Evan Johnson is given a place at a console and handed a set of bulbous earphones. There are banks of lights and switches to get on top of. He learns how to send instructions and receive information from passing spacecraft. He learns the first of the dozens of acronyms that will play through his mind in waking and sleeping hours for the rest of his life. He learns when to listen and when to speak. At the end of the day, when work is done, he switches his mind to beer and perhaps fishing. After that, to home and family.
In the morning, after breakfast, the van appears to herald a new day of absorbing, enjoyable activities.
While Evan learns the ropes at the tracking station, Linda Johnson makes her first public appearance in the town of Port Badminton. She emerges from the driver’s seat of the EH Holden and opens the back door for Jo. Shopkeepers, other housewives and the local dogger in his dirty Land Rover watch her openly. This is not only because Linda is tall and striking; it is also because she is new in town and every new person must be thoroughly scrutinised. The stares seem hard and long; it is hard to tell whether they are simply curious or vaguely hostile.
When she goes into the butcher’s shop, the butcher addresses her as Mrs Johnson. She is surprised that he knows her name. He knows that Evan is working at the tracking station on Red Range. He knows that Evan is picked up each morning in a van, along with his colleagues, giving Linda daytime use of the family car for shopping and errands. The butcher watches as Jo toddles out through the glass door in her white sandals and puffy dress. Her Melbourne skin seems dangerously white and delicate.
Out on the street, Jo is startled by a grown woman sitting in the doorway next door to the butcher’s. Their faces are at about the same height. The woman says, ‘Hello, little one.’ Jo shrinks shyly into her mother’s skirts. As they walk away, Jo asks loudly, ‘Why is that lady sitting on the ground?’ Linda grabs her arm and says, ‘Shh.’ The dogger, who has been watching from the open doorway of his Land Rover, calls out, ‘Stay away from the Abos, kid.’ Linda ignores him but feels his eyes on her back.
The woman in the doorway watches, too. The little girl is like a soft white grub, an easy snack for an omnivorous bird.
With Jo down for an afternoon nap, Linda takes her time unpacking boxes. She unwraps plates and cups and puts them away in pristine cupboards. There is room for everything; there is even space around things. The house is a blank slate; she can decorate it exactly as she pleases in clean, modern lines. She imagines the things she would like.
There is little to be found in the local shops, so over the following weeks she pores over department store catalogues and receives things in the mail, including a wooden salad bowl and matching servers. A women’s magazine recommends crisp vegetables seasoned with garlic, oil, tarragon vinegar and freshly ground pepper. She toys with the idea of growing tarragon in a pot near the back door.
***
With some exceptions – the bank, the post office, a couple of churches – Port Badminton was not then a town of brick or solid stone. It had a feeling of temporariness about it, as if it could easily be washed away in a flood or blown away by a cyclone. It was held together with cable and rope and a few banged-in nails. Something was always being tied or untied, lashed or unlashed, battened down or loosened off. It was a town of demountable classrooms and clinics. Small homes might be brought in – whole or partly dismantled – on the back of a truck.
Every couple of years – as now – the lines of the western edge of the town changed shape as tonnes of silt were dumped at the mangrove-covered delta. The seawall at the bottom of the main street was an attempt to fix at least this part of it in place. It was planted along the top with date palms, some say by the Afghan cameleers who brought the wool in from the interior. They’d drive the teams down the main street and turn right into Dromedary Lane. The wool was then piled onto a train that clacked along its tracks from town, over the swampy delta, all the way out to the end of the One Mile Jetty and into the maws of ships. By the early 1960s, the ships had stopped coming and the jetty was given over exclusively to fishing. The fish were teeming. You could always get yourself dinner, if you had a hook and a line.
Port Badminton was the perfect habitat for men who wanted to rig something up, give something a burl, have a go. Or simply to escape problems that had accumulated in cities thousands of miles away. One could sleep in one’s car on the side of the road, or out on the beach under the stars, or in the long grass on the riverbank, free of interference. One could use the things of the earth – the trees, the sea, the rocks – and combine them with rope and engines and lengths of tarpaulin to create something that might work, even if only for a little while, until ropes frayed or metal rusted in the salt air. And if it didn’t work or didn’t go, no harm done. You could always give it another go. There was all the time in the world.
