The World Beneath

by Cate Kennedy

  ‘There’s sporadic CDMA coverage, but any other kind of mobile won’t be any use to you at all. Apart from telling you the time, that is.’

  Sophie turned back to Rich with dismay.

  ‘That’s not the end of the world, is it?’ he said. ‘You look like he’s told you he has to amputate your arm or something.’

  ‘I won’t be able to call Mum.’

  ‘No. You’ll have to text her before we get started and let her know.’

  She was fumbling for her phone as he spoke, scrolling and checking for messages automatically. They’re addicted to the things, he thought. It’ll do her so much good, getting away from all that for a few days.

  ‘Ready to hop on the bus?’ he asked her, and she nodded, preoccupied, her thumb punching out some incomprehensible code.

  ‘Good luck,’ said the ranger. ‘It’s a brilliant experience, just stay safe.’

  ‘We will. Thanks,’ he answered.

  ‘Do you have a lightweight torch and spare batteries?’

  ‘Yes, we do. Thanks.’

  Then onto the bus with all the other walkers in their new gear, listening to a babel of German and Dutch and English in accents he tried to place — Canadian, Scottish, Kiwi — then efficiently deposited in the car park at Ronny Creek, which let them step straight onto the famous track, not a worn-earth track as Rich had imagined, but no-nonsense duckboards augmented with a strip of non-slip mesh. Signs and maps everywhere, and a brisk blustering northerly wind sharpening up his senses. His pack feeling suddenly real now that he was about to carry it further than the length of an airport terminal, feeling like a serious weight pulling at his shoulders. And people everywhere he looked, Sophie and him just two in a giant processed conveyor belt of humanity all shouldering their own packs and pulling up their socks, all pitting themselves against what was up that track.

  He actually heard one guy say to another, ‘Well, up and over!’, as if it was a fusillade of enemy gunfire they were facing out there. Then the shuttle bus reversed and took off in an acrid cloud of diesel fumes and another one pulled into its vacated space. There was a brief silence.

  ‘Well,’ he said dryly to Sophie. ‘Here we are, in the great uncharted wilderness.’

  ‘I guess so,’ she replied, with a shrug that showed she was as flummoxed as he was.

  ‘Care for some trail mix?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  He tried to time it, waiting to get started on that wide, safe boardwalk in a quiet moment when nobody else was near them. It was like trying to step onto a city pavement. Onto one of those moving airport walkways crowded with fellow passengers.

  ‘You ready to get started then?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course I am.’

  Still he hesitated, wanting the crowds to disperse and leave them alone.

  ‘Do you want to go first?’ he asked, and she shrugged again, shyly diffident.

  ‘No, you.’

  The raw, untried stiffness between them, unyielding as his boots. He gave her a reassuring grin and set off.

  Later it struck him that they could have started out walking side by side, across that first generous section of wooden planks. It just didn’t seem to occur to him at the time. Or to his daughter either, watchfully, warily acquiescent behind him.

  Sandy couldn’t help staring, under lowered lids, at the woman on her left, supported now by two workshop leaders who were murmuring soothing words, trying to calm her down. If she was having a past-life regression, Sandy thought, she’d regressed into someone having an asthma attack. Or perhaps a Goddess worshipper finding herself about to be burned at the stake.

  Focus, focus, focus. Who did she identify with, and how could she enter the sacred inner space to channel the Goddess’s voice calling her to offer spiritual guidance?

  ‘Have you received any messages this morning?’ one of the facilitators had asked her in the break, and she had answered, ‘I’m not sure, I’ll just check’, scrabbling for her mobile phone, and the woman had cried ‘Too funny!’ and laughed delightedly, clapping her hands as if Sandy had made a witty joke. Laughed for much longer than was necessary, actually, since it was an honest mistake.

  Sandy had tried laughing it off herself, but the message from Sophie (hey there wont b reception on walk till Mon talk then) had wiped the smile off her face pretty fast. There was nothing she could do but focus on deprogramming herself of this anxiety and accepting what was clearly a lesson for her in relinquishing control.

