He glanced at the constellation in question. ‘Some people thought we should use it upright. Problem is, the Southern Cross has been used by dozens of little protest movements over the years, and we are not some little protest movement. We’re about a complete overthrow of everything. So we flipped it.’ He strode on in silence for a time, staring up. ‘Anyway, it’s not always upright in the sky, is it?’
‘How did it happen?’ I asked.
‘Sorry?’
‘You. All this Underground stuff. It’s a long leap from hired gun for the Department of Citizenship to resistance fighter.’
‘It was called Immigration back then, not Citizenship. Anyway, I worked for a private company that specialised in prisons and remand centres. They were the ones who were employed by the Department.’
‘What’s the difference?’
‘The chain of responsibility, that’s what.’ He grinned briefly in the dark—his cynicism baring its fangs. ‘If the company happens to brutalise the inmates, well, that’s got nothing to do with the government, has it? Deniability.’
‘So did you work in the actual detention centres?’
He hesitated a fraction. ‘Yes.’
‘Which one?’
‘Woomera.’
‘Ah . . .’
You won’t know this, dear interrogators, but Woomera—that’s a name to strike dark and complex emotions in the Australian psyche. A faint echo, perhaps, of what it might be like to mention Auschwitz to a German. Our most notorious detention camp, operating back in the early days after September 11, when the walls first went up and illegal immigrants from Islamic countries became public enemy number one. It was a pretty tame place, of course, by today’s standards, and long since closed down. But Woomera was at the start of it all.
‘I was just a prison guard once,’ Harry went on, ‘working in state institutions. But then, when the whole boat people thing blew up and all the new detention centres came on line, the call went out for staff. People like me with prison experience were high on the wanted list. It was more money than I was getting in the state system. So I took a contract.’
From behind us, Aisha spoke up. ‘It was Woomera that made me become an activist. It was a war crime against the Muslim people.’
Harry glanced back. ‘You couldn’t have been more than fourteen years old.’
‘I knew right and wrong when I saw it.’
‘I didn’t think it was wrong. Not at first. The people there had entered the country illegally. We couldn’t just let them wander about in any way they liked. They had to be processed. We had to work out who was a legitimate refugee, and who wasn’t. So in the meantime, yes, if they were detained somewhere comfortable for a while, where was the harm?’
‘Somewhere comfortable?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘That was the problem, of course. I’d worked in prisons, and the point of prisons is that they’re supposed to be places of both detention and punishment, because the people in them have committed serious crimes. A detention centre is just supposed to be a temporary holding location, it’s not supposed to be punitive. The only crime the people there have committed is to cross a border without paperwork, which legit refugees are allowed to do anyway. But Woomera was the most punitive place I’d ever seen. Murderers and rapists got far better treatment than the men, women and children in Woomera did.’
‘I heard it was pretty hard on the staff, too.’
He shrugged. ‘The whole place was a nightmare. Lack of funds, lack of equipment, incredible heat, no shade, tin sheds, way out in the desert, a place designed for four hundred people holding nearly fifteen hundred. Then the Immigration Department stalled on the refugee applications and left us all there to rot. As far as I could tell, the unwritten understanding between the government and the company was just to make the detainees suffer—as an example to any future boat people who might want to come. After all, John Howard had sworn in public that no more illegals were getting in, hell or high water.’
‘I remember,’ I said.
‘Everyone remembers. It’s not as if it was a secret. But I saw it first-hand—innocent people, the vast majority of them completely genuine refugees escaping from regimes like Saddam and the Taliban—and this country punished them as if they were Saddam and the Taliban. You’ve got no idea what it was like to watch those people—who thought they’d found safety—gradually realise that they were even worse off than before. The way the hope turned into bewilderment, and then anger, and then just blank despair. So of course there was violence in the camp. Protests, hunger strikes, suicide attempts. The staff were helpless to stop it. And meanwhile the government was crowing: ‘See? We told you these illegals were savages!’
