Whipbird

by Robert Drewe

  ‘Yep, aren’t we lucky to have such a big selection?’

  ‘In the old days there was only one type of potato.’ He was defiant. ‘It was round, brown and encrusted with dirt, and you could mash or roast it, boil it or make chips with it. It came in bags weighing one stone. It had a name. We called it a “potato”.’

  ‘So you say every Saturday, Dad.’

  ‘Tomatoes that aren’t red – what genius thought that up?’ Shaking his head in amused wonder, he’d point out tomato varieties that were yellow, green, pink, striped, chocolate-coloured, even black, then read out the tags on their stalls and baskets so vehemently that the shoppers with their environmentally sound string shopping bags turned and stared.

  ‘Apollo. Black Russian. Beefsteak. Tommy Toe. Tiny Tim. Amish paste. Mortgage lifter – are they serious? And look at that giant thing, the Heirloom. Who’s going to eat that monster?’

  ‘I’m guessing you used to eat only one variety of tomato, Dad? It was red and you called it a “tomato”?’

  ‘Yes, Thea, I did.’

  Carrots and lettuces suffered his same derision.

  Then there was fruit, a sadder story. Strawberries weren’t what they used to be: smaller and sweeter. Yes, there were plenty of apple varieties around, and he acknowledged that Granny Smiths were still hanging in there with the flash new ones: the Pink Ladies, the Jazzes and the Sundowners.

  But try buying the crispest, sharpest apple of all, the one he and Kath loved. She’d always take one in her lunchbox at the bank.

  The Jonathan apple. No dice.

  Thea recalled that at most staff picnics, while the little kids dammed the creek’s shallows and collected tadpoles or fished for yabbies, the men would smoke, laugh, drink their beer in those pre-wine days and kick the football around. Sometimes a miskicked football went into the creek. Everyone raced to recover it downstream. Once or twice it tumbled away forever.

  In these creekside memories, just as in photographs of the picnics themselves, her mother was only subtly present. Positioned at the edge of the photo, as if trying to lean out of frame. Sitting on the edge of a tartan rug, one shoulder and foot out of shot, with two or three other pleasant-faced women, one inevitably the wiry and energetic Coralie Langhorne, raising their tea mugs to toast another successful outing of the State Savings Bank of Victoria (Bentleigh branch) Social Club.

  Outside the sedate socialising of these photos, while the women sat on rugs, smoked, chatted and drank tea, and the men’s jovial smoking, beer-drinking and drop-kicking proceeded, her brothers would be whittling wood, throwing knives into trees, carving their initials and shaving branches into spears.

  Two photographs caught them in their armed state. In one snap, Hugh and Simon, aged about eleven and eight, posed at attention, each with a proud hand on a sheathed scout knife. In the second photo, the boys held their unsheathed knives in menacing stabbing grips, their stance made even more threatening by their grimaces. Mouths still smeared with tomato sauce and charred sausage, they could have been little terrorists, cannibals, vampires.

  Boys with knives: no one saw anything sinister then. Scout knives carried the Boy Scouts’ praiseworthy manly, Christian, monarchical imprimatur. Indeed, all boys’ weaponry was OK, and she, too, had hankered after those knives, bows and arrows, catapults, cap guns and fireworks that were boys’ ordinary playthings.

  No armed children roamed middle-class suburbs nowadays, Thea mused. Now that toy weapons were banned and subject to criminal charges, part of her was nostalgic for the time when a weekend’s play was like a sortie, an armed incursion. Even their neighbour Barry Crann losing an eye from an arrow in cowboys and Indians hadn’t dampened their enthusiasm for the game. And girls were permitted to play too, as long as they were prepared to be Indians.

  Although Indians generally died by the end of the game, she was happy to be an Indian. An Indian and a ballet dancer. She loved dancing, it made her feelings soar, but she was definitely what people used to call a tomboy. A tomboy was a good thing to be. Adults respected the spirit of tomboys, even though they expected them to grow out of it. She’d joined Brownies, the junior female version of Boy Scouts, on the understanding she’d be doing adventurous tomboy and Indian things every Saturday: making campfires in the bush, sleeping in tents, paddling canoes, carving wood with knives.

