by Gregory Day
He hitched his wooden trailer to the ute, drove in through the flowering gums on what was now to be Dom Khouri’s land, and began to fill it with whatever was first at hand. Under the boobial-las nearby he threw all the things that were destined for the tip.
He realised that six cracked plastic plumbing pipes on a painted treated pine frame, which he’d rigged up for hydroponic vegetables in 1977, had to go. Not to mention the three huge Goodyear tractor tyres from the days when his dad and he used to make their rattling way from the cliff down to Mr Bolitho’s paddocks in the valley on the Massey Ferguson. And what about the monstrous vibroplate Ron had borrowed from Russ Urquhart out on Rifle Butts Road three days before the cops came and fetched Russ for drowning his missus in a water tank. The bloody thing weighed a ton. To get it on the trailer, Ron had to throw down a ramp and haul the vibroplate across the irregular, rooty ground and then on up the ramp by rope. He’d be glad to see the end of the haunted bloody thing.
But he kept far more than he threw out. Rolls of every different type of fencing wire, barbed wire, high tensile, ringlock, hinged joint, strainers and stays, piles of music books that Leo Morris had given him but that he’d never read, kitchen chairs, a red and white postman’s scooter, punnets and jars and plastic tubs full of fertilisers and plant food and dead worms and nails and door hinges, piles of besser bricks which he was always planning to use to build another more ‘permanent’ shed; four card tables, one ripped old black one which his father used to use as a washstand and three red ones in rickety but good order; drop-nets, drum-nets, nets on twine and nets with fluorescent orange handles, old life-jackets of the same colour but streaked with riversilt and casuarina dust, three different anchors, rakes, spades, three whipper-snippers and various other tools broken or otherwise, an ICE-RITE bait fridge, two full-size three-in-one record players and one small pink portable turntable with a detachable speaker-lid that Min bought second hand at a Woody’s Junction fair and which he preferred to the other bigger ones; a candlestand, a bamboo xylophone, fuel cans and glass demijohns, redgum beams, rolls of black irrigation hose, mission-brown lattices, mowers, folding garden chairs, empty shark-grey gas cylinders, milk crates, fishing crates he’d found washed up on the shore from vessels out at sea, two identical chainsaws, spare chains for the chainsaws, a welding helmet, cans of clearance-sale paint and brushes and rollers, wooden-shafted golf-clubs, niblicks and cleeks, a portable Convair air conditioner, smoke alarms still in their packets, rolls of linoleum . . . and, of course, the pump organ.
He still had the piano trolley with which he’d moved the organ from Leo Morris’s house all those years ago. The tyres were flat but with them pumped up it would do. He levered the heavy organ carefully onto the trolley and wheeled it across the block ever so slowly to the front porch where it was to stay overnight until the shed was re-erected in its new position. He wouldn’t have risked leaving it out in the weather. It was a delicate thing, with its oak casing, its beautiful keyboard, and one hundred and ten reeds inside. One downpour could ruin it forever.
It took him two full days to clear the shed. Half of its contents he placed under tarps near the pine boundary not far from where the shed would be moved to and the remaining lot he left on the trailer and in the long tray of his ute overnight. Then, early on the third morning, Darren Traherne arrived along with Noel Lea and his brother Jim, with hacksaws and crowbars and wood-splitters, spanners, gloves and spades and new hardwood posts, and knocked the old shed down in a jiffy.
Keeping as much of the original tin as they could without cutting their hands to ribbons with the rust and the bolting and unbolting, they had the new shed posts up by midafternoon. All that remained was to bolt and tie the sides and make sure any gaps were sealed. Then Jim would hoist himself up onto the new rafters and drill the roof on flat but with a twenty-degree tilt against the ocean, frapping the flashing tight so the wind’s fingers couldn’t get under and wedge it off. The new shed was placed strategically on the inland side of a leaning screen of tea-tree, but even so the winds of the world would never give up trying to find any gaps and would work at the tin sheets night and day.
