Orlando—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.
The thin paperback, having travelled with her through all her moves since the age of eighteen is now yellowed at the edge of the pages. The spine has held firm. Glad of the excuse, Virginia, lying on Cybil's lounge in the afternoon, hungrily devours the literature. The fiction.
'English,' Virginia White tells Cybil, 'has a lot to answer for. My twin brother, Jeff, the nuclear physicist, told me, it is the universal language of science and his colleagues from all over the world speak it. But they do not necessarily understand each other. Jeff runs marathons.'
'Tonight,' says Cybil, 'you will look exactly like him.'
Virginia laughs. 'No I won't. Jeff looks like Abe Lincoln, now he is fifty, stringy and tall, with his stiff hair and jutting beard!'
Virginia reads aloud the first sentence of Orlando. Then says, 'So English, Woolf's work,' and feels the power of many in her blood. She wants to be back at work in the wilderness, discovering. But it's okay to go out and have a good time, especially as Cybil is so excited. She glances up at the clean, ironed smock on the coat-hanger and the french beret.
Underground, not exactly buried, some Amazons hold on to the thread of existence in the maze of catacombs and caves beneath the Western world, to erupt at points of corruption and decadence in civilisation and flow onto the surface to proclaim the simple dictum: we are. Women warriors laying down lines to each other, marshalling forces, are gathering strength.
Rory happens to own an old-fashioned pair of khaki jodhpurs, flared at the thigh, bought at an op-shop. A brown leather bomber jacket and swimming goggles pushed up into her ginger hair complete her outfit.
Writing a long overdue letter to Auntie, I told her: 'We have town water, electricity and telephone. Sewerage septic tanks. There are several new brick houses clustered around the punt-port. The car ferry glides back and forth across the river on the simple pulley system of a submarine cable. If I go the long way around, which requires negotiating plenty of bends meandering over a couple of creek-bridges, I do not have to take the ferry. It's an extra hour into town, though.'
Auntie I met in the Kimberley, after I rode half-way round Australia. She could have been older than seventy, or younger. So tanned was she you could hardly see the scar on her face. We were introduced at Fitzroy Crossing where we were both staying at the hostel owned by the Ngar community there.
Her Landrover was covered in dust and mounted with tanks for water and petrol. She had been travelling for years, a geriatric gypsy, at home in the caravan parks and around campfires in remote areas. I'd set up a new off-road bike in Broome for my trip across the Top End. I rode to Derby on the sealed surface. I wanted to go to Tunnel Creek and Windjana Gorge. It was hard going on the rutted red road, the pindan soil got into my sinuses and the corners of my eyes. I was just about to admit defeat, luggage my bike and go by bus when I met her.
This grey nomad was an easy talker who seemed to listen and nod as she spoke. Auntie was prepared to take me to where I wanted to go: Gibb River Road, Napier Downs, King Leopold Ranges. Geikie Gorge. She turned me inside out and gave me an airing as if I were a stale sleeping bag. With my bike and gear on her roof-rack, we spent a few days together around the gorges of the Devonian Reef, swimming in its streams and exploring places of geological and tourist interest.
This character told me, 'You mustn't daydream, Margot. Your life is about crystallisation.'
In the shade at Tunnel Creek with brown falcons circling like buzzards, her hummock strung between trees humming with insect life, my thin blue mattress also my seat as I sat cross-legged, listening, she leaned forward on her camp stool, poking the embers beneath her billy. 'Prophecy is so terrible,' she said, 'I now bury my mind in the distant past. Knowing the obvious seems to break a rule,' she cackled. 'The rule of stupidity. The realists get so angry with us. But reality is created by men.'
Auntie moved in response to the hissing of the water and with a forked stick swung her billy off the heat and reached for her canister of tea leaves. 'The horror of prophecy,' she continued, 'is not only the deaf ears or the open aggression you get. It is also the anxiety you feel in your own body, in your nervous system.'
She shivered, sloughing out of a skin, and tossed her stick at the scavengers.
'Well, tell me,' I said, 'about the distant past.'
She glanced up from her methodical work with the tin mugs and hot billy, 'You have Scorpio somewhere but it is not your sun sign.'
'Virgo sun, Scorpio rising, Gemini moon,' I rattled off.
'Mars, Venus in Sagittarius,' she guessed. I shrugged. She continued, 'Earth, water, air, fire, good balance. Well,' she handed me my tea. 'Let's start with the invasion of the Indo-Europeans bringing worship of the father god, or, in some cases, the young warrior, to the Dravidians of India. This is attested, archaeologically and historically, to be about 2400 BCE but several invasions occurred earlier.' She talked like someone who had been alone for a long time as she drove the roads of the wide brown land, camping, reading, in discussion with herself, under the airy expanse of the sky. How much older than three millennia were the little stick characters painted above the entrance to Tunnel Creek?
