Dixie had built an arrangement of tin drums into a counter and wall so that she did the postal business through a small gap where she had not packed a drum. She kept all matters pertaining to her job in old cardboard boxes on her side of the wall. In there too, if you peeked quickly enough, you could see a bed, some tea chests and old meat safes to store her possessions and an open range over which she cooked. The PMG had warned her about this. Strictly forbidden to cook on postal premises. But who would know, year in, year out? Dixie did as she pleased. She washed, summer and freezing winter, under the tank tap out the back.
On our side, when I was a kid, was a black wall phone which we could crank and get the Murrurundi exchange—if we were lucky. Here in the front ‘room’ was where the townsfolk tended to congregate when Dixie decided, quite arbitrarily, to give out the mail. To notify us of her decision she rang a bell and we had ten minutes to be there and collect, otherwise we had to wait another day. She was far too busy, was Dixie, to waste time on stragglers. So she said. Still, no-one complained. Sometimes, too, the travellers, as the sales reps were called in those more courteous days, stopped by and set up a temporary shop in Dixie’s shack front, on their way between Tamworth and Murrurundi. All the new haberdashery lines, patterns straight from Women’s Weekly, work boots, serge suits and Real Australian Heroes Stamina cards for us boys to swop. The women and kids loved these visits. The grown men said the travellers were sissies. Dixie grumbled about this occasional commercial disturbance to her service but it was good-natured, and she could always be counted on to buy a jar of boiled lollies which she doled out to us if she decided we had been good.
I went off to Sydney and boarding school, only returning in school holidays. After my parents died it was nearly forty-five years before I returned, by which time my wife had died, too, the children had grown, my working life as a geologist was over and I had a hankering. I had always been interested in a monolith out our way called Wallabadah Rock, a giant outcrop of rhyolite, whose volcanic core is more than forty million years old. It’s hidden by the ranges so it’s relatively unknown, but anyone lucky enough to see it can’t help but be mesmerised by its secret places, its rainforested gullies and the sheets of waterfalls that cascade down its face in the wet times. I wanted to explore it, document it, make it my retirement project and so it was time to come home.
There were very few people left from the old days. It had become more a town for hobby farmers and young city people wanting a cheap weekend house but, to my surprise, Dixie was still there in her shack. When first I went to say hello she was unwilling to admit she remembered me, peering suspiciously from her hole in the drum wall, mumbling. She must have been close on ninety then, but when she did recognise me she wasted no time in saying how much I had aged and asking if I still had my own teeth. (Yes, to both.) Perhaps because I could remember the old days, we struck up a bit of a friendship, although it was always through her hole in the wall. I took to dropping in for a few minutes each day just to keep an eye on the poor old thing. Occasionally I saw her as I drove out on my collecting expeditions, making her way slowly towards the tip, usually burdened down with an old box but she refused my offers of a lift, with something like alarm in her eyes and fright in her old voice, even when she realised it was only me. Still, I always offered if I happened to pass her.
I had moved back into the family cottage that I’d held onto all this time thinking the kids might want it, and made myself comfortable. Nearly every day I went out to Wallabadah Rock with my notebooks and camera and little pick and shovel. I was surprisingly happy and considered myself a lucky man to have this contentment. I didn’t see many people, and those who were here were friendly and unobtrusive. That suited me just fine. My late wife often used to complain that I was too much an observer of life and why couldn’t I participate more but that’s the way I am.
I was not alone in keeping an eye on Dixie. Food parcels were dropped in front of the shack, blankets, a pile of fire wood because she still lit up her old range. There were holes in the tank and someone went around from time to time and patched them up and another time two of us dug a new pit for her filthy old toilet in its bramble-covered shed. Dixie never acknowledged any of this, becoming ever more hermit-like and decrepit.
Finally, something had to be done. It was the frightful smell that alerted us. It was not the familiar Dixie smell of unwashed body and urine. It was more sinister than that. One of the weekenders was a young doctor bloke from Sydney and I was prevailed upon to persuade her to let him give her the once-over. Discussing and arguing with her about this through the hole in the drums was ridiculous and difficult but it would have been no use going round the back. Dixie always barricaded herself in and breaking in through her back door would have been well-nigh impossible.
In the end it was only the pain that convinced her to see the doctor. He had to squirm his way awkwardly through the drum wall and he was appalled—and nauseated—when he emerged from that foetid back room. Her legs were a mass of seeping ulcers, he said. Gangrene was a real possibility. ‘We’ll send her down to Sydney,’ he said. ‘I’ll try and fix up a bed for her and let you know.’ And within the week they drove old Dixie down.
The evening she was to leave, a curious thing happened. I was just out of the shower, washing off the grime from a day of sample collecting when I heard the bell. Dixie’s bell. At least I knew it was that. The others told me later that they didn’t know what to make of it. But I obeyed as speedily as the old days when Mum sent me rocketing down the road for the mail. In the gloom I could make out the old woman waving to me through the drum wall. I went over and she told me, without preamble, that I was to ‘do a thorough clear out’ after she was gone. ‘I wouldn’t like anyone to know I wasn’t up to the job,’ she mumbled. ‘I did a good job, best I could. I can trust you. You remember the old days, you know what a good job I did.’ There was an urgency and helplessness about her that I had never noticed before. She was pathetic to see and I certainly didn’t relish the thought of sorting through the filth but I reassured her that she had done a splendid job and I would respect her wishes. That night the ambulance took Dixie away to die.
