by Heather Rose
‘How dare they film us!’ said Singh. ‘At every festival or public event, they’re there. They don’t have my permission.’
‘They don’t have to,’ said Farris. ‘And they’ve been pushing the foreign labour laws for years. Now, they’ve got them. The perfect scenario. It was always only a matter of time. And Tasmanians—your brother and his cronies especially—are too stupid to see it.’
Australia had never allowed foreign labour en masse before. But now it was brand-new law. Ironically, it had been the far-right White Nation Party that had supported the legislation to pass it through parliament. They’d been promised more funding of apprenticeships, a promise that may or may not be kept depending on the outcome of the next election. A new era was dawning for Australia. Globalisation of labour had arrived. Not via the internet with Paypal, Indian web developers and online shopping, but with a foreign workforce building infrastructure right here in sleepy Tasmania.
It was not going to be easy, managing the media around that. Racism was sure to rear its ugly head. But, then, humans doing anything together is not easy. Why is that?
‘So the Chinese orchestrated this?’ I asked.
Singh nodded. Lennox was looking uncomfortable.
‘The Chinese Communist Party to be precise. They’re playing a long game and we’re sitting ducks,’ said Farris. ‘We’re playing chequers and they’re playing Go.’
‘You know all this happened in the wake of the visit from the Chinese president?’ said Singh.
‘The bombing?’
‘No,’ said Farris, ‘the announcement of the bridge. The Chinese president came, and within twelve months we have a massive increase in Chinese investment in hotels and real estate. They even paid to extend the runway at the airport so planes can fly direct between Hobart and China. Then the federal government suddenly comes up with two billion dollars for a bridge to nowhere made from Chinese steel. And Tasmania signs up to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. That’s how your brother is getting the backing to keep his spending spree going.’
‘Ask your little brother about the Chinese,’ Farris continued. ‘It’s a bit like the Bin Laden family being flown out of New York after September 11. No-one dared ask the Saudis what they were doing sheltering the fountainhead of al-Qaeda. Still don’t. And no-one asks about the Chinese here. Here it’s all good for business. They own the fish farms, the dairy farms, the wind farms. Woolnorth on the west coast, our biggest wind farm, was paid for by taxpayers but was sold to the Chinese. Now it’s owned by the Chinese government. Not just a Chinese company—the Chinese government. Because we need the cash. We’ve got a debt-laden Ponzi scheme that’s meant to fund public service retirees and we need the cash. You can’t sell the dams; that’s legislated, at least for now. But you can sell the wind farms. What were the terms? Don’t know. Commercial-in-confidence, of course. It’s a joint venture between two governments, and governments have to protect their commercial position. Not.’
Maggie Lennox said, ‘I do not, personally, feel that we have anything to fear from the Chinese. I believe that China is simply doing what any powerful nation does. What the US has done, and the British before that. They are investing in their allies. I know that’s new and hard to accept for some people, that we have become an ally of China, but we live in a global world. I’m much more concerned about what’s behind this investment from the federal government’s perspective. That’s where I think we should be focusing our attention. And the state government is simply doing their bidding. Possibly without understanding the larger picture.’
We are pawns, I thought. We’re all pawns.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The house at Bruny was a tiny jewel box of light in the afternoon sun. It still had its 1940s weatherboard exterior but now it was painted a Greek sea blue. Inside, this ode to Mediterranean summers continued with polished floors and blue and white rugs. On the walls were framed posters of balconies overlooking the Aegean Sea and flowers in terracotta pots. The kitchen still had the original fireplace and a door to the balcony. Stephanie had suggested the deck be widened during the renovations and returned around the house by the dining room. The effect was a length of view up and down the channel and across into North-West Bay. The afternoon sea breeze was in and the water was whipped with white tips.
