‘No one,’ he called back.
‘First sign of madness,’ she responded.
When he came out of the bedroom in blue jeans and a striped shirt he’d owned for two decades, she sent him back to get changed again.
‘Well, what should I wear?’ he asked her, even though he hated those stories about useless men who didn’t know how to get dressed without their wives. Paolina struggled to her feet. The last bout of chemo had pounded her like hail on a rickety shack; she was the ruin of her former self. Her hair had fallen out for a second time, and her skin hung loose on her brittle bones everywhere except around her belly and legs, where fluid had built up and refused to shift. I’ve become a camel, she’d said to her oncologist, storing water as if I’m heading into the desert. She was due back in hospital so they could drain it, but she was determined to attend the memorial. She picked out black jeans and an almost new green shirt for Antonello. They both took jackets. There was a cover of dark cloud across the sky, and Paolina said she could smell rain.
‘It’s cold, Paolina. You should stay home.’
‘Are you worried some old girlfriend might turn up and I’ll cramp your style?’ She smiled and winked and Antonello shrugged, pointing to his pot belly and pulling at the loose skin under his chin.
‘Sure, they’ll be lining up to get their hands on me,’ he said and then moved closer to her, kissing her lightly on the lips. ‘Button up your coat, bella mia.’
By the time they arrived, there were several hundred people under the bridge. Mostly men, mostly unionists, wearing badges and t-shirts and windcheaters with slogans: Putting workers first; We bridge the gap; Stronger together; Dare to struggle, dare to win. Some of the workers were wearing safety jackets; in the crowd, they created rivers of yellow and green. There were union banners and TV cameras. Forty years was a long time, and young men were old, but some faces were so familiar, it seemed impossible all those years had passed. He recognised them, the weathered outdoor men who’d been his workmates. They recognised him. A smile. A nod. A slap on the back. Men moved across the crowd to stand by him, next to him. They called him Nello, and he was surprised they remembered, but then their names slipped off his tongue as if he’d seen them the day before. Dennis, Angelo, Steve … a tight pulley was winching him back to the young Antonello, a twenty-two-year-old rigger, a boy, agile, smooth-skinned, carefree; a man with mates who called him Nello, with workmates who called him dago and wog, and whom he called bludgers and racist shits. But no matter what they said, no matter what arguments and disagreements they had, when they were working up high, they looked out for one another. And all of them, all those men, stayed on the site for days after the collapse, digging in the mud, hammering at steel and concrete, using welders and jackhammers and cranes, all of them searching for the bodies of their mates. The grip of their handshake, his reflection in their eyes, time so elastic that Antonello wasn’t sure he could keep himself upright.
He was looking for Sam when Paolina pointed to Alice, but Antonello would’ve recognised her anywhere. She was talking and laughing, and a circle had already formed around her.
‘Alice comes every year to every memorial, to be with Sam. She lives up north with her second husband and her children,’ Paolina said.
‘How do you know?’
Paolina grinned. Of course: Paolina and Alice had kept in contact all those years. He didn’t know. How many other things didn’t he know about his wife? How many things that Paolina hadn’t told him? He was thinking about this, and about the short time they had left together, when he was distracted by a reporter interviewing a man standing behind him. The man was in his sixties, tall and solid, flanked on either side by his sons. He was familiar, but Antonello could not remember his name. The likeness between the father and sons was unmistakable. Both of the younger men had his build, but it was the eyes that were distinctive: three sets of bulging brown eyes, set in hollow sockets, under thick dark eyebrows.
‘Do you think about the collapse?’ the reporter asked.
The son standing on his left answered, ‘My father wakes up screaming some nights.’
The father put his arm around his son’s shoulder. The son, in his early forties, would’ve been a toddler at the time of the collapse. Antonello remembered him. Des. He had been a boilermaker.
‘A few bad nightmares,’ the father said to the reporter, ‘but I got off lightly. I saw my sons grow up.’
‘Nello,’ Sam called out to him, and they walked through the crowd to where he was standing talking to a woman also in her sixties. Her grey hair was set in a style that reminded Antonello of his mother and of the Queen Mother. ‘Mick’s wife,’ Sam said, motioning to Antonello. ‘Rosa was widowed at twenty.’
