If Blood Should Stain the Wattle

by Jackie French

  ‘You’d like to live by yourself?’

  Another nod, a delicate touch of the strong stumpy hands to her ears, a fluttering of fingers. ‘You want silence,’ said Scarlett slowly. ‘A . . . a song of silence?’

  Leafsong smiled at her. She made the finger-rubbing universal gesture for money, then pointed to herself.

  So. Leafsong wanted to cook for a lot more people, not just there at the commune, and for Matilda and Dribble. She wanted to live by herself, and earn money for herself too.

  ‘You want to be your own person,’ said Scarlett softly. ‘Not just Carol’s little sister? Not having to depend on cheques from your parents?’

  Leafsong smiled and nodded, then shrugged, her fingers dancing as if to show delight at the sunlight around them, the air that sang with cicadas and the long liquid notes of the magpies, even the black snake that was carefully twisting its way through the tussocks further down near the river, obviously hoping to be mistaken for a long and mobile stick.

  It was a mime of happiness. Contentment.

  But this was a time for more than contentment. Scarlett had EVERYTHING now, and so did Australia, according to Jed, with a government that would pass law after law as fast as possible to correct all the wrongs that had built up since 1788.

  There had to be a way for Scarlett Kelly-O’Hara to give her friend everything she wanted too.

  Chapter 27

  Gibber’s Creek Gazette, 1 February 1973

  Farewell Britain!

  For the first time since England created the Australian colonies the preferential tariff between the two nations ends today. Australian goods will no longer be exported to Britain tariff free and tariffs will be placed on British goods coming to Australia.

  To some this is the ending of one of the last strong links with the ‘mother nation’, a parting that began when Britain not only left Australia to fend off Japanese attacks by herself but insisted that Australian troops remain in the Middle East to defend Britain from Germany, reserving its forces in Southeast Asia to keep colonial India safe, not Australia. Australia looked to the USA for help then, just as now it must look for other markets such as China for its coal, iron ore, wool and wheat.

  SCARLETT

  Scarlett waited till Jed had eaten her boiled egg, fresh from the chook palace, taken her first bite of toast, laden with Leafsong’s groovy tomato jam, and drunk one cup of the percolated coffee she loved every morning. Outside, flies already brushed against the screens, trying to escape the sun.

  This was going to be difficult. Accepting an allowance from Jed was okay. She’d never actually ASKED for it, or anything else. If you didn’t ask, it didn’t count. Shopping for presents didn’t count either, because Jed NEEDED Scarlett to shop with to work out what people really wanted.

  And Scarlett never HAD asked for anything. That mattered, when you’d needed people to care for you most of your life, even wipe your bottom until three years ago.

  But this request wasn’t for her. It was for Leafsong. And for everyone at the commune. They’d all been good to her. Or rather, they HADN’T been good to her. Too many people were good to her, Mrs Weaver saying kindly, ‘Would you like me to push you, dear?’ as if she were a joey in a hessian sack, the teachers standing back to let her go first out of class.

  This last year at Halfway to Eternity had been the first time she’d had friends of her own — not just kids thrust together at River View, but people who actually liked her. People older than her too, who had interesting conversations.

  It was just so GOOD. So normal. No, not normal. The way things SHOULD be, with people choosing how they were going to live instead of accepting predetermined patriarchal social roles, like Carol said. Sitting up on the geodesic dome’s deck, singing The Kinks’ ‘Waterloo Sunset’, with Leafsong playing her violin, weaving a harmony around the melody; picking corn with Carol and Leafsong, flinging the cobs into the basket, the sisters taking turns to push the chair on as it didn’t have quite enough power to go reliably forwards in the loose dirt. Her help probably made the whole thing slower, but they liked her being there.

  She owed them this. And more.

  ‘Jed?’

  ‘Mmm?’ Jed looked up from her copy of the Gibberer. ‘This is hilarious! That editor has left the h out of “Uniting Church” and transposed the u and r . . . I’m going to cut it out and stick it on the fridge. I wonder if Matilda has seen it. I’ll take it over later —’

  ‘Jed, this is important.’

  Jed put the Gibberer down. ‘Spit it out, brat.’