I put off going to the shack because I was onto a particularly interesting seam and was keen to get some specimens away to Sydney, and what with measuring, labelling and packing my samples I simply didn’t spare a thought for the task that Dixie had set me. However, when the Australian Museum asked me to come down and deliver my report on the specimens in person, I decided to get Dixie’s place done before I went.
I backed my ute up to her back door intending to shovel everything straight in. I had to work in the daytime because Dixie only had one light bulb (courtesy of an illegal connection someone had rigged up to an outside power line for her) and I didn’t fancy scrabbling around in semi-darkness. Even knowing it would be a big job, close enough to a century of detritus, I was still staggered at what she had fitted into the shack. There were bundles of clothes, smelly, moth-eaten, possibly gnawed by rats; there were blankets and rags and buckets without handles and enamel basins with holes in them; there were encrusted chamber pots, blown tins, several stained and torn mattresses and pillows, animal droppings, puddles of fat around the range, boxes and boxes of tightly packed newspapers and rubbish tied in parcels with string. The smell and the filth were too much for me and I could only work for short periods before I had to get into the fresh air. It took a couple of sessions before I started to feel I was making progress. I made daily trips to the tip and all the old food, utensils, parcels, newspapers and most of the clothes were gone. All that were left were the heavy items—the old bedstead and the mattresses. The bed did not have a mattress on it; it seemed Dixie lay in a bundle of rags straight onto the springs.
The mattresses were stacked at odd angles against the walls. Gingerly I tugged at them, revolted by the extruding kapok. They lurched forward and I stepped quickly aside as they fell to the floor. There was Dixie’s secret. Crushed and hidd
en behind the mattresses were over twenty large sacks, sailcloth, calico, something like that, threaded through at the top with rotten rope and stamped PMG.
I could hardly believe my eyes. I prised open the top of one of the sacks and put my hand in. It was crammed with envelopes. I delved deeper and felt the lump of parcels. I pulled open the tops of all the sacks. All were crammed with mail. Unopened mail. I pulled out a few letters at random and tried to read the postmarks. If I was not mistaken the three I had chosen were dated in the 1940s. I sat back on my heels in amazement, trying to think what to do.
The time will one day come when I am too old to go fossicking up at Wallabadah Rock. Dixie’s shortcomings as a postmistress have been a godsend. As my wife said, I’ve always preferred to be an observer rather than a participator in life. I’ve decided I’ll ration myself with the mail bags. I’ll spin out my new hobby so that it will provide me with pleasurable musings, proxy what ifs and why nots and if onlys, delicious dilemmas, over all the long solitary nights that the good Lord sees fit to alot me.
means to an end
One August in 1987, Aurelia, sixty-five, bearing a strong likeness to Edith Sitwell ‘without the eccentricity’ as her neighbour Kath said, collected the files, said goodbye to her colleagues at the Parole Board meeting and walked briskly towards the gates of the gaol and the car park. Briskly, because she had learned, over the long years as a woman in a predominantly man’s world, never to show weakness. But she was bone-tired and her arthritic big toe throbbed with heat. Her work on the Parole Board was more taxing than she could ever have imagined, despite many years as, variously, a busy lawyer, a single mother, a domestic violence advocate and an author.
While irrevocably against the death penalty, Aurelia had come to believe, through her work on the Parole Board, that some people were just plain evil. So, what to do with an evil person? Did you lock them up forever, a price perhaps more terrible than death (she thought she would find death preferable), while they remained a costly, increasing burden on society? Did you undertake scheme after well-meaning scheme to rehabilitate them? Did you even judge correctly who were plain evil? Might it not be possible that some evil-doers became truly remorseful, reformed characters, who could learn to function within society? If this were even remotely possible, was it not morally imperative to give them a chance? Maybe, but in the lottery of picking the reformed from the reoffenders, the odds were abysmal. The responsibility of her appointment weighed upon her far more heavily than her businesslike, unemotional exit from the gaol would have suggested.
She did not look forward to her evening reading. The man who had come before them this afternoon, Walter Sims, had seemed innocuous enough. In her experience almost anyone who came before the Board looked innocuous. He was middle-aged, sandy, slim, politely-spoken, the only incongruity the prominent tufts of hair sprouting rather comically from his ears.
But this man was anything but ordinary. He was responsible in his teens for two horrific murders. Two little girls, sisters, ten and seven, the elder one tied up and forced to watch the rape of her little sister, hear the screams for pity as the man penetrated and tore her apart before cutting her throat and leaving her lying beside them as he turned his attention to the elder, ripping her anus and vagina into a searing bloody abomination before taking the knife and thrusting it up inside her while she was still alive. Only then, mercifully, did he cut her throat.