‘I don’t remember you, but then I didn’t meet many of Mick’s workmates before the accident. He loved this bridge. He used to say, “Wait until it’s finished, and then we’re going to drive over it, all of us, with the kids.”’ There was no bitterness in her voice. ‘I wish,’ she said, ‘that he’d seen his children grow up. He loved his girls so much.’ She pointed to three women standing behind her. One of them wearing a union logo, the same logo worn by Des’s sons. Bridge builders breed unionists, Antonello thought.
The speeches were heartfelt and respectful, but for Antonello the references to the bridge as a monument to the workers who died was difficult to listen to. The bridge wasn’t their legacy. For survivors like Sam, who took the tragedy and fought to improve safety, the legacy was a safer future for working men and women, tougher laws, and harsher punishments to stop employers taking shortcuts with workers’ lives. That was a legacy he could stand behind. Not a bridge.
‘Never again,’ the crowd shouted after one of the speeches.
Sam hadn’t let his nightmares define his life. Sam had joined together with other survivors and made a difference.
‘Never trust the bosses again,’ one of the other speakers said. ‘That was the lesson. That’s our motto.’
The last speaker read out the names of the thirty-five dead. Men took off their beanies. The crowd bowed their heads.
Sarah arrived at the bridge after the speeches were over, and the crowd was thinning. She stood in front of the memorial. The wreaths and bouquets laid out by the mourners created a tiny carpet of colour under the mammoth bridge.
She walked towards Williamstown on the path that ran alongside a row of grey and red stone pillars, a sculptural installation. Each pillar was slightly different. Each represented one of the men who’d lost their lives. Sarah ran her hand over the surface of one of the pillars. Overhead, drivers kept driving. There was no stopping on the bridge, except for emergencies. She supposed that for Ada life had been unbearable, death an urgent desire.
Sarah walked on, to a small clearing. Here a new plaque acknowledged the death of a thirty-sixth worker in 1972 on one side, and on the other it read: Forty years after the tragedy of 1970, the workers of the WEST GATE BRIDGE strengthening project remember the sacrifices of an earlier generation. They left us a mighty legacy. The struggle continues and in the words of a great philosopher — ‘Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battle lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers.’
Sarah knew the quote was from Engels and Marx’s The Communist Manifesto. Why didn’t the unionists name the philosophers? It was government land, so she could easily imagine the careful negotiations between union and government officials that had led to this compromise.
From her position in the small clearing, the bridge looming over her was ominous. Her brother Paul had studied the West Gate in his engineering course, examining the reasons for the collapse and the lessons that could be learned about the structure and architecture of bridges. ‘But their downfall was ego,’ he told her. ‘They thought they were so clever. These were the best bridge designers in the world, suppos
edly. A couple had been knighted for their bridge-building contributions.’
Sarah understood about ego: there were plenty of egos knocking into one another in the legal profession. But while some lawyers, some people — more men than women — were good at shouting out their own virtues, at making grand gestures, at pushing themselves forward, of thinking about how they might get ahead, that wasn’t her problem. Her problem was the doubt and the self-loathing, and that had been Jo’s problem too. A damaged ego could be as harmful. She had to find another way to live.
Sarah had gone to see Jo in the prison the week before the bridge memorial. She was in Castlemaine for a meeting of a working group of the Prison Reform Committee. She took Jo a stack of novels, some magazines, and chocolate. During the visit, Jo didn’t ask for anything, and didn’t complain. She was working, she told Sarah, on prison maintenance, painting the social areas. ‘It’s better having something to do,’ she said. ‘It’s good to see you. It’s good to talk to someone who isn’t — who is outside. Good to remember there is a world outside.’
‘You don’t have many visitors?’
‘Mum and Nan having been coming once a fortnight, but it’s hard. Nan cries most of the time. The strange thing is that a little while ago, I started receiving photocopies of pages from Ash’s journals. They’re out of sequence, some more recent, some from years ago, but they are pages where she’s talking about us, about me, about being good friends. It’s weird. Some of it’s surprising, not what I thought she was thinking and writing. How could I have been so wrong?’
