If Blood Should Stain the Wattle

by Jackie French

  The wind gusted heat and wattle blossom as Boadicea whizzed down the highway, and then onto the Drinkwater road that led to Dribble, the billabong, then Overflow. Scarlett’s country, every sheep and rock and kangaroo. Her people too. Though it would have been nice if someone at River View had said goodbye . . .

  Jed turned into the Dribble driveway. Not much had changed since the Thompsons had given the house to her, not while she was at uni. Leafsong had suggested Jed keep chooks now she was going to live there full time (Leafsong’s gestures suggesting chooks had been hilarious) or maybe get a cow, or at the very least plant an orchard and a vegie garden.

  Suddenly Scarlett wished Leafsong had come with Jed. It would have been good to take this momentous journey with a friend as well as a sister. But maybe no one else understood just how important it was. Even Jed didn’t seem excited . . .

  Jed parked in the carport. She grinned. ‘Welcome home, brat.’

  She let herself into the house, leaving Scarlett to unpack her wheelchair, grab the suitcase and wheel herself up the ramp to the kitchen door. Which was as it should be, Scarlett told herself. No fuss. A true home simply was there . . .

  She pulled open the screen door.

  Someone said, ‘One, two, three . . .’

  ‘Surprise!’ The exhalations of maybe sixty people shivered the balloons tied to the curtain railings and the light fittings.

  They were all there — Matron Clancy, Dr McAlpine and his wife, Nancy and Michael with Tom and Clancy, Matilda regal in the largest armchair, parked safely in a corner where no one would trip over her and break a frail bone, about twenty kids from River View, as well as Sam and Carol and JohnandAnnie, Clifford, Giovanni, Raincloud, even Barbie and the barbarians from school, who might, just possibly, Scarlett realised, actually like her at least a little bit, but not know what to do with someone with both a working brain and a wheelchair . . .

  And Leafsong, by the kitchen table, which was absolutely COVERED with Leafsong-type food: rolled orange crepes, melting moments, caramel tarts, fudge slices, ginger hedgehogs, platters of the first of the sweetcorn harvest from Halfway to Eternity, lemon cheesecake, fried spiced soybeans . . . nothing at all like the carefully nutritious, quite good-tasting but always easy-to-eat food of River View, aimed at its least able residents. And tubs of ice and soft drinks, the bubbly bad-for-you kind, and tall glasses with spoons lined up to make spiders . . .

  And laughter and hugging and the realisation not just that the people there all liked her, and that some loved her too, but that Matron Clancy and Dr McAlpine had decided — or perhaps didn’t even need to decide — that poor frail little Scarlett’s heart could withstand a shock like this.

  This is it, thought Scarlett, dazed. This is where I move from ‘Can I survive?’ and ‘Can I survive by myself?’ to ‘How far can I go towards being normal?’

  Chapter 19

  ‘It’s time to care,

  Yes, it’s time.’

  — from the 1972 Labor Party commercial

  1 DECEMBER 1972

  SAM

  Sam’s gloved hand lifted another bit of elderly corrugated iron carefully in case a brown snake had taken refuge underneath. They were laying their eggs about now. Brown snakes were never what you’d call laid-back. This time of year they’d have their fangs into you quicker than you could spot them.

  Which was why he wore boots, two pairs of socks, jeans and a thick long-sleeved shirt as well as gloves, and kept his face well above striking range as he rummaged through the rubbish dump. Brown snakes loved dumps as much as Sam did. Emptied garbage bins meant a brown snake rat banquet. And for Sam, a good rubbish dump was like Christmas, when you had no idea what Santa would leave in your stocking, or rather pillowslip, because Santa never stinted at Moura.

  He’d already found an old chaff-cutter today, with its wheels intact. He could attach that to the cement mixer so they could turn it by hand, with no need to pay for a motor and its fuel. There was an unlimited supply of humans in the world to turn handles, but petrol was a finite resource.

  Not that they mixed concrete at Halfway, but that lovely paste of strained cow manure and goat’s-milk yoghurt that became a bright green paint for the cottages’ inside walls was more easily made in a machine than in a bucket.

