by Shane Carrow
In the end the captain had decided to make for Kangaroo Island, which – last they’d heard – was a safe zone. Maybe they could find fuel, or trade for it, and be on their way. Of course, they’d never made it. An outbreak amongst the refugees had spread like wildfire, which was how Declan had come to be trapped in his cabin with the ship drifting through the Bight.
“So can we run it aground?” Anthony asked. “We can’t be taking stuff back and forth on two little tinnies, it’ll take forever.”
“That’s what I said we should do,” Matt said.
“You can’t just run a ship aground,” Len Waters said.
“Sure you can, I saw it on a doco,” Anthony said. “That’s what they do in Bangladesh when they cut ‘em up for scrap. Just drive it right up on the beach. We could do that, chuck stuff off the edge.”
“You’d never get it off again…”
“What would we need to?”
“It’s a ship, we can use it…”
“I’m not running the damn ship aground!” Declan said.
“Everybody quiet!” Varley said, breaking up the hubbub. “We’ll consider everything, but right now we haven’t even be able to get the power back on. I’m going to be drawing up a new work roster tomorrow. We still have to build the southern wall. We’ll have teams on the Maersk trying to get the power on, teams opening and triaging the containers, and teams working on ferrying stuff. If anyone wants to volunteer for anything particular, let me…”
“Why are we taking stuff off it at all?” Simon interrupted. “Why are we still talking about building the wall? We should be moving onto it.”
Varley stared at him. The room had gone quiet. “Well,” Simon said. “It’s a ship, isn’t it? It’s not just a big floating warehouse full of stuff. We could live on it.”
“We could go to fucking Tahiti,” someone said.
“Or Kangaroo Island, at least.”
“Tasmania!”
“I just meant we could live on it off the shore…” Simon said uneasily, but the room was breaking out into excited conversation again, people spitballing destinations.
Varley banged his palm against the bar. “Hey. Hey!” The room went quiet again. “I want to nip this in the bud right now. I don’t want to hear any of this shit about piling into a boat and sailing away. Eucla is home. We’ve worked hard to build this place. We’ve bled for it. Get that grass-is-greener shit out of your heads. Most of you have been outside these walls. Most of you have been on the run. Do I need to remind you what it’s like out there?”
“Bit different, Paul,” Len said quietly. “Bit different being out in the Wheatbelt or whatever, compared to being on a ship.”
“No,” Varley said. “It won’t be.”
“You don’t know that…” Simon said.
“It won’t be!” Varley said. “And I don’t want to hear any more about it! I’m drawing the work roster up tomorrow. That ship is going to help us build this place. This place. End of meeting.”
Varley stood at the bar with his arms folded as people trickled out of the pub. Colin, Liana, Len and a few of the other old Eucla hands moved up to speak to him. I glanced over my shoulder as we left to see Varley shaking his head irritably at something Colin was saying.
I walked with Matt and Ellie down towards the bluffs, to look at the dim lights of the Maersk winking in the swell. “What do you reckon?” Ellie said.
“He’s got a point,” Matt said. “Declan said they didn’t have enough fuel to get much further than Kangaroo Island. We haven’t heard anything on the radio about them in ages. Might not be safe anymore.”
“Haven’t heard much of anything on the radio at all, though,” Ellie said.
“Might mean people are just keeping quiet,” I said. “Figuring out that not everyone’s so friendly.” Down on the beach we could see Declan and a few others getting into one of the boats, firing up the motor, puttering off into the dark waves towards the distant shape of the Maersk.
“Not so keen on dry land, is he?” Ellie observed.
“Can’t blame him, really,” I said. “Can you imagine that? Going all this time and never seeing any of them, and then all of a sudden they’re right there, right up in your face.”
“We managed fine,” Matt said.
“First time we saw them was on a freeway,” I said. “In Canning Vale. We had space to run. He was stuck on a fucking ship with them.”