All the men agreed it was a top spot for the new shed, better, in fact, than the original, if Ron would only put a little window in the southern wall to look at the water through the tea-tree copse. Ron saw no need for the shed to have a view, however, and was content as he always had been with its wide opening on the inland side. He fixed the same green roll of canvas to the beam at the top of this opening so that it could be rolled down from its eyelets like a blind on those few days when vicious wind and even winter rain came from the north. Still, he figured with the house close by in that direction, there’d be even less need to roll the canvas down than there had been in the old spot, where only the boobi-allas provided screening. This he thought of as a definite improvement, for he loved the ventilation of the opening and the way it kept him connected with the outside. He could smell the pelargoniums from where he sat at the organ, he could watch the bristlebirds scurry past as he tossed the cards about with Sweet William, and he would always avoid the air of the shed becoming either too pungent or stale. In many ways he wasn’t as far away from the house as he would have liked but there was this upside, and maybe being nearby was the best thing anyway, because what if Min had a turn or something?
Selecting and matching the right tin sheets for the sides and roof and bolting them in took longer than expected but afterwards, once Jim and Noel and Darren had had their fill of soup and chops and headed off home, Ron sat down at the organ where it stood on its old square metre of Papa Mahoney’s striped carpet, alone in its position facing the eastern wall in the new shed.
The pump organ was immaculate and shining, even after all these years. He lifted back the oak lid and pumped slowly with his feet, playing a few notes to see how it felt. He checked all the turned timber stops to make sure they hadn’t been damaged by the move. Not for the first time he cursed the Bass Coupler stop that still wasn’t working; he remembered how handy it had been. He placed his hands fully on the keyboard then and jaunted out a few bars of ‘The Road to Gundagai’, with the Gemaphon, Clarabella, Vox Celeste and Pipe Melodia stops all pulled in the treble to see how they sounded. He usually played without these stops.
In the kitchen, Min heard the instrument, and a lot more clearly than she was used to. Would she mind? She smiled and stared absently down at the bowl of currants soaking in front of her. She vowed not to pass opinion on what he played now that she could hear it so well. She wouldn’t interfere. She didn’t tell him how to bait his hook and the music was private. Like fishing. Except more so.
Ron had been honest when he said to Dom Khouri that once the land was his he could do with it what he wanted. He’d be paying big money after all, and anyway, Ron wouldn’t have sold it to him if he didn’t think he’d do the right thing. But Dom Khouri, as down-to-earth as he was, had big ideas for his new patch of clifftop. When the front-end loaders arrived the week after the open shed had been moved, Ron got quite a shock. On a quiet Tuesday morning the air was rent, not with the sound of surf crashing onto the Two Pointers, nor with the sawing call of wattlebirds or the splash of honeyeaters in the spouting, but with the much louder sound of three large mustard coloured machines beginning the substantial job of clearing and moulding the cliff to Dom Khouri’s vision. Since Len McCoy bought the land in 1922 there’d been no morning like it. And certainly not in the long sweep back through history before that.
As Dom Khouri had told Ron, he wanted to build a big house, a house big enough, in fact, to accommodate his large extended family. With his architect he came up with a plan that included nine bedrooms, each with an ensuite and spa; a forty-seater cinema, a library, and various living and working spaces spread over four levels, all with large Taweel Glass views of the ocean. Despite the scale of the four-level house, the architect had designed it so that from where people entered on Merna Street it would only be one storey high, and q
uite a low storey at that. This low side of the house would be made almost entirely of glass so that by picking up the reflections of the surrounding bushes, flowering gums and sky, it would blend seamlessly into the environment. To achieve this effect of modesty required an enormous excavation into the clifftop, so that whereas at the front door the house looked humble, from a boat out at sea its full enormity was on show.
Deep into the pink and ochre earth of the cliff, Dom Khouri’s machines dug a space large enough to accommodate his Levantine vision. Ron and Min could never have conceived of such a plan and, in fact, Ron would’ve doubted that the cliff itself could endure it. But endure it it did, day after deafening day, the earthmovers transforming the headland into a great hole the size of twenty-five swimming pools. The locals who operated the machines were as amazed by the scale of the job as Ron was. They’d worked on the sides of a lot of hills before, turned over a lot of ground, but they’d never done anything like this, and never so precariously close to the cliff edge.
