Scene 1: a modern partitioned office dominated by a large imitation walnut desk and a selection of aging film posters from decades past, highlighting such long running cinema greats as The Massacre at Wombat Creek and Bloodlust of the Dingo Girls. A florid, balding manager-type, dressed in a rumpled business suit is angrily throwing down a pile of printed sheets. His audience is a loach looking character with a faintly purple, open necked shirt and a gold chain. You know the type – they vanished abruptly as soon as the disco era ended. This one has tried to update. He’s added a homey sweat top and overlarge cap. Needless to mention, fashion isn’t his thing.
“Bloody hell, Gavin (referring to the writer). Yer can’t use that bit, they’d sue us from arseshole to brekky!”
“Mango, mate (referring to the producer)! I’m tellin’ you, it was in all the papers, even the Herald Sun! We could milk it for weeks, months even, a scandal like that is just made for it!”
“Come on Gavin. The network’ll screw our contract if they have to lash out on more bloody lawyers. It’d be a feeding frenzy like Abbot and Costello!”
“But mate, think of the ratings!”
“Stuff the ratings up a rabbit’s bum! I’m thinking of our budget. We’ll have to play the market with the salaries just to get past this next session of takes”
“Awwh Christ, Mango. This storyline is perfect! Sex, drama, violence and more sex! It could get us a contract for another two seasons, maybe three.”
The rumpled manager pauses and scratches his chin. It is plain to the writer that he is weakening, future profits looming larger than legal bills. The writer scents his chance and moves in for the kill.
“Well, I’ll tell yer what. I’ll change the mistress to the secretary and shift the fraud across to the local councillor, instead of the college footy club and then we slant the love interest to an adopted stepson.”
“If we slip in the teen pregnancy a golden logie ‘ll be on your shelve by next year.”
“Nah bin it. The network manager reckons his son wants to have a go. We’ll use him instead of the preggers teenie, and have a mid twenties lady teacher carry the love story. There’s a trio of paedophile cases coming up. We can piggy back on the publicity and save a packet on ads.”
“Got it!”
Scene fades from office.
Peter could see it now. The reality was just too weird to use and be believed, so on the tellie you got the edited version. That just seemed so wrong. He’d been here. He knew the Aussies weren’t really like that. Though to be honest that had been in another state or rather territory, which, according to a few of his Aussie friends, existed in a parallel timeline that was twenty years behind the rest of the country. To an outsider you could accept that theory if you understood that its main proponents believed that the rest of the country was centred on Sydney Harbour and a few miles around it. Thinking on that interpretation, if his old house mate Sid thought time in Canberra was strange, what would think of here? As to that, what did he think of it? Better still how could he get out of it?
Damn. It was difficult to think that it was only five years ago when he was just one of thousands of impoverished students scrolling through the list of scholarships. Like them, money for accommodation and partying was uppermost in mind and occasionally if needs must, texts books. Of those understandably, partying weighed heaviest on the priorities list, and Peter found himself returning to his squats usually early in the morning, relaxed and sufficiently lubricated to dash off several scholarship applications at a go. Well, one must have eventually made an impact for at the end of second term he received a letter heavy on the official gilt scrollwork congratulating him on his award.
“The board of governors of this august and distinguished society were highly impressed with the calibre and erudition of your presentation and in the best traditions of the Empire wish to”...
And so on. The upshot was all expenses paid until he completed his degree. Peter immediately went out to the pub and celebrated, waving the valued document around for all to see right up until Cynthia Horsham grabbed it and read it all, to loud acclaim, even the fine print. At that section, Peter became horribly sober. He’d thought it was a local version of the Rhodes scholarship, you know the best and brightest of the Empire brought home to the mother land and nurtured in the finest Oxbridge traditions, cementing the ties of kinship and the rest. And as one former Aussie Prime Minster found, all the beer a lad could consume.
It wasn’t!
