If Blood Should Stain the Wattle

by Jackie French

  Sam nodded, his face serious. ‘You can count on it.’

  Chapter 25

  Gibber’s Creek Gazette, 8 December 1972

  The New Australia (Advertisement), by Jed Kelly

  The new Whitlam government has changed Australia after only a week. Although the cabinet will not be appointed until the newly elected members of the parliamentary Labor Party meet on 18 December, Prime Minister Whitlam and his deputy, Lance Barnard, have: formally recognised China; abolished conscription; released all draft resisters from prison; ordered the remaining Australian troops back from Vietnam; reopened the investigation into equal pay for women; and removed the sales taxes on contraceptives and Australian wine.

  Editorial: A Rush to Ruin!

  In a move that has dismayed experienced members of our defence services, the first act of the Whitlam government on its first day in office has been to free all draft resisters who were in prison and drop charges against more than 300 more. Conscription has been abolished and the last Australian troops will be returned to Australia within three weeks.

  The new ‘government’, which at present consists only of Mr Whitlam and his deputy, Lance Barnard, has announced that racially selected sporting teams from South Africa will no longer be allowed to enter Australia. This ban follows last year’s Australia-wide demonstrations against the touring South African Springboks. According to Chamber of Commerce president, Graham Flint: ‘Sport should be above politics!’

  SAM

  The summer heat was stifling under the big tent, even with the sides up to let in whatever breeze there was. Sam sat cross-legged, automatically brushing the flies from his eyes, and tried not to listen as the others argued back and forth. The problem with commune life was its very communality, every little thing forked over and over, like the compost pits. Like compost, the result might be rich, but it was also boring.

  ‘That reminds me,’ he broke into the discussion about whether the next vegetable gardens should be planted with tomatoes, or a mix of salad greens. ‘I won’t have time to help with the planting.’

  ‘Why not?’ demanded Carol, her hands still busy with a spider’s web of orange macramé.

  ‘Got some jobs on.’ Mentioning Jed would not be tactful. His fling with Carol had been in her ‘free love’ phase. It had taught him that love, and sex, left bonds you might not expect, or want. ‘Anyway, if we’re going to buy Colorbond for the roof of the new shed, we need to have some real money coming in, now that Greg’s gone home. The rates’ll be due soon too.’

  ‘Why should we pay rates if we don’t get anything in return?’ demanded Clifford.

  ‘We use the roads.’

  ‘We don’t have to. We could ride or walk across country.’

  Sam shrugged. It was a useless argument. They had to pay rates, fair or not.

  ‘There’s also a letter from the building inspector,’ said Carol.

  ‘That’s later in the agenda,’ began Clifford.

  ‘Well, I’m bringing it up now. We don’t have council approval for the dome. And we only have two hundred acres, which means we can only get building approval for two houses.’

  ‘We shouldn’t have to get approval!’

  That too was irrelevant, thought Sam. Councils had the power to demolish illegal buildings.

  Carol grinned. ‘I think I’ve worked out a way around the regulations. If we put a breezeway between Sam’s place and mine, then it’ll technically be one house. And we just need an engineer’s certificate to say the dome and the breezeway are structurally sound and they’ll give us retrospective approval. Sam, conveniently, is an engineer.’

  ‘But we shouldn’t have to —’ began JohnandAnnie.

  ‘Let’s vote,’ said Carol crisply. ‘Okay, all in favour except Clifford. But we do need the rates money. Sam, how much are you going to be paid?’

  ‘Didn’t ask.’

  ‘Oh, for Pete’s sake. Okay, we have twenty-four dollars and eighteen cents in the bank account . . .’

  ‘You’re making us sound like bourgeois capitalist lackeys.’ That was Clifford’s worst possible form of abuse.

  ‘There’s another eight dollars something in the jar,’ said JohnandAnnie. The jar was the honesty box on the table up on the main road where they left the spare vegetables to sell, as well as Carol’s macramé pot-plant holders, which even she admitted were truly, deeply hideous. The public so far had been surprisingly honest. The jar had been emptied only once, and usually contained more, not less than the goods on the table had been priced at.

  ‘The rates are fifty-one dollars,’ said Carol. ‘We need more money.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have bought new violin strings,’ said Clifford.