It was an ideal habitat for the sort of man Donald Horne calls the practical Australian. The practical Australian does not concern himself with the big picture; he likes to get on with a bit of detail.
Mrs Lillian O’Donoghue, postmistress at Hamelin Pool on the bottom lip of Shark Bay, is roused out of bed in the middle of the night. The elderly Mrs O’Donoghue shuffles into her slippers, throws a dressing-gown over her nightgown and calls out, ‘Coming!’ A bespectacled man in pressed shorts and long socks is standing at her door. There are astronauts in space, orbiting the earth, practicing docking manoeuvres. They’re outside their craft, vulnerable as witchetty grubs, depending for communications on a single wire running along the top of sheep fences. There has been a lightning strike. Everything has gone dead. Can she help?
Mrs O’Donoghue swings into action. She fires up the old telegraph. They’re going to have to do this the old way, using Morse code. Her mind may have forgotten, but her fingers have not. They fly over the keys, giving coordinates and other vital evidence of life and progress. She does this continuously for three hours. She is brought cups of tea. At 3 am, men from the Postmaster-General’s office arrive at the break in the line and fix it. Mrs O’Donoghue goes back to bed.
Everyone loves these stories: they like the invigorating contrast between high technology and bush improvisations. These are the stories the trackers love to tell, over the years, at barbecues.
Another concerns Port Badminton’s Great Sanitary Towel Shortage. There were no sanitary towels to be had, not at the chemist, not at Wesfarmers. Bleeding women were left to improvise – to return to earlier methods involving boiled rags hung out to dry (as discreetly as possible) under the hygienic Port Badminton sun.
Only later, much later, did the reason for this shortage emerge: the absorbent, lint-free sanitary pads were perfectly suited to cleaning newly installed wave-guide pipes. Once the technicians ran out of cotton waste, they moved on to other materials to hand in the town of Port Badminton.
***
Evan and his colleagues are walking out along the One Mile Jetty at dawn, carrying fishing gear. Their guest is NASA’s Number Three Engineer from Houston, Texas. Their conversation encompasses Work and Leisure but rarely Romance, Politics or Philosophy (these are Donald Horne’s practical men). With the best possible work and the best possible leisure, these men are enjoying themselves immensely. In fact, they find it hard to imagine anything better than what they have. They follow the rail tracks of the discontinued steam train, explaining to each other what they know of the jetty’s origins and specifications. The first half of the walk is over the silty mud, and then they’re out over the water proper, listening to it slap satisfyingly at the great wooden pylons. The sun rises, gradually lighting the Indian Ocean, deepening its blue-green hue.
The mulloway – also known as kingies, giant plump fish taller than an eight-year-old child – are milling about as if waiting for the hook. The Number Three Engineer almost immediately catches one, bringing its large silver body over the railing to gasp and flip on the old wooden planks of the jetty. They eat it that
night at a barbecue at Evan Johnson’s house, where his beautiful long-legged wife serves salad – sadly there is not yet tarragon – from a wooden salad bowl.
Back in Houston some weeks later, the Number Three Engineer picks up the phone and calls Evan Johnson. Evan is on the other side of the planet, in a different time zone and a long, long way down the NASA food chain. But having bonded over mulloway, the two men can be free and natural with each other. (Evan’s English colleagues, used to barriers of class and rank, find this remarkable.)
‘We need you guys to set up a system to check radiation levels in the upper atmosphere,’ says the Number Three Engineer. ‘You’ll need a big flat area about the size of a football field. What do you think?’
‘We’ll give it a burl,’ says Evan.
That evening, Evan stays out at the Port Hotel until 11 pm, drinking with colleagues. (This is still a novelty for Evan: in Melbourne, the pubs close at 6 pm sharp to force working men back to their homes. In Western Australia, it is understood that the economy would grind to a halt under these conditions. In Port Badminton and other outlying regions, closing time is simply the proprietor’s prerogative.)