He should have got the hint from the ‘Empire’ bit. It was a society founded by former colonial governors, real stuffy Victorian types, of the sort that ordered hapless natives to be used as cannon practice while having tea. These august gentlemen felt that the various educational institutions in the colonies and dominions really needed a good bracing of traditional British students to serve as an inspiration. To that end only the best and most promising were selected for a year of ‘student exchange’. What surprised him was he couldn’t remember what he’d written in the application that could have tagged the attention of the Royal Association of Empire Loyalists or when? Unless, it was directly after the ‘Biggles’ meets Rudyard Kipling theme night. That was a real splash, not that he could recall much of that one. They’d watched Carry on up the Khyber along with BullShot Crummond and Gungda Dinn and during the proceedings, imbibed a few dozen Strong Suffolk Vintage ales. Things tended to get a tad blurry by the end of the fourth bottle.
After the initial panic, Peter calmed down a bit as he surveyed the list of possible dominions. Canada would be really great, ready access to the US university libraries, and the luxury of French food from Quebec. Jamaica even wouldn’t be so bad. The beaches and sunny climate could make up for the violent reputation. Then of course the Far East was a possibility, Singapore, Malaysia, or even India at a stretch. They’d be pretty cool spots except for the heat of course. But as he came to the African block his spirits plummeted. It was the media’s obsession with that continent’s disasters that made it so difficult to accept. He could try to be objective and tell himself it wasn’t that bad. Though recent reports told a different story, Zimbabwe lacked everything except an excessive inflation rate (even if it wasn’t in the Commonwealth at that time), while Kenya was still getting over a few political squabbles remarkably similar to the Mau-mau rebellion. As for Uganda, the Lord’s Resistance Army was still prowling around and the country hadn’t quite gotten over the bloodthirsty exuberance of General Idi Amin. Then in the steamier bits, you ran the risk of drug resistant malaria along with a host of other exotic afflictions. He’d read Guns, Germs and Steel, as well as a host of colonial histories and got the message. Europeans may have done their gallant bit for exploration and exploitation, but they didn’t thrive in equatorial conditions and their presence was usually remembered in over grown cemeteries. All that kind of paled in comparison to the dread imaginings of a young man. How were you going to get around the issue of AIDS? Even with condoms, it still meant staying completely sober and abstinent for a whole year. How the hell was he going to survive that?
The whole concept of the southern most distant pink bit of the world map hadn’t even percolated past the shock of Africa, when he’d received a second letter announcing to his gratified surprise, that the placement was at the Australian Central University, located in the national capital, Canberra. He’d spent fifteen minutes bouncing off the walls in relief. Great, they spoke English and to the best of his knowledge there were no tsetse flies! Even better he knew all about the place since he’d watched a fair bit of the 2000 Summer Olympics. This was going to be so easy! He happily packed and told his friends he’d be lazing in the sun on a beach before the week was out with a coldie in one hand and a cute tanned Sheila in the other. He’d even done some research by watching the Adventures of Barry McKenzie and just in case he wanted to visit the outback, another Aussie classic, Priscilla Queen of the Desert. All ready to do his bit for Commonwealth relations, he hopped on a plane and joyfully endured
the twenty hour long flight from Heathrow to Sydney.
Peter had found that as good as the coverage of the city in the Olympic Games was, it paled in comparison to this view of the harbour as his plane broke through the last cloud layer and descended. It was better than he could have imagined and infinitely more beautiful than flying over the vast sprawl of London. The porcelain white spinnakers of the Opera House seemed to shimmer on the harbour like a crown of polished shells set on azure glass. That wasn’t all. Just past the gleaming beauty of the Opera House, the city’s other main architectural feature, the majestic arched bridge, leapt between two peninsulas, linking the city centre with the northern suburbs. He was speechless. To call the scene breathtaking really didn’t do justice to the interplay of boats, water and buildings. He’d heard Australians boast that they had the best harbour in the world. He’d also heard they had a tendency to laconic understatement.