  ‘That came out of Leafsong’s allowance from Dad. And the rest of her allowance went into our bank account. She’s subsidising you, mate.’

  ‘Patriarchal capitalist crap. It’s the people’s money. The people’s violin too.’

  Leafsong’s arms tightened about herself. Scarlett, sitting next to her in her wheelchair, was looking furious, though as a visitor, she had carefully not taken part in the meeting. She was always about the place now, Leafsong helping her chair on the uneven ground, in case it tilted.

  ‘Cool it, okay? No one is going to touch Leafsong’s violin,’ said Sam, and saw Scarlett relax and give him an approving smile. Funny kid. Nice kid. As far as he was concerned, no one was touching his tools either. Most had belonged to his Uncle Sandy, and before that to old Mr Mack, who’d been like a grandfather to him. Sam kept them locked up in his toolbox these days, not hanging up where any idiot could use one of his chisels to pry open a stuck window. ‘But we do need to think about more of an income. And some of us,’ he carefully didn’t look at Clifford or JohnandAnnie, ‘need to do a bit more work around the place.’

  ‘Hey, man, I do my share of washing-up . . .’

  ‘Your Protestant work ethic is showing, man.’

  ‘Yeah. Probably.’ And next week he was going to buy that ute. You could carry tools on a bicycle, but not lengths of pipe or solar panels, and he was sick of having to borrow a vehicle from his parents. Nor was the bank account where he’d saved the money for the ute anyone else’s business. If it came to a pinch, he’d pay the rates himself — Nancy’s and Matilda’s commissions alone would give him enough. But he didn’t see why he should pay for Clifford to read Karl Marx or JohnandAnnie to laze about smoking pot, playing Cat Stevens songs on their guitar.

  Sam uncurled himself. ‘I’m going for a swim. Anyone else coming?’

  ‘Me,’ said Scarlett as Leafsong stood up with a smile.

  ‘But the meeting isn’t over,’ insisted Clifford.

  ‘It is for me,’ said Sam. He took hold of Scarlett’s chair. The kid could swim surprisingly well, but he made sure he kept an eye on her when she was in or near the river.

  As he left the shade of the tent, he heard Carol call the meeting to order.

  Chapter 26

  Telegram to Jed Kelly, Dribble, Australia

  It’s COLD in London exclamation mark exclamation mark please send sheepskin coat query J xxx

  Gibber’s Creek Gazette, December 1972

  . . . and so as the Gibber’s Creek Gazette takes its annual leave, it’s goodbye from me until 31 January . . .

  SCARLETT

  How could late December be so green? It rained every second night, psychedelic clouds on the horizon at four pm, six growls of thunder about nine pm, then a half-hour of strong steady downpour, just as if someone had set a switch to give the perfect amount of rain when it would least discommode human beings, and still leave the night clear for wombats and kangaroos to graze.

  Nancy, being Nancy, had known way back how good the grass would be this summer. Overflow’s paddocks were filled with lean steers bought cheaply to fatten. The whole year was going to be good, said Nancy . . .

  A fab year! Scarlett had finished the school term with Jed driving her to town each day, then back in the afternoon, b
ut Sam had a plan for building a ramp at the bus stop so that next year she could take the school bus, like everyone else.

  Jed put in an hour every morning and afternoon with the River View kids, while Scarlett was at school, doing anything except cooking or washing-up, which mostly meant feeding the younger ones and playing games or reading. The rest of the time Jed helped Sam, first to put up the solar hot-water panels and the big new hot-water tank, which was WONDERFUL. Scarlett could shower for an hour now, as long as she took her shower in the morning so the sun had time to heat the water up again for Jed.

  And the chook palace was sooooo groovy! It was old corrugated iron, because Sam said old corrugated iron for chook sheds was an unbreakable Australian tradition. But this shed was also two storeys high and painted gold, with iron lace perches, also painted gold — Sam said metal was better for perches as wood harboured the mites that gave chooks scaly leg, which sounded FASCINATING. Scarlett almost wanted the chooks to get scaly leg so she could see the weird growths. She even ALMOST wanted to be a vet, not a doctor.

  But only almost.

