Whipbird

by Robert Drewe

  ‘You realise he’s the de facto mayor, more important than the town’s real mayor? The district’s stability depends on him. Its businesses depend on him. So do the bricks and mortar of its homes. All those quarter-acres of kikuyu and buffalo that husbands mow and weed at the weekend, where their wives grow roses and hang their washing, where their kids kick their footballs, are seeded and nurtured by the Local Bank Manager.’

  Local bank manager in capitals, of course.

  He imagined hundreds of wiry Austalian kids, skinny, yesteryear kids, outdoor kids from the days before mobile phones and melanomas, kids with sunburned peeling noses, all wearing Richmond jumpers and nursing tin moneyboxes.

  His letter ranted righteously and unwisely. The overcasual clothing and elaborate coffees of the image-changers still rankled.

  ‘May I jog the corporate memory?’ he wrote. He meant it as a gibe. ‘Corporate’ was the new buzzword back then, with ‘corporations’ replacing ‘companies’ overnight. ‘A meeting with the bank manager is a serious social event as well as a business ritual, with customers on their best behaviour and keen to present a financially frugal image.’

  God, he remembered when it was important that customers showed what good savers – not spenders! – they were.

  His letter waxed lyrical, especially esteeming his tradesmen customers, writing of nervous plumbers and solemn carpenters who’d forced their bodies back into their wedding suits for their appointment. They wanted a loan for the most honourable reason: the Australian Dream, a family home, the biggest purchase of their lives. So they put on a suit and tie to face the bank manager.

  Rosy-faced, close-shaved and strangled-looking, the poor buggers looked like big chastened schoolkids called to the principal’s office. Ferreting scraps of paper out of their pockets with their mortgage-repayment guesstimates worked out in carpenter’s pencil. Some wives wore hats and gloves for the occasion. Gloves!

  ‘To visit a branch manager of the State Savings Bank of Victoria the women would don hats and gloves,’ he wrote. He even used the word don. Shortly after, he was transferred to Yarraville. It wasn’t a promotion.

  For the past twenty-one years he’d rerun this sentimental and obsolete narrative in his head, and it still agitated him during his sleepless 3 a.m. melancholies. But by the early ’90s the transformation was complete. The new-style bank collapsed under the weight of bad loans made by its trendy merchant-banking arm. And the big boy, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the CBA, with its rampaging elephant logo and Get with the strength! slogan, trumpeting stridently, stomped down over the border from Sydney and trampled his old, non-groovy savings bank underfoot. And he’d been forced to retire at fifty-eight.

  By then, Cousin Doug with his economics and commerce degrees, his Harvard MBA, was not only a CBA whiz-kid but Group Executive for Strategic Development. On the spot at the right moment for the dramatic change in banking culture, the 180-degree turn, with responsibility for Group Strategy, Mergers and Acquisitions.

  A paltry branch manager was no match for a two-tone-shirted, Windsor-knotted head-office boy. Guess which strategy, merger and acquisition Cousin Doug had undoubtedly enjoyed presiding over? Mick’s branch. Without any evidence, Mick had earnestly believed and festered over this ever since.

  Then after twenty years of pandering to the shareholders, and replacing staff with ATMs, and shucking even more employees with online banking, and then monstering the customer with ever-more-imaginative charges (turning it around and charging the customer for the use of their money – how brilliantly evil was that?), of mocking the little Aussie savers of yesteryear while rewarding their executives with cosmically inflated salaries ($12 million here! $10 million there!), the major banks had finally acknowledged that their shitty reputations were so far down the gurgler, the perception of their greed so widespread, that something had to be done.

  Some satisfaction here then for Mick? Not at all.

  In came the macchiato image-changers in their crumpled linen jackets once more. Italian jackets now, light as feathers, and soft slip-on shoes. No socks. Hey, here’s an idea! Didn’t you guys used to have cute tin moneyboxes? They dug up a few from eBay or some collector’s nostalgia museum. And then these ads started appearing, featuring nationally respected sportsmen and audience-friendly entertainers.

  Think of the most lovable national treasures: TV soap stars of all caught by the camera sitting in what fraudulently purported to be their old desks in their old primary-school classrooms, in front of their old blackboards, while mistily cuddling their old moneyboxes and reminiscing wistfully about their old pocket-money savings. Savings!

