Whipbird

by Robert Drewe

  He shrugged. ‘Because we were flattered to be asked.’ Even by promoters they mistrusted and a band they privately sniggered at and regarded as purveyors of derivative crap. ‘Because we were lured by bloody Americanness and the Big Time. Because we desperately wanted an American record label.’

  They’d suffered from the classic Australian cultural cringe. So they overdid everything. Behaved like international rock legends. They were moody show-offs, deliberately late for studio appointments and gigs and press calls. Then Marco mooned the female reporter from the E! channel, so their segment was dropped. Even then, mooning TV entertainment reporters was twenty years out of date. ‘Especially with an arse as skinny as Marco’s.’

  Nowadays it was hard to fathom why Esau’s Pelt’s earnest fake Christianity had been so huge in the late ’90s. Their laughable fusion of new-wave grunge and balladic macho declarations of faith fitted awkwardly with their overt heroin use and troubled past, not to mention their ridiculously overblown stage presentation featuring a giant redwood crucifix.

  But the bible-bashing States had loved phony rough-hewn Esau’s Pelt just as they instinctively hated the unknown support band. Spider Flower were seen as decadent in Utah, Wyoming and Idaho. And not acceptably rock’n’roll decadent; not stoned, manic, macho, drunk, groupie-screwing and hotel-trashing decadent. Just foreign, palely loitering, weird-accent decadent.

  Somehow the word spread: this Aussie band from Mel-Bawn – as the Yanks pronounced it – were wussy sexual deviates. It dawned on Spider Flower, who prided themselves on being ironic, that they’d been set up. Esau’s Pelt knew their audience. Compared to Spider Flower they stood out as patriotic, sporty, outdoorsy, ballsy chick magnets.

  Esau’s Pelt had bulging pecs, abs, biceps, delts and groins and, in the case of their lead vocalist, Cred Greatorex, a chest of Mediterranean hairiness. Whereas effete Spider Flower had arms like drinking straws. On purpose.

  It seemed that America didn’t appreciate Melbourne ironic. Sly didn’t know whether it was the decadent mascara, shaved eyebrows and peroxided buzz cuts they favoured at that point, or his being well Jamesoned, stoned and travel-lagged, but the tour had come to a screaming halt at the halfway mark in Austin, Texas.

  When the constant heckling turned nastier and the cans and bottles started landing on the stage, he’d finally cracked.

  ‘OK, you ladies,’ he addressed the audience. ‘Here’s a hot number for the Lone Star State and its redneck bumfuckers.’ And he started thumping out his childhood morning piano lesson. ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.’

  As he told Willow: ‘I remember seeing a big oil-rig worker, a checked-shirt and workboots sort of guy, stand up in the audience waving a handgun and shouting, “I’m going to kill you, you limey deviate!”

  ‘I grabbed the mic and yelled out that anyone who called me a limey was a dumb fucker, that we were Aussies from Melbourne, and it wasn’t pronounced Mel-Bawn either, you dickheads, and as a matter of interest, Brisbane wasn’t pronounced Bris-Bayne either, or Canberra Can-Berra, and that everyone knew that limeys were actually English, and anyway the right word for them was Pommies, you stupid gun-happy rednecks.’

  Willow shook her head in wonder. ‘And the audience understood this mad rant?’

  ‘Not a word. Dane and Marco and the boys all fled the stage but I was still playing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”. I tried different interesting arrangements. Mozart’s twelve variations, and Elton John style. Even Billy Joel/”Piano Man”-ish. Then I had a brainstorm and thumped it out like Jerry Lee Lewis, with my feet on the keys and everything, and that seemed to confuse the guy waving the gun. Anyway he didn’t shoot me.

  ‘By now I was really getting into “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”, actually getting the old flash while I played it over and over, I don’t know how many times, and I sort of hypnotised myself. I was in a trance.

  ‘People had thrown every available bottle and can and busted seat at me. Now they started on the fire extinguishers, and they were frothing and spurting and rolling around on the stage. Even the over-roided security joined in, and the bouncers were throwing stuff at me, too. I didn’t care. I was in a daze. I felt bulletproof and above it all, and when I eventually finished I stood in front of the redwood crucifix with my arms out, covered in fire-extinguisher foam like a snowman, and bowed to the audience.