Ron could be seen at dusk, on most evenings during the two weeks of the excavation, standing still on his mown kikuyu slope overlooking the cleared heath and moonah and she-oak, and the massive hole. He gazed down at the strata of topsoil, pink clay, rock and sandstone, and his soul was mute. His ground had literally been ripped open. He’d cross back over the remainder of his land and continue the job of lining the new shed. He could hear the bristlebirds in the tea-tree on the other side of the tin. Scurrying, quickstepping, but also gathering like himself. He would sit down at the organ but his feet would remain still on the carpeted pedals. He couldn’t play. The bellows remained empty.
Min listened to the machines all day long but didn’t dare go and look at what they were up to. She stayed inside and battled her way through the new acoustics. She’d imagined a nice team of builders hammering away and popping in for cups of tea or a slice of fudge. When she asked Ron about their progress all he said was that they were digging a big hole. When she complained to him that it was noisy, he nodded and said, ‘It’s a free country.’
The machines would start up at seven thirty every morning, as Ron returned from the river or the beach or the bush. The world was the same place out there but coming home for breakfast was like having stones hurled at him.
After two weeks, however, the digging was done, the machines were switched off, and Dom Khouri arrived with his wife and the architect. They liked what they saw. Ron was introduced to the architect, and to Isabelle Khouri, who was plump and spoke with a thick Argentinian accent. He stood nervously alongside the group, looking into the huge hole as his new neighbour explained his vision for the house. Yes, it would be built on four levels, predominantly from steel and glass, but the high ocean-facing wall and verandah on the cliff would be built from local stone, with ironwork heavily influenced by the Art Nouveau architecture of Tripoli. There would be a very costly three-metre-high rusted corten steel wall shielding the property from the street as well as down the western boundary. All Ron could really latch on to was that there would be a cinema. That’s what stuck in his mind.
It was a different world they were bringing to his own, a big world to a little world and for a moment his green eyes flickered as he wondered how he would fit.
Later on that day as he sat with his old friend Sweet William in the shed, dealing out the cards and sipping his stout, Ron mentioned that a little house down on the river flat might be all right for him and his mum sometime in the future. Old Sweet William, lanky and debonair in his pale golf cap, his face scarlet-patched from skin cancer grafts, his right knee swinging over his left as if to the sound of some imaginary big-band tune, looked up from his cards, sipped his stout and shook his head, smiling.
‘Don’t you worry, Ronald,’ he said. ‘Once the house is built, things’ll settle back down.’
EIGHT
FEATHER-LIGHT AND HEAVY AS LEAD
In the 1960s and ’70s big Martin Elliot, when he had enough grog under his belt to loosen his dreams, would threaten to knock down his Mangowak Hotel and build a new one made out of the local stone. The larrikin publican had noticed that the escarpments and low-rises in the bush at the back of the town were filled with a quality limestone he couldn’t believe that no-one was bothering to quarry. In the Western Districts where he grew up, people scorned other building materials in favour of stone – bluestone mostly, or the soft sandstone from Adelaide, or a white limestone from north of Bendigo – but in Mangowak the only buildings not built from timber, brick or fibro-cement were the two original homesteads from the 1860s, the six meteorological buildings on the headland, and St Catherine’s convent out the back beyond the Bootleg Creek. With an eye perhaps infuenced by his childhood, Martin Elliot could see the particular qualities of the local stone in those old Met Station buildings and in the high walls of the convent: the pink veins running through the blond rock, and the contradiction inherent in all good, well-quarried stone: a sense of feather-lightness in a material almost as heavy as lead. He had a vision of a bright new hotel made out of it, something fair dinkum but a bit salubrious, a large two-storey affair that would face southwest to look across the ocean.