“Anyway,” Ellie said. “Didn’t answer my question. Do you think we should stay here? Or go?”
“I don’t know,” Matt said. “It’s not really up to us. Varley and your dad and your uncle and all that. They’ll decide.”
May 4
Another dream. Not the same as last time – this was a dream of a dream. This was me remembering. Trudging around in the snow. Encountering the ridge. Beholding, with my own eyes…
I woke up in the darkness of my room in the Amber Hotel. Rain was pattering away at the window; it was somewhere in that dark gloaming the other side of midnight, still hours before dawn. I pulled the curtain back, sat with the doona wrapped around me, looked out the window at the rain coming down over the town and spared a thought for the people on sentry duty.
I thought about going and waking Matt up, but didn’t. This had been just a dream. Not a dream.
The first time I had one – the first time we both had one – was in February, outside Albany. I dreamt of falling, that gut-wrenching lurch, but also of fire, of a terrible burning…
I stand in the snow. I look beyond the ridge, into the next valley. I see the forest of gum trees, with a cracked and broken scar where something tore through them. Camouflaged in the valley, covered by a thick layer of snow, I can see a shape. It is not natural. An elongated mound, far too straight, at odds with the gentle landscape around it. Here and there a protrusion, not covered in any snow at all, sticking out at an angle, a strangely blueish sheen like no colour I’ve ever seen before…
That was when I’d woken up.
I didn’t sleep for the rest of the night. I just lay there with the donna wrapped around me, listening to the rain tapping down on the roof and the windows, staring into the darkness and wondering.
In the morning we buried Zach and Stephen Heller, or at least what was left of them. They’d come here about a month before me and Matt had, strangers from the carnage of the South West, from the fall of Albany. Someone thought they’d been from Busselton, originally. Nobody had really known them well. But they’d stepped up. They’d gone to Esperance for supplies, they’d come out to the Maersk with us.
A guy called Brian Duffy went through the rites; he’s not a priest, but he is (or was) a churchgoing Catholic, which is about as close as we have. The rest of us stood around the graves, watching the others lower the bodies in, each and every one of us glancing past the edge of the bluffs to where the Regina Maersk lay out on the horizon.
May 5
Matt and I both volunteered for container duty. Way more interesting popping those things open than building the south wall at Eucla, or ferrying whatever it is that we find back to the mainland. Declan and Colin are still working to get the main power back on – something’s gone wrong with the pumps, he says. It runs off the same fuel as the engines, no solar power or anything. I guess it was built a while ago.
In any case, we went to work on the containers today, on a five-person team also made up of Simon, Jonas and Anthony. We started at the stern near the superstructure and made our way forward. The physical copy of the manifest was lost in the carnage and with only auxiliary power we can’t access the computer hard-drive, so it’s basically a lucky dip. And as me and Matt and Declan learned that first night aboard, there’s an awful lot of stuff here that’s useless to us.
I’d wrapped my head around the sheer size of the Maersk, the thousands of containers, the fact that this was just one small brick in the gigantic global trade network that had come crumbling down as civilisation did. What I didn’t quite come to appre
ciate, until we started going through the containers, was that not everything on a ship is the kind of thing that winds up on the shelves at Woolworths or Bunnings or Target. Not everything is a finished product for the ordinary consumer.
A lot of it – a majority, in fact – is industrial. Stuff destined for workshops and factories and refineries. Valves, pipes, insulators, fittings, pistons, resistors, handles, cranks, pumps, ball bearings, gaskets, discs, cam shafts… I could go on. Never mind all the chemicals and pesticides and precursors – the stuff we found for industrial use was overwhelming enough. We found at least three containers containing extremely specialised machinery for ridiculously complex trades – Jonas surmised that one set of parts was designed for affixing large drill bits to another piece of machinery which eventually became part of a very complicated machine involved in bauxite extraction, and which had probably been destined for the Alcoa mines near Bunbury. Whoop-de-doo. We shut the doors on it and spraypainted a large frowny face, the symbol we’ve started to use to mean “useless to us.” (Nothing is entirely “useless,” of course, but when we only have two boats we’re not going to waste time ferrying scrap metal back to Eucla.)
