‘Peck on the cheek. Better than nothing. Not much.’
Franny turned Brown Snake’s head for home and spurred him into a gallop. She called over her shoulder: ‘You’re mad!’
Chapter 8
BETH CAME home for five weeks in January and February. She had pictures of Moscow to show. Not really of Moscow, but of Russians, men and women, mostly unsmiling. Russians, so it appeared, were not used to being photographed in this way and appeared suspicious. The less happy the Russians looked, the more it pleased Beth.
‘What do Americans do? Smile as soon as you point a camera at them. The Russians are real people.’
‘Couldn’t get a giggle out of any of them?’ said Bob Hardy.
‘I didn’t try. That wasn’t my mission.’
‘Oh, you had a mission?’
‘Of course. Do you think I was on holiday?’
‘Jesus, on a holiday. Wouldn’t want you to get caught up in a holiday.’
Franny took Beth aside, out on the back porch. ‘You have to tell Wes something. You have to tell him that he’d never be happy with you.’
‘I have told him that. We’re just good friends, close friends. But I don’t want a boyfriend.’
‘Tell him he needs me.’
Beth spent most of the five weeks pasting up Sheepskins for Russia posters. She had chosen to go to the neighbouring towns in the shire—Victoria Bend, Wembley, Pullen—since most of the posters she’d put up last time had been torn down. How much impact the posters would have was debatable. The war was over, the Russians were now the enemies of the West, and people thought that the reds could find their own sheepskins.
To get from town to town, she needed a vehicle, also a licence—she couldn’t drive. She asked Wes for help, and he was glad to give it. He drove Bob Hardy’s old Ford truck, his spare, and spent most of his time shushing people who stopped to abuse Beth.
On the drive from town to town, Beth told Wes more than he needed to know about Moscow, the courage of the people recovering from the war, the patriotic parades, the rationing, which wasn’t too bad, not as much food as in Australia, but then Australia hadn’t had three million Germans plundering the countryside. She also felt it necessary to give him details of German atrocities. He had to ask her to stop.
‘Really, you Quakers have such an idealised way of looking at the world. Wes, the war has ended, but we can’t just ignore what happened. Haven’t you seen the pictures of the death camps?’
‘Yes, I have, Beth. I wish I hadn’t. “We Quakers” know very well the horrible things that happen in the world. But we focus on the good things. Like Gary Mullane. He gave a house to Lilly Copper when her husband died and left her with a mortgage on the shack they lived in. That gets into my heart. The world doesn’t keep going because of death camps and war. It keeps going because of Gary.’
In Wembley, two boys stood watching Beth paste up a poster on the wall of the old Majestic Theatre, no longer in use, and as soon as she’d finished, urinated on it. Wes chased the boys, but they were too quick, and he laughed about it in the truck. Beth was infuriated.
‘What do kids like that know about suffering? Spoilt little brats.’
‘Oh come on Beth. They’re kids, naughty boys.’
Beth fell silent.
Then: ‘Okay, you’re right. I don’t really want a world with no naughty boys in it. Do you think I’m a bit humourless, Wes? Di says I am, sometimes. I don’t like to think of myself as one of those communists who can’t laugh.’
‘You are, at times. A bit. Like my mum when it comes to God.’
‘I’m getting better. Di says so, too. I’m getting better.’
‘Good to hear, Beth.’
She fell silent again, but revived.
‘I have a joke.’
‘Do you, now?’
‘It’s a dirty joke. One of the women in the union office told me. Do you want to hear it?’
‘Sure.’
‘Well, it seems that Comrade Stalin had a new secretary to take dictation. Very pretty. And in the middle of dictating something—a letter, whatever it was—he was overcome by desire for the secretary and got her to bend over the desk while he enjoyed her from behind. In his exertions, he cried out, “I get the strength for this from the people!” And the secretary said, “Do I take that down, Comrade Stalin?”’
Wes smiled.
‘See, I have a sense of humour.’
Back at the Hardy house, Franny was seething. ‘Where have you been?’
‘Putting up posters with Beth.’
‘For why? Nobody reads them!’
Beth, out of sheer perversity, kissed Wes on the cheek. ‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t let her kiss you! It’s like being kissed by a witch.’
