Just Relations

by Rodney Hall

  – Looks like we made it in time, Uncle says cheerfully taking a count of heads. Like I said if the town’s got to go down, we’re goin to strike the blow, not Senator Nosey’s government johnnies. The bastards want to take us on, well we’ll see who comes out a this one. Once I saw Bessie Collins lyin in her blood and Felissy and them. I sent some gold samples to the newspapers plus a couple a front page facts.

  Wind blows through the empty houses of Whitey’s Fall, down the chimneys into warm livingrooms, it scurries out from cracks beneath beds just stripped of their blankets, jets stream in through keyholes unstopped when the keys were withdrawn, it puffs up joyous heads of dust where carpets used to keep it muffled down. Some houses left open as well as empty are a turmoil of conflicting currents, papers float about seeking their owners and authors. A drawer stands open in Mr Ian McTaggart’s house and the wind fingers through a heap of unopened letters there, unsettling the government envelopes and casting grit among them, a handful of seed on barren ground. In the unroofed houses all is still and the wind invisible, having scoured out any movables long before this; but in the newly abandoned places everything flutters, curtains and furnishings brought alive by the retreat of the humans who put them there. In Granny Collins’s roominghouse, the tattered calico ceilings, pulled free of their nails, float delicate silken banners while little winds begin eating at the walls, peeling back the wallpaper, lifting flaps, and then lifting the newspaper pasted underneath for insulation, brown newsprint with few photographs, all bought in the slow months of 1908 when the editorials welcomed the American Fleet as Australia’s new protector, just about the last papers sold in Whitey’s Fall. The wind was never so busy here as it is now. If no one else knows, the wind knows. They have gone. They won’t be back.

  More headlines are on their way to Whitey’s Fall to be stacked outside the late Miss Brinsmead’s door.

  Two

  A helicopter appears in the sky to the north-east, the air already drumming for miles around. There is no one to watch but the old buildings; and though they mutter together they’re past caring. Simultaneously a bus crawls round the first bend of the road at the foot of the mountain; the only place it can go is Whitey’s Fall. A minute later a car, careening round the same bend too fast for safety, slews behind the bus in a hot fog of yellow dust, swinging from one side of the road to the other, vainly hoping for a way past. Now another car joins the queue, another and a dozen more. As the bus creeps up, it trails a seemingly endless string of miscellaneous vehicles. To the south those dark dots across the paddocks are people trotting in the one direction, hastening, stumbling, their sights fixed on the mountain. From the west, as yet unseen, hundreds of motorists drive flat out, and illegally, along the foundations of the virgin highway, while in the gutters mad cyclists pedal through the flying grit over the bodies and bent machines of their fallen colleagues, private aircraft skim above them looking for room to land on the road ahead, a hearse and an ambulance battle it out at breakneck speed to gain a single place in the convoy. A thousand miles south the cold fishermen are loading pickaxes and metal-detectors into utilities, shedding the silver scales of their dawn labours; while three thousand miles to the north New Guinea warriors begin dancing through the jungle, their minds steaming full of luxury cruises to Iceland.

  At six o’clock this morning the news hit the country. On the radio and television, in every morning newspaper the sensation filled the headlines: gold. Whitey’s Fall is the most famous name of the day. While in Fleet Street journalists are putting the finishing touches to their prophecies of doom, duly introduced by complaints against Aussie attention-grabbing, Wall Street is too frantic with insider trading and the dollar already plunging below the critical level of the last recession. Kremlin phones are ringing with vodka-thick congratulations. Photographs of the mountain and estimates of its yield (varying from 600 000 tonnes to 1 092 000 tonnes of pure assayable gold) are instantly commonplace, and no sooner cut out for pasting in children’s exercise books than too dated to keep. In Canberra the Prime Minister who interrupted his nightly crisis to summon a ministerial breakfast now sits desert-eyed watching his hateful colleagues while particles of grime float across his field of vision. The Minister for Mines is personally aggrieved and the Treasurer wishes in his panic that he had studied economics instead of animal husbandry. Indeed the whole cabinet of farmers and solicitors rival one another in emotive bafflement, with one exception, but she being a woman is not consulted. The Defence Minister is already shouting for increased funds to build up our armed forces against possible invasion to grab the gold. The Minister for Industrial Relations tables a document, explaining tearfully that it represents a collective capitulation by employer organizations offering ruinous terms to tempt the workers back to work and bribe those who have not already set off for the diggings. The ministerial private secretaries, as a herd, jam a respectable Sydney phone exchange with calls to the same number: a number where Senator Halloran’s widow has the instrument off the hook and is making rapid progress into a nervous breakdown. Several satellites, on line from United States corporations, bombard world television with actuality pictures of Whitey’s Fall. Johannesburg magnates are selling their shares in their own companies and investing in Balinese hideaways, the Cairo Museum pays for an urgent advertising campaign. Retired bloodhounds are sniffing the air in Jerusalem, and Eskimo ivory carvers flog their stock of phallic knick-knacks while the going’s good. Swissair announces ten supplementary jumbo flights a day to Darwin and Melbourne; a Brazilian cruise ship, flung into full astern, thunders to a halt and ploughs around one hundred and eighty degrees to charge with two thousand cheering weeping passengers for Sydney or bust. The exiled Grand Lama of Tibet packs a clean saffron robe ready to go home.

