by Heather Rose
But had she?
When I hugged her on the sand dune, I was reluctant to let go.
‘You okay?’ Max asked.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘It’s nice to see you.’
‘You too,’ she said.
There were lots of dog walkers on the beach. A few of them glanced at Max, recognised her, gave a little nod, offered a ‘Morning’. Max nodded to each of them in return, said, ‘Good morning,’ and smiled. She is a very good public person.
We’d had years of being the children of our father at all the election events, the debates, the afternoon teas and barbecues. We were highly trained social creatures. But mostly, as we strolled along the shore, I could see that Max was trying to be anonymous. It was, after all, just after 6 am. Hence the beanie and the dark glasses, the grey marle hoodie and navy track pants that somehow consumed her form so that her five-two frame seemed even smaller.
‘Making progress?’ Max asked.
I gave her a bit of a rundown on the groups and clubs and associations of Bruny. The Day Walks Club as opposed to the Bushwalking Club, the Quilting Network and the Knitting Network.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’s straight out of The Life of Brian. You know, the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea.’
‘Quitter!’ we said in unison. You have to be a certain age to really appreciate Monty Python.
‘And that’s before any of the government departments or the political parties and their side groups—unions, business clubs and environmental groups,’ I said.
‘We are passionate people,’ Max said.
‘Present company included,’ I added.
‘Oh, they’ve tamed me, really.’
‘The Labor Party?’ I asked.
She sighed. ‘I’m a pale shadow of my former self. I think compromise is going to kill me.’
We arrived at the boatsheds at the far end of the beach and lost the view of the mountain. The Tasman Bridge was ahead, the godawful casino too—a seventies thermos of concrete and glass that had been emboldened by an eighties conference centre. It still had a revolving restaurant at the top that did a circuit every hour, but the bottom floors were given over to pokies.
Tasmania was the Nevada of Australia: the gambling state. JC’s last election campaign had been funded by millions from the family who owned all the casino infrastructure, the machines and most of the state’s pubs and clubs. There were no disclosure laws in Tasmania. It took years for the election funding figures to come out under freedom of information, and by then the electorate had surrendered to the inevitability of it all.
It nearly crippled Max, that election. And then, somehow, she rallied. ‘I will never watch democracy bought again; I’ll never play the game the same way,’ she’d said on one of our calls.
And now it was all beginning again. I was going to see firsthand the way Max was going to play the game.
We stopped for a moment and took in a narrow beam of light spearing the river. Granny used to tell us there were so many whales back in the first days of Hobart that you could have walked to the far side of the Derwent across their backs. Acres of whales breeding and birthing and then harpooned to light the streets of London. So many barrels of whale oil harvested in Hobart that it caused a glut in the market and nearly crippled the trade. By 1900, the whales in the Derwent were all gone. There hasn’t been a whale sighted in the river for well over a hundred years now.
Max was talking about the bridge. ‘I mean, I asked again and again for the raw data. The studies don’t add up. The metrics are all wrong. The projections are skewed. We had some huge fights, me and JC, on the floor of the house. But it was always a done deal. People love this idea of majority government, but what they forget is that majority governments run roughshod over due process when they don’t like what the people are saying.’
I frowned. ‘That sounds like heresy from a party leader.’
‘It’s always a fight. Why does it have to be a fight, Ace?’
‘Isn’t that just politics?’
‘But why? I mean, there are some basic things we could all agree on.’
‘Like a business plan for the state?’
‘Ha!’ she snorted. ‘I think JC believes the bridge is that. It’s too big a project for us to fight, so I’ve had to go along with it—publicly, at least. But in the party room, I’m the cat among the … well …’
‘Guinea pigs?’ I suggested. And we both chuckled.
‘And the people of Hobart …’ Max paused.
‘Are completely divided on this bridge,’ I said.
‘That they are,’ she sighed.
‘They’re divided on the salmon industry, too,’ I added.
