After more than 80 years, a little-known wartime survival story and a mysterious diamond heist are the talk of the town in outback Australia.

On a dusty dirt road, a convoy of cars rumbles towards the coast.

It’s the middle of a heatwave and the clock is ticking.

In a few brief hours, the aeroplane at the heart of a multi-million-dollar diamond mystery will be exposed by the ocean tide.

The decaying wreck is the last link to a little-known wartime tale of tragedy and survival.

But the road to reach it is rough and overgrown.

In the lead vehicle, a lean, chain-smoking amateur historian named Lachie Fraser is anxiously inspecting the road.

“We’re almost there, Henry — we’re off to Carnot Bay, by jingoes,” he calls out to his travelling companion.

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Henry Augustine, a Nyul Nyul and Jabirr Jabirr man, is clutching the steering wheel.

“It’s about time, my friend. Time to pay our respects.”

Swinging onto the beach, a large cross juts out over the sand dunes.

It marks the spot where the violence of World War II struck the remote coast of Western Australia.

And it was here that thousands of diamonds quietly disappeared, triggering a frantic search and a bizarre court case that made headlines across the country.

More than 80 years later, what happened to the diamonds in the chaotic aftermath of the wartime saga remains a mystery.

Lachie and Henry — a quintessential outback odd couple — are determined to revive the memory of this little-known chapter of Australia’s history and commemorate the lives of those who died on a hot beach far away from home.

“This is part of my family’s history, but it’s also part of Australia’s history and Dutch history, and it belongs to all of us,” Henry says.

But the plane wreck is slowly disintegrating, and it’s a race against the tide to catch a glimpse. Will the so-called Diamond Dakota reveal itself in the dawn light?

Stepping out onto a stretch of sand as the sun rises and the tide recedes, our Kimberley odd couple tell the story of what happened on a steamy morning in 1942.

It was a tense and traumatic time in Australia’s northern towns.

The Japanese forces had started attacking the coast, bombing the city of Darwin and sending troops to the northern tip of Western Australia. Speculation was growing that Australia was about to be invaded.

On March 3, the Japanese made their surprise strike on the small port town of Broome, ploughing the airport and moored boats with machine-gun fire.

The attack only lasted an hour, but it was devastating. Smoke billowed above the burning boats in Roebuck Bay as dead bodies floated amid the mangroves.

More than 80 people died, mostly Dutch nationals who’d been evacuated from the Dutch East Indies — now part of Indonesia.

It was by coincidence that, a few minutes after the raid, the returning Japanese aircraft chanced upon a small Dutch aircraft as it quietly flew evacuees to Broome.

On board the Dakota DC-3 was famed fighter pilot Ivan Smirnoff, as well as three crew and eight civilians.

The aircraft was pelted with machine-gun fire.

Captain Smirnoff was shot in the arm and leg as he tried to swing the plane out of the line of fire.

He made a miraculous emergency landing on the beach below, and the salty waves extinguished the flames.

All 12 people on board had survived, but many were badly wounded, and now stranded on a remote beach with little food, water, or shelter.

And somewhere in the wreckage lay a small brown package containing a stash of precious diamonds.

In the minutes before their fateful flight, a mystery man had appeared and asked Captain Smirnoff to transport something to Australia.

“He didn’t tell me what was in it, he just said it was very valuable and it must be delivered in Australia as quickly as possible.”

It would later be confirmed the package contained thousands of uncut gemstones, worth around $24 million in today’s money.

But in the midst of an emergency, the mystery parcel could not be found — the survivors had other priorities.

Several passengers were critically injured. A young mother, Maria van Tuyn, had squeezed aboard the evacuation flight with her baby boy, Johannes. She’d been shot twice.

“She was about to die,” one of the survivors would later tell Dutch journalists.

“She asked me, ‘Is the doctor coming?’ I told her that he’s on the way — why tell her otherwise?

Air force pilot Daan Hendriksz and mechanic Joop Blaauw were the next to die. The surviving men buried the bodies in the sand dunes as they waited anxiously for help to arrive.

Their prospects were grim.

Several years later, Captain Smirnoff would describe the scene in a crackly audio recording.

“Our water was getting low, and our food was down to a few tins of asparagus and pineapple,” he intones.

“On the third day, I decided to send the strongest men on an expedition with instructions not to come back — I thought we’d all die anyway.

“I said goodbye to them and thought, ‘we will never meet again’.”

The rescue effort

The survivors had no way of knowing there was a Catholic mission located just 50 kilometres to the north.

Beagle Bay was home to hundreds of Aboriginal people — including Henry Augustine’s grandparents — who were living under the watch of German priests and Irish nuns.

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Amid the turmoil of colonisation came a global war, belting the Kimberley coast with violence and further uncertainty.

“Local people hadn’t seen anything like this before — people shooting down planes and not knowing what was going to happen next,” Henry reflects.

“I think they would have been freaking out a bit, feeling fear and sadness.

The survivors were in luck. A local Aboriginal man spotted the beached aeroplane in the distance and reported it to the authorities at Beagle Bay mission, who mobilised a search team.

The following afternoon — day six of their ordeal — the remaining survivors spotted planes on the horizon.