  When the bus labours up the final stretch, leaving the scene of Mercy Ping’s accident far behind, emerging into the main street with a gush of steam from its radiator and ruined pistons clanking, the traffic jam extends right down to the coastal plain and beyond the limits of human foresight. The driver pulls out of the way at Ping’s welding works. And the cars behind, released from torture, shoot past, through the town and straight out the other side without a chance of ever getting back. So when the road ends and they are forced to stop, the whole chain stops and two thousand three hundred and fourteen vehicles apply their brakes for the last time: in the whole length of this primitive road there is not one place out of town where a car could turn. Ahead, the track ends in a gully and a giant mound of loose slag. The cars that have reached Whitey’s Fall disgorge people, but the prospectors further down sit tight, unwilling to believe in God. Then they spot the planes overhead, the fossickers on horseback, tractors bristling with tools crossing the paddocks, the invasion of foot-sloggers: they abandon their safe bourgeois shells. The mountainside swarms with people in a ferocious rustling speechless war, people drunkenly singing their way to glory, and people methodically casting an eye over the terrain, people already consulting the rocks and chipping at them with textbooks open at page 57 and page 123. Official estimates of the expected yield leap to 2 236 000 tonnes.

  Meanwhile, the bus door has opened releasing a cloud of incense that drops the driver to the ground: seen to be Rupert Ping, dressed in a blue silk costume, springing about with bells jingling at his wrists and ankles. Following him come four scarle figures somersaulting on the grass. The windows open and sprout a mushroom of limbs which unfold to a human scaffolding where a tiny person sings ally-oop and swallow-dives into the arms of a waiting giant.

  Five minutes later, Mr Ping returns from Vivien’s house, mystified. He weaves his way among the stopped cars. Not only wasn’t she there with his keys, but neither was anyone else he knew. The School of Arts lies in a rubble of splintered ironbark. The locals have totally deserted the place. The troupe of acrobats gather round him for information, their ancient Chinese faces rosy with goodwill. Lu P’an Ping has given them a purpose and he is among friends at this town. The workshop doors bur
st open from inside and a horde of barbarians pours out armed with stolen tools which they carry off in triumph to the diggings. A band of the more imaginative are still inside; ripping Alice’s cow-skin apart, they sift through the sawdust stuffing for gold. People have already reached the highway site. The clash of arms rings in the distance, a puff of smoke blossoms in the sky causing a pair of eagles to elevate and continue their perpetual reconnaissance at a greater altitude. The first tent goes up and the next few, so already a street is marked out. Wives and children establish community relations while husbands stagger back to their territory with the huge lumps of gold pushed aside by the graders.

  Rupert Ping watches Alice’s horns being severed from her skull by pessimists who think they must grab what they can as the gold will be cleaned out from the higher slopes, and turns his back. He glances down the lane at the side in time to see the last straggling familiar figures, Whitey’s Fallers escaping to the showground. Standing on his hands, he runs to catch them, the troupe all running on their hands behind him, legs joggling in the air like vegetable ears.

  The showground is back to its heyday, milling with people and beasts. Uncle marshals the procession of relatives, then waves the vehicles on. He watches with grim satisfaction as a helicopter and a squadron of private aircraft roar in close overhead: they won’t be told! The trek to London is to begin. Elderly citizens sweat at crankhandles. And just as the Bedford begins to roll forward through the high grass, what should come bowling past to lead the way but Mrs Ping’s little truck and Mrs Ping driving it, cool as you like, the tin mudguards trembling with excitement and the lady herself with a neat high-and-mighty look about her and not even a bandage on her wrist, carrying in her head an orderly catalogue of the populations and principal products of the world’s nations according to her 1930 encyclopedia.

  – Well I’m blowed, says Uncle. It’s the track to London we’re takin, he shouts after her and shakes his head wonderingly. Winnin form!

  Billy lets in the clutch and swings in line behind Mrs Ping. The patriarch McTaggart beside him cackles into a paperbag, the blue budgerigar still perched on his head. His wife has begun her routine of leaning out of the window, anticipating travel sickness. The Reo chugs into position following the jingling steam plough while puffs of the steam drift damply against its windscreen. Tractors and bikes and the horse-drawn carts take their places. The contingent who are to walk the livestock get to their feet and dust themselves for the journey, when what should they see but a circus! twenty boys in brilliant costumes, tumbling, hopping on stilts and running on their hands down from the town. The old folk clap with delight, the Chinese acrobats are here to entertain them.

  – It’s hard for the ones that died of the committee meetin, Uncle says. To miss a gala. We should pay our respects: Felissy, Mum, Seb, Jasper, yes and George. Bloody George. Come to think of it, they was all Whitey’s Fallers, not one among them knew London. Born at Wit’s End to a man. Funny thing that. It’s the most people to have died on the mountain since the 1908 riot, if you count them others as well.

  – They did what they could, Vivien agrees taking his hand.