  Brownies looked very promising for a tomboy. For a start, they were run by someone called Brown Owl – a perfect Indian name. Brownies shared the local scout hall, its walls lined with exciting masculine artefacts like the tiger-shark jaws that were the pride of the local Sea Scouts, and pictures of wolves in snowy Alaska, and framed badges rewarding skilful leatherwork and imaginative knots in ropes. But she was given a badge with an elf on it, and made to dance around an imaginary toadstool singing, This is what we do as elves – think of others, not ourselves.

  It was all goody-goody, non-Indian stuff. She had to recite the Brownie Promise: I will do my duty to God and the Queen; help people every day, especially those at home. The Brownie Law demanded: The Brownie gives in to the older folk, the Brownie does not give in to herself. The Brownie Motto was Lend a hand.

  The Brownies were great social engineers, Thea recalled. Every week she’d ask Brown Owl, alias Mrs Thelma Goldsmith, if they could please make a campfire. No, dear, that’s too dangerous. Now that they’d earned all the possible badges for knitting, sewing, sweeping the floor and cleaning, could they please pitch a tent or climb something? No, too dangerous. Well, could they do their swimming badge or make something out of wood? No. Well, what could they do? Today we will fold socks and try for the making-a-cup-of-tea badge. Making a decent cup of tea for an older person was the chief Brownie ambition, and Brown Owl was always thirsty.

  Unlike Boy Scouts, Brownies went unarmed, and carried no defences except yellow neckerchiefs for use as emergency broken-arm supports or tourniquets for snakebite victims. Not that Brown Owl would risk any location where fractures or snakebites were possible. Pathetically, Brownies never ventured into the bush. A better use for their neckerchiefs, Thea thought, would be to tie up stay-at-home Brown Owl and raid the Scouts’ weaponry cupboard.

  Of course, now she regularly dealt with the dire effects of bloodlust and mayhem, those old picnic photos of Hugh and Simon were unsettling. The murderous child soldiers of Sierra Leone came to mind. But in wanting to be a knife-wielding Indian had she been any different? Christ, at least I’ve changed. Now I’m Brown Owl! Helping people every day. Lending a hand.

  Even Hugh and Simon had left the tree-stabbing and knife-throwing behind. Neither ended up a weapon-lover. Hugh grew into an all-rounder sort of teenager. Neither mischievous nor prim. Neither nerd nor jock. The solid prefect type. Quite good at schoolwork. Quite good at sport. Third or fourth in the class, third or fourth boy picked for teams. Enjoyed reading. Always did his homework. Quite good hand-eye coordination. Quite good was the right modifier for Hugh. Not outstanding.

  However, Simon’s individuality, as her mother called it, was certainly evident back then. Left-handed. Never a swot or a sportsman, Simon, but a teenage fan of fantasy comics and science fiction. Doodling musical instruments and naked women in his schoolbooks. A copy of Down Beat in his back pocket. In a world of his own, fingers always drumming, feet tapping, lips pursed and popping as if playing an invisible trumpet.

  An eight-year-old Simon came to mind, running excitedly up to their mother after seeing an ad for Carefree tampons on television. ‘Can I have some of those things, Mum?’

  Her mother’s embarrassed confusion. ‘What? Why?’

  ‘So I can go swimming and horseriding and play volleyball on the beach without missing a day.’

  A sometimes sweet and more often weird small boy. Earwax Boy, she called him after discovering the sticky orange ball at the back of his socks drawer. The size of a billiard ball. For three years Simon had been collecting his earwax.

  ‘Why on earth?’ she exclaimed. ‘Gross!’

  Not
the least embarrassed, he just shrugged. ‘An experiment.’

  A bit later he was Asparagus Boy: conducting research into how long it took for his urine to smell strange after eating a tin of asparagus. ‘Twenty-six minutes is the fastest time so far,’ he informed the family at dinner.

  Of course, whenever they drove up to those picnics in the hills, there was his fascination for squashed animals. On the way there he’d itemise the flattened wildlife on the road, and eagerly recheck each cadaver as they drove home again. At twelve he planned to publish an illustrated book entitled What Was It Before It Was Run Over? A Guide to Australian Roadkill.

  She and their mother found that funny; Dad and Hugh less so. Fifteen-year-old straitlaced Hugh scoffed, ‘“What was it?” the dimwit asks. “Well, obviously something slow. A marsupial of some sort.” End of story.’