It had been only a few hours in their airport, waiting for a connecting flight to Canberra, and after the stunning vista of Sydney he was eagerly anticipating another glorious city. Peter chatted to a few locals about what he’d seen coming in and they smiled pleasantly at the compliments. When he asked about what to expect in Canberra, he got a slightly different reception. The national capital wasn’t that popular. He just put that down to how most Brits felt about Whitehall, or Americans about Washington DC, the usual reflected disdain for politicians, civil servants and where they lived. One well dressed gentleman, holding a briefcase with a distinctly possessive grip, frowned at his question and after moving his face around in various grimaces of disapproval, told him that the original city had been designed by a renowned American architect, Walter Burley Griffin, who’d worked with Frank Lloyd Wright, though it had changed a bit. To Peter that sounded pretty good. He’d had a girlfriend over in the Design faculty who’d gone down the Arts and Crafts path and just adored FLW and Mackintosh, and she even had a draftsman’s print across one wall, the Burley Griffin view of the proposed City. So after a few intense sessions of ardent rumpy-pumpy with that as backdrop he was really looking forward to Canberra.
Expecting a real treat he’d got a window seat and eagerly watched the olive green and brown countryside slip away beneath him until a half hour later the plane dropped down past some hills to land. Peter saw a couple of blocks of industrial warehousing and a few five-storey tower blocks of the style favoured by the Stalinist modern school of architecture. Thinking this was just a brief stop on the way to Canberra, Peter stayed in his seat until one of the cabin crew insisted that he’d best get off unless he wanted to continue on to Melbourne.
Misunderstanding and disappointment. That was the common theme for his time in Australia’s national capital. He just couldn’t understand how after Sydney they’d got it so wrong! It was fifty miles inland on an artificial lake, flanked on one side by a forested ridge of mountains that extended into the far distance and surrounded on the other sides by endless acres of barren dusty barbed wire, enclosed paddocks and a scattering of scraggly trees. Peter just couldn’t grasp why a nation with thousands of miles of the most impressive beaches and coastline, decided after years of careful deliberation, to wack their crowning glory, the statement of their national aspirations, on an old sheep farm. He also found, to his further dismay, that the stunning Burley Griffin design had been modified, altered, bulldozed, committee-ed and ‘developed’ into virtual non-existence. To add insult to injury, only a couple of relic suburbs had been left of the original plan to hint at the lost possibilities. That was like saying that the riverfront from Westminster to the Tower was hopelessly old fashioned and needed seeing to with a wrecking ball. Then it got worse. Within a week he’d been told by another student that one of the houses designed by Marion Mahony, Griffin’s partner and the former landscape illustrator for Frank Lloyd Wright, had been bulldozed to make way for a four story block of flats.
To Peter, that was indescribably sad. He was here to study history and the off hand manner of the storyteller gave him his first hint of the contradictions of the Aussie character. At two hundred and a few years, their own history was painfully fresh and raw, and they hungered for the antiquity that the home countries had in such abundance. Considering their lack of historical depth and cultural insecurity, it hardly ever stopped them from the destruction of their own precious relics, for something new, modern and flipping damn ugly. And all that didn’t even come close to describing their conflicting attitudes to the long native history of the continent. Once he’d returned to the mother country, when his friends had asked him what it was like, all he could do was shake his head and suggest they watch ‘Yes Minister’ get drunk then watch the Aussie cult classic ‘Wake in Fright’. Somewhere between those two lurked the spirit of Canberra.
That, as the saying goes, was history and as Peter always ruefully recalled, history was his business, his passion and the framer of his current problems. A slip at the bottom of the staircase brought him back to the immediate present. He glanced at his watch. Damn, if he hurried he could make it across the green manicured lawns to the main university concourse in time for a quick cappuccino before his first lecture of the day.
In a strange way, his Canberra posting prepared him for the reality behind the brittle glimmer of the Gold Coast. If Fiona ever managed to come out here she’d spend ten minutes walking down the Esplanade and past Jupiter’s Casino, then turn to him and remark in her perfect Sloane Ranger accent. “Why Peter, this place is just soo classic! Soo retro! Why it’s Miami without the Kulture!” She would have then cruised all through it in an afternoon, dragging him along, sighing over the garishness, moaning ecstatically at the seafood, dismissively remarking over the washed out beach, then gotten bored, dragged him back to his flat for a bout of steamy passionate rumpy-pumpy, before hopping onto the next plane and jetting off to St Morritz. Oh God he missed Fiona!
