Mrs Weaver was not handing out anything, nor had she taken a how-to-vote card. The aliens, it seemed, did not have a political position, even if her kangaroo did. But she had brought buttered scones with blackberry jam, which they had all eaten, the Not-a-Nazi taking five, as if National Socialism meant not eating breakfast.
Families with kids holding melting ice blocks. Carloads of teachers from the school. Father Michael, who said, ‘Bless you, my child,’ to Scarlett as she handed him a leaflet, in a way that made it clear how he was voting. But most people took cards from every party, even from the Nazi man.
‘Will you exterminate all Jewish people and those with dark skin if you get in?’ asked Jed.
‘Of course not.’ The small man seemed affronted that Jed hadn’t read his party platform. ‘They will simply not be allowed into positions of power. Nor will communists,’ he added warningly, glancing at the leaflets in her hand.
Jed wondered whether to tell him that visiting communist China did not make Gough Whitlam a communist, especially now that conservative President Nixon of the USA had been to China too. But if the poor man was deluded enough to think his party could — or should — be elected, there was no point arguing the finer points of politics with him. She was faintly ashamed of even questioning him.
A clean white station wagon — conspicuously clean where most pale cars were the brick colour of the local dust — pulled up at the kerb. Three women and two men of varied ages, dressed in white as pristine as their car, stepped out. The man she had met at Nicholas’s first introduction to Gibber’s Creek emerged from the driver’s seat, once again in a white suit.
Jed offered him a leaflet. He smiled, showing teeth almost as white as his clothes. American teeth, thought Jed, able to dazzle at twenty paces. But his accent was educated Australian.
‘Thank you. Though there’s no need to give us how-to-vote cards. It would be a pity to arrive at the polling booth without having made a well-considered decision.’
‘Then I hope you’re voting for Gough Whitlam.’
Stupid. She should have said Nicholas Brewster, because that was the name on the Gibber’s Creek ballots. Anyone who wrote Gough Whitlam down instead of putting the number one next to Nicholas’s name would waste their vote.
‘Whitlam will win the election,’ said the man. He might have been stating that the sun would not roll over four times at lunchtime.
‘I’m glad you think so.’
‘The election result is easy to calculate scientifically.’
‘Psephology,’ said Jed, showing off, ‘is scarcely an accurate science.’
‘It depends how it’s done.’ He held out his hand. Jed shook it automatically. But then she’d shake a vampire’s hand today if they might vote Labor.
Then wait with a pointed stick till they came out.
The stranger held her hand a little too long, still smiling. ‘I’m Dr Zacharia.’
‘Doctor of medicine?’ She thought Dr Dougherty had taken over Dr McAlpine’s practice.
Dr Zacharia glanced at Scarlett, handing a how-to-vote card to a couple with three small kids, then back at Jed. ‘Yes. We’re doing some interesting research at our place outside town. It’s out on the Back Creek Road. Perhaps you’d like to visit us, Miss Kelly?’
‘You know who I am?’
‘Gibber’s Creek gossip flies as fast as a comet,’ he said dryly.
Which was true. But Gibber’s Creek gossip had been strangely silent about a research academy of any sort on Back Creek Road.
One of the women giggled. And kept giggling. Dr Zacharia turned to her. The giggles stopped. Dr Zacharia looked back at Jed.
‘Will you visit us, Miss Kelly? Perhaps tomorrow? And, please, do bring your sister too.’
Jed forced a smile. Why didn’t she like him? Because he was too . . . pleasant. And just too slightly intent. He’s setting up a con, she thought. As old Fred had told her, that first night at the billabong, ‘You can’t con a con artist.’ But today there were more important things to think of than con men in white. ‘By tomorrow I hope we have a new government. A new future for us all.’
‘As I said, Gough Whitlam will win. And Australia will change, a little. But on 11 November 1975, it will change beyond recognition.’
‘How?’ asked Jed, startled by the precision of the date. Though possibly it just meant that Dr Zacharia and whatever funds he’d conned — or not — would have safely vanished by then.
‘You’ll need to visit us to find out.’
He left her with another of his dentist convention smiles, his followers behind him like a flock of white leghorn chickens.