  She covertly studied the moaning and writhing woman, and she tried, she honestly tried, to empty her mind and clear it of judgement, but frankly if that woman was in a shopping mall, or in a car park, or her workplace, or a bank queue ... in fact, if she was anywhere other than at a workshop endeavouring to awaken the Divine Feminine, someone would be calling an ambulance by now. Honestly, if she knew how ridiculous she looked, said a small but withering voice from the back of her head. Janet. Great. Don’t even start, Sandy thought despairingly. Shut up — I can’t hear the Goddess.

  ‘I honour the challenges of my past, when I have allowed myself to go deeply into the strength of my inner core,’ said the workshop leader.

  She closed her eyes. This was better, challenges of the past, and it was much more comfortable lying on her back with a cushion under her head.

  Strength of inner core, yes, something to be honoured. She’d been to prison for her beliefs, after all. OK, remand, whatever you wanted to call it. They were still locked up for a night while they waited for their court appearance. She remembered her apprehension, as they’d climbed out of the police van, slowly, slyly evaporating into a strange kind of exhausted, reckless triumph. In fact, they’d all felt high as kites. After they found out they were entitled to it, all the blockaders had asked to be given writing paper with the ‘Risdon Prison’ letterhead on it, so they could write to as many people as possible to tell them where they were and what had happened. There was a rush for that paper.

  ‘And with this inner core of strength I will now empower myself to heal and nurture my present,’ she heard, but the workshop room was drifting away now, growing faint and unnecessary.

  Jail wasn’t like she’d anticipated. In fact, secretly she felt just a little deflated, like she’d been psyching herself up for something gruelling that didn’t happen.

  The police, for instance, processing the women as they were registered, asking them all what they wanted for dinner. Then a hot shower, clean clothes, prison issue or not, and a hot cup of tea, followed by a real bed with sheets — after camping at Strahan in the mud and rain, it all felt a bit surreal.

  ‘I’m a vegetarian,’ she said to the policewoman taking meal orders.

  ‘No problem,’ the woman had answered cheerfully, and she’d felt, again, the odd, thwarted sensation of having been outgunned. Still momentous, though. This would be something to tell her children, she told herself — jailed as an environmental activist. Something to tell her children, while somehow keeping it secret from her mother, forever.

  There was a lot of discussion and sharing that first night, she remembered. Some singing started up at lights out, but she felt too tired to join in — and besides, secretly, she was getting a tiny bit tired of those one-size-fits-all solidarity songs: Onwards righteous Greenies, marching into Strahan ... She was already hoarse with singing, anyway, and it wasn’t as if she needed support to keep her spirits up. Her spirits had never felt higher.

  The next day, though. This was her favourite memory, the secret comfort food she could bring out and savour when she felt hungry for something now, twenty-something years later. It was a hot morning — which was a turn-up for Tasmania — and after they had a sharing in the quadrangle where she could feel the eyes of the other curious prisoners on them as they hugged, there was nothing to do but mill around the yard, talking.

  She had requested her writing paper and had six sheets ready to write to someone, but sitting in the sun made her soporific. She couldn’t remember now wh
ich protestor it had been who’d had the idea, but she’d turned to the others with a grin and said, ‘Let’s take off our tops and sunbake.’

  Within minutes they had pulled off their sweaters and shirts and bras, Sandy included. She could feel a new atmosphere in the air suddenly, as if there was a snake in the yard, and she opened her eyes as a shadow fell across their seated bodies. A warder, or whatever they were called, and she was looking right at her.

  ‘I’ll have to ask you to put your tops back on,’ the warder said.

  Sandy felt the other prisoners listening, to see how activists trained in non-violence would respond. She felt a sudden surge of responsibility — everyone else in the group was deferring to her, letting her answer. ‘Why?’ she said politely.

  The woman put a hand across her forehead, she remembered, to shade her eyes. And to get a better look at her.

  ‘It’s against regulations.’

  Speak pleasantly and clearly, when you challenge authority, Sandy recalled from the training.