  Simon didn’t answer back. He ignored Hugh as usual, peering out the car window, whistling through his teeth, tapping his fingers on the seat, and continuing to mutter ‘ex-wallaby’ or ‘former possum’ as they passed over another furry body.

  As the elder siblings, separated by only two years and always in competition, she and Hugh had fought constantly. But she couldn’t recall ever squabbling with Simon. They shared an understanding that they were different from Hugh, and from most kids they knew, and were content to be so.

  Without either of them mentioning it again, this shared understanding stemmed from a particular early Sunday morning when they were twelve and seven. Sitting together in their pyjamas watching The Addams Family on television, TV being permitted only at weekends, they became aware of odd rhythmic noises, and nudged each other. Squeaking furniture, then panting sounds, followed by muffled moans. The TV? No, the eerie sounds were coming from their parents’ bedroom.

  For a long shared moment she and Simon looked at each other. Something stopped them from bursting into the bedroom. A barrier of forbidding air. She remembered Simon’s anxious frown. She supposed she was also frowning.

  Of one mind, they left the television and sat on the back steps, the farthest part of the house, knees touching, staring into the back garden where their father’s shirts revolved slowly on the rotary clothesline, the sleeves hanging down and almost touching the grass, and she and Simon said nothing at all.

  Only twice was her mother the sole subject of those old picnic photos. Teenage Thea had taken these pictures with a birthday camera. In both snaps her mother looked deep in concentration. In one, she was rinsing plates in a creek after lunch. In the other she was sitting on a creek bank, reading a book and smoking a cigarette. You could see the book’s title: The Thorn Birds. Thea had this photo framed on her bedside table. She liked to see herself in it. In its sensation of solitude and in the independence of her mother’s expression it was much more unmarried Kathleen Darmody than wife and mother Kath Cleary.

  With a jolt Thea realised she was now more than ten years older than the woman reading by the creek. God, she was older than her middle-aged, cigarette-smoking mother. And now here she was today, sitting and smoking by a creek as well. But unlike her mother, she had no partner, a domestic situation unlikely to change, and she wasn’t getting any younger, plus she was wearing a stupid Tigers T-shirt that swam on her. She somehow lacked, she feared, the quiet dignity of her mother.

  She was more like Coralie Langhorne.

  She drew heavily on the Romeo y Julieta Reserva and as she stared into the oil-streaked and bubbling water the thoughts that flew through her head were as scattered as gnats.

  Kungadgee Creek was in semi-flood, a turbid rusty-cream after recent rains. It didn’t babble like a creek. It wasn’t a romantic stream or businesslike canal either. More a narrow muddy river, carrying urban street run-off and farm chemicals and rushing deceptively fast and deep.

  Would there be any platypuses left? Thea wondered. Not in this turbulent murky reach. Maybe yabbies and perch still hid from ibises and cormorants among the tree roots. But could they withstand the pollution? Leeches still wriggled in the slush and dragonflies flicked over the stagnant side pools for mosquito larvae. Under the restless surface, there’d be invisible trees clawing upwards. Nearer to town, you could bet on one or two dumped supermarket trolleys.

  This creek could be anywhere in the country, from Queensland to Tasmania. On a hot day back before swimming pools were everywhere, a child would still have been tempted to jump into a creek like this. She would’ve done it herself. But carefully dog-paddled, her legs only lightly breaking the surface, just gently kicking to avoid the snaggy scariness of the creek bed.

  In creeks your feet brushed against mysterious grabby things. Nothing to see underwater but the orange mist turning tan, then black, your own legs ghostly and quickly fading from sight. And you felt the creek water dividing into layers, merely cool at the surface but chilling at the bottom. The water tasting of clay and smelling of rotting leaves.

  How hard it was to climb out again, Thea remembered. The creek was in control and it preferred you to stay. You fought the current by pressing your feet down at last into the silky slipperiness. The clay’s softness oozed between the toes, your feet couldn’t properly grip. Gravity and your body weight slid you back into the silt of the creek bed. All the while the current fiercely tugged and you grabbed tree roots to save yourself.