In the fridge there was beer, three sorts of cheese, fig paste, white wine and a jar of caramelised onions. In the cupboard was pasta, pasta sauce, tea bags, long-life milk, red wine, dry biscuits and sardines. In the freezer I found bread and my favourite Homer Hudson ice cream. In the bathroom were blue-and-white-striped towels and good shampoo, conditioner and body wash. Stephanie had said I’d need almost nothing, and she was right. On the back of the bedroom door there were two dressing-gowns.
Wishful thinking, I thought.
When Granny, our father’s mother, died, she left me and Max and JC her house: a little white cottage just off the road into Dennes Point. This was the house our father had grown up in, before he went to school in town to complete his education, boarding with an aunt. Our father’s father died in a work accident when our dad was twelve. Fell from a roof. He’d been a carpenter and an early representative for the unions. When JC and I were born, Granny had come to live with us.
‘Well, I did it to help your mother, of course,’ Granny told me later, when I was a teenager. ‘I mean, you were twins!’ Looking back, I think she did it so that we actually got the kind of mothering she believed in. I imagine Granny could see from the moment she set eyes on the very young widowed Hyacinth and her little baby Maxine that Hyacinth Coleman was not the maternal type.
Granny had a separate flat in the garden of our house. It was Granny I remember holding the bowl to catch the vomit when I was sick, teaching me to knit and sew, playing cards with us by the fire, listening to my woes about schoolyard bullies and incomprehensible maths.
Once a year, each winter, she went on a holiday. She’d take bus trips across the Nullarbor or up to the Great Barrier Reef, bringing us back bright bits of coral and seashells. I remember the house feeling very empty without her.
During the summer holidays, Granny took us home to Bruny with her. ‘Give your parents a break,’ she’d say. Dad often came with us. Mother rarely. It was here we got to run wild. Barefoot for weeks on end, so that lacing our feet into new shoes at the beginning of the school year was awful for the first few days.
Granny died when JC and I were seventeen. The first person I had loved and lost. Our father insisted we wait until we had all turned thirty before any decisions were made about the house. He said it was smart to keep it as an investment. So it was rented. By the time I was thirty, I was long gone from Tasmania, resident of New York, with an undergrad in politics from NYU and a PhD in international relations from Columbia, an intern at the UN thinking I was going to contribute to world peace.
JC was in the UK working as a lawyer at a regional firm, and then he moved to a London practice. Max had gone into nursing, specialising in paediatrics, and was working in Melbourne at the Alfred. She became involved with the Australian Nursing Federation.
This was what happened to Tasmanian children. A lot of us left the island in search of bigger dreams. And then, sometimes, we came back. This contingent living interstate and overseas was known by economists and sociologists as the Tasmanian diaspora. We were the intellectual wealth that lived away from the island and, if the island was lucky, one day returned.
JC came home at thirty-six because he’d met a Tasmanian girl called Stephanie, only twenty-four, in London. They decided that if they were going to have children, Tasmania was the place they wanted to raise them. They were married, and a few years after that, he and Stephanie produced Ella and Grace, now thirteen and ten.
I remembered the short letter I’d received from our father in his measured cursive hand.
Your brother has decided to run for parliament. For the Liberal Party. I have wished him well. I have explained that due to our political his
tory, my family’s values before me, and my values, I am sorry I cannot campaign for him. I have, however, I remind myself, given him the benefit of the Coleman name. Certainly from the media attention his campaign is getting, he seems to have no shortage of support.
‘Times have changed,’ JC said, when asked by the media how he could reject his father’s politics and switch sides. ‘Economics isn’t what it was back then. Nowadays we need Tasmanian families to flourish, not just survive. I have enormous respect for my father and all he achieved during his time in parliament. But the Labor Party hasn’t improved the lives of ordinary Tasmanians. Tasmania needs to play a bigger game if we are going to meet the future well prepared.’
The electorate bought it. He was made shadow Minister for Growth and Development. Three years in, he was party leader. At the next election, almost eight years ago, his party won government after Labor’s long run of sixteen years in power. The Tasmanian people had, it seemed, finally forgiven the Liberals for all the corruption around gambling and forestry. Or simply forgotten. Not that the Labor Party had been much better. There had been corruption on both sides.