Odd. She forgot him as a bunch of ringers clambered out of the back of a ute, wolf-whistling at her and Carol.
She exchanged an eye-rolling look with Carol. Jed usually made a rude gesture at any bloke who wolf-whistled at her. Not today.
At half past eleven, the Labor Party van arrived again, this time with sandwiches — ‘Frozen,’ said Scarlett, disgusted, as Jed put them on the table to thaw. The Country Party bloke, ‘Call me Reg’, offered to go and get everyone ice creams, if Jed could hand out his cards for him.
To her surprise she found herself with Country Party cards in one hand, Labor Party ones in the other. Nor did it matter, she thought as she offered both cards to an elderly woman with a little embarrassment. The woman seemed to find nothing strange in being offered competing how-to-vote cards. Probably they had all made up their minds already.
‘Call me Reg’ returned, hands crammed with double-cone ice creams, vanilla one side, chocolate the other. ‘I didn’t know what kind you’d like.’ Everyone got one, including Mrs Weaver and the National Socialist supporter, who tucked into his dubiously but hungrily, as if he wasn’t sure whether an Übermensch ate ice cream.
At five minutes to twelve, Dr McAlpine’s old Mercedes pulled up and he and Mrs McAlpine got out.
‘We’ll just pop in to vote, then take over from you,’ said Dr McAlpine, clapping his son on the back as Sam endured being kissed in public by his mother. Jed slightly envied both the mother and the embarrassment.
She was also envious of the McAlpines’ vote. Carol and Sam had voted already. Jed had envied them too. How dare Billy McMahon say she and everyone else under twenty-one were too immature to vote? Unfair for a country to conscript young men for war at nineteen, but not allow them votes to say what wars their nation ought to fight.
She surrendered her how-to-vote cards to Mrs McAlpine. Had this woman in her neat apple-green A-line dress really once performed bare bosomed as a circus mermaid? And stayed with a violent husband, until he and their marriage healed?
She would have liked to stay, to just possibly persuade some doubter or give guidance to any idiot who didn’t know which candidate was which. But she needed to get Scarlett home to have a rest before their late night at the Town Hall, when the world might change.
‘See you tonight,’ said Sam.
Tonight. Would Nicholas become the Gibber’s Creek MP? Why couldn’t her glimpses of the future come when called? Or show her the answers to questions such as: who will be prime minister on Monday?
Why hadn’t she asked someone, ‘Did Gough Whitlam win the 1972 election?’ If they’d never heard of him, it would mean he had lost. She could even have asked her future self . . .
She left Sam to ride his bicycle, and dropped Leafsong and Carol off at Halfway to Eternity, narrowly missing an affronted chook chasing grasshoppers.
‘I wonder who hens would vote for,’ said Carol.
‘Chooks are deeply conservative,’ said Jed.
‘I’m not so sure. They spend at least half an hour each evening discussing who is top of the pecking order. Maybe they have constantly changing minority governments.’
One of the hens flapped up onto Boadicea’s windscreen, leaving a small white trail behind her on the duco. ‘Anarchy?’ suggested Jed, shooing it off.
Carol shook her head. ‘Chooks are decidedly not an
archist.’
And you are definitely getting bored just building mud walls and growing corn, thought Jed, building an alternative society or not. She said instead, ‘Pick you up tonight?’
‘May as well,’ said Carol. Her wave was almost friendly as Jed drove off in a small cloud of dust and squawking chooks.
Chapter 21
Gibber’s Creek Gazette, 2 December 1972
. . . Rocky Valley residents are urged to vote at the old schoolhouse. Remember, if we get fewer than seventy-two voters, we may lose our polling place!
RA ZACHARIA
It had been hard being so close and not examining her. But 40 had done a good job, even photocopying the girl’s records.
An underdeveloped spine. Perfect. Even better — the records indicated that Scarlett O’Hara, as she now called herself, had far surpassed the doctor’s prognosis for her condition. Which meant the girl had focus. Courage.