  ‘Will you buy the Bluebell Café and let Leafsong run it?’

  ‘Will I what? Darling, she’s sixteen.’

  ‘Seventeen now.’

  ‘Sixteen, seventeen. She’s too young to run a café.’

  ‘I’d help. You know she’s a good cook.’

  ‘She’s a brilliant cook. But you start your HSC next year, which even you are going to have to focus on if you want to get into medicine. Running a café needs more than good cooking. Leafsong would need to know how to run a business. Do the accounts, work out how much everything should cost, understand tax stamps and overtime rates for staff. Running a café is a huge amount of work and often when other people are relaxing. No holidays, early mornings, late nights.’

  ‘You could help her too then.’

  ‘I really, really don’t want to work in a café ever again, even for five minutes. Have you discussed this with Leafsong?’

  ‘Yes. No. Well, sort of.’ She had actually only glanced at the Bluebell last time she and Leafsong had been in town and said, ‘I bet you could run it a million times better,’ and Leafsong had smiled and nodded.

  ‘Maybe you should do more than “sort of” discuss it.’

  ‘There’s no point getting her hopes up if you’re not going to buy it,’ said Scarlett.

  Jed sat back. ‘Fair enough. You do know that “buying the Bluebell” could mean buying either the business, or the building and the business? They’re separate.’

  ‘No,’ admitted Scarlett.

  ‘And neither happen to be for sale.’

  ‘But I’d bet they’d sell it if you offered.’ The Bluebell changed hands every few years, somehow, miraculously, never bought by anyone who could cook.

  ‘Fair enough. We’d be breaking a great Gibber’s Creek tradition here, if someone actually sold food there that anyone except the flies wanted to eat.’

  Scarlett relaxed. If Jed was joking, it meant she was seriously considering it. And it would be fun, as well as being a way the commune could make enough money selling their vegetables to pay their rates every year. If the Bluebell could struggle on for years making scones of stone and rock cakes so unbreakable they might just be able to be patented as a new building material, then Leafsong would make a mint.

  ‘Okay,’ said Jed. ‘Here’s the deal. You have a serious talk with Leafsong. And Carol,’ she added. ‘Because I’m pretty sure seventeen is too young to sign a contract. If both agree, then I’ll have a chat with whoever owns the Bluebell.’

  ‘Thank you!’

  ‘Don’t thank me yet,’ warned Jed. ‘Three out of five small businesses fail in the first three years. And, no, that does not make me an expert in small business. I read it in The Australian last week. I suppose this means you want a lift to Eternity now, immediately, as of thirty seconds ago?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘Don’t forget we’re having dinner at Drinkwater tonight.’

  ‘I won’t. Nicholas promised to get me Mr Whitlam’s signature AND Mr Cairns’s!’

  Jed was quiet for a second too long. ‘When did you ask him?’ she asked, carefully casual.

  ‘I wrote him a congratulatory letter,’ said Scarlett. ‘Matilda said that’s the polite thing to do when someone is elected.’

  Jed kept forgetting that Scarlett had known Nicholas MUCH longer than she had. Scarlett might even have been in love with him too, back then, though she’d only been nine when sh
e first met him, if it hadn’t seemed impossible she would ever have a boyfriend.

  Nicholas was truly fab. No wonder everyone voted for him. But for Scarlett he’d always be the young man in the wheelchair who read her as many stories as she wanted, the closest person to a friend she’d ever had till she met Jed, then Leafsong.

  And Leafsong HAD to have the Bluebell. Because . . . because . . .

  Because Leafsong was as imprisoned in the commune as she, Scarlett, had been at River View. Both places with lots of love, even if one was a firmly run institution and the other more or less democratic. But when you were a bit different from the rest of humanity it was all too easy to keep to the places where people knew you, and if you didn’t move out of that small circle of love, you never grew.

  Scarlett hadn’t been truly herself till she was able to go to Gibber’s Creek Central School, instead of correspondence school, till she’d used her motorised wheelchair to move about the town, had got used to people staring, had learned to solve problems like how to get up onto a footpath from the road. (Answer: ask a nice gentleman to help you. Nice gentlemen LOVE helping waifs in wheelchairs.) In three years’ time she’d be independent, at university, and though she still wasn’t sure of the logistics, she longed for the challenge.