  Eight sheets of galvanised iron, enough for an extension to the chook house. Fifteen wooden fruit boxes. Fruit boxes could be wired together to make shelves for books or crockery, or covered with cushions to make seats, wired horizontally instead of vertically to become a bed, topped with a homemade chook-feather mattress, or given ‘bush legs’ to make a table, covered with a patchwork tablecloth.

  He’d also found three hessian sacks of old clothes, worn at the knees and collars, but with acres of good material in them.

  And an old wool bale, only stained at one corner! Sam grinned. Wool bales were tough enough to make a front bench for Mr McNeil’s old ute, which Sam only needed another twenty dollars to buy. Of course the ute needed new brake linings, and a rear-vision mirror too, but all except the brake linings came free at the dump too.

  Sam had used the richness of the Gibber’s Creek dump to help convince the others to buy land for the commune near his hometown. Not that they needed more reasons, as they all knew they would never get two hundred acres with creek and river frontage as cheaply elsewhere.

  If their son wasn’t going to accept a respectable engineering job, Blue and Joseph McAlpine wanted him where they could see him, ponytail and all.

  Or so he’d thought. He’d wondered, lately, if his parents’ offer hadn’t been as much to provide for Carol and Leafsong as it had been for him. Mum had needed a home and safety too, once, though her parents had been deeply loving, by all accounts, until their death.

  Sam felt bad about Carol. Worse than that, he loved her, and Leafsong too, but as a protective friend, not as a lover, or partner in his life.

  But Jed . . .

  Sam sat back on a perfectly good though hideous Formica kitchen chair — was that why someone had thrown it and its five pristine companions away? — and thought about Jed Kelly.

  He had been smitten by Jed Kelly the first time he’d seen her. Beautiful, vulnerable and fierce, and not remotely aware she was any of those things.

  She had also been in love with a man Leonardo would have loved to paint, a romantically wounded handsome hero. Sam was blunt featured, and knew it. Jed hadn’t even noticed him when he’d grabbed the plate of chocolate slices to offer her.

  But Matilda had noticed. She’d laid a claw upon his wrist and said quietly, ‘She fancies herself in love with young Nicholas,’ then winked at him and added, ‘for now.’

  It was the first time a geriatric woman had ever winked at him. The first time one had given him advice on his love life too.

  He hadn’t consciously waited for Jed. He had buried thoughts of Jed Kelly under ideals and plans for self-sufficiency, of using his body as well as his brain each day, and of changing the world by example, not by words.

  Then there she’d been, looking beautiful and only slightly lost, getting out of her ridiculously expensive car at the commune, part of the Thompson clan, which was deeply entwined with his own. He had watched her scrutinise the commune; seen the moment she truly looked at it, instead of seeing the clichés. Visitors either saw Halfway to Eternity as the beginnings of an alternative society of peace, universal love and the abandonment of private property, or a refuge for dole bludgers, dropouts and potheads.

  Halfway to Eternity was neither. None of its members had achieved peace, universal love or the abandonment of private property; nor were they likely to. Which didn’t bother Sam. The commune’s name was ‘halfway’, after all. As long as they were headed in the right direction — and were prepared to change course now and then — Sam was okay. Halfway to Eternity was just a step in his life, not the end.

  But Jed was different these days. The things he’d loved before were still there. But now she seemed to fit the land
, despite her clothes and car. Mostly, as they talked, he had sensed integrity, as deeply thought out as his own.

  It hadn’t been easy, choosing a commune instead of doing what his university friends had chosen — donning dark suits to become project engineers for developments that ripped out the land’s heart, instead of working with it. But Sam had known not just what he wanted, but also what was right.

  Carol believed in what they were doing too. But she hadn’t realised yet that while the commune had given her and her younger sister security and fun, she was not cut out to pick tomatoes and dig dunnies all her life. And yes, Carol had it hard, but Jed had known far worse. Yet there Jed was, hunting for the right life for herself, for those she loved, for Australia and the world, just like he was.

  If he and Jed came together, he’d make sure he left her free to keep on doing what she felt was right. Two lives together in joy and commitment, just like his parents’ marriage, except in those bad years, Mum with the factory, Dad with his medical career. Too many people shrank in their marriage, wives making their husband’s careers their own mission, husbands accepting the social and family lives their wives planned for them, from the choice of sofa to choice of friends.