The next step was to win over the sister . . . A giggle broke into his thoughts. Ra Zacharia frowned. He needed to increase Number 23’s medication, or keep her at the centre. Questions might have been asked if she had failed to vote though. Ra Zacharia was willing, even delighted, to answer many questions. But other things were best kept quiet until the Day of Sacrifice. His day, and the Elders’, of enlightenment and joy.
Chapter 22
Gibber’s Creek Gazette, 2 December 1972
Gibber’s Creek to Face Yass in a Cricket Match This Afternoon
In a special pre-Christmas match today, the Gibber’s Creek Eleven will face their traditional opponents from Yass in what promises to be a thrilling match at the Gibber’s Creek Cricket Ground . . .
MATILDA
Michael had set an armchair to one side, just below the stage. Matilda sat in it, surveying her empire: an uncertain crowd tonight as they waited to see the election results come in, many with red faces from handing out how-to-vote cards in the summer sun.
The men held stubbies of beer. The women stuck with shandies, cask wine and the inevitable china cups of tea. ‘Coffee,’ she ordered, to be contrary, when Nancy asked her what she’d like to drink, though she would have loved a cup of tea. She was always snappish when nervous. She knew it, but was too old to change it.
Interesting. That was the first time she had ever thought ‘I am too old’. But not, she thought, the last.
Polls closed at six pm. Counting would have begun at the Central School and across the country, except in Western Australia where the polls had yet to close, overseen by scrutineers from both the Liberal Country Party Coalition and Labor Party, perhaps some of those dreadful National Socialists too if they had members enough, as well as some from the DLP. Appalling that Nazis should still be allowed to play a role in politics, but that was democracy for you.
She had been so passionate about democracy and women’s suffrage when she was young, as if votes for women might make a difference. She doubted it had. Most women still, when asked, said, ‘My husband makes the political decisions in our family.’ All that the dearly won women’s suffrage had achieved had been a doubling of men’s votes.
Until tonight. Perhaps. Because this year the Women’s Electoral Lobby had made it plain: women’s votes counted tonight. If young Whitlam became prime minister tomorrow, women might begin to take an equal place across the land — go to university. Until now so many families had found the fees for a son but not a daughter.
Would her own life have been different if she had been educated? But of course she had been, by so many teachers . . .
‘You okay, Mum?’ Only Michael and Jim called her Mum. To the rest of the world she was Grandma or Matilda or Mrs Matilda or Mrs Thompson. Manners weren’t what they used to be, but no one had ever yet had the temerity to say, ‘Hey, you,’ to her.
The first results came up on the television screen. An inner-city swing to Labor. Which meant nothing, she told the flutter in her heart, for inner-city seats were always Labor, and Labor voters voted early. A swing in Werriwa, Gough Whitlam’s seat. Well, they would swing wouldn’t they, for their chosen son, his face on all those advertisements. Matilda wasn’t sure that she approved of political songs. Politics was for rational debate, not pop songs and stamping. Though if it had worked today . . .
‘And now to Gibber’s Creek. Gibber’s Creek is held by the Country Party with an eight point five per cent margin. What is the board showing us there?
‘Well, with only two per cent of the vote counted, it’s difficult to say. But there seems to be a swing towards Labor . . .’
But that was never in doubt. There’d be a swing, just as there had been in ’69. But would the swing be large enough?
‘Excuse me, Mrs Thompson. Would you like a pikelet?’
‘No. Thank you. Perhaps a slice of quiche.’
She wouldn’t eat it. But if she held a plate of quiche, people would stop bothering her with food.
A smattering of cheers as Nicholas strode in, using his stick only to steady himself. And truly strode, thought Matilda. Either he was more used to his new legs or this campaign had given him confidence. Only the slightest sway gave any indication that under those trousers were metal and plastic, not leg. Sensible of the lad to wait till some results were in, especially ones that showed a possible victory for himself. Made him look more in control . . .
‘And that makes the swing to Labor in Victoria twelve per cent now . . .’
But a swing in Victoria was predictable too. One hundred and twenty-five seats were being contested tonight. Labor must win not just more than fifty per cent of the popular vote — it had done that in the last election — but more than half the seats, which was far harder.