  The chook shed also had a chandelier, carefully positioned so its brilliant glass diamonds wouldn’t be sullied by chook droppings, and laying boxes Scarlett could open without having to run her chair wheels through chook dung (which was the ONLY polite word to use, Matilda said).

  Sam worked till dinnertime each night, which meant it was only good manners to ask him to stay and eat, especially as Leafsong always cooked far more than she and Jed needed.

  Leafsong also cooked over at Drinkwater, leaving Matilda’s dinner in the oven or fridge ready for her when she felt like eating it, then bicycling over to deliver dinner to Dribble. Which meant that Leafsong mostly stayed for dinner too, and Sam drove her and her bicycle home in his new but very old ute. Sometimes the four of them played Scrabble. Scarlett had been sure Jed would win every game, but Leafsong clobbered them all. Which went to show, thought Scarlett, that not talking was not the same as not knowing words.

  Having a home meant TIME. Time to find out that a wombat lived under Dribble, scratching its back at two am. Had the wombat decamped to another hole the times she and Jed had been there before, but decided the humans were now familiar and unthreatening enough to ignore?

  Time to sit on the veranda and watch the wedge-tailed eagle balance on the updraughts above the river, see its sudden legs-down dive to grab a wonga pigeon as it tottered down the road, as wonga pigeons never flew when they could wobble. Time to know the competing growls of the two old-man possums claiming grazing rights on the leaves of Dribble’s newly planted fruit trees. Time to watch the echidna, henceforth named The Pig, push over every pot Leafsong carefully planted with basil and tarragon and thyme from Halfway to Eternity, as it hunted for the small black ants that lived under pot plants.

  Time to leave a mess in her bedroom. Scarlett had never left a mess before, because no bedroom had been truly hers. She wasn’t quite sure how you DID make a mess, but she had read about messy bedrooms in books. It was time she had one too.

  She asked Leafsong about what a bedroom mess might consist of. Leafsong had grinned, pulled out two pairs of underpants and scattered them on the dressing table, piled books in an unsteady heap on the bedside table, then messed up the bedspread as carefully as Scarlett had made the bed that morning.

  Scarlett had been so proud of being able to make her own bed, had felt so normal. How could she have known that NOT making your bed was even more normal?

  Christmas was STUPENDOUS! A bulging Santa sack of the mini skirts that Matron Clancy would NEVER have let her wear at River View, plus tangerine cotton culottes, soft denim bell-bottoms in the most beautiful pale blue and a hot pink skinny rib top that would look perfect with them. Sandals covered with silver flowers, and some hot rollers from Matilda that Jed must have bought. And being Jed, she’d even remembered to include a Mason Pearson hairbrush and some hairspray. And, under the tree they’d all decorated, a pile of medical books that Jed must have ordered from Britain, and TWO wheelchairs, made from the new metals aluminium and titanium, both so light she could wheel them by herself. A motorised chair was good for going up hills, but it also weighed too much to make wheeling herself easy.

  TWO wheelchairs! The second one was low slung, with groovy wide PINK wheels. ‘A four-wheel drive sports car of a wheelchair,’ Sam said, because he’d called in with Leafsong and Carol on their way to Drinkwater, where EVERYONE was having Christmas dinner. He’d brought Scarlett a crash helmet, which was the most SENSIBLE present anyone had ever given her, because it meant she could now have a go at things where she might crash.

  Leafsong gave them all big jars of fudge and Carol presented them with lopsided baskets woven out of wonga vines, which were ideologically correct and TOTALLY hideous, but Carol laughed and promised them all enough peaches to fill the baskets and hide their ugliness as soon as the fruit ripened.

  Scarlett and Jed had chosen joint presents for everyone. A giant stockpot for Leafsong, big enough to cook a stew for fifty people, and the largest frying pan in the commercial kitchen warehouse in Canberra, a fondue set for entertaining and a set of chef’s knives.

  The warehouse had provided nearly everyone else’s presents too: a pottery chicken brick for Nancy, a dog bowl that proclaimed The Boss for Maxi and Matilda, a chef’s apron that said Eat Lamb: a thousand dingoes can’t be wrong for Michael, blue drinking glasses for Carol made from recycled bottles. Scarlett had even found an apron that said I don’t do washing-up for Jed, and bought it when Jed was examining a set of knives for Sam, though in the end they bought him a chainsaw.

