', and drove into the Murchison River which was in full flood. Instead of floating, the tank disappeared beneath the water in a cloud of steam. It had been modified for laying cables on dry land and one of its side panels had been cut out. No one had bothered to check.
¹⁹

Today, a round of Swan Bitter is enough to prompt the oldtimers at Gil Gai Tavern in Kalbarri to start spinning their pet stories about ‘The Shah', as many still call him. Gary White, a local dozer driver who worked at the station from the early 1980s, remembers Jah as a generous though somewhat eccentric employer. ‘My job was that no matter where I went grading the track had to be two blades wide. If there were any kinks in it I had to try and straighten them out. He liked to travel everywhere at 100 kilometres an hour. He didn't like going around corners, definitely not sharp corners.'
²⁰

White insists that Jah's engineering skills were limited to topping up a radiator with salty water, which would eventually cause the engine to seize. Most of the menial work was done by his Indian servants:

If Jah wanted a nut tightened on something he would just direct one of his coolies to do it. If Jah wanted to pick something up one of the coolies would be there with a pair of gloves they would put on him. They did all his work for him. The whole bloody lot. They would get everything prepared and he would just jump on the motor and go driving. He was the type that if he got grease on his hands he would unscrew the fuel cap of a dozer and dive his hands in and wash them in the fuel tank. His excuse was, that's what the filters are for, they take that dirt out.
²¹

Jah claims that he personally graded almost 300 kilometres of roads and ‘straight as a die' fencelines on Murchison House Station and once boasted he could easily be earning $500 a week as a bulldozer driver. The locals were less impressed. Jah would used a giant D9 dozer for a job that could have been done by a D6. Soaks were disturbed and winter rains washed out sections of road. Projects were abandoned midstream and everything was a quick fix. ‘Jah would get semitrailer loads of feed in for the cattle, but it would never reach the fields,' says McClintock. ‘Those animals who were smart enough to hang around near the homestead did all right but the others almost starved.'
²²
Jah's Perth-based managers were also feeling the frustration. ‘You'd get a bill out of the blue for $4000 because he had driven across Australia and then chartered a Lear Jet to get home,' says Nuttal.
²³

Before going out on his dozer, Jah would fill a small esky with a block of cheese, a few bars of chocolate, a six-pack of Diet Tab and an ice brick. Grabbing his .303, which he used for target practice, he would disappear for the rest of the day. Sometimes he left the dozer parked in the bush and radioed the homestead to be picked up in one of his four-wheel drives. Whenever he came across any of his tough beer-drinking, meat-eating workers he would insist on sharing with them his chocolate and lukewarm drinks. ‘It was shocking shit,' says White. ‘The chocolate was always on the verge of melting but if you didn't take it you'd feel like you had offended him. So we used to wait until he wasn't looking and then get rid of it.'
²⁴

White insists he was ‘one of the only people that didn't rob him blind' and backs up his claim by the fact that Jah kept rehiring him for almost 25 years. ‘The thing was, he wasn't so blind about it. He used to say to me: “These people think I'm nothing but a dumb Indian. Far from it. They come out here, they do the job, they overprice it, I pay them. But they'll never get another job here again.”'
²⁵

It is difficult to gauge the extent to which local tradesmen took
advantage of Jah because he was so wealthy or how much wastage was due to Jah's own naivety. ‘He'd put money into the farm all right but it didn't hit the right spots,' says McClintock. He remembers how Jah insisted on laying white plastic piping to carry water from bores to other parts of the station, only to have it trampled on and wrecked by the cattle. He then ordered black poly piping but neglected to have it buried underground. It melted in the first bushfire.
²⁶

Complicating matters was the usually tense relationship Jah had with his station managers, who in turn had their hands tied by the farm consultants based in distant Perth. After Bill Shimmons left in 1979, Jah began hiring and firing managers at an average rate of one a year. The only surviving station manager's diary chronicles the ups and downs. On 2 February 1982, John Waters wrote: ‘Jah graded the road from Tulua to the Homestead with the D9 and snow plough not a bad job either.' By October, however, Waters had been replaced by Ian Secombe, who was unimpressed with the way things were being run. ‘All men picked up and stacked hay,' he wrote on 18 October. ‘What a miserable failure as an exercise. Hay was mown too late. Very little seed and very dry stalks. Very heavily infested with safflower.' A few days later Secombe noted that the sale of 120 wethers had fallen through because their brands were illegible and the necessary permits had not been obtained. The next entry reads: ‘Mobile 3 breaks down pumps not working.'
²⁷

