The Tower Mill

by James Moloney

  ‘I’ll only be in Brisbane for two days and Friday’s out of the question,’ he said, when finally I got through at Diane’s. His nasal drone, which I’d become used to, seemed harried and I had to be careful not to press too hard.

  ‘When do you fly back to Melbourne?’

  ‘Sunday morning, early. If you want to meet, it has to be Saturday.’

  ‘No, I can’t. My husband’s coming home for the weekend.’

  Mike and I hadn’t been together for five weeks. The weekend was off limits.

  John was firm. ‘I can’t change my plans. Do you have anything new since last time?’

  ‘Very little.’ I sighed into the phone. ‘The police are a closed shop. Won’t even talk to me now. Ignore me at the counter if I go to Makerston Street.’

  ‘Did you expect any different?’ said John. ‘They’re hardly going to let you see personnel files. For all they know, you’re an ex-wife chasing maintenance from one of their own.’

  ‘Yes, it’s a boys’ club all right. I was able to confirm that Dolan’s in north Queensland, Townsville, in fact. He’s in the cib now.’

  ‘How’d you find out?’

  ‘Rang every police station until he turned up,’ I said proudly.

  He laughed. ‘I’ve done the same thing myself. Sometimes there’s no other way. Not something they tell you at uni I’ll bet. Are you getting much out of what they’re teaching you?’

  I had switched my degree to Arts, where I could major in journalism, something Mike didn’t know about yet. I was planning to break the news on the weekend.

  ‘I still can’t confirm where Dolan was posted in 1971,’ I said, ‘or even that he was one of the country coppers bussed in for the protests. All I’ve got is the letter that doesn’t even tell me his full name. What I really need to know is who wrote that letter ’cause he’s the only one who can give evidence.’

  ‘Evidence. You’re getting well ahead of yourself, lady. Your chance of seeing him charged is next to Buckley’s.’

  ‘Did you bring your notes with you?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, but I thought you said Saturday is no good.’

  ‘It’s not,’ I confirmed quickly. ‘Look, John, do you think you could—’

  ‘They’re not leaving my possession. I’m sorry, some of what I have isn’t legal, the way I acquired it, I mean. I can’t take any chances.’

  Obermayer had been a treasure trove, especially when I’d struggled at first to uncover anything on my own. A contact in that file had led me to the name Dolan. Without quite knowing how, I made a decision.

  ‘I’ll meet you on Saturday then. Is eleven all right?’

  ‘No, make it noon, in the foyer of the Tower Mill Hotel.’

  Mike left Bindy on the dot of three that Friday, stopped only for petrol and even then it was after ten before he arrived. In the morning, I woke to find Tom already crawling over his daddy, who had miraculously turned up in the night. Later, he sat like a prince between us while we shared breakfast in bed. Helen brought the weekend papers down for us, and between the talking and the tickling, Mike’s mouth must have grown tired of smiling.

  I felt awful, even as I played the good wife. And it wasn’t an act, in any case, but all the while I kept wondering how I was going to tell him I had to duck off for an hour. I gave in to cowardice all morning, and more than once decided to skip the meeting with Obermayer.

  Then Mike piped up, ‘How about a picnic in New Farm Park?’ and I was telling him it was a special thing for uni, had to be that day, it would only be an hour. Still plenty of time for New Farm Park.

  It didn’t sound so bad when I couched it that way and he waved me off with Tom in his arms and no more than a bemused look on his face.

  But John was late at the hotel and made up for it by replaying the police charge in forensic detail. I showed him the route Mike and I had followed, guided by the garden bed we’d scrambled through to escape the batons.

  ‘It was utter panic.’

  ‘I know,’ said John, who hadn’t been at the demo but had interviewed many who had. ‘Your lot fanned out. Any direction that let you get away.’

  Eventually, we reached the path and the rusty handrails. I’d been there many times, but I still didn’t know exactly where Terry had lain for so many hours in the darkness.