  ‘And then for some insane reason I pushed over the crucifix, which was difficult because it was heavy and splintery, and it cut my hands so I was bleeding everywhere, and I deliberately rubbed the blood all over my face. Then I put my foot on the crucifix, like a big-game hunter with his kill, like Ernest Hemingway with a dead lion, and raised my bloody fist in victory.

  ‘And there was a sort of roar then, a deep roar like a squadron of B-47s. And I passed out on the stage.

  ‘I came to with someone furiously screaming. An amazing octave range, about five – from an F1 to a B flat 6. It was your mother standing over me like a tigress, waving a broken seat, and preventing the Texans from rushing the stage and stomping me to death, and they were wary of this wild, high-pitched little chick and backed off.

  ‘As I stumbled back to the dressing-room, Tania was yelling that she wished the oil-rig guy had shot me, and this was the end, she’d really had it. And the record-company people were just staring at me open-mouthed like I was a lunatic. And outside, our tour bus had been set on fire, and there were no extinguishers left, and the police and fire brigade got involved, on the side of the Texans, and there was suddenly a visa problem.

  ‘So that was it for Spider Flower in America. And for your mother and me, as it turned out.’

  As Willow rejoined Sly, her phone rang with the first bars of ‘Tight, Tight Jeans’. A nostalgic touch on her part. If her father heard the familiar ring tone, it didn’t register.

  Otis was on the line, sounding jumpy and gaspy. Of course, she thought, Saturday nights were imaginatively active times for Otis. One Saturday midnight he’d arrived home breathless from a night at the Railway Hotel convinced he’d seen a yowie striding along the road verge into Tyagarah.

  According to the local stoners and believers in cryptozoology – not necessarily different people – yowies were big hairy creatures like yetis and sasquatches, vertically inclined and over 2 metres tall, with long arms and huge feet, and, interestingly, most often spied after their spotters’ recreational outings on Friday and Saturday nights.

  One of Otis’s old surfing cronies, Zack Bonner, often left Subway sandwiches for the local yowie high in the fork of a camphor laurel, beyond the reach of feral dogs. ‘Man, you can hear him grunting and yowling in satisfaction,’ Zack said. And the food was always gone next morning. Case proved.

  ‘Well, the pool job’s cactus,’ Otis announced now. She could hear his individual breaths.

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘An old guy swimming laps this afternoon had a seizure in the middle lane and got all tangled up in the lane ropes. Getting him to the edge of the pool was hard enough, unwinding him from each rope and then hauling him out of the water – he was a big, fat bloke – and then for a few minutes I couldn’t find the AED unit.’

  ‘What’s that? Jesus, Otis.’

  ‘The automated external defibrillator. Just one of the hundred fucking things you have to be conversant with in this job.’

  ‘Conversant? And you weren’t conversant then? And the guy died?’

  ‘Yes, I was bloody conversant, Willow, thank you. And he was still alive after I jump-started him and the ambulance took him away.’

  ‘Well, what can I say? Let’s hope he’s OK. But how is it your fault?’

  ‘It’s a bad mark against me either way. I was so panicked I didn’t notice he’d shat himself during his attack, and I didn’t establish an FILSRP.’

  ‘You’ll tell me what that is, I guess.’

  ‘A faecal incident loose stool response plan.’

  ‘I really don’t want to know about that plan, Otis.’
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br />   ‘It’s not just a matter of scooping. It’s closing the pool for a start, adjusting the pH, whacking in chlorine dioxide as a shock treatment. But what with the big crowd in the water and all the splashing, I didn’t notice anything too untoward and kept letting people in to swim all afternoon, and the two pools and the kiddie paddling pool all use water common to the contaminated pool. That’s what I’m in the shit about.’

  What could she say? Not that he’d always been a dopey goose and that this incident was typical. Just make supportive noises as usual, as everyone expected from her, and had expected from her ever since the humid February afternoon when Mum had suddenly had enough of the tour absences and the wildness, citing the embarrassment of the disastrous American tour – well, that was her stated reason – and had given up rock-chickdom and fled the coop with Monsieur Dressage, real name Alain Beaumont, the Brisbane chef with an alleged French ancestor and a shared interest in horses, and the mother’s role had passed seamlessly to her.