  She remembered a test she wanted to do back then: to drop a doll in a fast creek and see what happened. So at the next bank picnic she experimented with her biggest doll. Angela, the size of a real one-year-old, sped and bumped along at first, face up, eyes wide and trusting. Suddenly she rolled over, face down, and she was whirling in eddies, bumping her head on rocks, before being dragged underwater, pummelled, her dress swept over her head. And Angela was carried away.

  It wasn’t a sad loss; she wasn’t a doll-loving sort of girl. But it had made her feel sour and not her usual self.

  Giardia. E. coli. Cryptosporidiosis. Hep A. You couldn’t pay her to swim in Kungadgee Creek now.

  24

  Thea’s present unease with creeks stemmed from a particular creek in 2012 that flowed into a place they’d called Birdshit Beach.

  She and three other MSF doctors were dropped by a Panamanian army helicopter, with half a dozen border-patrol soldiers, automatic weapons and all, on the only strip of flat land, a guano-stained ocean beach, at low tide on the river delta. As they arrived, dozens of ghostly pelicans, the same ash-grey as their copious droppings, flapped lazily back to sea.

  A local dugout canoe fitted with an outboard and driven by a mestizo youth in a Brasil football shirt carried them upriver. Like fingers on an open palm, the river mouth spread into five creeks. The boy chose the middle waterway, and suddenly there was nothing horizontal in the landscape apart from the creek’s surface. Not an inch of flat shoreline or bare earth or rock, just black and red mangroves trailing long tendrils into both banks of the creek. Herons zigzagged ahead of the piragua, and small turtles bobbed in its wake. Dense foliage rose up to a sky dotted with soaring vultures.

  Tom Bullwer, the English doctor, was a keen birder, with Birds of Central America in his knapsack. He’d suddenly startle the others with cries of ‘Blue heron at two o’clock!’ or ‘Grey-bellied goshawk at ten!’ No vulture announcements. In their line of work, vultures were too commonplace to mention.

  They were in the Darién Gap, a geographical space of tropical nothingness that separated the two Americas. This gap in the Pan-American Highway was too wide, marshy and rugged to bridge. Its vast swathe of swampland and mountainous rainforest had defeated the noble intention of linking North America and South America. A grand idea bisected by a vacuum.

  Their background briefing had warned that the Región del Darién was ‘shared tensely by Panama and Colombia’. Nothing novel about that, Thea thought. In every world trouble spot, territory was ‘shared tensely’.

  That was the thing about territory, wasn’t it? Forget food, shelter, sex – nature’s primary urge was a matter of territory. Humans were n
o different to hippos, mandrills or magpies. Whether it was tomcat spray, rhino dung, Iraqi landmines or a Melbourne garden fence fought over by eighty-year-old suburbanites, every species marked its territory and fought endlessly to protect it. Woe betide any mandrill or neighbour who jumped the border.

  The Colombian side was the 100-kilometre-wide swampy river delta of the Atrato River; the Panamanian rim was a vertical jungle rising sharply to the 2000-metre-high peaks of Cerro Tacarcuna, with the piraguas the only means of travel.

  She and the other doctors, Englishman Tom, Joséphine Laurent from France, and Alex Bouras from Greece, were heading with the border-patrol soldiers to a remote Indian tribe, the Kuna.

  ‘Remote’ didn’t mean what it once did. As they motored upcreek, Joséphine announced drolly for birder Tom’s benefit: ‘Coke can at nine o’clock.’

  Plastic bottles bobbed past, then beer and rum bottles, three dead pigs, five or six bloated dogs, and a small headless girl.

  It was the easiest of raids. Most of the village men and boys were away at a soccer match when thirty-two Kuna girls and women, tending their plantain, mandioca and banana crops, were attacked by drugged and drunken Colombian insurgents.

  The Colombians had planned the incursion with the aid of the Panamanian soccer fixtures. Nine females and two old men were killed. The surviving twenty-three women were raped and/or slashed with machetes. The Colombians hadn’t found it necessary to waste bullets. Nostalgically perhaps, they’d preferred machetes.

  While the border patrol stamped about bossily and ineffectually with their automatic rifles and two-way radios, the doctors patched up the living. There would have been more survivors, Thea thought angrily, spotting the phone box and satellite dish in the middle of the village, if they’d been notified earlier. In the week since the attack several women had died from treatable wounds.