There ought to be a name for the kind of overwhelm that happens when you realise there are too many things to fight. If it’s not environment, then it’s human rights. If it’s not human rights, it’s women’s rights. Law and order. Gun control. Invasive species. Water pollution. Tax reform. Refugee policy. Education. Health care. The list is endless. And the Australian healthcare system looks like a Mercedes-Benz compared to the burned-out jalopy the Americans have. That makes me more angry than anything, living in America. How the poverty is so vicious when so many people have so much. The divide is ugly and nobody wants to talk about it, not really. The poor people keep voting for the people who have everything—as if they honestly believe those people will change their lives for them. Meanwhile, the schools get more broken, people get dumber and sicker, and the rich just keep on getting richer and richer. It’s The Hunger Games, but nobody’s noticed. Australia is probably twenty years behind, but it will get there soon enough.
‘I keep asking myself who wins,’ said Max. ‘Who wins if the bridge is blown up? And it would be easy to think Farris and his supporters. All those shack owners at Adventure Bay who are fighting the hotels and the high-rises. Or the business owners who rely on the ferry traffic down Kettering way.’
‘But whoever did it, didn’t do it properly.’
‘No. They injured it … and an injured bridge creates a reason to enact the foreign labour laws,’ said Max.
We turned and headed back along the beach. I have a feeling there’s another version of me in the future. A relaxed, funnier me. Maybe I do a bit of painting. I have a fabulous lover. I drink peaty whisky, read all the classic novels by the fire and never open a newspaper. I’d like to know that woman. She might sit on the balcony of the Bruny house, looking out over the channel, watching dolphins. Did I want that great bridge to look out on every day? There were worse things to look at. It was a very beautiful design. It was the traffic and what the traffic meant I wasn’t sure about. But I’m not paid to want the bridge or not. ‘So you think JC got some mates?’ I asked very quietly, once the next passing dog walker was out of earshot.
‘No,’ said Max, shaking her head. ‘He’s many things, our brother, but I don’t think he’s that. But I do think, just between you and me, that someone in Canberra might have got busy. I mean it’s crazy, right, but it’s fishy. It’s only damaged enough to need a whole new round of skilled workers to finish it by election day. And they’re clever. It’s not replacing Tasmanian jobs, it’s in addition to—so who can really complain?’
‘Not a year’s worth of damage,’ I said. ‘Not six month’s worth of damage. Just the right amount of damage.’
‘You know, the second bomb that didn’t blow … that would have sunk any hope of having it repaired by the election.’
‘Same if they’d totally severed the suspension cable,’ I said.
‘The thick plottens,’ said Max. An old joke from childhood.
‘Yes, but you know what they say: if you have to choose between conspiracy and stupidity …’ I said.
‘Put your money on stupidity,’ said Max. ‘I know.’
‘There’re no leads at all?’ I asked.
‘You’d probably hear before me,’ she said.
There were boundaries and they were never clear cut.
I reported to JC. I wasn’t free to discuss my findings with Max. How much Max knew, how much I knew, what JC told either of us, what I gleaned working alongside his people and in doing my job, it was a delicate process. To say nothing of the other job I was here to do that nobody knew about.
‘You love a good mystery, Ace. Doesn’t it feel like a mystery? We’re just missing the lead character. We need a heroine. You have the VIP pass. You can pretty much ask any question you like under the guise of “conflict resolution”. You’re perfect for the part.’
I gave her a glance. ‘You don’t think JC would notice if I started asking around?’
‘I think people would feel a whole lot better about the bridge if they felt in their guts that it was all as simple as the government wants them to believe.’
‘You’re working on me,’ I said.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘You’re right. It’s just, having you home, I actually feel for the first time …’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know. Like I’ve got my friend back.’
I nodded. ‘Me too,’ I said.