‘What was your job exactly?’
‘Oh, I was just camp security. Manning the perimeter. It was harder for the medical staff—they really saw the worst. Me, I just had to keep the inmates in, and any intruders out. And intruders meant virtually everyone. Journalists. Legal Aid. United Nations inspectors. In the end, it started to get to me. I’d never had trouble in my old job. Crims were crims. But this . . . I mean, of course we had the right to control who entered the country. Even to send illegals back. But in the meantime, they were human beings. To deliberately neglect, imprison and dehumanise several thousand innocent people, little children included, over periods of years, simply to scare everyone else away . . . That we did not have the right to do.’
‘Even though it worked? The boats stopped coming.’
‘Oh, it worked all right. At least as far as most of the voters were concerned, come the next election. But not for me. After a year or so in that place—after seeing what this country was doing to people who had dared beg us for help—well, I’d walk around in a normal town or city and it all seemed surreal. It still looked like Australia. Sunny and warm and friendly, everyone going about their lives. But it was bullshit. I’d go back to Woomera, and see the filth and the insanity and the kids turned into zombies, and to me, that was the real Australia.’
‘It was because they were Muslims,’ Aisha intoned.
Harry waved a weary hand. ‘Sure. Probably. Although some of the poor bastards converted to Christianity in there. Fat lot of good it did them.’
I said, ‘Did you quit?’
‘Not exactly. Do you remember the big break-out from Woomera?’
‘Vaguely.’
‘That’s where it all began for me. Of course, there were always a few protests from the community outside about what was going on. There were marches and picket lines, even way the hell out there at Woomera. It was part of my job to secure the camp against them—although usually the government flew in extra South Australian police, or the AFP. Water cannons and the lot. But finally there was that one really big protest, and in all the running battles, someone got to the fence with wire-cutters, or threw them over the fence to the inmates—and the next thing you know, the fence is down and inmates are running everywhere, mixing in with the protesters.’
TV images surfaced in my mind, old footage I hadn’t really paid much attention to at the time—dust, and a fence buckling, and figures running, leaping.
‘Complete chaos,’ Harry said. ‘The last thing I remember was some Immigration arsehole yelling at me to do something—to stop them, to shoot over their heads, maybe even to shoot at them, I dunno. But I just stood there stock-still for a minute and saw the raw joy on those people’s faces. The ones escaping. It wasn’t like you might see from a regular prisoner during a jailbreak. There was nothing furtive about it, nothing half-smart or clever. This was sheer liberation. This was people escaping a death camp, people who suddenly had their lives back.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘I dropped my gun and ran off with them.’
I gaped at him. ‘Bullshit.’
He laughed. ‘No. Seriously. I don’t know what came over me—but in that split second, I wanted to be just as free as they were. That’s what Woomera did to detainees and staff alike. It
was a prison for all of us. And I wanted out. So I ran with them. Whooping, screaming, tearing off my uniform, hugging people I didn’t know. I kid you not, it was about the best sixty seconds of my life. Then I sobered up a bit, of course.’
‘Did you go back?’
‘Hell no. Next thing I knew I was bundled into the back of some old hippie couple’s car with two of the detainees, and we were racing hell for leather away from there. That’s when I began to wonder what the fuck I was doing. And what the detainees were doing, too—’cause they were really gonna be made to pay for something like this, once they were caught again. But it was impossible to worry too much. I mean, the hippies were laughing and the detainees were grinning from ear to ear and it all seemed worth it, just for that moment.’
I searched my memory vainly. ‘How many got away?’
‘Thirty odd. Most of them, of course, didn’t get far—they just ran off into the desert until the police caught up with them. But a good few got smuggled off by the protesters, like I did. And that’s what really amazed me. Those protesters—they’d come organised for this. It wasn’t just an impromptu dash. They’d planned the escape, and now they had plans to keep the escapees hidden. Those hippies, for instance—they weren’t just any old fools. They had maps and supplies, and about fifteen k up the road they dropped me and the detainees in the desert, with instructions about where to go next. They couldn’t keep us in their car. They knew there’d be roadblocks going up on all the main roads even as we spoke.’