But on a quiet midweek morning in 1976, big Martin Elliot’s dreams of a new hotel were scuppered for all time. After a lazy breakfast of leftovers from the previous night’s mixed grill, followed by curried eggs, Coco Pops, and his usual morning game of pinball in the poolroom, he took off on his 60 cc mini-bike to waste a couple of hours riding through old fire tracks in the bush behind the town. The mini-bike was his vehicular version of casual clothes and often his huge frame could be seen straddling the tiny Honda, speeding across the cleared shortcuts of the town ridge, on his way out back for some R & R. But this time, as he yanked the throttle to climb up the Bootleg Creek track, a thing he’d done countless times before, the Honda’s tyres failed to grip on a huge slab of ironstone jutting into the track where it ran closest to the gorge. The bike came out from under the big publican and he went tumbling over the edge, down the steep escarpment to the rocky creek bed below.
It took him a day and a night before he was able to drag his smashed-up body out of the Bootleg gorge and up the slope of iron-barks on the other side. Eventually, at around ten o’clock on the morning following the accident, he was picked up by a passing ute on the Dray Road, a couple of hundred yards south of the Mexico bend. His injuries were extensive and for three days he lay in a critical condition in the hospital at Minapre, as everyone gathered in the bar back at the Mangowak pub, praying that he’d make it through and marvelling at how he had managed to pull himself up out of that gorge. Eventually, just after dawn on the Sunday morning, Martin Elliot passed away in the hospital, due predominantly to the kidney damage he’d sustained in the fall.
The following autumn, ten months after Big Martin’s death on the mini-bike, two brothers, Ian and Brian Birdsong, as if they’d heard the publican calling from the grave, took a lease on a northeast facing hill a few miles up the Dray Road to begin a small quarry. The Birdsong family had been in the area since Ian and Brian’s grandfather Silvio, or ‘Silver’ as he became known, first arrived in Minapre as an itinerant worker on the building of the Ocean Road in 1927. They, like him, had a reputation for being wild. Even as small children the Birdsong brothers were renowned vandals, thieves and, by their teens, drug-dealers. Most people in the town gave them a wide berth.
What no-one knew, however, was that running deep in the Bird-song family was an affinity for quarried stone dating back to the days when their ancestor, Luigi Cantoduccelli, was known as the ‘maestro of the tufa’ that arrived on the docks in Messina and Palermo from further north on the Italian peninsula in the early 1800s. Silver had often talked to Ian and Brian about the times he spent working stone with the Maestro before he emigrated. But when the Birdsong brothers opened their little quarry on the Dray Road in early 1977, everyone in Mangowak thought big Martin Elliot’s stone dream had fallen into the wrong hands. What could those two loo
se cannons possibly be thinking?
It wasn’t long before the town’s cynicism was overwhelmed by curiosity. People began to take trips out along the Dray Road to the Birdsong quarry to see what Ian and Brian were up to. And once a few people started having a peek at the new sixty-foot gouge the brothers had cut into the hill, the word quickly got out that Ian and Brian, inexplicably, seemed to know what they were doing.
By the time the ‘sea-change’ real estate boom hit the coast in the mid to late 1990s the blond stone from the Birdsongs’ quarry was the building material everyone dreamt of using but couldn’t afford. It cost $200 per square metre but on comparing its quality with its price in the general market, prospective purchasers of the stone found that it was worth every cent. It was, in fact, mid-Jurassic limestone, of the perfect age and density for use as a building material. It could be handled and fashioned with relative ease and its pinkish ripple had the kind of effect sought after by stonemasons for centuries.
For Dom Khouri, of course, money was no impediment. As soon as he was made aware of the local stone he had no hesitation in deciding to use it. In fact, he couldn’t believe his luck when he visited the Birdsong quarry and found the two black-eyed brothers hefting blond blocks about with what was obviously some kind of innate foreknowledge. Although their names didn’t betray it, Dom Khouri knew straight away that these two lawless looking characters, covered in hair and dust and as wiry as the surrounding eucalypts, were somewhere, back along the line, from his part of the world.
Three days after Dom Khouri’s visit to the quarry, the local builder that he had contracted, Dave Buckley, informed the Bird-song brothers that his client would be needing more stone from their quarry for his ocean-facing wall than they had sold in total for the last two years. Needless to say, Ian and Brian Birdsong got quite a surprise.