In paint, that colour on the horizon is called Prussian blue. Prussian blue is also an antidote to heavy metal poisoning, which is ironic because the Derwent River has received the daily outpourings of a zinc smelter just ten minutes north of the city these past hundred years or so, and it’s still going strong. Social licence is a powerful thing. Communities forget sometimes that they hold all the cards. They are the voters. The taxpayers. Society relies on a willingness for us to act as a group. Without the group, there’s anarchy. But within the group, there’s immense power. That’s why JC’s new protest laws were so effective. They deterred not just individuals but whole communities from speaking out.
I thought of Dan Macmillan saying, ‘Us little folk are relying on you big folk to make it work.’
I had wanted to talk more to Dan when he ran me over to Tinderbox in the Zodiac on Saturday morning. But after our initial greeting, neither of us spoke. The noise of the boat, the breeze and something about him had made me silent. He was hard to read, I thought. What had made him that way? His business partner had suicided a year before. That could do it. Deaths like that linger a long time. But it seemed to go deeper with him. I wondered what his story was.
I’d done a little research over the weekend. His company website had a brief bio noting he’d served in the Australian Army and had been deployed in East Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq. Rank—Corporal, 3rd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (1999–2003), Special Air Service Regiment (2003–2011). A paratrooper. There was no photo. No Facebook page or anything else either. No newspaper articles or court records. I did find two photos of him from a few years back with a young woman who claimed him as her brother and the uncle to the two children he was also photographed with. This must be the widow of the partner who suicided. Nothing else. Being ex-military Dan would have knowledge and contacts. But motive? And, more importantly, means? Who had bankrolled the bombing? Who had the means to employ a highly trained team to cripple a bridge in the dead of night and then disappear in a stealth vessel? I wondered if Dan Macmillan was the kind of bloke who might bomb a bridge?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Day after day, my job for JC was to go from meeting to meeting, face to face, person to person across Hobart, up and down the channel, and up and down Bruny. I was sewing together a tapestry of community concerns that might somehow help everyone to coalesce. But these people had already participated in community meetings. Many of them had signed petitions, written letters to the paper, sent emails, organised crowdfunding, sat in the public gallery of parliament, sat on the lawns of Parliament House. All the things anyone against the bridge could do without getting arrested.
In some ways, any attempt on my behalf to meet with them as a group was just inflaming the situation. And the year was drawing to a close. People had Christmas and school holidays on their minds. I went gently. I had lots of one-on-one meetings. I identified key voices within the protest groups. I listened to their stories and assessed opportunities for collaboration and alignment. I ate scones and asked questions. I drank cups of tea and I listened some more. I reflected. I applied my training. And I observed my own inner dialogue. That is often the real barometer of the underlying machinery in conflict. We are all a cocktail of emotions. Even Supreme Court judges voting against a woman’s right to an abortion or for a refugee’s right to a visa are driven by emotion. Understanding exactly what that is, that’s the way to bring about change. But it can be delicate and unpredictable.
The more I listened, the stranger it all got. Here was a huge bit of infrastructure that would join two islands together. But, somehow, despite the enormous investment by the federal and state governments, the jobs it had created and the vision it aspired to—to make Bruny a global destination—Tasmanians weren’t buying it. Forty-three per cent of people in southern Tasmania didn’t support it. The people who disagreed came from across the political spectrum. And for them, because Max and JC were aligned in supporting the bridge, the one person they felt they could rely on, even though it went against the grain, was the bridge’s one political opponent: Amy O’Dwyer, the leader of the Greens.
Amy O’Dwyer was a wide-eyed, dark-haired, articulate beauty. She was warm and vivacious and the latest polls had thirty-five per cent of voters wanting her as the next premier. JC’s support had dropped to thirty-six. Unlike us Colemans, Amy did not come from political stock. Her parents were Americans who had sea-changed to Tasmania in search of a quieter, safer world. Both were employed at the university. Her father was a plankton scientist, her mother taught history. Amy had been Steiner-schooled. She told me all this over dandelion coffee at the only good cafe in the southern town of Cygnet.