  We returned to the foyer of the hotel, where John opened the file of photographs he’d collected. I pored over pictures that hadn’t made it into the Courier-Mail, scribbling note after note onto a Spirex pad. I’d been among the crowd that night and had my own pictures filed away within synapses and ganglions, but they were nothing like these. The photographer had snapped shots from among the police lines and regularly aimed his camera across the road at the protestors, showing me for the first time what bystanders might have seen, had there been any.

  And of course there were, thousands of them, who opened their newspapers the next morning to see photographs carefully selected to suggest it was the protesters who’d turned violent.

  I lingered on images of the stark police lines. ‘So many. I don’t remember there being so many.’

  John rifled through until he found one in particular. ‘You must remember these ones, though?’

  It showed the rank of makeshift riot police in motorcycle helmets. Their uniforms appeared black in the monochrome, which made the helmets stand out even more under the street lamps. They were assembled shoulder to shoulder and gun-barrel straight as though lined up for review, each solid, tall and deeply menacing.

  ‘Why weren’t we more afraid?’ I murmured.

  ‘Because you never thought they’d charge, that’s why. You’d come to shout and wave your signs, part protest, part street party. Everyone I spoke to had the same story. You hadn’t read the tea leaves, any of you. Overreaction. The whole week was an overreaction. That was going to be a chapter heading in my book.’

  ‘Book?’

  ‘I thought there might be a book in it. That’s why I did the extra interviews. Same with these photos and all my notes.’

  ‘Are you going to write it?’

  ‘Bit late now,’ he said, sounding defeated. ‘And besides, in Melbourne nobody gives a rat’s arse what happens up here.’ He held my gaze for a moment and I sensed a decision being weighed behind his eyes.

  ‘That’s not the main reason, though, is it?’ I said, hoping he’d come out with it.

  He shook his head. ‘The political climate isn’t right. I thought it would work because there was a shift going on and any fool could see Whitlam was going to win in ’72. Time for a change and all that. It was a good slogan, so I thought it was time for a book that showed up the old crowd as out of touch, and those Springbok protests were a classic example. My book would sell all over the country to people hungry for change and maybe it would get a healthy political cycle going up here again.’

  ‘You’re forgetting about the gerrymander. The cards are marked against Labor.’

  ‘You can’t blame the gerrymander for what happened last December. Labor would have been trounced anyway. As for my book, well, I gave it away because I couldn’t get to the heart of what’s going on up here.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He glanced at his watch, prompting me to do the same.

  ‘Shit! I have to go,’ I blurted out.

  He shrugged and said, ‘If you’re interested, there’s a lecturer at uq who can explain better than me. Talking to him I realised I was on the wrong track.’

  ‘Would he talk to me?’

  ‘I could take you to see him now, if you like.’

  No, I was late already.

  ‘He might not talk to you alone. Has to be careful, poor bastard.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He waved a hand with a wince and a frown. �
�It would be easier for him if I was there with you. Look, he doesn’t live far from here. Auchenflower.’

  Any other suburb and I would have gone home, but Auchenflower . . . We were there soon after and when the lecturer found John Obermayer at the door, he spread his arms wide to embrace him.

  I was expecting the absent-minded professor and a moth-eaten sitting room lined with books piled in precarious stacks. I couldn’t have been more off the mark. The timber floors gleamed, a skylight flooded the hall with bright welcome and the room he showed us into was a Scandinavian cliché.

  A second man appeared, a little older and dressed in slacks with knife-edge creases and shiny brogues. ‘Would your friends like a cup of tea, Trevor?’ he asked, with such grandeur he might have been butler to the queen.

  Queen was right, I decided, as the tumblers fell into line. No wonder John had spoken of reticence.

  There was more delay while the tea was poured, but once we got talking, I forgot the watch on my wrist.