Jah could still afford to make mistakes that would send other farmers broke. There was little incentive to make a profit out of farming when the assets he could draw on were more than adequate to maintain an expensive lifestyle. Jah had invested in property in Kalbarri, Geraldton and Busselton. In 1978 he purchased Havelock House, a historic two-storey mansion in the leafy suburb of West Perth. A year later a Panamanian-registered 260-tonne luxury yacht named the MV
Kalbarrie
turned up in
Fremantle's Success Harbour. Jah had bought the ex-Dutch Navy minesweeper from Harry Pound's shipyard in Portsmouth and had it refitted in Singapore, before sailing it down the Western Australian coast. It was the biggest boat ever moored at Fremantle's marina.

Jah also joined the mining rush by buying a gold mine near Halls Creek in the far north of Western Australia. He named it the Majeed Mine after his Turkish grandfather. Attracted by stories told by locals of gold deposits being washed up after heavy rains, he invested several million dollars in equipment, mining permits and staff. The mine never made a profit and became the butt of jokes in pubs around the town. Jah was unconcerned. He got more of a thrill seeing his beloved HD41 gouging through the red dirt than the few specks of gold it produced. If he needed work done on one of his dozers or four-wheel drives he would charter a plane to fly a mechanic from Perth to Kalbarri or Halls Creek and back again. Paul Palazzo, who runs Palazzo Motors in the Perth suburb of Northbridge, remembers Jah ordering a charter flight just to bring up one 20-litre can of hydraulic fluid for one of his dozers. ‘You would never tell him something can't be done.'
²⁸

Gary White was one of the few who dared to say no. When Jah got fed up with the pilfering of gold from Halls Creek, he asked White to manage the mine, but he refused. As Jah toyed with the idea of selling the mine, he asked White to ‘walk' his HD41 the 2000 kilometres to Kalbarri, which would have involved driving it across farming land, roads and rivers on 400 litres of fuel a day. White told him he could do it, but it would take 12 months and cost more in diesel and support vehicles than the dozer was worth. For once Jah agreed to let Palazzo dismantle the dozer into pieces small enough to be loaded onto trucks and carried to his farm.

Former shire president, Ron Allen, believes Jah had good
intentions, but was often thwarted by those around him. ‘He offered to lend his bulldozer to put in Kalbarri's new golf course, but when the driver went to fill it up with diesel he found that the tank had been emptied by the station's workers and sold on the side.'
²⁹
Used to being a ruler rather than a rate-payer, Jah could not understand why he had to pay the local council for the privilege of owning his land or obtain approvals for building on it.

In 1978, Jah found himself involved in another project that had little to do with sheep farming. Jeremy Green, the Curator of Maritime Archaeology at the Museum of Western Australia, asked for and received Jah's help in accessing and excavating the
Zuytdorp
. The Dutch East India ship had gone down in 1707 with 280 people on board off the coast of inaccessible country approximately 60 kilometres northwest of Murchison House Station. In 1927, Aboriginal stockman Tom Pepper discovered the remains of a camp made by survivors of the wreck at the top of a cliff together with other artefacts from the ship. Dangerous currents and heavy swells limited diving to only a few days a year and it was not until 1964 that museum divers found the evidence of a shipwreck lying against a reef platform opposite the remains found on land.

The real significance of the wreck, however, was yet to be revealed. On 21 May 1968, after several unsuccessful attempts to dive at the site, commercial diver Alan Robinson lowered himself over the edge of a cray fisherman's boat and dived into the murky waters. Seeing a ‘glint of silver' he dived deeper and saw a carpet of coins covering the seabed. It was, he said, ‘the biggest single mass of bullion I ever hope to see. Coins were in conglomerate form by the tonne and everything I touched showed silver. I removed a few dozen and then returned to the boat, on the last ounce of air in the bottle.' The next day Robinson announced to the press that the coins and bullion he saw were ‘worth millions of dollars'.
³⁰