‘Didn’t they care that you were one of the guards?’
‘It threw them a bit, but they seemed to accept it. After all, I was half-naked by then and laughing like a maniac. It was the detainees I was more worried about. There we were suddenly, just the three of us running alone into the desert. Me, and two young Afghani guys. Now, they had no reason to trust me, let alone to like me. They could have told me to fuck off, they could have beaten the crap out of me and left me for dead. But they didn’t. Despite it all, they understood what I was doing. And so we pressed on to the next rendezvous.’
‘You actually got clean away?’
‘Clean away,’ he nodded. ‘We hid during the day and walked during the night, for two nights, until we were out of the immediate search zone, then we hit a back road and got picked up, just as promised. By a couple of young greenies this time. They smuggled us to Adelaide, and handed us over to some lawyer, who hid us in his flat for a while. From there we moved to Melbourne, and then from house to house. Just with ordinary people, for the most part—a bit left-leaning, maybe, but nothing outrageous. And it dawned on me gradually. These were safe houses. And this whole system was an underground.’
‘I get it. The Oz Underground . . .’
‘Not quite. But the beginnings of it. I could scarcely believe it at the time. The government was screaming blue murder about the escapees. They knew we were being ferried around the country by sympathisers. And there were all sorts of threats being broadcast—anyone caught hiding an escapee was going to have the book thrown at them. They were gonna face prison themselves. Total hysteria. And yet here were everyday Australians, most of them just average middle-class folk, nice and secure, and they were risking it all to hide us. They were so disgusted by Howard and his mob that they were engaging in actual subversive activity against their own government. It blew my mind. Lazy old Australia—the most unradical place on earth—and we had a secret resistance movement!’
‘And you stayed hidden? But you weren’t even a detainee.’
‘No. And once the real escapees were safely away and gone, I surfaced again. The AFP called me in, of course, and wanted to know where’d I’d been, but I just spun them some story about deciding to quit Woomera the day of the riot, and heading off on a holiday. They knew it was crap, but I didn’t give them anything else.’
‘And you’ve been in the Underground ever since?’
‘Well, the name didn’t come along until later. But I really think Woomera was the inspiration. That was the first time an actual network was set up. It took a lot of people to get those detainees to safety, and not just those doing the hiding. Some of the escapees were sick, so we needed doctors who were onside. We needed lawyers onside. We needed interpreters. We needed sympathisers from the Immigration Department itself. The incredible thing was that we could actually find people like that. And once all those individuals had discovered each other, and seen what they could do to circumvent some of the government’s worst policies, hell, they weren’t going to forget it. Especially later, when the government and the security laws got even worse. And so the Oz Underground was born.’
‘And so here we are now.’
‘Yes. Here we are.’ He strode on in silence for a moment, boots crunching on hard sand. Then his head was shaking thoughtfully. ‘It’s funny. All these years in the OU, all the secrecy and the recruiting and the thousands upon thousands who joined us. And we’re still losing. Losing worse than ever. And here I am again. Running off into the desert to get away.’
He stopped, stared all about at the night.
‘At least back then me and the two Afghani boys knew what we were supposed to be doing, and where we were going. But us three . . .’
We had all stopped.
Aisha said, ‘Allah will preserve us.’ And the weird thing was, I didn’t think this was just one of her ritual utterances. I think she really meant it—that she was offering, in her way, some sort of support and understanding for a fellow rebel.
But Harry just sounded deathly tired. ‘You think so, do you?’ He pointed northwards. ‘Look.’