  ‘The Springbok protests were old-fashioned dissent, a bit of street theatre that points the way ahead,’ said Trevor. ‘Every society has similar moments. The Moratorium marches were much more significant, of course.’

  ‘But they were mainly in Sydney and Melbourne,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Trevor. ‘As ever, Queensland needed something different to turn the wheels. It was the same thing, though. John here wanted his book to be about how dissent is forcing change in public policy, but the Springbok protests showed that public policy isn’t really the main game, not up here, anyway.’

  ‘The Queenslanders are a different thing again,’ I said, hoping he had more for me than platitudes. ‘If that’s not the main game, then what is?’

  He made a face, not unpleasantly – more in the vein of a man who enjoyed subtlety. ‘It’s about how dissent is tolerated. No government enjoys criticism, but they don’t normally see it as a personal affront to be silenced by every means available. At least not in a democracy, and certainly not in Australia, not until now, anyway.’

  I listened for half an hour, which became forty-five minutes while I scribbled frantically in my notebook. When, finally, I hurried out of the house it was after three-thirty, which blew out to four o’clock by the time I arrived home.

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Mike said nothing while I stumbled through my excuses, which sounded even more feeble now that I was actually mouthing the words I’d made up in the car.

  ‘Can we still go to the park?’ I said brightly.

  ‘Bit late for that,’ Mike said, and taking Tom he went upstairs to his parents, forcing me to join him.

  In my Year Nine history book at Avila there had been a woodcut showing the French ambassador entering Elizabeth’s court after the massacre of the Huguenots. The looks I got from Helen Riley were no less poisonous. What had seemed like the sensible thing to do, the essential thing to do, when I was in Wickham Park, now seemed unconscionable. Mike had driven seven hours to be with me, and he faced another seven to be back again in time for school on Monday morning. I was close to tears with the weight of my own folly.

  ‘I’m sorry about this afternoon, really I am.’

  What else could I say, and keep saying, until I could escape down to the tiny kitchen and get busy with dinner.

  When Mike brought Tom down soon after, I had a beer ready for him and threw down two glasses of wine myself, eager for the alcohol to kick in, and by then Mike had opened a second stubby and was talking more freely.

  Dinner wasn’t as awkward as it might have been, and, with Tom delivered upstairs to sleep, I took the lead in bed, letting Mike have my body to look at and touch as I’d stopped doing in Bindy. Yet his heart didn’t seem in it any more than mine was. I’d mucked it up.

  When I woke on Sunday morning, Mike was playing noisily with Tom upstairs. Departure already loomed. It would have been better if he’d exploded as his mother so clearly wanted to do. Then I’d have had a chance to cry and beg forgiveness and admit how stupid, how thoughtless, how hurtful I had been. I deserved his anger, and I would have willingly copped it, I might even have told him about the letter and the whole story of who I’d been so desperate to meet instead of going to New Farm Park. I could have told him how John Obermayer had introduced me to a man who saw the politics of it all more deeply than anyone else I’d come across so far.

  Why couldn’t Mike do that, instead of offering up more wounded understanding? I was beginning to hate him for it.

  TOM

  How did Dad survive those months when my mother abandoned him to finish out his Bindamilla posting alone? Whether he wanted to admit it or not at the time, those months were the harbinger of his marriage’s end, but at least they left a legacy of a different sort that he’s rightly proud of. He let slip occasional snippets over the years, enough for me to assemble a vague picture of those lonely months – and then there are the poems, some of the most heart-searing verse I have ever read.

  On weekends, he would take sheets of scrap paper into the sand hills beyond the southern edge of Bindamilla and scramble his way to the single tree that clung stubbornly to the crest. Here, he was far enough from town to hear none of its slow breathing, as he described it to me once, and when the wind dropped, there was a silence like he had never known. That was why he came. The house, for all its size, was claustrophobic.

  ‘At school, did they teach you about Wordsworth’s emotion reflected in tranquillity?’ he asked me once, and we’d shared a good laugh then because those were the very words my English teacher had used. ‘Nothing much changes, then. I was told the same thing. Except it’s bullshit and I needed Bindamilla to teach as much.’