  Because she WOULD solve all the problems life threw at her. Living without Jed’s help would be the final leap.

  Leafsong needed to leap too. And the Bluebell would be the perfect place for her to land.

  Scarlett sat next to Nicholas at the Drinkwater dining table in a small flame of triumph. Not only had both Leafsong and Carol thought buying the Bluebell was a GREAT idea — though Carol had firmly phrased it as ‘we’ll lease the café from Jed’ — but Matilda had placed her there, next to the guest of honour, who sat at Matilda’s right hand, with Michael at the other end of the table and Jed next to him.

  Scarlett hadn’t seen Nicholas since the election, even though he spent a day at his electorate office every fortnight, except when parliament was sitting.

  She applied herself to her gazpacho, loyalty to Leafsong overruling her doubts as to whether cold salad soup really WAS a soup. There was cold beef Wellington next — she had spread the paté on the fillet while Leafsong made the pastry — and then a chocolate cheesecake, all left ready for Anita to serve up.

  ‘What’s Gough Whitlam REALLY like?’ she asked Nicholas.

  ‘Big,’ said Nicholas. He grinned at her. ‘I don’t just mean his height. Every idea he has is big too. He intends to be the biggest prime minister in Australian history, ever.’

  ‘And he’s going about it the right way.’ Matilda spooned up a slice of cold tomato. Over in the doorway Maxi looked innocently uninterested. She’d scoffed the scraps of beef and pastry already.

  ‘As much as he can anyway,’ said Nicholas. ‘The major reforms are being held up by the Senate.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Clancy. It wasn’t clear if the three-year-old was precociously politically brilliant, or if it was just one of his daily list of whys.

  Nicholas answered him anyway. ‘Because the Senate is still controlled by the Coalition.’

  ‘But everyone elected the Whitlam government, so they should be able to pass new laws. That’s the way it’s always worked,’ said Scarlett.

  ‘It’s the way it worked when the Coalition held both Houses,’ said Nicholas. ‘I don’t think Malcolm Fraser and the Coalition really recognise Labor as a legitimate government, despite the election results. Nor do a lot of the senior public servants. Labor’s having to bring in new ones just to get someone who’ll actually do what a minister has told them to do.’

  ‘Really?’ asked Jed, from the other end of the table, as Nancy said, ‘Tom, darling, don’t drop bits of cucumber on the floor. Just leave them if you don’t want to eat them.’

  Nicholas met Jed’s gaze down the table. ‘The Department of Supply is the worst. You’ve no idea how long something can be held up waiting for some clerk in Supply to put their signature to it. Treasury is almost as bad.’

  ‘A double dissolution,’ said Matilda crisply. ‘And as soon as possible. Australia has waited long enough for reform!’

  You mean you have, thought Scarlett affectionately, lifting more gazpacho to her lips. Would she ever get over the thrill of not just being able to feed herself, but to do it easily, without drips or accidental splatterings?

  ‘Why?’ asked Clancy.

  Matilda smiled at her grandson proudly. ‘The Senate and the House of Representatives have two separate elections and only half of the senators face the electorate at each general election. The party that controls the House of Representatives forms government. The Senate is made up of state representatives, not ones from each electorate, and it reviews all the legislation that the Lower House sends up to it. But if the Senate refuses to pass bills sent up by the House of Representatives, then the prime minister can call for both Houses to be dissolved, and then we have elections for both of them and all the senators also face the electorate.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Clancy.

  ‘Because that’s what’s in the Constitution.’

  ‘Why?’

  The last question was ignored.

  ‘A double dissolution might be the only way forwards,’ admitted Nicholas. ‘I can’t see Gough waiting for the next Senate election to get the Medibank legislation through. I brought you Gough’s signature, by the way,’ he said to Scarlett. ‘Don’t let me forget to give it to you. And Jim Cairns’s too.’

  ‘What’s Jim Cairns like?’ Scarlett remembered the charismatic figure on TV leading one hundred thousand people through the Melbourne streets in the last big moratorium march, the one that convinced the McMahon government to finally agree to begin withdrawing Australian troops.

  ‘Enthusiastic. They all are, everyone in the cabinet.’

