This Red Earth

by Kim Kelly

  I smile at myself in the mirror: the style does suit me, truly. Doesn’t matter what I look like, though, does it. I am a changed customer, outside and in, and this ensemble is all for my service to the nation, knitting the threads of security together with tomato vines. Still, I do look behind me in the mirror. Gaaaah.

  But at least it gives me ample to start off my letter to Gordon.

  I delay my first riding lesson to go down to the riverbank, to the willows and my vanilla trunks to begin it.

  My wonderful darling Rock

  You won’t believe what I’m about to do this afternoon …

  I tell him everything, about Dad and Mum, the Department of Cruelty, and Albert Namatjira’s love trees in DJ’s. And I do cry. I cry and cry as a great swirling mob of corellas screech and swoop through the tops of the gums, not caring one dot about me, as the river quietly continues to creep down this bank with the drought, not caring about any of us. And then I tell him:

  I could burn up in want of an apology I’ll never get for all this wrecking and ruining, or I can live, in love, as Mum and Dad wished me to, and promise you, as well as myself, that I will never lose my way in grief again. Never lose my own courage again. I will certainly never leave a letter unwritten so long again. I can’t imagine what this silence has seemed like to you, apart from deeply ironic that I’m now about to demand you to let me know immediately that all’s well with you. I’m very worried, about the Japs and all that. Does this mean you’re coming home? I hope so. To see you would – oh, enough of that for now. I’ve got to go and get on a horse.

  I love you, my darling Gordon; I love you with every atom in me. I love you come what may. I love you always. Never, ever doubt it.

  Your Bernie

  I stand up. Ready for anything and everything now. Ready to reclaim my fight, in my tan slacks, however it comes.

  ‘Bernadette!’ Mrs Lockhart is leading the horse out of the tin shed towards me.

  It’s the little one, called Odd Socks, about half the size of Mitchell’s big white one, who’s called Pete, and no less terrifying for it. Odd Socks is the only horse here at the moment, though, little chestnut horse with three white socks, whose stable I was too frightened to muck out last February when Mrs Lockhart was a swaggie short of assistance, never mind the smell. You can’t get a swaggie to do anything out here in the high heat, not for a three-course meal, and you’re not getting me up on that horse now either.

  Oh Hughie, help me. No: Hughie help us all if the nation’s survival depends on the likes of me.

  GORDON

  I’m crossing Malaguna Road for the Bung, to get some fish for lunch. I’m in a hurry, but it’s good to have something to do apart from sitting behind the sandbags at the club waiting for another raid and wondering if anyone at all is looking out for us. Or if we might have dropped off the map. Up under the figs here at their market, the marys in their white dresses are still selling their produce at their bamboo tables, but there aren’t any men sitting around chewing betel and smoking today. There haven’t been for the last three weeks. It’s hard to credit how the marys keep their dresses so white in all the grey mud, but they do, white as their smiles: ‘Good day, mister. You want fish?’ Yeah, I point at a basket with what looks about twenty bass in it. Life goes on. You need to eat, and their men still want their tobacco.

  I think I hear the buzz coming again, and look up behind me, towards South Daughter peak, to the airfield I can’t see from here. That’s where the raids have been targeted, a dozen or so planes at a time, tearing up the runway. Fifteen natives killed in one of the villages over the other side, and still no one’s come for us. Natives don’t count as casualties There’s been no word from Sydney. No word from any of the higher ranking officers as to a plan, though for the first fortnight they bullshitted that everything was under control. Toughen up, said Sid, only six diggers lost taking Rabaul from the Germans in his day. Be grateful the RAAF is on its way in our day to save our soft arses. It’s not. They’ve sent ten Wirraways, which Johno reckons are good solid aircraft, but there’s only ten of them. Or seven now, if this morning’s rumour is correct: that three got shot down over New Ireland just after dawn, fifty miles to the northeast of us. The Japs have got an aircraft carrier out there somewhere, snuck down from the Carolines. We have one unarmed commercial freighter loading copra in the bay.

  The mary is handing me the basket of fish when the sirens start up again now and the planes start coming over, either side of the North Daughter peak. They come over the rubber trees at the rear edge of the Bung. Right over our heads. There’s more than a dozen of them this time. A lot more.