Earlier in the day we had swum, walked and waded through the cool black water of the creek beneath the landlocked reef, seeing the paired red globes of fresh-water crocodile eyes watching us in the darkness. While she spoke of the Bible, the Koran and the Greek epics, I could have been in Gondwana where, 20 million years ago, fangaroo with dagger-like canines hopped like kangaroo in forests outside memory and science.
'And, of course, we,' she included me, catching my look with her own, 'go back to the Earth Mother of Willendorf, at least thirty thousand years. She is about four inches high and is a very fat woman, with big breasts and thighs and tummy.' She showed me the size with her hand.
The fantastic Fitzroy River, in the rainy season, flows fast enough to fill Sydney Harbour each day! We parted at Halls Creek. She drained her vessel for me.
My destiny was not in the desert, but I had met my karma in the Kimberley.
Sometimes I just long for her to be around, but our contact was of a moment. And letters from time to time.
Chandra Williams has no intention of going to any event which includes men; she finds even the word 'gender' offensive. She works at her computer, changing a page on her website.
Without control, Chandra wonders, how can one be responsible for one's actions? With constant clicks and quick movement of her cursor, her forefinger on the electronic mouse, Chandra Williams is a spider on the superhighway carefully weaving a revolutionary maze beneath it. As a spinster, she is as shrewd as a widow, making cobwebs to trap and protect, supplying threads through hypertext for those who would join her in subversion. Follow if you wish, she invites her cyber-sisters underground. In code. Political activity on the Internet is exhausting; information overload; keeping in touch. Email, news groups, chat sites take her time, tax her imagination. Her job is making the workable infrastructure. When she discovers the way to secure contact and interaction, what can be achieved?
Every woman, she feels, is different in her talent, but all share an enormous grief about loss of the female contract. She is establishing a special branch to her domain, Wimmin. Hoping to ensnare only the sympathetic ones, she knows that equally, or perhaps more likely, she will also attract the antipathetic. Lunatics and fanatics love to surf the Internet. She laughs as she types a quote from Pauline Hanson, The Truth: 'Australia could become a crumbling republic presided over by a lesbian cyborg president appointed by a distant "World Government".'
For the moment it is a joke. But why not call the bluff? Chandra can put in place mechanisms for quick connections. She had set up listservs dealing with Wimmin & Feminism, Lesbians & Amazons and simply Woman Be Whole, but, using some newly acquired game-maki
ng software, she can make a grid for the conspiracy. Her site—including guest books, drop-out menus, a reading list, a CD register, recommendations for decent entertainment videos, audio tapes—has firewalls to stop pesky hackers, encryptions for all the financial dealings as well as a real-time chatline house with different rooms open all hours. She figures out a way to call for noms de geurre and imagines that among the true believers there would be disappointingly few prepared to fight. She utilises Common Gateway Interface to execute her remote location with several web servers to add functionality to her site. Her avatar censors porn, boots out the less than sympathetic. She plays with seguing backgrounds. Chandra is the type of person who refuses to say the word 'impossible' until she has proved it so.
The Internet so accessible, she institutes etymological codes to cast her fine mesh as wide as possible, for the conspiracy to be significantly international. Chandra gets disgusted with the victimhood of women, and sees herself as a facilitator of vital feminism in the virtual world. She wants effectual revolution. What is really going on must be secret. Borrowing strategies and tactics from resistance movements, her warriors will be urban terrorists in the global cyber-village.
Chandra rolls back in her chair and reaches for her training bar, a piece of solid dowel secured from wall to wall in her office. She does ten chin-ups and another ten to the back of her neck. She then does five of each with one arm alternately. Though difficult, this exercise is necessary for her to maintain her lifestyle. She has been building her upper body strength since she was a child. The chair moves inconveniently. She swears at the brake, climbs back to comfort and returns to the screen. To command the nature of her recruits, she designs a hyperlink thread into her labyrinth using crazily mundane words, every the, an and but making adits to her mine. Ultimately only those who've read Gertrude Stein will find their way through her maze to the cell at the centre.
Now all she can do is wait and see. She checks the time on the screen and closes down.
Chandra wheels herself to the verandah which runs along the north, south and eastern walls of her house. Forward, back, twist and forward. Steely grey behind the lit limbs of the gums predicts rain for at least three days. Violet clouds deepened by yellowy lime leaf-tips complement her mood of excitement and trepidation. She decides to ride today. Chandra's horse answers to her call. Her Rottweiler bitch, Nikki, trained by a friend whose mission in life was to extend seeing-eye canine capacity to assist all disabilities, is erratic in her interpretation of instructions. Sometimes she actually brings the right bridle. Chandra exchanges chair for callipers and swings herself across the yard, accompanied by horse and dog and scattering chooks. Rigged up in the barn is a pulley-contraption from which a sidesaddle is suspended. When the knot is released, the rope lowers the tack onto the sturdy pony's back. A recycled dentist's chair provides hydraulic lift for Chandra herself to reach a monkey-bar so that she can twist herself onto the horse. All three have the procedure down pat: dog, horse and Chandra using crisp identical directions and murmuring loving reassurance until she is safely aloft.
