Charles Wooley was angrier lately than in the twenty-odd years I’d known him. A prospering, jocular media personality, he’d lately halved his television commitments and moved back to his island home in search of that dream of his Huckleberry childhood – fly-fishing, bushwalking, rock-climbing, rafting, catamaranning – that he now might relive with his young family. And he saw what he called the ‘Stalinist economics’ of the Tasmanian quangos in their thick-witted bureaucratic sluggishness wrecking, uprooting, smashing his dreamtime hour by hour. World War Tree, some called it. The industry that dare not speak its name. Trees taller than the Opera House, tall enough to reach from the water high up into the arch of the Harbour Bridge, each of them a wonder of the world, being turned into garden furniture and office desks and woodchips. It made no sense.
I spent Christmas with him, in his federation house in Battery Point, Hobart, and had a roisterous good time with his wife, Red the chef, and certain bibulous, revelling, mildewed male companions. But the anger, though cloaked in bawdy stories and a journo’s acid-drop ridicule, did not cease.
‘The dog that starred in Babe retired to Tasmania,’ he said with feeling, ‘with his owner. He was on a long leash in the backyard. And a wombat dying of 1080 came staggering out of the bush. He died. On his leash, the dog was just able to get at him, and gnawed on his leg. And he too had a long, painful death he didn’t deserve. Nothing deserves to die like that. 1080’s banned in the United States, and most of the rest of the world, and rightly so. It comes in little chopped piles of carrots, which the chemicals turn blue. You see it everywhere – by the road, at the forest edge. It’s put there with the same clear conscience that gave poisoned flour to the blacks, for a good economic purpose, and for the civilisation of Tasmania.’
WEDNESDAY, 27 DECEMBER
Senator Bob Brown looked up from his breakfast coffee at Zum’s in Salamanca Place.
‘I first came to Tasmania in search of the thylacine [the Tasmanian Tiger],’ he said, ‘and if there were any alive when I came here, they’re dead by now, taken out by 1080, probably round Maydena.’ It’s a particularly nasty death, he explained with his characteristic dark-humoured sombre calm. ‘The animals convulse inside. They lose control of all orifices, and they just die, convulsing internally, a pain-racked death.’ Though it subsides quickly, it’s still around for a while. He’d recently seen, for instance, three farm dogs that died of it ‘when they hopped a fence into a woodchip area and ate wallabies’. I asked why this particular loathsome exterminant was used. ‘It’s cheap,’ he said. ‘If they wanted to, they could send out men with guns, or even build fences. But those alternatives are costly, and this is cheap.’
I looked at this interesting, gently spoken, possibly saintly man. He sometimes looked, I decided, like a medieval woodcut, carved from the same tough eucalyptine material he was tirelessly, patiently trying to save, an iconic familiar presence, a man of earnest constancy, all of a piece – the lean Abe Lincolnish frame, the angular Pilgrim face, the classless baritone voice, the sound-bite eloquence, the fundamentalist tenacity. I asked him how he got up each morning to go on with the fight.
‘I think of the suffragettes,’ he said. ‘They had it harder than me. And the anti-slavery campaigners. They had it harder still. I’ve got it pretty easy. I get to use a Commonwealth car.’
FRIDAY, 29 DECEMBER
It was not beyond the wit of humankind, proposed Tim Morris, the lean, persuasive ex-mayor of Maydena, to imagine a profitable tourist resort called the Valley of the Giants, with a steam train that came, as it used to, chuffing up the valleys to Maydena with a trad jazz band in the restaurant car. The eco-tourists could then enjoy fine food and a boisterous cabaret in the dining room of Tim’s crumbly weatherboard chalet on the night before they went out on their walk in the forest with him as guide, or another. It would create forty jobs, at least.
‘With those forty jobs,’ he said, ‘we’d have a sustainable community.’
What wrecked Maydena, he said, was the newsprint mills closing down at two weeks notice in the late ’80s, when jackal economic rationalism at last remembered Tasmania, and fifteen hundred workers were sacked over four years.