Buying his round, Evan tells Crowie that a couple of sandhills on Red Range will need flattening.
‘Right you are,’ says Crowie.
As relevant customers approach the bar – someone from the Shire, someone with a bulldozer – Crowie makes the arrangements. The next day, men and machinery turn up at the appointed place. Crowie himself is there to supervise. Others who have no practical role but have expressed a desire to be in on it are there too. Thus, there is quite a little crowd in attendance at the flattening of the sandhills. A grader arrives to add the finishing touches, smoothing out the red sand. At day’s end, Evan puts in an international call to the Number Three Engineer.
‘We’ve done it,’ says Evan.
There is a pause on the line. Evan feels the ray of approval beaming from one end of the planet to the other.
With a smaller team of men, Evan’s task the next day is to lay lengths of chicken wire over the flattened red earth. The bales of wire catch the sunlight in hot little flares. The wire is hard to tame, preferring to spring back into its roll rather than lie flat on the ground. Once it has been laid out like a tablecloth and pegged in, the men erect eight tall masts at one end of the field that look like a proliferating set of Victorian Football League goalposts. At a forty-five-degree angle between the vertical masts and the horizontal chicken wire, two metal pipes are positioned to act as aerials. Strung between the masts is a latticework of copper wire held in place with guy ropes made of Dacron, a new material that is strong and rot-resistant. It is an ionospheric listening device. Chicken wire is now ready to listen to the universe.
The next day, a big male emu strolls out across the chicken wire, curling his toes with every step, lifting the wire out of the red earth. Evan darts out with a hessian bag and a rope. He launches himself at the emu, but it kicks and flails and within a minute rolls of chicken wire are springing up out of the red earth. One has the furious emu wrapped up in it.
After that, the trackers decide on peaceful coexistence.
They peg the chicken wire down very firmly, so that any emu can walk across with ease.
But another problem emerges. The trackers notice that the guy ropes, carefully tied off during the day, are all undone by the following morning. The copper wire is lying in the red dirt, the grubby Dacron cords lying slackly on top. It’s a mystery. The men stand looking at the scene, baffled.
They reassemble and reknot, firmly.
But it’s the same again the next day: an identical scene of dishevelment.
Evan Johnson volunteers to get to the bottom of it.
At the end of the day, when his colleagues leave work in the van, he stays behind. He keeps working until midnight, and then goes to bed under his desk. He rolls up tea towels from the staff kitchen to form a pillow. The floor is hard and it is impossible to sleep. At 2 am he gives up and returns to his desk to read Carter Brown’s The Myopic Mermaid. At 2.45 a new wave of tiredness comes over him and he returns to the floor, hopefully. At 4 am, before it is light, he makes himself a thermos of tea and a ham sandwich in the trackers’ kitchen and goes outside to wait. The chicken wire is spread over the red dirt before him. The aerial is pointing out properly at forty-five degrees. The lines of copper wire are intact, held by the Dacron cord.
He nestles down behind an acacia shrub – not hiding, exactly, but sitting very quietly. He listens to the falling bell-like song of the chiming wedgebills. The locals call the bird the ‘did ya get drunk?’, because these words fit the rhythm. Did ya get drunk? Evan, listening carefully, notes that there is a fifth syllable in the call and mentally adds a new word. Now the birds are singing, But did ya get drunk? He intends to tell someone about the fifth syllable but he will forget, because these are predawn thoughts and, finally, in the soft red dirt, under a lightening sky, he falls asleep.
Almost immediately he is woken by a shriek. A flock of pink and grey galahs, entering stage left, takes up various positions on the guy ropes.
‘Galahs,’ says Evan aloud.
They squabble and chat to each other like women in a clothing factory. They busy themselves over each knot with focus and determination, as if paid by the piece.
Evan watches them quietly, making no move to intervene. He unscrews the lid of his thermos and pours himself a cup of tea, thinking about a solution. He’ll splice the rope and put binding over it so the birds can’t untie the knots.