  The first bomb I see hits the tram lines on Malaguna Road, about two hundred yards away. I drop the fish and start running back towards the club. Women are running too, running and screaming, babies on their backs, kids and chickens sprung out from under the bamboo tables and running everywhere too. I pick up a little bloke who’s tripped over in front of me and I run with him as he screams. More bombs are screaming and falling behind us, further away behind Mother Mountain. They must be taking out the guns on the coast at Nordup, three miles east. Two small guns. Useless. There must be at least fifty planes coming over Rabaul now. They are flying boats, massive heavy engines, dropping TNT across the town. Everywhere. What are they doing? They don’t need this many bombs to take Rabaul.

  The roof of the post office flies up in the air. The noise is everywhere. I can’t hear anything. The kid in my arms is grabbed away from me as I keep running south towards the club, to grab my swag from the Weekender. I want to grab the German maps from my trunk, too, the geological maps, the notes that will put Roycox and Taylor in prison. Odd the things you stick with in times of extreme panic, but I still reckon I’m going to accuse Roycox and Taylor of conspiring with Komazaki, and I will see them done for treason. By the time I get to the top of Central Avenue, though, the whole club is on fire.

  I am stuck for a second, not knowing what to do. I look down the street, straight at Matupi. He’s stopped his spewing and the sky is blue over that way. Twenty-first of January and hardly a cloud in the sky. No rain, either. Even nature has abandoned us. Something explodes out the back of the kitchens at the Weekender that brings me back to where I am. Look behind me again and there’s even more planes coming over. There must be a hundred. Where the hell did they get all that fuel?

  Someone is yelling above the air-raid siren: ‘Fall back to Tunnel Hill. Rifles, fall back to Tunnel Hill. If you are not AIF, get out of the town. Rifles, get out to Tunnel Hill!’ It’s Sid. No less panicked than I am. Running, just as I am, back up through the town. Through the she-oaks, I watch two planes come in so low they look like they will collide. But they don’t. They are strafing the Pacific Hotel, that is on fire too. That was the AIF garrison. That was the defence of Rabaul.

  We’re all going to die.

  ‘Move your dozy arse.’ Johno grabs me by the elbow, shoving my swag at me, and a rifle with it.

  I’m running again, with him and the rest of his company, over back fences and yards. Sven is blacking his white hair with boot polish as we cross the western end of Malaguna Road, heading for Tunnel Hill. Christ, the whole town is on fire around us.

  A way up the road, off the bitumen, I slip in the mud a few yards from the tunnel entrance, and as I get up I look back over my shoulder, at the flames. They’ve taken Rabaul. They’ve taken Bernie today too. All that I had left of her, and my Geological Formations. My papers. My dinner suit. My hat. It’s all gone. The whole of the world, and every understanding I ever had of it. If there is such a thing as bad guys, they’ve won today. All of them.

  Johno pulls me into the tunnel, just about taking my arm off. ‘Mate, keep with me, will you.’

  And now it starts raining again.

  This tunnel we’ve retreated into isn’t the best construction. It’s an unlined archway of rammed black mud. I’ve often wondered when, not if, it will fall in, so I am not that surprised when sev
eral tons of ceiling comes away at the back entrance now. It crashes onto the road with considerably less force than the bombs we’ve just witnessed, but nevertheless it’s blocking any further retreat for the time being. There’s maybe a hundred of us in here, all looking up at the mud, not game to breathe. Except for one. The Kiwi gold surveyor Gerry Flynn, otherwise known as Errol, has joined us, from Nordup. He’s doubled up laughing.

  He says: ‘Jesus. You wouldn’t read about that, would you.’

  BERNIE

  I don’t want to look at another tomato so long as I live. Is this fruit the right shade of red? Just on the turn from green, not too red. The Riverine Tomato Growers Association objects to my employ at this too, objects to the whole idea of a women’s land army; fruit picking isn’t work for girls, and I agree. My wrists are pieces of string, black as the dirt; my spine is a series of rusty hinges on the verge of disintegration, and my shoulder blades are driven through with nails every step I carry my buckets up to the crates in the shed. Fruit should be able to walk itself to market. Or let the luncheon tables of Sydney go without.