Opening up container after container of this shit made me feel nauseous after a while. Not just because it was a disappointment from a scavenging point of view, but because it illuminated just how grand a civilisation we’d had: so interconnected, so high-tech, so intricately balanced. And now it’s gone, and we’ll never get it back. It made me think of Ellie’s baby, or of Tom and Anne’s son, little Lewis. What will they think of the past world? A vanished dream. What will their own kids think, if they live to have any? It’ll be like the Aztecs, or the Roman Empire. No – bigger than that, better than that. They’ll think of their ancestors as something like gods. Entire generations stretching off into the future are going to be living in the ruins of what we had.
Can’t think about that. Focus on the job at hand.
Some containers appeared more promising at first, only to disappoint us yet again. A stack of pallets marked “MEDIZINISCH” turned out to contain the precursor ingredients for various drugs, not any actual pharmacy counter medication. A container full of boxes marked “HECKLER & KOCH” made us all very excited, since Anthony said that’s a gun manufacturer. Then we tore them open and found they contained nothing but flare guns – and they didn’t even ship with cartridges.
Throughout the day, we found just four containers that came in above the line at what we’d consider “useful:” two of pickled vegetables, one of walnuts, and one full of clothing. That clothing happened to be all Versace brand. Which was how we ended up sitting in the tinnies at dusk, motoring back to shore, the boat packed to the brim with pickled onions and packets of walnuts, and the five of us wearing what were probably – once upon a time – thousands of dollars’ worth of Italian designer coats.
Me, Matt, Simon and Jonas were, anyway. Anthony had retained the weathered RM Williams farm jacket he’s probably owned his whole life, and looked at us with disdain. “Wind’ll go right through that,” he said. “And the rain. Useless shit.”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “It doesn’t get that cold here. You’re from Katanning…
“Kondinin.”
“Right, whatever. It’s not Tassie. It’s nearly winter already, it’s not that cold.”
“Cold enough,” Anthony said. “It’s only autumn. You got no idea.”
“Lighten up, mate,” Simon grinned. “Look at it this way: when a convoy rolls up tomorrow and slaughters every single one of us and takes the town and the ship for themselves, at least the four of us are going to look good while we get our heads blown off.”
“Thanks for that,” Anthony said dryly.
“It’s not exactly a waste of space,” Matt said. “I wasn’t going to strap more tins around my body and wear them like a suit.”
“Yeah,” Jonas said. “Think of it like a bonus. This whole thing’s a bonus, really.”
He has a point. Not just about the containers, but about the ship itself. All the arguments about whether we should stay in Eucla or up sticks to the Maersk – at least we have that choice. We didn’t before.
May 6
There’s a growing schism between people who think we should stay put in Eucla, and people who see the Maersk as a sanctuary. It’s not clearly defined. Some people are undecided, and there’s a further split between the Maersk people: those who think we should just relocate and use it as a floating platform, a sort of fortress, and those who want to try to sail off to Kangaroo Island or Tasmania or Bora Bora or whatever. Varley can try to put his foot down and say it’s not on the table, but people talk anyway.
Varley’s obviously for staying put – he made that clear at the meeting. So is Colin, and Liana; not for sentimental reasons, they haven’t lived here more than five or six years, but because they think it’s the wise decision. Geoff I think is more ambivalent, but seems to be siding with his brother. Alan wants to stay too.
Len wants to go to the Maersk. Jonas wants to go to the Maersk. Simon wants to go to the Maersk. Anthony, Steve, Jennifer, Sarah… there’s no clear pattern emerging. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve been in Eucla the whole time or whether you fought your way across the Wheatbelt, it doesn’t matter whether you’re someone who’s gravitated towards leadership or someone who hangs back and stays quiet; there’s no obvious division, there’s people of all kinds who fall on either side.