  I heard then of how he’d despaired at the trite lines he came up with. There was no poetry in those tranquil sand hills and no poetry in him, either, it seemed. He stared out at a landscape utterly devoid of human presence and only became more aware of himself as an alien amid such emptiness. Mike Riley belonged where human beings crossed his view, he belonged among houses and streets and the hum of traffic and the shadows cast by office towers.

  ‘The silence, Tom. You have to experience it to know how all consuming it can be. Even the scratching of pencil on paper was carried off into its vastness,’ he told me. ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud,’ he’d called once, at the top of his voice. There was no echo. The silence devoured Wordsworth, too. He tried Larkin, then Shakespeare. Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

  ‘I could feel the horizon laughing at me,’ he confided. ‘Especially after I made a rushed visit to Brisbane to spend time with your mother. I was lonelier than ever after that weekend and walked out to the hills, to no avail, it seemed. But one day when I stood up and turned around, there was Bindy. At my back all that time, I’d forgotten it and taking it in suddenly, like a slap, I felt my own revulsion and at the same time my need. It was my wife that small town had rejected, not me.’

  So he sat down again, at the base of the same tree, facing the town this time. He said he could feel the weight of the landscape against his back, but it was Bindamilla that jerked his pencil into motion. ‘Forget Wordsworth,’ he told me. ‘Tranquillity was no mood for the poetry in me, Tom.’ And with the town stretched out before him, he’d listened at last to a landscape that was anything but silent, and began to write.

  SEVEN

  TOM

  In my twenties a certain rhythm worked its way into how I built a picture of Susan’s marriage. I would talk to her, winning precious nuggets, assay them in my own good time then go digging for more from Dad. That was why, soon after my solo tour of Circular Quay, I found myself saying to him, ‘It must have been hard living in Bindy by yourself.’

  By then he was used to such questions popping out of the blue. ‘You can put up with anything when you know how long it will last,’ he said, ‘and there
were some compensations. I wrote all the Larkin and Eliot out of myself and started hunting around for an original way to say things.’

  ‘You found your voice.’

  He shot a dismissive breath down his nose. ‘Don’t get wanky on me, Tom. Anyway, much as I missed your mother, having some space between the two of us brought its own relief. Looking back on it now, I can see how unhappy she was married into a compromise and stuck out there among people she didn’t understand. At the time, it seemed like an emotional flu that never went away, and I was the one she wiped her nose on. What I missed wasn’t Susan so much, it was marriage, the partner thing. And I missed you, too, more than I’d bargained for.’

  ‘Who’s getting wanky now?’

  ‘No, it’s true. I guess that had a lot to do with what happened afterwards.’

  ‘In Sydney?’

  ‘Yes, in Sydney. Susan’s told you about the rows we had, I suppose.’

  ‘She thinks she was half-crazy, should have been on something to calm her down.’

  ‘Your Riley grandparents would agree,’ he said, then making a face he tilted his head to one side as though considering this idea as a work of art. ‘The result would have been the same, though. Had to be. We were growing apart too quickly and you can only follow someone a certain distance before you realise she’s not leading, she’s running away. And then, of course, there was the Dismissal. That seemed to stir her up even more than the state election where it all started.’

  No, Dad, I wanted to say. It started at the Tower Mill when the police charged into the crowd with thirty-six-inch batons in their eager hands. You were there, Dad. You saw it begin.

  Instead, I said, ‘She still gets hot talking about what Kerr did to Whitlam.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I was just as angry at the time. I was still in Bindy when it happened, a Tuesday – I remember because we were setting up for a staff meeting when someone came in with the news.’

  ‘Susan was visiting Diane at Mater Mothers’,’ I added. ‘Said she came out onto the footpath afterwards and saw the headline at a newsstand. She started to shake.’