Cygnet is the Byron Bay of Tasmania, before Byron Bay got money. There’s no surf, but there’s the hippie culture, an annual folk festival and a Sunday farmers’ market with excellent organics. In the sixties, Cygnet was a farming community of small-to-medium landholdings raising cattle and sheep. Neat white weatherboard homes with large barns and plants in white-painted rubber tyres. When farming became more precarious, a new kind of land lover moved in. White weatherboard had become sunset orange and daffodil yellow, with Tibetan prayer flags fluttering in the breeze across the front verandahs, gardens run to seed and motor vehicles with bumper stickers saying JC: DON’T BELIEVE IN HIM AND NO BRIDGE TO BRUNY. The JC one amused me.
Amy had run for the lower house of the Tasmanian parliament at age eighteen and was the youngest person ever to have been elected in Australia. The national media loved her and had elevated her to pop star status. Everyone said she was bound for the Australian Senate but, so far, she had made no moves in that direction, saying she was a first-generation Tasmanian and this was where she was focused.
‘It’s inconceivable that we’re not all more concerned,’ Amy was saying, severing a vegan caramel slice. ‘I battle with solistalgia all the time. You?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘It sounds uncomfortable.’
‘It is,’ she said. ‘It’s a deep melancholia for the assault the world is experiencing. Our home is fast becoming a place we’re not safe in. And it’s much worse if you’re on some low-lying island in the Pacific. Or a refugee in some camp for the last ten years.’
‘Ah,’ I said.
‘Scientists like my father are the most depressed people on the planet right now. Do you have children?’
‘I do.’
‘What do they do?’ she asked.
‘They’re both in New York. My daughter’s in international law and my son’s in virtual reality.’
‘Virtual reality,’ said Amy. ‘Our grandchildren, maybe even my children, will walk in virtual rainforests and swim over virtual coral reefs. And you know what? There’re a lot of people who don’t think that’s a problem.’
‘So how do you feel about the bridge, Amy?’ I asked.
‘We Greens have been the best strategists for
Tasmania in the past forty years,’ she said. ‘We are the reason Tasmania is experiencing this tourism boom. Because we imagined a clean, green island and it turns out we were right. Clean, green and remote was what people wanted. So it’s a double-edged sword for us. I mean, we’ve been so successful at selling Tasmania as a destination that now we’re being overrun. Our special places are being overrun. Neither of the major parties are doing anything about it. It’s crazy. I’d hoped all these tourists might shame the government into doing more to protect our wild places. But it hasn’t. And the communities down the channel—the bridge is going to mean lots of them close down without the through traffic. No matter what anyone says, people aren’t going to take the ferry when they could drive straight across. It’s like Mount Wellington and the cable car. They promised that the road would stay open, but within eighteen months the developers had convinced the government to close the road. Now we have to pay to get up our own mountain, as if we were the tourists.’
I hadn’t taken the cable car up the mountain yet, but it was visible from just about everywhere in Hobart. And the shuttle buses taking tourists to its base added to the traffic congestion.
‘There are more than two hundred family businesses in the Huon beyond sheep and cattle. Cheese makers, fruit growers, wineries and cafes, the Heritage Centre, art galleries, the Apple Museum, distilleries and breweries. All of them will suffer when the bridge opens. Those people have laboured for years to grow the reputation of their region, to build their brands, and now all that passing trade is going to dry up.’
Amy had the manner of someone who got a lot of airtime. Single child. Media darling.
She continued. ‘There’s a hundred-page feasibility study on the bridge. Have you read it?’
‘I have,’ I said.
‘Then you’ll know it doesn’t assess in any depth the impact on the wider community. How was that allowed to happen?’ she asked.
‘So why is the bridge going ahead?’ I asked. ‘You must have a theory.’
‘Some people think they’re going to give Bruny duty-free status. Make it like the Jersey islands—a tax haven. But I have a feeling they’re going to sell the whole thing to the Chinese. Still, good luck getting anything out of your brother on that, even if you are the one asking.’