‘Before then we had a paper industry, a paper industry that took some trees but preserved the ecosystem, and it made a profit. Now, with clear-felling everywhere, our one paper mill, in Burnie, unbelievably imports its woodchips from Indonesia, while we send ours more cheaply to Japan. Madness.’ Only 7 per cent of Australia’s foreign tourism comes to Tasmania, Morris emphasised, and there was, apart from the distance, a reason for that.
‘We have this enormous civil war going on in this state, and the oppression of that part of the population who are out there saying, “We don’t want this happening.” And the government says, “Oh we’re clean and green, we like this image.” And vroom, down the road comes a big truck with a four-hundred-year-old tree on the back. And the people who are visiting the state really hate this. You go round a bend, just quietly looking at the scenery, and a sixty-ton truck loaded with forest giants comes round the corner on your side of the road.’
And the trucks do not swerve, of course, to avoid native animals dawdling across the highway.
‘In the dry weather after Christmas they come down to the rivers for water and they cross the roads because the roads are largely parallel to the rivers. And the stink of the dead animals is tremendous, and the tourists don’t like that either. And Forestry Tasmania has to send out a truck every morning in summer to pick up the carcasses off the road.’
I asked him why so many people like him – literate, middle-aged, thoughtful, thong-wearing, opinionated, artistic, politically implacable – fetched up at last in Tasmania.
‘Well, it’s where people unthrilled by the money economy come,’ he said. ‘Here you can be broke in passable comfort, in a beautiful, clean, inspiring, special – still special – place.’
SUNDAY, 30 DECEMBER
I stood among the snowdrifts on Mount Wellington on December 27th looking out over bunched clouds and sun shafts and cliffs and shores and rainstorms and patches of blissful, green-meadowed summer as if I were seeing, somehow, the whole world all at once, and I pondered, as further snow began to fall, the upside-downness of Tasmania.
How though 39 per cent of it was national park or protected zones, the largest such entities so classified in the known world, the war of the trees, more trees, more trees, went on. How, though 72 per cent of its people disliked wood-chipping, wood-chipping went on. How its woodchips mostly went to Japan, but Japan preserved all its own trees and used the trees of the rest of the world for its famous, delicate paper and dividable virgin chopsticks. How the bitter history of Labor and the Greens in Tasmania, and the coalition between them that Bob Brown ended by bringing down the Field government after a breach of trust – or what he said was a breach of trust – and the historic links between Labor and the timber-workers’ unions – John Curtin was for years the chief representative of the Victorian branch – meant that thankless, carping rancour unceasingly envenomed the discussions of two humanistic parties, Labor and the Greens, here in Tasmania as nowhere else. How a pledge of a hundred dollars each from each Green voter in the Commonwealth might buy the Styx Valley, but what was preferred instead was the politics of whinge, and crusading kerbside slogans, and poignant song.
How nonetheless the valley was beautiful, and each tree if left as a tourist wonder would over time make hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands more dollars than its component fibres turned to veneer and chopsticks and paper and kitchen tables … I learnt too that day that the three big trees I saw in the Styx had been, since the ’50s, declared preserved, along with a fifteen-hectare patch around them of token, temperate rainforest. But without the vast surrounding ecosystem, the Greens then argued – a hundred thousand more acres of it – the high winds would kill them soon and that would be that. It wasn’t easy. None of it was easy. And time, the enemy time, was fleeting.
&n
bsp; I got on the bus disconsolate to be leaving a place so like my childhood round Murwillumbah, remembering what I could. I remembered especially Christmas afternoon, when Wooley’s mischievous Huckleberry boyhood rekindled in his eyes, and he described with fading relish the triumph he had felt as a boy when he cut down at last a bloody big tree:
‘And there it comes, and it comes all the way down. But then, then in that awful crash, and in the terrible silence that accompanies a crashing tree in the forest, a huge and awful silence after the last bit of litter comes down, it abruptly seems to us all nature, all awareness in us is saying’ – and he dropped his voice to a whisper – ‘What the fuck did we just do?’
‘It’s like the death of God.’