  Feeling stirred up now, Mick was about to say, ‘Better stick to rugby, Doug, where your top players are Maoris’, but then Doug might bring up Chinese footballers, and for the life of him he couldn’t remember the names of any of those successful players he’d vouched for, and he wouldn’t want Doug to press him. His memory for names wasn’t what it was.

  Somewhere Irish music began tentatively playing and several people turned towards the sound, laughing and jigging. A skinny boy in a black cut-off shirt and jeans, arms by his sides, a cigarette in his mouth, kicked his feet out, scattered gravel and dust and mocked Riverdance.

  The music rose and dropped in volume and then stopped and the boy veered off, laughing and waving his arms, as if in triumph, into the crowd, where a plump pale girl was waiting for him. Mick couldn’t place the boy. A cheeky Opie kid or maybe a McMahon. Perhaps a Kennedy.

  Mick gazed out across the mob of drinking, eating, chatting relatives, racing and bouncing children and excited dogs, over the rows of dormant grapevines, towards the trees bordering the creek, until the music and the way the treetops stirred in the breeze calmed him a little.

  Doug turned to him and smiled a tight, head-office, Group Strategy, Mergers and Acquisitions grin. ‘Did you happen to read the other day about the girl in Aceh who was publicly flogged after being found in her own house with the bloke she intended to marry?’

  He’d read it. On the rare occasions it appeared, the word ‘Aceh’ had jumped out at Mick from newspapers since 2004. But he said, ‘No I didn’t.’

  ‘An ordinary decent young woman sitting in her home in Aceh, chatting to her fiancé. Two adults, both fully dressed. Ten neighbourhood men had been spying on the house for hours, waiting for them to come home together. Desperately hoping they would. The creeps all raped her and beat up her fiancé. Nothing happened to the rapists of course, but the couple were then whipped for their trouble. Sharia law, they call it.’

  Mick sighed. ‘That stuff does my head in.’

  ‘Yeah. Tough being a Muslim woman. You know what I don’t get? I don’t get why they won’t crack down on their medieval woman-haters and their terrorists.’

  ‘Rani’s not part of anything like that,’ Mick said, his voice a sort of groan.

  9

  Observing and smelling all the grilling and frying activity, the teams of cooks labouring over the fleet of barbecues, Rani couldn’t stop worrying about how Restauran Bunda was coping without her this weekend, with Lusi left in charge for the first time.

  Friday and Saturday were community drinking and partying nights all over Australia, definitely not excluding the outer suburbs of Perth, and customers always wanted to soak up the evening’s alcohol with ayam goreng and beef randang. And nasi goreng, of course.

  Always nasi goreng. And Sunday noon and evening were popular family times, with grandparents and kids in tow to share the Asian food experience – or an Australianised version of it – and all three days were the busiest, noisiest occasions at the Banksia Vale International Food Court.

  But Craig had insisted they fly to Melbourne with the kids, and then drive to Ballarat to these dusty country paddocks to celebrate a big family anniversary about Ireland and ancestors or something. They couldn’t miss it. ‘It’s a big deal,’ he said.

  ‘Really?’ she said. ‘Ireland?’ A big deal? News to her. />
  Thanks to daylight saving, she hoped the three-hour advantage in Perth would just allow her to get home in time tomorrow for the Sunday-evening rush.

  Despite his beaming promises, she guessed that Kevin Chen would be sneaking in loads of MSG while she was away. How to convince Kevin, the only stand-in chef she could find at short notice – and borrowed at double pay while the Red Dragon Sichuan Hotpot was being renovated – that while the Chinese might love MSG, her chilli paste, lemongrass, ginger, garlic and coriander made Sumatran food spicy enough already. With sambal you hardly needed any zesty additives.

  Kevin was intractable. The man even sang the praises of MSG as a health food and pressed upon her as kiddie treats some colourful monosodium glutamate packets carrying images of smiley kite-flying and leapfrogging children.

  ‘Once they get the taste, they love it,’ Kevin enthused, ‘and their illnesses disappear. No more asthma or flu. Say goodbye to constipation.’