Beth kissed him again. Franny punched him on the arm, hard.
Lillian, who was making lunch, called: ‘Hoi!’ Then: ‘Want to stay for lunch, Wessy?’
Wes declined. He knew Beth’s kisses were satirical, but relished them.
Chapter 9
THE FIRE broke out in the scrub above Jefferson Road. By the time the brigade got there, it had taken hold on the hillside and was in the foliage of the ironbarks. It was running east along Jefferson Road toward Chinese Town, where all the houses were semi-decayed weatherboard and especially vulnerable. Fire trucks from the nearest town would join the fight, but they would need an hour to prepare and drive the distance.
The accepted practice for fighting bushfires was for anyone with a truck and manpower to get to the blaze and beat the flames back from the roadside until tankers arrived. But this was a day of February heat touching the century, with a mongrel of a wind shifting from north to north-east. One look would tell anyone that the fire would be up the hill to the spur and into Chinese Town in a half-hour.
Wes took Hardy’s truck. Hardy himself, with a crook back from where a cow kicked him, couldn’t join the fight. But out of the house dressed in a pair of her dad’s overalls rolled up at the cuffs came Beth. Bob Hardy said: ‘What the hell?’ Wes said, ‘Beth, you can’t come.’ ‘I’m coming!’
‘Beth, the men won’t work with a girl. You can’t come.’
Beth climbed into the passenger side, the overalls hanging around her small frame.
She said: ‘In the Soviet Union, women fight fires.’ She had no evidence of this.
‘Yeah,’ said Bob Hardy, ‘and in Australia, girls stay home and make sandwiches for the volunteers. You’re not going.’
She wouldn’t budge, but sat there with her arms folded and an obdurate expression.
Wes couldn’t wait any longer. ‘I’ll leave her in the truck,’ he called to Hardy, and took off.
‘I’m strong, Wes. You’ll see I’m strong.’
Wes said, ‘Shut up,’ and drove to Jefferson Road like a madman.
The volunteers and the brigade vehicles, other than one truck, had left Jefferson Road for the Chinese Town spur. The fire was racing up the spur track, driven by the scorching north-easterly. The plan was to stop the fire crossing the spur track and force it up into the mountain ash on the hills. By the time Wes reached the others, flames were soaring on both sides of the track. The fire had engulfed two volunteer vehicles and killed five men. Wes drove through the flames, yelling at Beth to crouch on the floor. The only hope for the 150 residents of Chinese Town was for the volunteers to get ahead of the fire and turn it away before it reached the slope above the town. The heat in the truck was so intense that Wes feared Beth would die.
She kept muttering, ‘I’m okay…I’m okay…’ But glancing down, he could see her face dripping with sweat.
The trees were burning as if they’d been soaked in diesel. Whole canopies at the top of the ironbarks exploded into flame. The bare earth of the track was burning, and off to one side, where the Chinese Town pasture could be made out through the trees, the grass had become a carpet of fire. There was no way ahead. He and Beth were going to die on the spur track.
They had
one chance. He knew from his boyhood that the old Victory mine on the spur might shelter them, if he could find it.
He pulled the truck off the track, opened the passenger door for Beth and urged her out. She struggled to her feet. ‘Wes, we’re going to die. I can hardly breathe.’ And yes, the blue smoke was dense. The tree canopies above them rained down burning fragments. Before Wes could set off in search of the Victory mine, a brigade truck emerged from the smoke. Ernie Boyle was in charge.
‘Can’t get out, Wes. The fire’s closed the spur track behind us. We’re cooked, mate. Who the hell is this?’
‘Beth Hardy.’
‘Wes, what the fuck? What’s she doing here?’
‘Never mind that. You’ve got what? Four blokes with you? You all come with me. I’m looking for the Victory mine. Leave the truck.’
The fire was behind them as they climbed the hill, hunting them, and the heat was so fierce that the men cried out aloud and wept. Beth could only go three steps without tripping over the cuffs of her father’s overalls. Wes picked her up and carried her, her legs wrapped around his waist and her arms wrapped around his neck. ‘Sorry,’ she whimpered, ‘so sorry, Wes.’