‘Someone wants you to know that Ashleigh loved you.’
Jo didn’t know who was sending them, though she suspected it might be Ashleigh’s grandfather.
‘We’ll apply for parole as soon as we can,’ Sarah said.
‘It’s better for everyone,’ Jo said, ‘if I do all the time I was given.’
‘You have to forgive yourself, Jo, and stop trying to make things harder than they already are.’
‘I know, but I killed her … and I doubted her friendship, and it was all in my head, stuff I was making up. Lots of time to think in here and dissect things.’
‘You could study,’ Sarah said. ‘There are some education programs; it’ll help when you get out, and stop you going over and over things you can’t change.’
‘I know, I’m not ready for that yet. But I’ll think about it.’
At the end of the visit, Jo gave Sarah a hug. ‘Thank you. I realised I never said thank you for everything you’ve done for me and for my mother.’
On her way home from the bridge, Sarah went to visit Mandy, and, just as they did during those months before the trial, they gravitated to the backyard.
‘Did you go down to the anniversary memorial?’ Sarah asked.
‘Just for a little while. I listened to some of the speeches. It was teeming down with rain, but there was a big crowd. It’s good to see that people remember.’
They talked about the bridge and about Jo. It would be the last time Sarah would visit — the house was sold, and in a few weeks Mandy was moving to a farm cottage outside Bendigo. She’d be closer to Jo, would be able to visit more regularly. Sarah would miss Mandy.
‘Drop in if you are ever up that way,’ Mandy said as they embraced at the door. It was a casual invitation, and Sarah knew she shouldn’t make too much of it.
After the memorial, there was a party in a nearby hall. A local band was playing Seventies covers, and Antonello recognised one of the guitarists — he’d been a young carpenter on the bridge, one of Slav’s crew. The band played the ‘Ballad of the Westgate Disaster’, and by the last line most people were openly weeping. The band continued with Mark Seymour’s ‘Westgate’. When they stopped, young men standing close to the stage called out, ‘Play Lennon,’ and the band members nodded and the crowd clapped as they played the familiar chords of John Lennon’s ‘Working Class Hero’. There was nothing heroic about working long hours in dangerous jobs — Antonello knew that better than most — but he could not help being carried away by the song, and he sang along with his mates.
Alice and Paolina sat in a quiet corner together, reminding Antonello of the young women they once were, of the nights they had spent together at the San Remo Ballroom, of the dancing and the music. When someone patted Antonello on the shoulder, he turned, expecting it to be one of the men, but it was his son. Alex with Nicki, Rae, and Jane. Alex gave Antonello a hug. And they both got teary. It had been forty years since the bridge and more than twelve months since Ashleigh’s death, but they were all still hurting.
‘You refused to talk about the bridge all those years,’ Nicki said, giving him a quick peck on the cheek.
‘I’m sorry, Nicki.’ He drew his daughter into an embrace; there was a moment’s hesitation, before she also wrapped her arms around him.
‘It was a tough thing to deal with,’ Nicki said as they moved apart.
‘Other blokes managed better than me.’
‘We aren’t all the same,’ Alex said.
Back at the house, they sat around the kitchen table. Paolina carried in a dusty box, from which she pulled out two sketchbooks and a framed sketch wrapped in newspaper.
‘The only ones I managed to save,’ she said, handing them to Alex and Nicki.
In the books, there were sketches of Paolina, Emilia, and Franco, of the river and, of course, of the bridge, in all its stages, and of the many bridge builders, including Sam and Slav and Bob. Antonello watched his children flicking through the sketchbooks. He watched Jane unwrapping the framed watercolour sketch of the half-made bridge.
‘You were talented,’ Alex said. ‘Mum said you were good at drawing, but we always thought she was deluded.’
The sketches seemed so naïve to Antonello — drawn by a young man blinded by love, and by ego. Sketches of the glorious bridge he was building.