  Not him and Jed.

  He smiled, remembering her floating in the river, her hair the colour of wattle bark, her skin creamy as a dappled red gum. He took out that memory at least three times a day. They’d be so right together. And Mum and Dad would be delighted.

  Very, very delighted. Suddenly he wondered if his parents’ gift of cheap land hadn’t been a ruse to get him together with Jed . . .

  No, surely not. They’d thought he was involved with Carol back then, and there were a million other reasons, including the fact that his parents would never play matchmakers.

  Matilda, on the other hand, was capable of doing exactly that. He had even overheard her murmuring one night to his mother that Jim’s marriage to Iris ‘. . . had not gone quite as I planned’.

  It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, except him and Jed. He’d seen the way she’d looked at that Nicholas bloke at the meet-the-candidate night — despite the fact Nicholas was engaged to someone else — and hated it. Jed deserved someone whose feet and heart were firmly planted in Gibber’s Creek earth, and he wasn’t thinking about the poor bloke’s prosthetic legs either. Nicholas Brewster was okay. He had guts. But he was not right for Jed.

  So Sam would have to win her. Not with speeches or roses, partly because he wasn’t good at speeches and the only decent roses in Gibber’s Creek grew at Drinkwater. He planned to win her the way he planned to change the world, by doing things. Becoming part of her life, bringing her into his, till one day she actually looked at him without Nicholas-coloured glasses in the way.

  And maybe Matilda Thompson might even offer him a few Drinkwater roses to help smooth the way. Whatever it took.

  His face slowly slid towards his knees. He stood up, having just discovered why the set of six almost imperceptibly sloping kitchen chairs had never been sat on, and eventually thrown out. The jingle everyone was humming suddenly danced around him.

  Sam grinned. He had waited four years for Jed Kelly, without knowing it. But now, it was time.

  Chapter 20

  Gibber’s Creek Gazette, 2 December 1972

  It’s Time, by Jed Kelly

  Three years ago I watched a man walk on the moon. They said it couldn’t be done, the older scientists and engineers. Impossible. How can you fit a computer vast enough to guide us to the moon in a rocket ship that would still be light enough to be blasted from this earth’s gravitational pull?

  And now many are once again saying something is impossible: that a government can change after twenty-three years.

  Up in Canberra, public servants in the Departments of Defence and Foreign Affairs are burning papers and looting filing cabinets, because they believe the party they have for so long thought of only as the opposition or even the socialist enemy might actually come to power. They know what the winds of change are singing above the Canberra hills: it’s time.

  Time to care for the elderly, who cannot afford the company of a cat. Time for children, crammed in temporary classrooms, unless their parents can afford private school fees. It’s time for proper pensions, and an Arbitration Commission to settle industrial disputes instead of strikes that cripple our economy.

  Editor’s note: The above is a paid political advertisement placed at the insistence of the owner. It is not authorised by the Australian Labor Party of Australia, or the editor of this paper.

  Earl’s Court, London

  Darling Jed,

  I’m here! And you’re there and I bet your brain is full of elections and scones. But if you are just the tiniest bit bored, hop on a plane and in just twenty hours and a couple of stopovers you’ll be here!

  London is totally fab. So fab I can’t tell you because I am still jetlagged and Sue has nearly finished in the bathroom — there are eight of us crammed into three rooms and the ‘bathroom’ has a toilet, 6,324 cockroaches and a bath the size of a coffee cup.

  Mostly I just wanted to say ‘good luck’. I know how much this election means to you. Go get ’em, girl.

  Love always,

  J xxxxx

  JED

  Jed woke early, then lay in bed and watched the flies crawling patterns on the ceiling. Go get ’em? If only she could. Because election day was for not doing things.

  Not writing another article for the Gibberer, because it would be tempting fate to write of a victory that hadn’t yet happened, and she would be too angry at Australia to draft an obituary for dreams if Gough Whitlam or Nicholas lost.

  She wasn’t even a member of the Labor Party or old enough to vote, and even if she had been older and a fully paid-up member, the Labor blokes wouldn’t listen to a woman.