Goodbye Babylon (first published in Good Weekend, January 2001)
BEACONSFIELD, 20 MAY 2006
In Beaconsfield car doors are unlocked, house doors too. There are vacant blocks of land with blowing, tufted grass. A Crusty’s Pizza; a brick Uniting Church; a grey cement church hall; red autumn leaves in a grey concrete storm drain; three boys on an oval attempting Aussie Rules; a Red Ruby Chinese restaurant; a community centre; a pub called The Club; an unremarkable patch of grass among straggling white roses in the park where Richard Carleton died. And a felt, unsettled gloom over everything – over the sandstone shops and houses and picket fences still in the style of Australian architecture’s great era, 1880 to 1920 – since the media packed their bags and went away.
I stand a while before the war memorial and its hundred names of the dead on the low green hill of RSL Park. Under this hill, a good way underneath it, Brant and Todd spent quality overtime while explosions whose purpose was to discover their corpses grew louder and closer and scarier. Across the road on a facing hill the powder-green house of Todd’s parents looks out at where their son and his friend were entombed, a mile down under the park. Beaconsfield Garage, says a sign in the front yard. Mechanical Repairs.
‘The mine management didn’t even ring the families to tell them their sons were missing,’ said Paul Howes, Bill Shorten’s deputy in the AWU, still stirred to anger a fortnight later. ‘We had to do that, and pay their hotels and plane fares too. It was the tenth anniversary of the Port Arthur Massacre, and the cop there then, and the cop here now, Paul Reynolds, hating the coincidence, said “They’ve found a body.” And I cried on camera, couldn’t hold it, not knowing which one of the three it was.’
And the media packed up then; no story anymore, they reckoned, they were going home. Paul, unsleeping, shuttled between Todd’s wife, and Nobby and Kay his parents, and Brant’s wife Rachel at Beauty Point – who was holding onto Brant’s driver’s licence, not letting it go – and Brant’s dad Webby, a rugged fisherman, his wife Chris, and Larry’s wife Jacqui. Then the coroner arrived and said it’s not a search and rescue anymore, it’s a retrieval.
‘Don’t leave my boy down there,’ Todd’s mum, Kay, sobbed; she could see beyond the war memorial the low green hill that enclosed him, could see it every day. To the minehead soon Todd’s labrador dog made its famous daily pilgrimage and was daily shooed away. In Todd’s backyard, his little boy dug with a spade, trying to reach his father, under the ground.
*
Among the miners in the Ophir pub there’s no envy, not yet, of Todd and Brant’s new television millions, they’re flush now, good luck to them. Nor even resentment that the selfless heroes who for twelve hours a day, pick-blow by pick-blow, spadeful by spadeful, blast by blast, dug them out and saved their skins, didn’t get any overtime – we’d have done it anyway – but there was perturbation over what would happen to everyone hereafter. Most wouldn’t go down that mine again, every creak or thump after this would be a major upset, a minor trauma, a health hazard, a psychological buffeting; but they looked nonetheless to future mine work, flying in and out of Queensland or Western Australia, a fortnight there, a week home.
Home. Home was always here. It was a concept they couldn’t imagine anywhere else.
*
Paul Howes had been run ragged over the first four days of it all, administrating the grief and despair of the families, racing from house to house, buying groceries, monitoring the phonecalls, protecting them day and night from the remorseless, harassing media, arranging it so Larry King’s wife Noeline, when his mashed corpse was identified, could read out a statement and show a photograph and go inside, and Todd’s brother and brother-in-law likewise. He ran the mass meeting, then went to Nobby and Kay’s for melancholy farewell drinks and flew out – still in his one stinking pair of underpants, feeling alien, weird, disconnected, out of it, a different species now in the airport lounge where strangers, recognising him from the television, smiled at him and he barely had the strength to smile back – to Melbourne where he comforted his wife and two tiny kids after a house break-in two nights before, a scary, unlinked coincidence. He was twenty-four years old and unused to such union duties. He then booked a flight back on Sunday for what he knew for sure would be three funerals. And he was in the airport lounge again when his wife rang to say, ‘They’re alive.’