  Scarlett had never known shopping could be so much fun, when you had enough money to buy ANYTHING you wanted and get it delivered too, a sports car to ride in, your hair blowing and moths sticking to your face, and a sister to laugh with, to discuss each purchase with, and then have dinner with in the revolving restaurant on top of the Black Mountain Tower, seeing the whole of Canberra circle below, before the late drive home. A LATE drive, getting in at two am, she who could count the number of late nights in her life on one hand.

  It was magic going to church on Christmas morning with all the Thompsons and McAlpines. A FABULOUS Christmas dinner at Drinkwater, everyone nibbling liverwurst on toast and drinking sherry, with a little sherry and a lot of lemonade for her, then halved avocado pears with prawns and French dressing and an enormous turkey and three million vegetables and the plum pudding with its special sixpences kept in a jar from one Christmas to another, everyone reading out the corny jokes from Christmas crackers and wearing their paper hats.

  Then New Year’s Day down at the river, everyone swimming and eating and yarning, then swimming and eating again.

  Because best of all, every time she went anywhere now she got to come home. Dribble. Her house. Her family.

  ‘I’ve decided my name is now Scarlett Kelly-O’Hara,’ she announced to Leafsong as they sat on a bend of the river at Halfway to Eternity, eating lunch before harvesting more tomatoes, Scarlett picking the top ones from her chair, and Leafsong picking the lower ones.

  Leafsong made a ‘holding a teacup with little pinky finger extended’ gesture.

  Scarlett laughed, and pantomimed giving a royal ‘from the balcony’ type wave, with one hand, while mincingly holding a handkerchief in the other. These days she often found herself talking to Leafsong without words. How could it be so satisfying talking to Jed WITH words and to Leafsong without?

  It was the first week of the new year, which was going to be the most TREMENDOUS year the universe had seen, for her and Jed and all of Australia. Later when it got cooler she and Leafsong would make tomato chutney to sell on the commune’s roadside stall or, rather, Leafsong would make it while Scarlett chopped. School holidays DOING things instead of filled with therapy or wheelchair basketball with the kids!

  The chutney was NEEDED because the commune’s rates were due, and even with Mrs Weaver’s stock of empty Vegemite jars and free wo
od to cook with, it was going to take thirty-five jars of chutney to pay them, plus enough chutney for everyone to eat over a tomato-less winter.

  There weren’t many spots above the river her wheelchair could get to, even the new one, as it was too sandy. But there you could watch the swans with their ungainly feet-first landings, which changed from frenzied running on the water to an elegant glide within seconds, leaving them looking faintly embarrassed.

  She gazed out at the river. Ah, there was a pelican. She gestured ‘beak full, fat stomach’ to Leafsong, who gestured back a pelican so fat it sank. But there were some questions she did need words for. One that was hard to ask even if you had words.

  ‘Leafsong, is this where you really want to be?’

  Leafsong glanced at her, clearly surprised. She bit her lip, just as clearly having never considered the issue.

  They were alike in that, Scarlett realised. Both she and Leafsong had both been basically dumped by their parents. Both lived with their sisters. But she had chosen Jed as her sister. She’d also chosen the life she led now, as well as the life she WOULD lead, as a medical student then doctor. Back in Gibber’s Creek, of course, because this was her home.

  Leafsong hadn’t had a choice.

  Leafsong gestured to the paddocks of corn and tomatoes behind them, then held her hands either side of her face to show a smile.

  ‘I know you’re happy here,’ said Scarlett slowly. ‘But if you could choose anything, absolutely ANYTHING. Any way to live, any place to live . . .’

  Leafsong considered the river again. At last she turned, made a ‘stirring the pots’ gesture, then flung her arms wide, as if to include not just the sand-singing river, the balloon-blue sky, but the whole world beyond.

  ‘You want to cook for everyone?’

  Leafsong nodded. She pointed to the cottage she shared with Carol — one room, admittedly a generously sized room, but still only one, a combination bedroom and living room, with the outdoor shower and composting toilet shared with Sam. Leafsong held up two fingers, then pushed one of them back down.