Aurelia knew this outline before she met the man who had now spent more than half his lifetime behind bars. He had been removed from his home state and kept away from other prisoners, so reviled was he. It was hardly believable, to look at him, that he could be such a monster. But it was all true and Aurelia knew that the files she carried under her arm would spell it out in even more frightful detail and the photographs would sicken and repel her as she forced herself to examine them. Then she would read the inarguable report of the police inquiry, the capture, the frenzied court case and the sentencing. There was no doubt the man had done these terrible things. He, himself, later admitted them in a letter, asking forgiveness of the shattered and unforgiving parents.
He had also, from gaol, done a law degree, followed by an agricultural science degree and had written a well-received book on hydroponics and its application to food production in the Third World, all profits from which went, at his request, to Community Aid Abroad. He painted in watercolours, taught himself the flute and learned sign language. There was no denying his time in prison had not been wasted; he had been positive and constructive. In short, a model prisoner.
The question that had to be decided was, is he still, at heart, an unregenerate evil being? Aurelia pulled her car to an abrupt stop in the garage under her unit block, dragged on the handbrake and leaned back tiredly. She felt almost too weary to get out and only the thought of the welcoming whisky and her four evening cigarettes roused her. As the lift took her up she pondered her responsibility. She knew that many politicians, Sims’s legal counsel, advocates of civil liberties, any decent human being who espoused the possibility of redemption of the human spirit, believed he deserved a chance. It was up to the Parole Board to make the final recommendation.
As she pushed open her metal security grille, Kath opened the adjoining door.
‘Thought I heard you. Drink?’
‘Thanks,’ said Aurelia, grateful for the distraction. She and Kath had been friends and neighbours for over ten years; Kath widowed, ten years younger than Aurelia, both with one daughter, although Aurelia had never married. They were ideal friends because their lives were too fulfilling and busy for them ever to intrude upon each other’s privacy. Kath was sensitively aware of the confidentiality of much of Aurela’ s work and never attempted to encroach upon this confidentiality. A pleasure they never tired of was sharing details of their daughters, revelling in their progress, suffering in their crises, analysing the latest choice in boyfriend.
Kath poured them both generous whiskies.
‘I’ve got a rabbit stew heating in the oven,’ she offered. ‘Sal brought it round. Said she had felt like making it and ended up with enough for twenty. Want some?’
‘Love it,’ said Aurelia.
‘She makes me laugh, Sal. I remember when she was little. “I could never eat a bunny” she said.’ Both women laughed. The pressures of the day drained away in their warm female cosiness.
A month later, on the recommendation of the Board, Walter Sims was granted parole. While it drew a small press in his home state far from New South Wales, that was the only publicity.
Nine years later, in June 1996 Walter Sims was charged in the Downing Centre District Court with the abduction, rape and murder of a thirteen-year-old girl. Aurelia, retired now, writing her fourth book, gnarled with the arthritis, looking more like Edith Sitwell than ever, read the Sydney Morning Herald report with horror. It was him! It had to be! Same terrible procedure. Same frightful wounds of the vagina and anus, same frightful mutilation with the knife thrust up into the living child before the savage cutting of the throat. No mention, of course, of the man’s prior convictions. That was strictly forbidden, would have resulted in a mistrial and the impossibility of him ever receiving a fair one.
Aurelia could not sleep that night. Her twisted joints ached with outrage, her heart pounded and finally, just as the dawn started to lighten the winter sky, she vomited up her revulsion and self-blame in an acrid stream of bile.
For the six weeks prior to the trial she was an obsessed woman. She respected the law, she had battled for changes to inadequate or archaic laws, she had upheld the law for seventy-five years. Now, for the first time she felt herself powerless before it. She longed to pour out her conflict to someone, her daughter, Kath, someone who would be unrestrained by legal niceties in their reaction. Finally, she rang some of her old colleagues from the Board. You know better than that, they had responded quite sternly, seemingly impervious to any dilemma, and Aurelia knew they were theoretically right. Their private knowledge had no
place in the working through of the justice system. But. But.
After three weeks she took herself and her current manuscript to north Queensland.
‘It’s this wretched arthritis,’ she told her neighbour. ‘Maybe the warmth will do it good.’
‘Yes,’ said Kath. ‘You’ve been looking exhausted lately. Send me a postcard.’
But she was unable to keep away. The day the trial began and every day thereafter, Aurelia was in the public gallery. Knowing what she did, it was inconceivable to consider that the jury might bring in an acquittal, but Aurelia knew a good defence team could accomplish the inconceivable and, indeed, this is just what Walter Sims’s team was doing.
They systematically and ruthlessly destroyed any dignity the dead thirteen-year-old was entitled to. They set out to portray precocious depravity: a child who looked eighteen, regularly worked the streets of the Cross, never attended school, drank and had track marks on her arms. Aurelia listened in disgust. It was so clever. They were demolishing the rights of the child, making her a less worthy human being, so outside normal parameters that decent-minded people would understand that a crime of lesser significance had been committed. Regardless of who had committed it or how, the girl had somehow deserved it. Disgraceful but, Aurelia knew, permissible legal tactics.
Disreputable People Page 13