Like a suffering martyr he walked through the entrance of Lecture Room 6B. Every time it was the same culture shock. Everyday and each time he mentally kicked himself for not watching Muriel’s Wedding about the small community of Dolphin’s Spit. That more than any other film or book would have been a better introduction to the denizens of Skaze University.
It must be some form of natural imperative – that was the only explanation. No matter where it was, once you gathered a group together and put someone in front of them to give a bit of instruction, the audience automatically wanted to be somewhere else, in fact anywhere else. It wouldn’t matter if you where dispensing free cafe latte and muffins, the instant a lecturer appeared, most of the students switched off. Peter was getting slightly worried as another film allusion wafted into view – Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, and in particular the Sex Education class with John Cleese. He took a deep breath before walking to the podium. It was a fairly ominous indication of the day if he started to think in film clichés so early.
As expected, the audience were absorbed in their current addiction, the mobile phone, either chatting or texting, locked in their own personal bubbles, oblivious to the rest of the world. Peter suppressed a frown and set up his lecture. He’d heard that mobile jammers were becoming popular at restaurants, to give the diners an escape from the overloud phone conversations, annoying ringtones and the incessant demands of online universal access twenty four/seven. For the hundredth time, he wished the university would install them.
He loudly cleared his throat a few times and switched on the computer slideshow. A few seconds pause and the dramatic tones of the Ride of the Valkyries rang out across the lecture hall, overlaid by the shattering scream of the crusader war cry. “DEUS VULT!”
A chorus of startled screams and squeals answered the summons to battle. Peter gave a brief smile. He’d upped the volume and twitched the harmonics so that his opening soundtrack invariably caused piercing feedback to those too closely attached to their mobiles.
“That was the cry of the Knights Templar as they charged into battle against the Saracens.” An imag
e of a crusader, eyes glazed in devout mania, cleaving a Saracen warrior in half, flashed into view on the screen behind him. At the oversized shot of mayhem his audience gasped in surprise.
“The major wave of crusades began in 1096, when in response to the call for the liberation of Jerusalem from the Moslems by Pope Urban II, thousands of knights and peasants from Western Europe under a plethora of lords and princes, marched eastwards.” The graphic view changed to a charge of mounted knights surging over a collection of fleeing Saracens, very Victorian in style and composure.
“Although initially successful, the new Latin kingdom of Outremer lacked the resources and manpower to defend its gains, or protect the new flood of pilgrims arriving in the Holy Land. So in 1115 two knights, Hugue de Payne and Godfrey de Sainte Adhemar, recruited a small group of devout knights who swore to protect the pilgrims travelling from Jericho to Jerusalem.” A picture of the dusty road to Jerusalem hovered on the screen behind him. Peter always thought the Aussies should pick up on that image. It looked so much like part of the inland west of the mountains.
“The renown of the early band grew and attracted recruits and donations, even being awarded a wing of the royal palace at Jerusalem, said to be the site of the ancient Judaic Temple, and that is how this order of warrior monks gained their famous and notorious title, The Poor Knights of Christ of the Temple of Solomon, or as they are considered today, the Knights Templar.”
That got a reaction. The audience rustled as they shifted forward in their seats. Peter had timed this revelation with a few distinctive images of the warrior knights dressed in the white surcoats with a blood red cross blazoned on their shields. Let’s face it everyone knew about the Templars for all sorts of reasons.
“Being the first and most prominent of the militant Orders, the Templars grew in stature and wealth. Their duty of protecting pilgrims was transformed into defence of the Kingdom and they were granted dozens of castles in Outremer to shield the Kingdom from Saracen raids, while in the kingdoms of the west, lords and kings gifted the Order with lands and estates to support their expansion as the defenders of the Holy Land. This made them the richest organisation in the Catholic lands after the Church.” A series of slides of vast vineyards and stone castles set amongst green fertile valleys moved into the next area of the lecture. Peter had tried to get a more cinematic experience, to engage the limited attention of his students.
Terra Australis Templar (A Peter Wilks Archaeological Mystery) Page 4