  He clucks with disapproval at this commonplace. In her shoes, Annie would have surprised him out of his maudlin reflections.

  The walkers amble away on stiff hips, swinging the leg out wide in fine style. Accompanied by dogs and cats, they drive some independent-minded livestock among which is Grandma Buddal’s cow with Grandma cock-a-hoop on its back. The people are in no hurry and have nothing to carry. The dogs do the rounding up, the principal problem being Mum Collins’s Myrtle who is convinced she ought to be at home going about her usual routine. Uncle laughs at her each time she tries to make a break. The party is cheerful, flies cluster on their backs holding some kind of parliament, taking a ride. The acrobats are chanting gibberish to the accompaniment of gongs and cymbals.

  – Jumpin side-winders! Uncle shouts. That blue one there is Rupie Ping.

  And Mr Ping executes a double back somersault with pride at being recognized in front of his colleagues. The walkers crowd round to congratulate him on his return. Vivien confirms that she is a woman of mystery by taking his keys out of her bag and handing them to him. The dogs and cattle begin to catch on to the rhythm of the music and step in time, so that Grandma Collins has to belt her cow, ineffectually screaming that she’ll fall off the drunken coot. Even Myrtle accepts captivity and trots ahead having a mumbled conversation with someone she loves, while Jessie swears she catches a hint of Mum’s voice along the way. But there’s more here than aimless cheerfulness; young Viv Lang being with them. For themselves they don’t need reasons, doing what they have to do, but she has to be comforted and reassured. Do you recall how we used to speak of this creek Uncle? Stranger’s Creek, it ends way down there twenty mile down in Dry River, that fellow does. I’ve been prospecting along this creek in my time, never did much good but, though I can still handle a dish of dirt, dolly out you know, or trace a lead, makes you laugh when you think what they’re digging out now. Tisn’t a sport any longer, it’s bloody murder, that mob back there’s only in it for the money, if you ask me. Vivien answers little, brooding on her problem: how is she to break her news to Bill Swan? No room for doubt, she is pregnant. His imagined reactions muffle their talk. She carries with her her big black umbrella which she has not yet learnt to live without, the fear of getting wet as persistent as her English accent. She thinks of Billy when once he flashed past on his motorbike, head strapped in a helmet, face unshaven for weeks, ferocious and innocent as a crusader. The old people talk, they reassure her so she can belong too. Pick up a pebble Vivien and carry it in your hand, gives you contact with the land. My gracious these shoes of Angela’s fit me like a glove, so comfortable you wouldn’t believe. Where is Angie? Driving her milkcart while Vance drives her pa’s six-wheeler, what a laugh. That six-wheeler was rusted right into the ground; I’ll get her movidng if I have to pull her along myself she said. Are you sorry to be leaving your home when you’ve only just settled in? one of them asks Vivien and Vivien replies. She shakes her umbrella. The talk goes on. I can’t help feelin at home on this road, makes you want to whistle on a sunny mornin like today. I can see the last time so clear in me head, Tom Whitey a young fella like meself at the time, full a beans an jumping about all idiotic an strutting round the sheilas, a blasted turkeycock with his feathers going an his face red. Who’d have thought it’d be Tom finding a nugget, him and Paddy McAloon, and getting a town named after him? He had a load to live with Tommy did, knowing his father was the barber at Melbourne jail and shaving the heads of dead prisoners fresh after being hung; that was his job so they could take a mould and make a plaster cast for their gallery, that’s to say when they didn’t cut the skull off to get at the brain and see what made them criminals. They should have tried a look in their own heads, if you ask me. I don’t suppose there’d be much left of this old place up here. London? Bill tells me she’s a ghost of stumps and foundations, only the streets left really. Give us a fresh start then, won’t it? Just as well; I remember some pretty crook things went on there, did some of them meself, like nailing ears on the barn door with the rest of the blokes. Ears? yes, cut off of Abos and Chinks and the like: we was young larrikins. Nailed them up we did, like a warning I suppose, or more like trophies when you think about it. For sport. Yes, we come a long way since then. We was barbarians when we lived at London, we’d trample on anybody, full of courage and full of wickedness, that’s what a big place does to you when there’s gold around and you’re fightin for it. It’ll be happening right this minute back at Whitey’s, mark my words. You can’t have a goldrush without you become barbarians, that’s for sure. People gets hurt and you don’t notice, you don’t bloody well want to notice, you don’t care, don’t even recognize you’re doing the hurting most of the time neether, I done some wild things meself. Now then, now then, you don’t want to frighten Miss Lang with all that stuff you men. Don’t I but! I got my eye on Mi
ss Lang! What a thing to say, man of your years, you ought to be ashamed, as I’m sure you are, Mrs Rose Swan declares to make her peace with Billy’s woman. Eggie here, who we haven’t seen for I don’t know how many ages, can behave like a gentleman, you ought to take a leaf from Eggie’s book is what I say, wouldn’t you agree Uncle? Vivien finds to her relief she is no longer worrying about what she’ll say to Bill. The acrobats perform intricate juggling tricks on the run, polished dragons’ eggs spinning through the sky.