I think we should take the ship. For obvious reasons. It’s not about survival anymore. It’s not about huddling away in a desert stronghold at the edge of the world – or a floating stronghold, for that matter. We need to go east. We need to go to the Snowy Mountains. The others don’t realise that, of course. But we have to.
I need to go. Matt needs to go. It has to happen.
I go to sleep every night thinking of the silent snow gums, the stark blue sky, the infinite white reams of driven snow. I haven’t had a dream like that again, not yet. But I feel it. Eucla, the Maersk, Kalgoorlie, everything… none of it matters. Everything is leading to that.
May 8
Unpacking containers again today. Me and Matt were paired up with Alan, Simon and Brian Duffy this time. It was another dispiriting day of uncovering industrial materials, although we did at least find one full of nappies, which Anne will be pleased about, and one full of Italian-made hiking boots, which… well, I mean, we don’t need a thousand pairs, but we’ll take feast over famine.
Towards sunset, as we were getting close to packing it in for the night, we found what was probably one of the best containers yet. “Oh, yes,” Brian said as he cracked it open. “Oh ho, yes!”
Packed to the brim with red wine. French, Italian, pinot noir, cabernet sauvignon, whatever-the-fuck: for a bunch of people waiting out death at the edge of the Australian Outback, nobody’s going to read the label very closely.
They were all corked instead of screwtop – arrogant European snobs – but Simon prised the cork out of a bottle with his Leatherman and we sat on the starboard side with our legs over the edge, passing the bottle back and forth, taking swigs and watching the sun sink down over the ocean. I was still wearing my Versace coat – I don’t care what Anthony says, it’s pretty warm, warmer than the shitty K-Mart jacket I was wearing before.
“This isn’t so bad,” Brian said. “You know? Lots of people worse off than this.”
“Lots of people better off, too,” I said.
“Where?”
“I dunno,” I said. “New Zealand? America?”
“America?” Simon scoffed. “You’d want to be riding this out in Manhattan?”
“Not there,” I said, waving hand. “Like… Colorado, or the deserts, or whatever. They have more guns. And a bigger military. Maybe they’re doing okay.”
“More guns, more soldiers, and two hundred million suburbanites running west,” Simon said. “You think the refugees coming out of Perth was bad? What do you reckon the Midwest looks like now?
Nah, I’m with Brian. I mean, talk to the Germans – you don’t see them complaining about being stuck out here.”
Actually both Felix and Hannah had become more and more withdrawn and depressed since the zombie siege, when Axel had been killed alongside Matt on the run to the police station. I wasn’t sure I could blame them. If you feel like you’re going to die anyway, you’d probably rather do it back home, alongside your family.
“I don’t understand the people who went back,” Brian said. “From Eucla, I mean, the ones who were living there and went back west before we all showed up. What were the fuck were they thinking?”
“They had family,” Alan said.
“Steve O’Malley tried to get back to Perth, you know that?” Simon said. “The guy who runs the desal. He was out here on a six month contract. He made it as far as Northam, turned around and came right back. That was in the first couple of weeks, before things got really bad. You know what it’s like out there now. We’re sitting pretty here.”
“I thought you were Team Maersk?” Matt said.
“I said we’re sitting pretty here,” Simon said, passing the bottle over. “And we are. But we’d still be pretty well off even if we were in Eucla. I don’t know why everyone has to get so worked up about it.”
“It’s a bloody dangerous idea,” Alan said. “We don’t know how to run a ship. Declan was a navigator, Colin was a cook for about a year. That’s not a crew. We go out to sea like that, we’re asking for trouble.”
“We don’t have to go anywhere,” Simon said. “That’s my point. Never mind the bloody Lonely Planet set who want to take off to Tahiti or whatever. We can just anchor and stay here. This is more defendable than the town, Blind Freddie can see that. What do we do if another big convoy comes along?”