Then he leaps to his feet and shoos the galahs away. They rise up in a straggly pink and grey cloud, complaining indignantly. They haven’t finished.
Evan assembles his tools and materials and gets to work splicing and binding. The sun rises higher and warmer. The bush begins to crackle in the heat. There are little scurryings. The chiming wedgebills fall silent; they’ll pipe up again when it’s cooler.
As Evan splices and binds, the myopic mermaid swims to the surface of his mind. Her silver tail flashes in the glitter of the waves. For her, the world is a beautiful watery blur. She splashes Evan playfully. He watches her greenish blonde hair fan out under the water. He tries to hold her still so that he can study the line at her belly where skin becomes scale, but she slithers out of his hands. The binding and splicing complete, Evan returns to his desk and drops down into his chair. His feet are hot in his socks and shoes. He would like to stretch out under his desk once more, but the workday is well in hand. So he gets on with a bit of detail.
When they arrive the next morning, the galahs soon realise that they have been foiled. After trying their best, they give up in disgust.
But it isn’t over yet.
Next, the trackers notice that the copper wire latticework between the masts is breaking. Evan boards the van the next morning with a portable army stretcher, a grey blanket, a tin of sardines, a packet of ginger nut biscuits and another Carter Brown. He sleeps well this time. In the morning he discovers that the galahs, having given up on undoing knots, are now using the copper wire lattice as a gym, swinging around one wire and down to the next. They exercise themselves thus, like Ukrainian gymnasts, until the wire snaps. Then they start on another one.
The Number Three Engineer sends more copper wire, but this time with unbreakable steel at the core. The galahs are happy with their new reinforced parallel bars; the trackers are happy and, most importantly, NASA is happy.
Taking a break with a cup of instant coffee, Evan watches the galahs as they lift up and fly off to the right in a cloud of grey, then suddenly loop around in a cloud of pink and fly off into the distance, as if painting the infinity symbol against the sky. Now that a solution has been found, he can allow that they are beautiful.
***
This is how the galahs tuned the Dish. The Dish was young and impressionable at the time; it had only just been
switched on. As the galahs bounced on the copper wire, signals began to pass rapidly back and forth between bird and Dish, bird and Dish. The Dish had to make a series of radical adjustments to keep up. After a few weeks of daily bouncing, the signals between Dish and galahs were crystal clear. All Port Badminton galahs now had the ability to send and receive, whether they had been directly involved or not. Mostly, they didn’t bother to check their signals; the information was rarely relevant. But when I first rode out of Clam Street on Lizzie’s shoulder and came into direct line of sight of the Dish, I felt the signals vibrating through me.
Dish: 04 11 54 48 CC Intrepid, Houston. Looks good. 04 11 54 51 CMP How’s the tube, Jerry? 04 11 54 56 CC Real good, Dick. Real good. 04 11 54 58 CMP Okay. 04 11 54 59 CDR Okay, Dick. Yawing left, 60. 04 11 55 04 CMP Hey, Pete, you’re cutting in and out to me. 04 11 55 07 CDR Roger.
At first I had no idea what it all meant. But then, without any effort on my part – as if I were watching a photograph developing in a bath of chemicals – the pictures formed and became clearer.
Dish: Stand by.
Galah: Roger? Do I say Roger?
Dish: Yes. That’s right.
[Pause]
Galah: What do you want to say?
Dish: Nothing. I’m bored. I’m going over some old material.
Galah: Roger that.
I, too, like to go over old material. To repeat it, try to make sense of it, see it from another angle.
This sideline in galah communication didn’t affect the Dish’s performance in the main game, of course. In fact, it may have enhanced it in ways not yet understood by science.
***
Jo Johnson is sitting on the polished wooden floor with a pile of coloured wooden blocks. She builds them up and knocks them over. Her plastic lamb is boring. She watches her mother run a dishcloth along the windowsill. She watches Linda’s familiar back and her bottom and legs, her arm and hand and long hair. She is thinking of nothing, living entirely in the present. A beige blind is halfway up the window with its dangling circular tassel.
The Lucky Galah Page 5