  Moan, moan, whinge and moan! As my thumb drives right through the skin of the next one: too soft. Too red. More red now than green; after almost a month, this job is coming to an end. Sometime in the next hundred million years. One stingy pound a week I’m getting for it, too, and as many wrinkly too-reds as I can carry back to Riverbend for chutney. Mrs Zoc says the Italian boys at the camp should be let at it – they’ll do it for tomatoes alone, for their spaghetti sauce – but of course that’d be too reasonable, wouldn’t it. Reasonable as letting the Werner boys come and live at Riverbend so that they can at least go to school while their mother concocts her outrageous plots against the free world. No: every­thing must be done the hard way. Up and down two and a half acres of vines, two Coogee Ovals worth, or roughly half a million tomatoes, in this blithering, brain-broiling heat, from seven in the morning till hopefully Mrs McDoughal rings the bell any second now for three o’clock. With my old bush cockie bowyang straps cutting into my shins, to prevent the brown snakes slithering up my slacks and –

  ‘All righty, Bernadette, that’ll do.’ Mrs McDoughal is behind me now, her voice as weary as she looks, and it’s enough to make me want to say, No, I’m right for another hour. But she sighs, pointing down the rows towards the river: ‘It’s pretty much finished from here.’ Disappointed at all the fruit not got to in time; it’s only been the five of us to do it all – Mrs McDoughal; her sister-in-law, Mrs Denison; and her two daughters, Chrissy and Ruth, both giving up their school holidays for it, and me. But she smiles: ‘You’ve done a good job, girl, a blessing to us.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I smile back. It’s not small praise, and I know my carefulness with the colours has been appreciated. This crop and the beans they’ll harvest next is all the McDoughals have got, apart from Mr McDoughal getting droving work, moving stock to pasture with actual pasture on it, which pays for the water licence and fertiliser here, and the loan on their irrigation pump. Nothing so romantic as seeing five thousand sheep being driven through the town up Lachlan Street, dust flying and whips cracking, until you see the lines on the face of the wife after the run’s been sold to pay the bank back only half of what they owe, on all they have left: a patch of tomatoes and beans. Who’d be a farmer? Rock would say every time he came home from Nyngan, and now I understand why.

  I also have to get back to Riverbend with that thought, suddenly lively. Have to get back to see if any mail has come for me, from him, and to fall on the wireless for the news, of what’s going on up north. The McDoughals don’t have a wireless in their house, and not because they can’t afford it. They’re just such strict Presbos – no dancing, no card-playing, no accidental saxophones.

  ‘We’ll start on the beans towards the end of March,’ Mrs McDoughal says by way of farewell, and I’ve said, ‘I’ll be here,’ without thinking, lugging my sack of too-reds for chutney over to Odd Socks. ‘Take me home, girl.’ I throw myself over the saddle, and the girl who was frightened of horses now curses our little chestnut mare for being such a plodder. ‘Come on, Odds, you’ve been standing around in the shade doing nothing all day – move.’

  Plod. Plod. Smack her on the rump. ‘Come on.’ Blooping plod.

  By the time I get in, thumping across the back verandah, Mrs Lockhart has the three o’clock news on, at her station by the stove. ‘Just started, dear, and no, no mail today.’ I dump the sack of tomatoes on the kitchen table and don’t care what’s happening in North Africa or London; I’ve stopped still to hear:

  ‘Australian Militia Forces and AIF are resisting the Japanese and holding positions across the western end of the Rabaul Peninsula. Although reports of fighting at Rabaul are meagre, it is known that Australian troops were putting up a magnificent fight against the invaders …’

  No news telling me what I want to hear: that Gordon Brock is not there. The first bombs fell on the fifth of January. It’s now the twenty-sixth. He should have contacted me by now.

  ‘He mustn’t have got your letter, dear.’ Mrs Lockhart has no trouble reading my mind through the eyes in the back of her head. ‘And don’t take anything from these wireless reports. If all communications with islands have been cut off, how could anyone know what’s going on, magnificent or otherwise?’