  Fingers crossed, Otis, that half the Northern Rivers doesn’t come down with giardia or worse. It’s Saturday night. Wait and see what happens on Monday. For God’s sake have a couple of Dad’s Jameson’s that he no longer drinks because he’s deadybones and go to bed.

  29

  Even though it wasn’t her sort of music, her second glass of champagne made Rani want to dance. The music was dark and clashy, with no romantic feeling or beat or lyrics she could understand, the reverse of happy and sexy – she was aching for some karaoke – but it was enough to start her bopping very slightly, a bit of hip movement there, because she was keen to grab some sort of good time during this strange dusty Australian weekend in the country.

  She stood smiling and jigging shyly at the edge of a clump of older women. Even though they’d all loudly introduced themselves and exchanged a few pleasantries, and called her dear, and – of course – asked where she was from, and one of them said, ‘Aren’t you pretty!’ as if she was a five-year-old in a new party dress, she wasn’t actually with them or among them. Just alongside them. In their vicinity.

  The women had all changed out of the family T-shirts for the evening but they still resembled each other, with the same blonded hair and overstrong perfumes and buxom shapes and similar voices that were gabbing competitively about people Rani didn’t know who’d had gruesome operations or flamboyant marriage break-ups or disappointing daughters-in-law or eighteen-hour birthing labours.

  They patted each other’s wrists familiarly while they prattled, their hands exhibiting their rings, and they hugged and kissed other sixty-fiveish lookalikes when they joined them, and they always found some detail to loudly admire about the new arrivals’ appearances – anything, it seemed to Rani, no matter how cosmetically or fashionably inadvisable.

  She lit a kretek and sipped her champagne and the 65-year-old blonde women sniffed the burning clove mixture, slid curious glances at her, raised their eyebrows and quietly edged away.

  Hunter, Jackson and Gemi were racing around the paddocks, flushed and overstimulated by night-time play, and Craig was behaving distractedly.

  ‘Don’t leave me stranded,’ she’d told him, but he’d suddenly parked her with the old ladies, and though he kept darting back and forth, he was only attentive to her for a minute or two before he disappeared again.

  ‘Back in a sec. Just catching up with the cousins and uncles, babe,’ he said, topping up her glass. ‘Long time, no see.’

  ‘Long time, no see for me too,’ she felt like saying to this boy – still a big boy to her – who spent weeks at a time away in the bush and desert, rounding up his endangered wildlife and translocating them to some offshore sandspit or gravelly outback ridge, a husband she wished was spending this off-duty weekend at home in Three Reefs with her and the kids, maybe picnicking and relaxing and sleeping in late, or fishing for whiting and tailor, which the Acehnese village girl side of her really enjoyed doing, instead of partying with this unfamiliar noisy, old and boring crowd.

  But she hadn’t grumbled too much yet because it was a family party that clearly meant something to him, and he seemed to need cheering up. In the past fortnight a weary look had come into his eyelids, and his boots dragged and thumped more heavily on the verandah when he arrived home.

  ‘Just tired,’ he said. So it wasn’t the fundamental paradox of being a conservationist working for a mining company that sapped him. It was just ordinary work fatigue, he insisted, after the latest translocation (the word the animal-movers used) of western quolls or Strickland’s froglets or Gerhardt’s coastal warblers from A to B. Saving not just their individual lives but their whole species. It sounded so honourable when he put it like that. And it was true.

  Still, ever since he’d left the Department of the Environment to join the mining industry, the point of Craig’s work confused Rani. Going over to the Dark Side, his old colleagues teased him at his farewell party. Not with any rancour – it was common practice nowadays. Better money. Less red tape. She got that. But being employed by a resource company to shift small rare, anonymous creatures from their familiar habitats was puzzling to her.

  It was nice he was saving little prickly, scaly and whiskery things, but she’d never heard of any of the creatures he worked so hard to translocate, and it wasn’t as if any of them were cute or useful. They weren’t koalas or anything. Not cuddly. Mostly ugly. You couldn’t eat them. So why bother? Why go to all that expensive effort – effort that took her husband away from home?