“They circled over us, and we saw the colours of the Australian Air Force, and they dropped packages of food and medicine from the skies,” Captain Smirnoff later recalled.

Handwritten notes had been stashed in the survival packs that plummeted to the ground.

“Relief party be with you tonight with food and medical supplies. Good luck,” one of the notes read.

Soon after, a rescue team from Beagle Bay Mission arrived on foot.

“We turned away from each other to hide the tears in our eyes.

“We spent a delicious 24 hours in that mission, sleeping like children between fresh clean sheets.”

It was bittersweet salvation. Four people were dead and the war raged on.

And in the days that followed, Captain Smirnoff would be hit with an unexpected question: what happened to the diamonds?

The search for the missing diamonds

In the chaotic hours and days after the plane went down, the injured men searched briefly for the parcel, but it was low on their list of priorities as they tried to survive.

It wasn’t until weeks later that Smirnoff was told the package contained diamonds — thousands of diamonds.

Over the coming weeks, police searched fruitlessly. Officials, bankers and businessmen grew increasingly agitated.

Had the gems floated out to sea, been scattered in the sand as the plane landed, or perhaps been pocketed by the survivors?

That’s when a local larrikin named Jack Palmer stepped into the limelight.

“Jack Palmer — who later became known as Diamond Jack — was a beachcomber who decided to check out the plane wreck when there was no-one else about,” Lachie Fraser explains.

“He came across the diamonds and basically started handing them out.

“He was pretty chuffed with himself and was apparently telling people he’d never have to work again.”

Soon, Diamond Jack was giving away diamonds to friends and girlfriends and people he knew around Broome.

He also presented two salt and pepper shakers full of diamonds to an army recruiter, which eventually led to the hapless Palmer being arrested and put on trial in Perth for theft and receiving stolen goods.

A local newspaper would describe the trial as “the opening acts of a strange wartime drama”, as “bizarre and sensational as any best-selling thriller”.

The jury ended up acquitting Palmer and his two co-accused, with the judge acknowledging the chance discovery of such a stash was likely too much for any man to resist.

Diamonds kept turning up in dribs and drabs. According to court transcripts, they were found in tins and hidden in trees.

Henry Augustine reckons they were the talk of the town.

“People were picking them up and thinking they were marbles, people were shooting birds with diamonds. Some chucked them down the well because they were worried they’d get in trouble,” he says.

“It was like treasure, everyone wanted the diamonds but no-one knew what to do with them.”

Only about half the diamonds were ever recovered, and the missing gems have become embedded in local folklore.

Recognising the bonds of the past

The diamonds may have proved elusive, but other relics have surfaced.

And they’re forming a fresh chapter in an old story for the local community.

A few weeks after visiting the plane wreckage, Henry Augustine is back in Beagle Bay. He unwraps a small object cradled in paperbark and bright yellow eucalypt flower.

“We’ve invited the Dutch ambassador so we can hand over this relic from the crash site, that my family found decades ago,” he says.

“My mother, before she passed away, she always wanted it to be returned to the rightful owners, the Dutch.”

The small drift meter — a navigation device commonly used in early aviation — was manufactured in Germany in 1938 and was believed to have belonged to Captain Smirnoff.

It’s one of many items collected from around the site of the wreck in the post-war years.

There’s a flurry of activity as the official convoy arrives in Beagle Bay, and Ambassador Ardi Stoios-Braken takes a tour of the Mother of Pearl church before a handover ceremony at the local primary school.

Henry addresses the crowd, surrounded by beaming relatives and community elders.

“I’m glad we are giving back something that was lost and hidden for a long time,” he says. “And I’m glad to give it back to the right people.”

There are cheers and stifled tears as the parcel is handed over.

“I cannot thank you and the community enough for not only being custodians of the land, but in this case, custodians of something very important to people in the Netherlands,” the ambassador responds.

“And what makes this artefact even more important is that it comes with the story of how your people helped to rescue [Dutch] people … and I cannot emphasise enough how grateful we are.”

The drift meter is now on display at the Luchtvaartmuseum Aviodrome in the Netherlands.

Back at Carnot Bay, Henry Augustine spots the first glimpse of the plane frame as the water falls away.

“When I come here I feel happiness, but also sadness because of the traumatic events that happened,” he says.

“Makes you think about what the people on the plane saw and what they went through — we’ll never really know that feeling.”

His family hopes to start tours to the wreck site, to help generate tourism jobs and ensure the history is not forgotten.

“We have this connection with the Dutch that we want to keep alive.

“We just need to get this road sorted — it’s in bad shape at the moment.”

The aeroplane remains embedded in the mud flats. It’s an eerie shape that’s evolving with the landscape, slowly eroding with the salt and sun.

Every day it is engulfed by the tide, and every day it reveals itself.

For Lachie Fraser, it’s a symbol of a largely forgotten past.

“Throughout the remote north of Australia there are these wrecks and sites that are linked to our national history, but people don’t get to see them,” he says.

“And too often the truth of our history and the role Aboriginal people played in our history is washed over.

“The places and the people are worth remembering, because they’re part of our story.”

Credits

Reporting: Erin Parke

Photography: Andy Seabourne and Erin Parke, with archival photography courtesy of Broome Historical Society

Editing and production: Lucy Sweeney