  That’s true. He’s probably been evacuated to Darwin or Cairns, as they told us all civilians were last week; could even be back in Nyngan now, or Sydney, oblivious to my need to know he’s all right wherever he is. He must be, mustn’t he? The company he works for wouldn’t just leave him there, would they? I am whipping myself up, hopefully for no good reason. Unwind these bowyangs, breathe in the sweet garlicky aromas of Mrs Lockhart’s chutney factory, as the news moves on to the United Australia Opposition getting into Mr Curtin for suggesting that Britain has been slack in its defence of the Far East. As if that isn’t true, wasting our time, our resources and our lives in Greece – give me a rifle and send me to Singapore, I’ll do the job, with some vengeance. Mr Curtin’s such an American-loving Commie he might let me one day, too – he’s got girls in the air force now. They’ll be learning to fly next. Fancy that.

  ‘Our parcel of duck cloth for the blackout curtains came this morning.’ Mrs Lockhart talks over the stock report, stirring the pot while ever deciding what I will do next. ‘That’s good timing, isn’t it? We can start running them up for the hospitals, Narrandera first, and …’ I’m not listening; I’m searching for Gordon across the mauve sea, until she prods me with the end of her wooden spoon: ‘Oh dear, we’ve lost you to wondering, haven’t we. Why don’t you telephone the people he works for – they’d have a Sydney office, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘Yes, they do, but–’

  ‘Tell them you’re his fiancée and don’t take no for an answer – you’ve every right to know.’

  ‘Yes.’ I am his fiancée. Of course I am. I tell the telephonist: ‘I’m looking for the number of a company in Sydney, the Southern Star Oil Company. I’m sure the address is George Street something.’

  ‘One moment please, madam.’

  It seems to take forever, a forever over which Rock never wants to speak to me again, before another telephonist finally answers: ‘I have a number for the Southern Cross Theatre Company, is that the company you’re after?’

  ‘No, Southern Star. Southern Star Oil.’

  ‘One moment please.’ Another small eternity, during which I decide he did receive my letter and he can’t reply because he’s married someone else, and then: ‘I’m sorry, madam, we don’t appear to have a number for that company.’

  I nearly drop the phone. Don’t have a number for that company? Where is Gordon?

  ‘Bernadette? Bernadette! What’s the matter, dear?’ Mrs Lockhart is beside me, wiping her hands on her apron.

  I think I might whisper: ‘There is no number.’

  She takes up the phone from me. ‘Don’t you worry, these mining companies chop and change their name
s and addresses willy-nilly,’ and does what any woman with limitless connections would do: she asks to be put through to the Lodge, the Prime Minister’s residence, in Canberra. ‘This is Mrs Elizabeth Lockhart of the New South Wales Country Women’s Association, calling for Mrs Curtin. It is a matter of the utmost import – no I certainly do not intend to wait.’

  She waits a few moments before: ‘Oh Elsie, I’m terribly sorry to interrupt … Were you? I’d go back to Perth if I were you too, dear. Oh, at Cottesloe? How lovely for you …’ She puts her hand over the mouthpiece and mouths at me: ‘Her daughter’s getting married – over there.’ Then back to Mrs Curtin: ‘Well, I won’t keep you, dear, and I’m terribly sorry to impose at all – I just want to know whom you suppose I might call about a missing person … Rabaul, unfortunately … Hmm. No, civilian … Try Commonwealth Investigations? I’ve burned my bridges with them, I’m afraid. What about a minister? Ah, Customs, of course … Good, dear, thank you, and I will … Oh, are you? All that to-ing and fro-ing, I don’t know how you do it. Cheerio. God bless.’

  Mrs Lockhart turns to me: ‘Salt of the earth, that woman.’ Then back to the phone, making her demands, not taking no for an answer. ‘Minister Keane’s office. Yes please. No, I do not intend to wait, this is of Prime Ministerial imp– Thank you.’ And after a few more demands: ‘Yes. Gordon James Brock is the name, have every passenger list from New Guinea scoured, please, by ship and air, from December 1940 – yes, that’s right, the whole year, and then up until the present day.’

  She turns back to me when she finally hangs up. ‘We’ll know soon enough. At least whether or not he’s in the country.’