‘Why is politics these days so often the choice between the lesser of two inadequates?’ Max had asked when JC became leader of the Liberals. ‘I’m so proud of him, but you know JC—he’s going to be impossible if someone good doesn’t emerge on the other side.’
By then she was the head of the Australian Nursing Federation and a fixture in the media. So Max came home too, bringing all her nursing activism with her. Our father doorknocked every day for a year for her. Max was elected in his old seat for the Labor Party the same election JC became Premier.
A very public fall from grace six years ago by the then Labor leader (he was discovered to have taken bribes to buy his support for tourism development in national and state parks) saw Max made leader of the Opposition. Nothing like putting in a woman to clean up the mess, she had said at the time. They became serious rivals, JC and Max, and yet somehow they kept turning up for Sunday lunch, for Christmas Eve, for Good Friday fish and January barbecues. How it worked, exactly, nobody really knew, but Dad, in his calls to me in New York every Sunday without fail, told me Max still looked at JC the way older sisters who love their younger brothers look at them. And he said he’d seen JC put his arm around Max while turning the sausages at the barbecue, and they’d laughed together like two comrades who knew the war would be over one day. This had heartened our father no end, thinking we could all still get along.
‘You’re family a long time,’ he used to say. Before he started quoting Shakespeare.
Once they were both back in Tasmania, Max fell for a cottage at the Bay of Fires on the far north-east tip of Tasmania, a series of beaches with pink granite rocks and aquamarine sea. JC said he and Stephanie had their hearts set on building a holiday house at Spring Beach, midway up the east coast. Which, after the divvying up, left the little weatherboard cottage on Bruny to me.
It wasn’t worth much at the time. It would have been a better investment to sell it and buy up the east coast, too. Land prices up there had skyrocketed two hundred per cent over the next five years. But I’d always loved the Bruny house. I loved the view. I loved the memories of Granny and summers and being free.
About five years ago, Stephanie suggested we set up the Bruny house as a short-stay business. The long-term tenants had given notice and she thought it would be a good earner with the ever-increasing tourist trade. She sent me quotes for restumping, rewiring, a bathroom upgrade and a new deck. The photos she sent showed the house I knew so well. It still had the patterned wallpaper, a wood stove in the kitchen and an outdoor toilet. Stephanie organised builders, painters, plumbers. Sorted new carpet and furniture. It created a friendship between us, all that to and fro of ideas and decisions on colours and costs. And Stephanie wouldn’t accept a cent for her troubles, for all the hours she put into the cottage.
‘That’s what family is, Astrid,’ she’d said. ‘We look out for one another. Heaven knows, we need to do that more than most families. Besides, it’s fun. JC won’t let me do anything else on the place at Spring Beach, so I might as well use my new-found knowledge on your place.’
Just after the renovations were completed, the bridge project was announced. There had been a steady flow of journalists, engineers, architects and bridge enthusiasts looking for an Airbnb in a convenient location to the bridge ever since.
‘Did you know?’ I’d asked Stephanie. ‘When you suggested the renovation, did you know about the bridge?’
‘Of course not,’ Stephanie said. It wasn’t a video call, so it was impossible to tell if her face said something different from her voice. We are a political family through and through. She knew how to play the game, I was sure.
When she got the news I was coming home, she’d cancelled the forward bookings.
‘Of course you must stay with us, in the downstairs apartment. It’s right by the pool and quiet. Much nicer than a rental. And the girls will love the chance to get to know you better. But I’m sure you’ll also need to be over on Bruny quite a bit of the time, too. With the queue these days, you can wait for hours for the ferry. This way you have the option of staying on the island. And there’s nothing like being part of the community.’
As I said, she’s a good woman, our Stephanie.
‘I’m thinking I’ll spend the night on Bruny,’ I’d said to her last night when we’d discussed today’s itinerary. ‘I’m keen to see all you’ve done to the house.’