It was another helicopter, a blue light low on the horizon. It was too far away to hear, but a narrow search beam stabbed down from it towards the ground. And suddenly the night and the landscape did not seem so vast and empty anymore.
‘By tomorrow they’ll have found our tracks on that dirt road,’ Harry sighed. ‘Hopefully it’ll take them a bit longer to find the Humvee—but once they do, they’ll be right on our tail. It’s just a matter of following our footprints.’
We watched the silent light hovering for another minute or more, no one speaking. Then we turned in unison, and fled on.
TWENTY-THREE
The three of us were still walking at dawn. By then, we’d left the sandy plain of the night behind, and were trudging across low scrubby hills. Dreary country, and hard. We hadn’t slept in nearly twenty-four hours and, for me, the march had taken on a tone of exhausted delirium. Even Harry was flagging, and had begun to look for somewhere to rest—a hole, or thick patch of scrub, in which we might hide ourselves. But there was nothing. Only a few fences that crossed our path, and alongside them the faded wheel marks of seldom-used tracks—both reminders that we weren’t in a real desert, but instead were traversing someone’s property, a cattle or sheep station. But how big a property we couldn’t hope to guess, let alone where it might end, or what lay beyond it, or where, at the last, we were headed.
‘The Murray River,’ was all Harry would say. ‘It’s south of us somewhere. And once we cross that, we’re into Victoria.’
Yet even in my condition, I could see that crossing the border did not magically make us safe. This was not a matter of state jurisdiction. Besides, any bridge would have a checkpoint and soldiers. But Harry was past arguing.
‘We’ll swim across,’ he insisted, plodding onwards.
The daylight grew, and the sun rose. Far away to the west, a tall line of dune-like hills blushed pink in the dawn, and cockatoos screeched in the scrub around us. There was not a cloud to be seen, and all of us were scanning the sky now, alert for the black dot of a helicopter, or even the sound of one. And indeed—just at the point were I was about to drop to my knees and demand to sleep, hidden from the searchers or not—there did come a sound. But it wasn’t a helicopter. It came from ahead somewhere, and it was the rattle of a small engine.
Harry paused, his head tilted. ‘Do you hear that?’
I stared at him ble
arily. He looked a mess. Bloody, dirty, unshaven, his eyes as red and swollen as mine felt.
‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘A car? A motorbike?’
Already I was imagining army troops or Federal Police patrolling for us.
But Harry shook his head. ‘That’s a generator.’
We crept cautiously towards the noise. It rose and fell deceptively, and after several minutes we didn’t seem any nearer. There were certainly no buildings in sight. It was as if the thing was underground. We scrambled up a low ridge, and from the crest looked out over a wide expanse of white sand—it was a lake bed, long dry, and a few miles across. The ridge upon which we stood formed its eastern rim. But the sound of the generator was loud now, and I stared, suddenly confused. At our feet, the ridge sank away into a gully—and the ground there abruptly turned from earth into some sort of material. A material littered with sand and clumps of dead scrub, so that it merged uncannily into the natural surrounds. For an instant I thought I really had started to hallucinate, but suddenly the picture resolved itself. The material was shade cloth, stretched across the gully, forming a roof. We were looking at it from above.
‘What the fuck?’ Harry wondered aloud.
He led us down, until we were standing at the foot of the ridge. Ahead of us spread the white floor of the lake, burnt sterile by the sun. But looking back into the gully we could see, beneath the shade cloth, a deep, dim covered space.
I almost laughed. ‘Sweet Jesus.’
It was a greenhouse, full of the biggest and fattest marijuana plants I had ever seen.
I turned to Harry. ‘Can you believe this?’
Harry, however, wasn’t smiling. His face had gone wary, eyes roving, and from his belt he drew the pistol that he had kept from the massacre.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.
‘Shut up.’
‘But it’s just someone’s dope crop.’
‘Exactly. A big one. With power, irrigation and a camouflaged roof. And something like this isn’t going to be just left here without—’
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