  Lusi was Balinese and, Rani believed, too easygoing on Kevin and his cooking habits. Without the boss there to stress the purity of the dishes and keep Kevin’s glutamic-acid salt shaker in check, she imagined flushed or pallid Anglo customers reeling out of the food court with dizzy heads and palpitating hearts and never coming back to Restauran Bunda.

  There was another minor irritant she anticipated, annoying to someone who already quietly resented having to adjust her Acehnese flavours, the essences influenced by her Arab, Persian and Indian ancestors, to suit local tastes. Although Craig had bravely tackled them in their first romantic weeks together (but no longer), not too many non-Asian Australians relished jackfruit or goat gulai. Or the bird’s-eye chillies on a half-grapefruit she enjoyed for breakfast while Craig and the kids tucked into their Weet-Bix and Vegemite toast.

  Of course, as business dictated, she’d modified her dishes. Or rather, she’d included more basic Sumatran courses. For Banksia Vale’s KFC fanciers, she’d swapped the ayam tangkap for the less spicy ayam goreng. Then she’d surrendered further and provided those Indonesian dishes familiar to all the boozy West Australian boys who turned up in their Bintang beer T-shirts from Bali. Beef randang! Nasi goreng!

  The other nuisance she’d come to expect was that every weekend some Banksia Vale nitpicker felt bound to surreptitiously whip out a marker pen and ‘correct’ the spelling on her signage by adding a final ‘T’ to Restauran.

  Craig didn’t understand her annoyance. He was weary of deleting the pedant’s offending letter T on the Monday mornings he was back home from the north-west.

  ‘No big deal, babe. We’ll paint the final T on the sign so it looks right, turn it into English and stop the bastard’s fun.’

  ‘But it’s a Bahasa word! It’s a Sumatran, Acehnese restauran! We should catch him at it and punish him.’

  He laughed. ‘I think it’s French actually. And it’s not quite a restaurant, is it? It’s a stall in an Asian food court.’

  From her frown, and the fact that Restauran Bunda brought in good money, he didn’t pursue it. He erased the T once more.

  And here came Craig towards her now – her whiskery blond boy striding through the crowd, baseball cap on his head as always, and sunglasses perched on top of the cap like a second hat.

  Like every other thirty-something Australian male, that was his uniform: cap and sunglasses night and day. An oddly boyish but cute habit, she thought. She reminded herself of her luck in snapping up this tall, fair, handsome, hardworking, wildlife-saving husband. And her fly-in, fly-out conservationist boy was not only back home from the desert for two weeks, but bringing her a glass of champagne now, and her silver Oroton chain-mail purse with her cigarettes.

  So attentive he’d been when he got home to Three Reefs from his new job in the north-west. Thump, thump as he took off his workboots on the verandah and walked in the door in his socks and hi-vis vest with presents from the airport gift shop. Sex every night for the first week. And, after the kids had left for school, sometimes the mornings, too.

  He was holding little Gemi’s hand and the boys were bobbing about in excitement beside him. Bursting out of their skins to have Dad home again, their beautiful children: Jackson, nearly as tall as her already, Hunter, Gemi. They could be any race. Round eyes. Olive skin. Maybe Italian or Greek. But overwhelmingly Australian. The boys surfed and played football; Gemi’s swimming lessons were coming along and she’d recently moved up from Jellyfish squad to Seahorse.

  How much more Australian could her family be? This was good, yes? Something to be proud of. Then why did she sometimes feel over-powered by Australianness? Swamped by Australia?

  At her kitchen window as she prepped her Sumatran dishes for the food court, with Craig away in the Pilbara and the kids at school, she could occasionally feel overwhelmed and subdued by this limestone suburb 60 kilometres north of the CBD, the farthest outreach of the city. Crushed by the blowing, powdery sand. Beaten down by the sky’s cloudless brilliance.

  Some days, most often at her time of the month, she’d gaze out over the scores of rotary clotheslines that symbolised Australia to her, all standing centrally in the bare backyards of Three Reefs and leaning like cypresses away from the afternoon south-westerly gale whose ferocity the locals sought to pacify in their minds by calling it ‘the sea breeze’, and feel besieged and homesick and alone.