‘Your grandmother wanted him to be an artist,’ Paolina said. ‘That’s why she named him Antonello. It was the name of her favourite painter from Vizzini: Antonello da Messina.’
‘Mamma used to say we were his descendants and that art ran in our blood.’
‘I remember that print of the Madonna with a blue veil you had in the old house, was that one of his?’ Alex asked.
‘Yes, the Virgin Annunciata. We had the same print in our room at primary school,’ Antonello volunteered.
‘I gave it to your father as a wedding gift,’ Paolina said.
Antonello thought about all the stories he had not told his children, stories and memories he had locked away and kept to himself. Stories he would never have the chance to tell Ashleigh. But it wasn’t too late to tell his children and his remaining grandchildren — Jane and Thomas.
It was sunset. Paolina, exhausted, had fallen asleep on the couch, and the house was quiet. Antonello unfolded the rug and covered her. He watched her sleeping. She was beautiful; she was his home.
He left the house and headed back to the bridge, long and lean in the distance. It was oblivious to its own history, to the blood and bones crushed and buried under the silt and mud, beneath the concrete.
A neighbour waved as she stepped out of her front gate with her cocker spaniel, and then she pointed to two teenage boys sitting in the gutter smoking, and frowned. Antonello kept going without responding, making his way past the Mobil Oil terminal, the tanks glistening under the setting sun. Across the road, Jo’s house looked dark and tired, but a Sold sticker over the For Sale sign promised a chance at another life.
As he approached the bridge, Antonello could see the West Gate memorial plaque was surrounded by dozens of floral bouquets and wreaths, left over from the anniversary ceremony. He made his way to the small white cross that marked the place where his granddaughter died; he bent down, touched the cross, and whispered, I love you. Ashleigh and Bob and Slav were no more. Paolina might not make it to the end of the ye
ar. Death was everywhere — but so was life. And for the moment, he was alive.
Acknowledgements
When the West Gate collapsed during construction in 1970, I was a schoolgirl, living with my brother and working-class migrant parents in Yarraville, less than ten minutes drive from the bridge. The thirty-five men who died were workers whose employers failed to ensure a safe workplace. It is Victoria’s largest industrial accident, and it has haunted me for more than forty years. The real cost of progress is often borne by the working class, but while politicians, designers, and engineers might make it into the history books, the workers are forgotten. This novel is a work of fiction and none of the characters are based on real people. However, I have written it as a tribute to the men who built the West Gate Bridge — the victims and the survivors — and their families, to give voice to their stories.
This novel is also dedicated to my dear friend Teresa Corcoran, who passed away in 2005, and who believed we each have a responsibility to leave the world a little better than we found it. She was a humanitarian, storyteller, teacher, and gardener. I continue to miss our long and animated conversations, which always included lots of laughter and politics.
A substantial part of this novel was written while I was working as a full-time academic at Victoria University. My thanks go to the university, the College of Arts, and my colleagues for their support. I would also like to thank the City of Melbourne’s Arts Grant Program and Victoria University for funding that provided some of the time and space for me to focus on the novel.
My gratitude to Patricia Hayes, who was my research assistant in 2011 and spent time digging up archival materials on the West Gate; to John Tully, for talking to me about rigging; to the staff of the University of Melbourne Student Union Advocacy and Legal Service, who gave me advice about sentencing lengths and conditions for culpable and dangerous driving; and especially Danny Gardiner, from the West Gate Bridge Memorial Committee, who provided some archival materials and stories early on in the project and later read and provided feedback on a draft of the West Gate sections of the novel. I would like to acknowledge the work of the West Gate Bridge Memorial Committee and their website (http://www.westgatebridge.org/), which documents the collapse of the West Gate and commemorates the lives lost; Bill Hitchings’ book West Gate, published by Outback Press in 1979; and the many Melburnians I have met along the way who, when they heard I was writing about the West Gate Bridge disaster, shared their memories and recollections. I am grateful to everyone who was willing to offer their knowledge and experience. However, the facts are not always clear. While my aim has been to stay true to the historical circumstances of the collapse, not everything is known and sources differ.
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