He said, ‘Shush.’
He knew he was heading the right way when he saw a massive granite boulder off to the side. And there it was, the opening of the Cornishmen’s mine, perfectly hewn into the hillside. The Cornishmen, master miners, had found a vein of quartz at the top of the hill and had worked their way into the hillside, expecting to come upon the vein deeper down where the gold would be found.
Wes sent Tony Lodge in first, with a torch. The mine ran to one side and the other at intervals but Wes told Tony to head straight. These side tunnels were just speculative; it was only the one tunnel that penetrated deep enough to give the men safety.
‘Here,’ said Wes and the men flopped down on the damp floor of the Victory mine as the fire roared over them, thwarted. The sound it made was amplified by the mine, like a living thing seething with anger. The men put their faces against the wet wall of the mine, breathing in relief. Tony set the torch down and they all gave themselves to mutters of thanksgiving. None was louder than Beth. ‘This is what the people of Stalingrad did during the siege, hid together in places where the fighting passed over them.’ She was delighted. ‘We’re workers together.’
Tony said: ‘I’m a bank manager.’
Behind where the men and Beth sat, creatures of one sort and another had stealthily sought the same refuge, a pair of bandicoots, a goanna, a half dozen copperheads coiled close to each other, two koalas, and a feral dog trying hard to look like it had undergone a radical conversion to peace and harmony. After some raised eyebrows, the visitors were accepted. The roar of the fire was as loud as ever. Tongues of flame leapt in through the mine opening, but without fuel, withdrew.
Beth filled the space that the men had no wish to disturb with memorised tracts from Marx. ‘This is what he said about the causes of injustice, do you want to hear?’
‘Yeah, go ahead.’
‘He says we can’t have a just society that is headed by a ruling class, because no ruling class has any interest in justice. But look at us here. We have come together for the very just cause of saving lives. You see, it’s crisis that often creates justice. That’s what we’re doing. Making justice.’
Tony said: ‘I’m just trying to stop a bushfire, lovey.’
Wes leaned close to Beth and whispered, ‘Down in Chinese Town probably dozens of people are dead. Best give Marx a holiday.’
‘Oh. Okay. Sorry. I was just excited. Sorry.’
Even so, she couldn’t contain herself. She referred to the men as ‘comrades’ and pointed out that it was crisis that had brought animals that would normally avoid humans into the mine. ‘We need a big crisis in the nation to bring people together, people who would usually avoid each other. Like a general strike. That would be good. Out of crisis, we get justice.’
Yuri Malkov from Wembley hadn’t said a word. He sat with his head lowered, his fingers in his fair beard. Now he spoke. ‘Do you know where I come from, miss? I am Ukrainian. The Russians murdered sixty people in my village. They drove tanks through the wheat. For why? We wouldn’t join the collective is for why. I hate the Russians. I wish the Germans had crushed them. As well as the Jews. The Jews were on the side of the Russians. So, that is what I say.’
Wes intervened before Beth could respond: ‘Cut it out, Yuri. A bit of decency.’
‘I wouldn’t carry the communist slut out of the fire. I would have let her burn.’
Wes reached out and seized Yuri’s beard in both hands and pulled him forward. ‘Now you listen to me. The Russians killed millions of your people. The Germans killed millions of Russians. Nobody wants to talk about murder as if it’s a good thing. You treat this young woman with decency.’
Yuri said: ‘She’s a red slut. I don’t apologise.’
Wes whacked him across the face, and again. Yuri’s nose bled down into his moustache and beard.
‘Lean your head back,’ said Wes, ‘and then shut up.’ Beth found a grubby handkerchief in the pocket of her father’s overalls and offered it to Yuri, who accepted it after some hesitation.
Terry Hoskins said: ‘You’re a robust sort of fella for a Quaker, Wes.’
‘Yeah, well.’
The goanna turned and stalked back up the tunnel for the entrance. Then the bandicoots. They must have known that the fire had passed over. The copperheads remained where they were. The feral dog padded away. The two koalas were unsure. Wes picked one up and carried it; Dale O’Conner carried the other. Out in the open, the fire had moved on. Everything was blackened. The two trucks were burnt out. Some way ahead, smoke could be seen rising from Chinese Town. Wes and Dale carried the koalas to a patch of eucalypts that the fire had leapt, and released them. They both scaled the same tree.