  ‘It must be hard to be a backbencher,’ said Jed.

  Nicholas shrugged. ‘Not really. I’m still finding my way around — it’s all very new and different. And I couldn’t expect a cabinet position or even an assistant’s position. Everyone in the cabinet has been working towards this forever. In another five or six years perhaps . . .’

  How much will Australia change after six or eight years of a Whitlam government? wondered Scarlett. Because of course Labor’s reign had to last at least as long as the Coalition’s before it.

  Nicholas hesitated. ‘The government’s vision is even broader than most people realise. Getting rid of state governments, for one thing. It’s just wasteful duplication. What we need is a series of regions across Australia, with boundaries that make sense geographically, instead of the present local government areas. And decentralising too. Melbourne and Sydney are too big to function properly as cities . . .’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Scarlett.

  ‘What is a city supposed to do?’ asked Nicholas.

  ‘Be a central place where people can live and work?’

  ‘Exactly. But Melbourne and Sydney have grown too big to travel around them easily. How can you live in Western Sydney and work in the city centre without proper public transport? It makes much more sense to build up regional towns and cities, like Bathurst and Orange and Albury and Wodonga. Move industry and even parts of the public service there . . .’

  ‘Excellent idea,’ said Matilda.

  Scarlett wasn’t so sure. Matilda had chosen to live in Gibber’s Creek. Canberra bureaucrats and even Sydney factory workers might not want to move to the country.

  ‘Is the Hibbins girl working out in your electorate office?’ demanded Matilda.

  ‘The Hibbins girl’ was thirty and had two children, both at school. ‘She’s excellent. Knows exactly what issues and questions to handle herself and what to pass on to me, and who everyone is and who they are related to. But some of the questions we get . . .’ He shook his head.

  ‘Like what?’ asked Jed.

  ‘Like will we accept an alien embassy when the flying saucers land?’

&nb
sp; ‘Mrs Weaver,’ said Nancy. ‘But her alien was a draft resister. He’s back in Melbourne.’ Gossip flew faster than cockatoos in Gibber’s Creek.

  ‘I discreetly did not mention names. But I suspect Mrs Weaver may have found a new alien companion. Or companions. Another person who shall be nameless wants me to put in a formal complaint to the weather bureau.’

  ‘Well, they’re usually wrong,’ said Nancy.

  ‘It’s not the bureau’s lack of accuracy,’ said Nicholas dryly. He’s enjoying this, thought Scarlett. Loves it. ‘It’s their failure to regulate the rain. The person I have the honour to represent wants them to guarantee no rain during Saturday afternoon football. Another member of my electorate brought her sheets in to show me the brown stains from the muck in the Gibber’s Creek water system.’

  ‘Happens every summer,’ said Nancy.

  ‘Why?’ asked Clancy.

  ‘Because the dam on the creek is lower then and mud gets sucked into the water supply pipes. Did you explain that the water supply is a local government matter?’

  ‘I did. She just muttered that wouldn’t get her washing clean. But that’s something else we hope to get through — being able to make direct specific-purpose grants to local areas instead of all the funding going through the states. That way we really will be able to do something about the Gibber’s Creek water supply.’

  ‘The states aren’t going to like that,’ said Jed.

  Nicholas grinned. ‘No. But I’m managing to get some stuff done for the locals anyway. The number of old blokes around here who are entitled to pensions or medical help but have been turned down by Veterans’ Affairs is appalling. It only takes a phone call or two to sort that out. Should have been done years ago.’

  ‘How is Felicity enjoying all this?’ asked Nancy. ‘No,’ she added to Clancy, ‘Maxi does not want your cucumber. Tom, get up from under the table. Now. I said, now!’

  ‘She’s pretty busy with uni work. Vet science is a hard course.’

  The table waited for more. It took Nicholas a spoonful of gazpacho to realise it. ‘We’ve both been busy since the election.’ He obviously hunted for something else to add. ‘She told me something funny last week. Taronga Park Zoo was complaining that their lions kept falling asleep. They asked the vet school to investigate, and it turns out the lions were being fed racehorses who’d broken their legs and had to be put down. So the lions were getting great doses of tranquilliser . . .’