  Like her, many of the residents were from overseas. Apart from a handful of young Filipinas married to elderly gnarled Australian men, retired farmers and widowed tradesmen suspiciously watchful of their wives’ pretty skittishness, her neighbours were chiefly northern English, attracted here by this same overpowering weather. Did they feel besieged and alone, their sense of self, of Leeds and Hull and Manchester, desiccated and shrivelled by the fierce sun and wind?

  As she chopped chillies amid familiar cooking smells she could momentarily pretend to be at home in Aceh. But that vastness looming outside the window, with its harsh sky of faultless blue and its stark dunes lacking the lushness her eyes craved, could be no other country but Australia.

  Despite an early developer’s aerial spray-painting the area so he could off-load it to Japanese investors, those windswept dunes were no longer green. In the devious developer’s prospectus this patch of coast had stood out as a lush oasis, but since Tokyo’s Miyagi Corporation shelved its plans for an Asian tourist mecca, a satellite city of 200 000 residents, the green veneer had long since faded and been overswept by sand.

  In the distance, over Three Reefs’ endlessly shifting greenless dunes, large areas of which were still fenced off because of unexploded ordnance from its days as an artillery range, and over the streets proudly named after prominent footballers (they lived at 38 Brad Hardie Boulevarde), and beyond the graffitied limestone statue of a frowning, thickset mermaid in a seashell bra and tiara, Amphitrite the Sea Goddess, whose grim gaze took in the village supermarket, real estate agent, fish and chip shop and the abandoned Oceanworld Marine Park, the whitecaps of the Indian Ocean endlessly rolled and boomed.

  Craig had mentioned the environmental difficulties of returning the ten performing dolphins to the ocean when the marine park closed down. Before their release the tame dolphins were housed temporarily in ocean pens between Three Reefs’ three actual reefs to get them accustomed to the open sea. But wild bull dolphins kept breaking into the pens, attacking the males and raping the females.

  ‘Believe me, it wasn’t like Flipper,’ Craig said.

  As her FIFO man pulled up a chair and lit her cigarette for her now (how attentive he was being, she thought), she asked him, sipping her champagne, ‘What is all this Irish fuss about anyway?’

  He looked as if he had something to tell her.

  ‘It’s a celebration of our family arriving here. My great-great-grandfather stepping off the boat in 1854.’

  A celebration? Then how come he looked so tired and serious?

  ‘What is it, Craig?’

  ‘Nothing. You’re looking gorgeous, sweetheart.’


  10

  With the job of registering the arrivals concluded, Olivia and Zoe were making disgusted faces and flipping their hair away from the constant smell and smoke of barbecuing meat, while at the same time dipping into their phones and ostentatiously enjoying the anniversary fare from Agrarian Revolution.

  The twins had turned vegetarian the year before, after an unfortunate chicken-nugget experience at a Mobil truck stop on their way home from a country gymkhana (the interstate roadhouse had a rare parking area big enough for their two-horse float), the double gastric upset allowing their longstanding sympathy for animal welfare and distaste for meat final leeway with their parents.

  In the beginning their father was unenthusiastic. ‘Growing, developing young women need plenty of protein,’ Hugh told his daughters. ‘Maturing adolescents need meat for proper growth.’

  His pro-meat lecture was informed by a Reader’s Digest he’d read at his tennis-elbow appointment at the physiotherapist’s. An article discussing why today’s offspring were on average 2 inches taller than their parents pointed out, however, that teenage girls fashionably rejecting meat could affect their menstruation, even curtailing it altogether.

  He mentioned this to Olivia and Zoe. Not that he put it quite like that or, God forbid, mentioned periods. Frankly, he was surprised to see the old Digest his father had subscribed to for decades – a pile of which always sat on the bathroom shelf for convenient toilet reading – discussing periods, too.

  Menstruation? He remembered the old Digest for things like ‘Humor in Uniform’ and ‘It Pays to Increase Your Word Power’, by the amazingly Americanly named Wilfred J. Funk. However, even if the modern-day Reader’s Digest was comfortable with menstruation, ‘developing’ was too embarrassing a word for him to ever say to the girls again. Instead he used words like ‘growth’ and ‘maturing’. Even ‘maturing’ made him uneasy, with its suggestion of bodies budding and ripening.