  ‘Can we see the regulations?’ she asked, and a delighted, suppressed laugh went around the yard among the other prisoners. Even now, remembering it thrilled her. Because there weren’t any regulations, of course. She’d asked exactly the right question. Impossible to describe the triumph bubbling up as the warder gave an exasperated shrug and turned away, shaking her head.

  And then, heady exhilaration skating through her as one by one some of the other women prisoners, grinning, started taking off their shirts too, and their bras, and settling in next to them.

  ‘I reckon I’m going to be a Greenie for a day,’ one said.

  It was a great moment for sisterhood and for solidarity, Sandy recalled later at reunions and parties. It was exactly as the information book at Strahan had suggested: Non-violence is dependent on reason, imagination and discipline. Victory should not be in terms of victory by one side over another, but victory over injustice.

  It was almost like a planned action, like everyone in authority could suddenly see there was no stopping them. And she’d made it happen, knowing just what to say at the right moment, not losing her cool. She’d been the one.

  Holy shit, it was straight uphill. They’d passed through some buttongrass plains, a bit of rainforest, and suddenly the path had gone vertical. He was knackered within the first hour, not that he let that show, and he couldn’t believe how difficult it was, trying to climb up rocky inclines with twenty kilos of solid weight on your back. Just when he thought they were over the worst there came one bit — he’d actually felt an adrenaline bolt of real fear here — where they had to scramble across a dolorite rockface on the side of a mountain, hand over hand, wedging their boots into the rock, gusting wind headbutting into their faces, and Rich wished fervently he was back with the wooden duckboard and the safety mesh. There was even a chain installed on the steepest sections.

  Before he’d come Rich had pored over photos of mirror-still lakes and pandani rising out of mist — nobody had said anything about pulling yourself straight up the side of a bloody mountain with a chain. Some small part of him hoped desperately that Sophie would grab his arm when they stopped for lunch and tell him she’d changed her mind, it was too hard and she wanted to go back on the day-walk loop. He’d be solicitous, understanding; book them both in to Cradle Mountain Lodge for a few days and kick back. Bond over a game of Scrabble or two.

  Just as he was thinking this, she overtook him. He watched her legs working metronomically up that mountainside, never hesitating, and his heart sank like a stone. Sure she was thin, but so were those Ethiopian marathon runners who wiped the floor with everyone else at the Olympics.

  Stopping for photos and a breather, then up again. Endlessly up, with the pack slumped on his back like a dead animal and his knees feeling full of hot gravel.

  ‘That’s the steepest part of the whole track,’ a guy at Marion’s Lookout commented as Rich staggered sweatily to the summit, his breath heaving in his chest.

  ‘Is it? Thank Christ for that.’

  ‘Unbelievable view, though.’

  He looked up and out. Of course it was an unbelievable view: they were 1223 metres above sea level on a pre-Cambrian glacier; what did you expect? But he still took the lens cap off his camera and aimed. Dove Lake far below looked dark as a pool of ink. What was it with humans and their insatiable desire to get up high to look at bodies of water underneath them? His eye was caught by a black bird, a crow, alighting carelessly on a dead tree nearby. He turned the camera lens to it, but it spread its wings, eyeing him, and disappeared over the edge in a careless swoop.

  ‘Lovely view,’ he conceded. He’d just about had a heart attack, coming over the ridge of the crater, the exposed rock plunging on either side of him. Sudden vertigo. Scanning anxiously for Sophie up ahead, and seeing her doggedly tramping in a line of other walkers, he’d been sidelined by a complicated disbelief. He hadn’t expected her to be clinging onto his hand, but still. You wouldn’t put money on it, looking at her, that she’d take the mountain quite so literally in her stride. Wobbling over the crater, he’d taken his life in his hands and paused to get off a couple of shots of it — the tiny figures dwarfed by the vast wilderness in all directions — but some idiot had spotted him, and waved. Thanks, moron. He had recapped his camera lens, and laboured on.

  ‘Telepathic communication with your spirit guide,’ intoned the facilitator, ‘is a spiritual enfoldment, a pathway towards our truest work as we are gifted with the talents of insight and intuitiveness.’