‘I’m keen for you to see it too,’ she said. ‘You’ve haven’t had a moment to catch your breath. It’s all ready for you. Just take PJs and a change of clothes.’
‘How will I get back?’ I asked.
‘Are you sure you want to come back tomorrow, not Sunday?’
‘I need to get back,’ I said. JC had given me an office on his floor in the executive building. There was a lot to get underway.
‘JC’s PA can organise someone to collect you from Dennes Point pier and run you across in a boat and a car could wait for you at Tinderbox and drive you to town. If you left Bruny at eleven am you’d be back in town by midday. Would that work?’
‘Easy,’ I said. ‘I could get a rental,’ I added.
‘I think you’ve got enough on your plate without remembering to drive on the left side of the road,’ she laughed. ‘Wait till you’ve settled in. And keep your phone on in case there’s problems with the weather.’
‘Last time I was here, there was no mobile coverage up that end of the island,’ I said.
‘All that’s changed with the bridge. Telstra put up a new tower.’ I sighed. ‘I used to think it was the only place in the world I could be unavailable.’
Stephanie nodded. ‘Those were the days,’ she said.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I lay on the bed and took in the curtains, the lamps, the wooden dresser, the view beyond the window into the garden with gum trees dropping leaves in the lazy afternoon breeze. It was almost 4 pm. I had started at 6 am.
I took out my phone and sent Stephanie a text. Thank you. It’s fabulous. Granny would be amazed! I love it!
I sent JC a text too. Met with Farris, Singh and Lennox. And mgt group earlier. All good. Talk tomorrow.
Then I turned off my phone and closed my eyes. I thought about the meeting with the Bruny Friends Group. I could hear Jenny Singh saying, ‘It’s the death of a way of life.’ I’d heard that one a few times. The death of a way of life. Fishermen, subsistence farmers, forest dwellers. A lot of violence these days had its genesis in some kind of environmental disaster if you looked. My career had been spent trying to help people come to terms with the new. Give them some sense of empowerment that wasn’t attached to the need for guns and missiles. But weapons were the biggest international trade—all across the Baltic, the Middle East, throughout Asia and Africa. More than one hundred billion dollars was spent on weapons every year. If people could get their hands on weapons, they generally d
idn’t see the need for conversation. It was my job to remind them.
Who exactly had stood to gain from the bombing of the bridge? Officially I wasn’t here to solve the crime but, as I said, there are things my family do not know about me. Other roles I’m employed to play. It was highly likely that someone on my meeting list over the coming week had been involved.
Had the BFG been infiltrated by the kind of radicals that would do that? Did Farris really know his fellow activists? And if it had come from within the BFG, what else might they do? Assassinate someone? JC would have to be at the top of the list.
The nationwide media attention JC was getting four months out from an election was priceless. Yes, he’d gained a lot from this bombing. But what about the damage? Was it pure coincidence that the bridge could be repaired by March, but only with the help of skilled foreign labour?
The police divers had also found a bomb on the base of the other tower. It hadn’t detonated; infiltrated by sea water. Had that been a coincidence too?
The investigators were saying the charges were detonated remotely, probably from a computer or a mobile phone. Apparently the music festival bombing outside Paris last summer had been activated in Libya. The call to detonate the bridge could have come from anywhere. Whoever they’d been, they’d done enough.
The bombing suited the federal government even more than JC. Mining companies had been lobbying for foreign labour laws to bring in cheap mine workers in the Pilbara for years. The federal government had needed a project of national significance to find a way around the CFMEU, the union Alec Brankovic represented here in Tasmania. Now, suddenly, they had their chance. They’d swooped and gotten themselves a little test case running in Tasmania.
I thought back to the afternoon JC had rung, asking me to come home.
‘The Bruny Bridge. Someone’s just blown it up.’
‘What?’
‘They blew up the bridge, Ace. It’s a fucking nightmare. I just got off the phone from telling Max,’ he said. ‘In her official capacity, of course,’ he added wryly. My siblings …