  Nor could she see Nicholas to wish him luck, because . . .

  Because.

  She got up, slowly, dressed even more slowly, in a not-very-mini skirt, a politically neutral green. Sandals. Stockings? No, too much for Gibber’s Creek on a Saturday morning. She should have checked with Matilda. The perfect ensemble to wear at a polling booth while you handed out how-to-vote cards was exactly the kind of thing Matilda would know.

  She looked at her watch again. Another two hours till she had to be down at the primary school. She and Scarlett were rostered for the first shift, nine am to noon. The Labor Party had refused Leafsong’s request (through Scarlett) to feed the Gibber’s Creek volunteers, insisting that the party would distribute their own official bundles of sandwiches.

  Leafsong and Scarlett were already seated at the kitchen table. So, to Jed’s surprise, was Carol, wearing flared jeans instead of overalls, and an It’s Time T-shirt, sharing scrambled eggs on toast.

  ‘Yours is in the oven,’ said Scarlett.

  Jed grabbed her plate using a tea towel as an oven mitt. ‘Are you coming down to the polling booth with us?’ she asked Carol.

  ‘Might as well. Sam is going to meet us there.’

  ‘To hand out how-to-vote cards? I thought you were the alternative society?’

  Carol took a mouthful of scrambled eggs. ‘A decent government and the rise in alternative societies aren’t necessarily incompatible.’

  Which was not quite what she’d asserted a few months ago. But Jed just said tactfully, ‘True . . .’

  ‘Fascism leads to fascism. Revolutions happen not when things are at their worst, but when things begin to get a bit better and people can hope.’

  Jed looked at Carol with interest. That was actually a point worth discussing, almost worthy of Julieanne. But not today.

  She ate her eggs instead, drank tea, then poured more into a Thermos. They found hats, and argued for five minutes till at last Leafsong put one on so Scarlett agreed to wear one too, while Carol grinned, her own floppy red felt hat already on her head.

  Boadicea sped between the paddocks of sheep, munching away, supremely unaware that anything i
mportant might happen today.

  Or might not. And that failure would matter deeply. Desperately. Because if Labor lost now, it meant the majority of Australians were too what? Conservative? Dumb? Timid? All were possible reasons today’s voters might reject the change that was so evidently needed . . .

  Failure today would mean failure forever.

  It was easy to find a parking space, even on this Saturday. Jed looked at her watch. A quarter to nine. A strange quacking noise in the distance resolved itself into ‘Vote Briggs, your Country Party candidate’, spoken through a megaphone. The car drew up, plastered with posters. A hopeful woman in a quite gorgeous straw hat offered Jed a bunch of Country Party how-to-vote cards.

  ‘No, thank you. I’m here for Labor.’

  ‘Oh. Well, good luck then.’

  Extraordinary. But then people were nice. Mostly.

  A figure approached on a bicycle, and it turned out to be Sam, carrying a giant bunch of Labor-red roses in the bicycle basket. ‘From Matilda,’ he said, leaning his bike against the playground fence and presenting a serviceable china vase to Jed.

  Jed laughed, lowering her face into the petals and drinking up the scent. Trust Matilda to think that their how-to-vote table needed decoration. On the other hand, Matilda might be right.

  More megaphone squawks, which resolved into the ‘It’s Time’ theme. A van pulled to a stop with vast images of Whitlam plastered on both sides and equipped with bundles of how-to-vote cards ready for distribution. Jed stepped forwards . . .

  By ten am, the volunteers were in full swing. Gibber’s Creek was heeding the old adage to ‘vote early’, if not, hopefully, the additional ‘vote often’.

  She and Scarlett, Sam, Carol and Leafsong shared the footpath with a ruddy-faced gentleman wearing a sports coat despite the December heat, handing out the cards for the Country Party; a small and slightly greasy man who represented the Nazi party — no, sorry, the National Socialist The-Holocaust-Was-a-Fabrication Party — and who, just possibly, had dreams that he might be transmogrified into a representative of the master race; and Mrs Weaver, who had taken Jed’s chair in the shade and was now feeding yet another small kangaroo, wearing an It’s Time badge on a ribbon around its neck, courtesy of Scarlett and Leafsong.