Then they train in the dressage quadrant. Extended trot, collected canter, sitting trot, figure of eight, changing legs. Both horse and rider work up a sweat.
4
'Almost Gothic, isn't it?'
The surreal image of several lads roller-blading down the tarred lane to the clubhouse in Elizabethan hose amuses Virginia enough to intend to enjoy herself at the Orlando Ball. Unfolding herself out of Cybil's little car, she spreads her arms wide, taking in the round yellow moon above the horizon, the wild waves of the king tide and the thunder of the Australian surf. She looks around: it could be a scene from a Fellini movie shot on a hostile Peruvian coast, so many freaks about. Cybil, fussing with her dog, her fat skirts, struggling out from behind the steering wheel, placing money in her jewelled purse, tucking her serviceable handbag under the seat and, after clicking the central lock, trying to fit her heavy ring of keys in with her cash, is about to lose her temper. Country gays cannot quite manage the sophistication of their city brothers. Emerging from farm utes, trade vans with advertising, ladders, piping, gold card stickers, sedans, 4WDs with fringes of mud, in dresses, men have thick make-up on rugged faces, lipstick with moustaches and beards, eye-shadow under bushy brows. They are grotesque, tottering about the carpark on old-fashioned sling-backs. Cybil, usually so brazen, is bashful in her perfect pre-Raphaelite costume. Virginia wants to socialise and share jokes with her mates from the bush who arrive on the tray of Rory's army truck, clinging on as if they've just hitched a ride down from the road. Indeed, there are no spaces left in the Surf Club's parking lot. Rory drives over the curb onto the grass near the beach under the banksias. Cybil uses words as weapons and clings like glue, so Virginia just waves and yodels, then partners her lover up the steps.
There is a broad expanse of decking overlooking the sea, tables and a closed kiosk. The main hall is decorated for the ball in swathes of scalloped cloth. The entrance is narrow. There's a queue along the stairs. Cybil pays for both, plucking a note from her tiny accessory. Along the seaside wall are glass doors opening onto a railed verandah, higher and not attached to the kiosk area. Dogs are on the decking. Smokers on the verandah.
When the dance is in full swing, outside Rory squashes her cigarette butt with the heel of her boot. Other smokers puff and try to be witty. The path to the moon is shattered by ripples, its light exaggerating the whitewater of the breakers. Inside, cross-dressing wardrobe imaginings of times past are at odds with the music. Disco.
She shouts, 'Every woman knows Valerie Solanas is right! It is just suicide to say so.'
Virginia White, in her artists' smock, tight dark jeans and beret, hands her a drink.
'What a load of crap! You're a dinosaur, Rory!' Margaret Hall, who is dressed pretty much as she always is, crushed velvet top and stovepipe jeans, winds her up.
'Can you conceive of an Age of Solanas?' asks Rory, quite happy to argue.
'Ha ha. Deluding yourself. Solanas?' Their battle, which has been going on for some time, causes interest. Rory prefers to talk and smoke rather than prance around dancing and Margaret chain-smokes tailormades.
'Jesus was probably just an ordinary, gentle man with a good conscience,' suggests Daze. 'The writers and politicians made Christianity after his death.' Daisy is an old maid who knows exactly how the world should be run.
Rory respects Daze and addresses her. 'In his own lifetime Christ was—what?—famous for three years?'
'The age of Christ is fucking dead in the water,' Dee Knox contributes, then leans over the railing to check on her dog.
'Life is so full,' sighs Haze, who though she doesn't smoke, is never very far from Daze.
'The Age of Aquarius is, after all, here now,' Fi says. 'The Age of Pisces over.'
'Have you read Marija Gimbutas?' Haze asks Virginia. 'The language of the Goddess? Birds?'
'Yep,' Virginia clips her response and returns to the dancefloor.
'Well, we could overthrow Western civilisation as we know it,' Margaret speaks to Rory. 'But how? Involve ourselves in the surreptitious dealing of arms or other contraband, bring down the stock exchanges?'
'Character assassination of friends and acquaintances,' says Daze, 'is something we can stop.'
'Soon they won't even be able to fix the flu with a vaccine, the bug will outwit them before the laboratories can roll into gear,' Dee reckons. 'They're killing themselves.'
'Future shock already has me reeling back with the shudders. Cyberspace and virtual reality have those of us who struggled with Newtonian physics gaping in wonder and horror,' Haze confesses.
Daisy tut-tuts at the looming doom.
'Gunpowder will attack all the fortresses of the Western world in the third millennium. The financial castles will fall as cash crashes and plastic money turns on them,' Fi takes up the apocryphal theme.
'What I rue most is the loss of faith,' dear Daisy contributes.
'It m
ight just happen,' Margaret is serious. 'The walls will come tumbling down. They're acting as if there is no tomorrow.'
Haze says, 'It would make a difference if they didn't make, um, plastic bags, for instance.'
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