  The way Onslow Ore navigated the situation, it wasn’t a matter of moving inconvenient species out of the way of its rich mineral deposits at all. (Worth ‘trillions’ apparently. ‘Trillions’!) It also skated over the reason the creatures had become rare in the first place: from earlier habitat destruction by miners. There was a better, unarguable, last-ditch way of putting it: saving threatened species from extinction.

  What with the environment’s political clout nowadays there’d be no more random bulldozing and dynamiting of their nests, wallows, lairs, snugs and shelters. The company was correcting things. And keeping the environmental lobby on-side. And the government, with its power to grant mining leases, too.

  The company boasted a stalwart record on the saving-from-extinction issue. Onslow Ore employed professionals like Craig and his University of Melbourne zoology degree (a major in Ecology in Changing Environments) to collect and pack up the endangered species inhabiting its leases. No company could be keener than Onslow Ore to snatch those threatened quolls, froglets and warblers from the bulldozers and dynamite, and from the giant wheels of the ore trucks, those remote-controlled yellow monsters, and to translocate the timid creatures in the company’s helicopters and gently set them down somewhere safe. In a haven. Onslow used that word.

  At each stage of resettlement it fired off press releases demonstrating this humane translocation procedure, culminating in the exciting and well-illustrated news of the animals’ weight gain and effective breeding in their new home. Despite their raw and ugly scrunched-up hobbit faces, the new babies were healthy proof of their fresh habitat’s serenity and suitability.

  That Onslow Ore translocated the warblers, froglets and quolls to a haven where they’d previously become extinct and, incidentally, where the company had already extracted anything worthwhile, satisfied all sides with its praiseworthy environmental neatness.

  As Craig often tried to explain to an uncomprehending Rani, conservation was a good thing. Saving animals from dying out. The Australian public thought these creatures had a value. But now, at a table strategically placed between fresh wine and beer supplies, chatting to Uncle Mick, Uncle Doug Casey, and two slightly inebriated cousins, Steve Duvnjak and Warren Opie, and Warren’s wife Claire, Craig muttered, ‘It’s not as cut and dried as you think.’

  He’d moved from beer to shiraz. ‘There are complications and grey areas,’ he added, in a serious voice.

  ‘The tree huggers generally get it wrong,’ Steve said.

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p; ‘The bloody miners, more like,’ Mick said.

  Craig frowned. ‘More complex than that. Both sides are greenish these days. What hamstrings you, what makes the job tough isn’t just the fall in ore prices and China dropping the bucket, it’s bloody Occupational Health and Safety.’

  Their eyes lit up. ‘Jesus wept!’ said Warren. He was site manager for a Gold Coast artisan brewery that had recently entered the bespoke beer market with a mango-flavoured lager and a papaya pilsner and had already incurred health-and-safety ire with the brewery’s use of hazardous substances and for requiring cellarmen to lift beer kegs. ‘You’re speaking my language!’

  The others all nodded vigorous agreement, refreshed their glasses and began talking at once. Craig had unleashed a receptive and voluble force, one united in their masculine relish of vigorous red wines and their belief that modern Australia had become a nanny state since their reckless suburban youth.

  ‘I know where you’re coming from,’ said Steve, who ran a lawn-mowing business along the Great Ocean Road. ‘Boy, does OH&S hate me!’

  Until recently he’d been regarded by his branch of the family as the shrewdest Duvnjak. While working as a weather forecaster at the Bureau of Meteorology he’d cross-referenced Victoria’s highest-rainfall and days-of-sunshine areas – hence the places with the lushest, fastest-growing grass. He’d added some other statistics to the mix – richer soil types and prevailing winds – and arrived at a spot on the map that was also high-incomed, coastally scenic, property-proud, with a high proportion of wealthy retirees and holiday rentals and, most importantly, according to the Yellow Pages, a dearth of lawnmowing firms: Lilac Point. Steve moved his family there, and started his business.

  Unfortunately, he hadn’t forecast that these combined statistics also gave Lilac Point an extreme fire risk, resulting in a disastrous bushfire four summers before that wiped out seven coastal communities and razed their lawns to charred earth. Only now was his business recovering.