The men trekked along the spur road towards Chinese Town, not knowing what they might find nor what they might achieve. At Muckle Bridge that crossed Warward Creek, they stopped to drink. The smoke above Chinese Town was moving on, which probably meant that there was nothing left to burn.
One hundred and twenty people lived in Chinese Town, only thirty of them Chinese. In the late gold rush, in the mid-1870s, the Chinese had followed behind the European miners—mostly Welshmen and Germans—going through the tailings left on the creek banks and finding more in the left-behinds than the European gold-seekers had found after having first go. The Welshmen and Germans were infuriated, believing that what the industrious Chinese gold-seekers had found rightfully belonged to them. They were encouraged by the most outspoken to storm the Chinese camps with clubs and picks and rifles to smash the tents and wound or even kill the Chinese. Political pamphlets were in wide circulation in which trade unionist correspondents proclaimed that Australia always had and always would belong to the white man. Whole lists of offences were included in these pamphlets, the propensity of the Chinese for theft and rape, a secret plan of the Chinese to take over the entire continent of Australia and present it as a gift to the ‘yellow Empress’.
The gold had petered out well after the Quakers arrived from Hobart and placed the Chinese under their protection, printing their own pamphlets reasoning that people were people whether from China or Cardiff or Munich. The Quakers didn’t have to argue their point of view for long. The Welshman and the Germans departed, finding no reward for their toil. The Chinese stayed on, those who didn’t return to Guandong, and built Chinese Town on the banks of Fish Creek. Many switched to market gardening and sold their spring onions, potatoes, string beans, tomatoes, carrots and cabbages as far afield as Castlemaine. The remaining Chinese attended the Quaker meetings, without counting themselves as Quakers—just Christian visitors. They might have chosen the Anglicans or Presbyterians in Almond Tree, but it had been the Quakers who’d stood up for them.
Now the town was gone. The fire had come down the spur road and destroyed one weatherboard shack af
ter another. Many of the shacks had been the dwellings of the poorest of the region’s whites. It was possible to buy one for a hundred pounds from Hoong Li, one of the remaining Chinese, who had come to own every house in Chinese Town when his fellow countrymen returned to Guangdong. He called himself the mayor of Chinese Town. Now he was dead. Wes found his body in a water trough for horses. God knew what he thought he was doing in the trough. Escaping the heat?
The whole of Chinese Town was a single main road with four streets branching off. The fire had set upon the weatherboards as if they had been laid out like a gourmet feast. Some of the houses were still flickering with flame. The corrugated iron of the roofs lay twisted on the ground, bent and buckled as if in a rigor of agony. There were survivors, standing in a daze before their charred homes. Here and there a house had escaped the flames, although why was a mystery, when the homes on either side were blackened wrecks. Bodies felled by the radiant heat and smoke were strewn on the roadside, hoping to outrun the flames. The telephone lines were down so there was no chance of calling the Almond Tree ambulance. Instead, they hauled the bodies down to the small park Hoong Li had proudly set up ten years earlier. It was a ratbag of a park and didn’t look much worse after the fire than before. They found twenty-two bodies. Many more would be found in the smouldering debris of the houses. Wes had to climb a charred gum tree to fetch down the body of a woman who must have believed she could find safety where she had no chance at all of avoiding being killed. She was hanging upside down, and it was difficult to free her. Wes knew many of the Chinese Town residents, but the woman was too badly burnt to recognise.
Three ambulances arrived and four brigade trucks from Targo and Barton. Two of the brigade trucks went on to Galilee, where the fire was heading. The ambulances took eight of the worst injured away to the Targo hospital. Beth and Wes went in the cabin of the ambulances and were dropped off at Almond Tree. Beth said: ‘This is what we have instead of war. Bushfires.’ She was exhausted. It was evening. She had the strength to put her arms around Wes and hug him. ‘Wes, my gratitude. You saved me. My gratitude.’
The Bride of Almond Tree Page 5