*
I looked around the faces in the pub. They were big, burly, mild, self-mocking, no-bullshit blokes with Bob Mitchum or John Meillon faces, like my father’s generation – it’s September 1951, I thought, and all’s well – a time capsule, like most of the rest of Tasmania, of family men, footballers, shooters, weekend sailors and fishermen, shotgun-wed a fair few of them, I guessed, and copping sweet the decades of mortgage, skrimp and grind that followed. My father, Keith, was a coalminer for a while in Maitland, an Anglo-Celtic monoculture like this one, and I felt at home.
However incorrect it may be to say so, I mused over several VBs in the growing, smoky noise, among the pool games, quarrel and grumbly mateship, monocultures have a fair bit going for them – as any afternoon in Galway, Hydra, Kiev or Hanoi shows. You don’t have to be on your guard. You know that the barman, the grocer, the nurse is pretty much family. You don’t have to translate what you’re saying into proper, tactful, delicate multicultural euphemism. You just say it, and it’s heard, clear and plain. And men and women are more comradely, more matey in monocultures. They know what the gender deal is and they can josh and chiack and not feel insulted or threatened, sexually menaced or sexually mocked. Monocultures are perhaps, as Fiddler on the Roof suggests, the way it was meant to be. Like Anatevka. Like Beaconsfield.
*
Bill Shorten had got back from overseas just an hour before Paul left Melbourne but couldn’t get a seat on Paul’s southward flight. Richard Pratt’s jet delivered him, grimy, jetlagged and unprepared, into a media bacchanal. There were two hundred of them back on Kay and Nobby’s lawn, all asking how long? Three hours? One day? They’d find a drunk in the street and he’d say five hours and they’d believe him. After that it was Groundhog Day, with hints, Bill said, of The Truman Show. He and Paul would wake at 4.30, and be at the minehead at five to get the real situation from their contact Cheesey (Gavin Cheeseman). Bill’s feigned calm, steady gaze and refusal to fabricate or moralise was impressive. He spoke only of the community spirit, the guts of the rescuers and the latest uncertain estimate of the time the media had to wait. He kept the lunacy off the relatives’ necks, and gave to the situation an authentic, unhectic, believable voice.
He gave, too, and everybody noticed it, new credibility to the union movement, and he did it knowingly. He played those nine days of media attention like a trusty old harmonica and turned round the popular view of unions as gangs of rorting thugs to decent, conscienceful guardians of Middle Australia, and their safety and their work conditions. He surfed the breaking news in a way that may yet put Labor over the line in ’07. Pushing it a bit, some party operators wanted to parachute him into parliament straight away, roll Beazley and seize the leadership at thirty-nine, but he wouldn’t be in it. There was time for political advancement and it wasn’t now and Beazley was in with a good chance anyway.
*
�
�Get out of my church, you’re sinners!’ Shorten, from the Anglican pulpit, warned the two arriving mine board members. A surly, hung-over congregation of unionist miners gruffed their approval, and the abashed and fearful capitalists ducked out of sight. The church was ornate, with carving and stained-glass, and in its pulpit Shorten – who had first assumed it jokingly, then felt more and more at home – looked like a nineteenth-century radical Free Churchman as played in a movie by James McAvoy perhaps, whose clear blue angry gaze he shared.
His discourse was crisp and unflinching – Is it what we want? No way. Will we settle for it? Probably. Could we have done better? Hard to say. But we’ve wrenched a million more dollars out of the bastards this afternoon than they were prepared to pay this morning, and it’s a victory, a victory of sorts. Who’s in favour then? – was the colour of his dialogue, and the rhythm of his Socratic technique. He had clarity, dander, humour, class feeling, momentum, a massive IQ and scads of ambition. He was like Bob Hawke in, say, 1978: on a roll.
*
‘Every hour was a day, every day a week,’ Paul Howes remembered. He’d breakfast with Kay and Nobby, visit Rachel, sit on Brant’s recliner, mend her broken toilet, hear out her certainty that he’d be fine, but his mum, dad and kids didn’t think so anymore. He’d befriended Richard Carleton on his last day on earth, saw him on television that same night asking the basic Marxist question, was it your greed for gold, sir, that put these good men in peril of their lives?, went to the wake and felt like the lads down the mine were dead again. Carleton’s going had sucked out the rising joy of the little town. It wasn’t a game anymore.
Bob Ellis Page 8