Matilda glanced at Nicholas, Felicity on one side of him, dressed again in brown — Good grief, didn’t the girl have a few bright colours in her wardrobe? — Flinty leaning on her stick as if guarding her granddaughter, her soon-to-be grandson-in-law and the entire district, if necessary. She gave Matilda a brief affectionate nod before turning back to listen to Nicholas, talking to a group of supporters.
Nicholas was doing well. If he lost tonight, Matilda guessed he’d take it on the chin. She also knew this meant far more to her than to him. If Nicholas lost by a narrow margin this time, he could stand again. At ninety-one you had few chances to see Jerusalem’s walls built for your nation.
Matilda looked at her watch, pink gold set with diamonds, a gift from Tommy. She took it off only to bathe. Seven-thirty. If only Tommy were there tonight.
She heard his voice chuckle. ‘Who says I’m not, old lady?’
‘Old lady yourself,’ she said, then took a bite of quiche to cover her embarrassment. Anyone could talk to ghosts, but only the very old were caught doing it.
‘And in Gibber’s Creek more results are in. With twenty-four per cent of the vote counted now, there is a definite swing to Labor in Gibber’s Creek. It looks like newcomer Nicholas Brewster is in with a real chance now.
‘An ex-serviceman, Nicholas Brewster is also the author of . . .’
More charts and graphs on the TV. More talk, talk, talk. Nothing could be definite yet. Why not shut up until it was?
Scarlett wheeling through the crowd, offering home-made sausage rolls — a clever choice — with tomato sauce to dunk them in. The sauce was home-made too. That strange young woman Leafsong walked next to her, offering what looked like tiny balled-up echidnas, but were probably made of rice.
A hard worker, that girl, and one who hadn’t let the punches life threw her knock her down. Matilda approved on both counts. And of her great-granddaughter’s choice of sister. Strong women needed to stand arm in arm. Or at least help each other now and then, with a cup of tea, some scones, a tuna mornay or even a house . . .
Eight o’clock. Had she dozed? No, of course not. Just shut her eyes. She’d known what was happening the whole time. The hall was no longer quiet. Laughter, toasts. A growing hope so strong you could almost twang the cords that linked the crowd.
And yet
not certainty. And finally Gough and Margaret on the screen. Pity Margaret wasn’t standing for election instead of Gough, but Australia would never elect a woman PM. Well, perhaps one day. Jed’s daughter, maybe. It would be good to have one of her descendants a female PM.
‘She is my descendant, not yours, darling,’ said Tommy’s voice.
‘I have claimed her, so she’s mine,’ Matilda told him, but silently this time.
‘And with sixty per cent of the vote counted in Gibber’s Creek, it is clear that newcomer Nicholas Brewster . . .’
A shriek. Felicity. So the girl did have some spirit. ‘Nicholas! You’ve done it!’
‘We’ve done it,’ he said, laughing, for the whole crowd to hear, then, ‘Ooff!’ as Felicity launched herself at him. ‘Darling, my legs . . .’
Felicity stood back, beaming at her fiancé as if he’d won the Melbourne Cup. Then cheers. Felicity hugging Nicholas again; Nicholas hugging Flinty. Flinty waving her stick in the air.
If only Sandy could have seen this. Sandy had started the Rocky Creek branch of the Labor Party after the Great War.
Michael kissed Matilda’s cheek, and Nancy kissed her other one, then Jed and Scarlett and Leafsong kissed her too, and then Flinty, darling Flinty. So many more kisses now than when she was young, but those had been in the days when a kiss might transmit polio or scarlet fever. She supposed profligate kisses were safe enough now . . .
She blinked. Somehow Nicholas had ascended the stage. ‘Thank you! Thank you! Well, we’ve done it! Tomorrow there is going to be a new Australia. I can promise you a government that will care, that will listen, that will do what is right for Australia, not just for the rich.
‘I promise you that, as your local member, I will listen too, and work for you. No more young men sent to another’s war. No more widows trying to survive on tiny pensions, mothers desperate for a doctor’s care for their children, but without the money in their purse to pay for it. No more!
If Blood Should Stain the Wattle Page 14