  Sandy floated, dreamy. The first time she’d read about the Blockade, she knew with absolute certainty that she had to go. Someone in her house had been to a fundraiser for the Wilderness Society, a film screening about the river and the Tasmanian government’s plans to dam it, and they’d brought back a leaflet that Sandy had idly picked up. She’d kept that leaflet for years.

  People will soon be in the region of the Franklin River preparing to defend it and thereby keep it safe and inviolate. They will cut their ties with their normal life, their jobs, family, and customary pursuits and will stay in the South-West as long as is necessary. Theirs is a peaceful non-violent strategy and will result in HEC work (vandalism) being curtailed and delayed. It will focus world attention on the Franklin and South-West Tasmania. We know that you’d love to be with us. But if you can’t ... there’s no need to feel left out.

  You would have had to be living on the moon, she recalled, not to sense the rising pitch of emotion surrounding the dam as the uni year finished and the imminent Blockade began to dominate the news. Fifteen thousand people marching in Melbourne on the Walk for Wilderness. The federal government announcing it would not intervene to stop the dam. Support rally after support rally until the area was officially declared a World Heritage Area and then it was never off the news; it was a constant hum on the wires. Seeing the headline: Premier Warns Franklin Guerillas. She, and everyone else she knew, writing No Dams on by-election ballot papers. She wanted to go. She could feel the pull of it, like a current. Then in the new year, two hundred people who’d already been arrested were remanded but refused bail in solidarity. They will cut their ties with their normal life, their jobs, family and customary pursuits and will stay in the South-West as long as necessary. Heroes.

  The nuns at Sandy’s school had always gazed fixedly over the class during Religious Education, foolish apologetic smiles on their faces, and talked about vocations. Sandy had sat like everyone else, face blank with scorn and boredom. But now she felt fired with something conscientious, unavoidable. A crusade and a calling, and anyone with a shred of ideological courage was down there already. She’d bought a ticket and arrived in mid-January, one of fifty people a day pouring in by then. It was possible, you could cut your ties with your normal life, and become the thing you believed in. She was an activist, she thought firmly, ready to step up and testify, even if it meant stopping a bulldozer. Soaked in true faith. She would step off her safe shore, and be willingly s
wept away.

  It was a perfect small world they created at Greenie Acres. A microcosm of the way society could be. That’s why she allowed herself to sob openly as she stood on the wharf singing and cheering for the other protestors, and why she cried again after the police marshalled them all together at the Kelly Basin Road, the day she was arrested herself. It was because on one level she already knew: this was it. This was as full as a heart could get, and she would never feel this kind of euphoria again.

  Turned out she’d been right too. She’d been searching for that first sweet hit ever since. At the beginning the feeling of it coursing through her system was still there, magically replenishing itself in those early months after they came back from Tasmania. First the election, and the stunning idea that if you could change the minds of enough people, you could vote out one party who’d let you down, and elect another who shared your ideals. The new prime minister stood on the dais and his first words were, ‘The dam will not be built’, and Sandy remembered a roar going up, and dancing with her housemates, all of them with arms round each other, high kicking like cancan dancers, engulfed in a wave of triumphant joy.

  Then the Supreme Court decision that overturned her trespass case so that all charges were dropped, when she’d gone to another rally and miraculously, out of the blue as they were assembling at the Wilderness Society building, she had spotted Rich.

  That kind of life-changing synchronicity wouldn’t happen now, Sandy thought wistfully. There was no way you’d ever find yourself on a street corner these days and catch sight of a person through a sheer twist of chance. And you’d never be able to take that as a sign, the universe stacking up all these odds to show you who you were meant to be with. Because now you’d be in mobile contact, you’d just text each other (r u here? c u in frt TWS :)) and it would all just seem ordinary and predictable. You’d be deaf or immune to those signals, there’d be no room for the magic to happen.

  Back then, it was fate. They’d gone together to a huge spontaneous party when the High Court ruling came down, when they knew they’d won and nothing could change that; history was going to show who owned the moral victory and always had. Let the Franklin flow, let the wild lands be, the wilderness should be strong and free, from Kutakina to the south-west shore, has to be something worth fighting for ...