Hinterland

by Steven Lang

  During the earlier part of the show he’d offended her. They’d been discussing Margaret Atwood’s new novel, which he’d hated. She, of course, had loved it, and claimed his criticism was based on prejudice against women’s writing. It was an old argument, one she liked to haul out as a way of winding him up. In this case, though, it wasn’t so. The writing was simply bad.

  ‘Someone,’ he said, ‘should have had the decency to tell her. An editor, a publisher, anyone.’ The extraordinary thing, he continued, was that no-one had, with all the implications for literature this implied.

  Towards the end of the show, reviewing a slim volume from a famous American which they, unusually, had both agreed was slim not just in size, she took the opportunity to stick in the knife.

  ‘There’s a sense,’ she said, ‘the man’s running out of ideas, isn’t there?’ Looking directly at him, ‘Perhaps it’s time for him to publish a collection of his occasional pieces, maybe even his letters.’ Pausing to let that idea settle, those teeth gleaming in their awful rictus. ‘But then that doesn’t always work out so well, does it, Guy?’

  She had been referring, of course, to his own recent collection, Correspondencies, the publication of a volume of letters he and his wonderful friend, Edward, had exchanged over thirty-five years.

  He wasn’t often lost for words on the show. If, on occasion, either of them stumbled, it could be edited out before the program was put to air. Before a live audience there was no escape. There was a moment of silence. Two or three seconds too long for television. Realising she’d gone too far, perhaps hoping to rescue the situation, she started prattling on about Winderran.

  ‘You’re in the news up there at the moment aren’t you?’ she said. ‘They want to build some stupid dam right in your backyard, isn’t that the case?’

  And there he was, caught by a vast swelling need to humiliate her and all her pusillanimous little hangers-on.

  ‘Stupid?’ he said. ‘Far from it. Most of Queensland, including the south-east, is in the grip of a terrible drought, has been for the last few years. You might have heard about it. The city’s dams are at less than twenty per cent. Where I live, at Winderran, it rains a lot, more than almost anywhere else on the eastern seaboard if you don’t include the far north, and there’s this bit of disused farmland, over-cleared and over-grazed for the last hundred years, a barren plain, which is the perfect site for a dam. The water trapped there would, as it happens, be up on a hill, and therefore could run down to wherever it’s needed under its own velocity. In fact you could even generate electricity at the same time. I believe they plan to do so. It’s a sort of no-brainer which ticks every box in the green pantheon, not excluding creating jobs during construction and boosting tourism when it’s done. It’s a kind of God-given answer to a difficult problem, but, of course, every fool and his dog is out there campaigning against it.’

  This, or something like it, something more tailored, less abrasive, less patronising, he hoped, was what he gave as his opening remarks at the debate; realising, even as he spoke, he’d misjudged his audience.

  The woman, when it was her turn, began nervously, sitting forward in her armchair, straight-backed, a bit Nordic in her frock that just covered her crossed knees, something deeply sexual in her propriety, she had, he thought, aged beautifully in the last decade, coming into herself in the way of women in their late thirties, that exquisite late flowering. She read from notes, the paper quivering, laying out her position on the dam in language that was clear, if pedestrian – but then so, too, were her ideas. There should have been no argument, except that she was applauded for almost everything she said, and so became more enthusiastic, her rhetoric rising to meet the occasion.

  The dam, she said, was an environmental disaster in the making, inappropriate for the site for reasons of geology, climate and safety. It was the wrong dam in the wrong place.

  More applause.

  She wandered into political theory: the decision to build a dam was an attempt by central government bureaucracies to prolong their hold over ratepayers; it would do nothing to alleviate the problem it was designed to solve. ‘If a dam is the answer,’ she said, to actual cheers, her back ever more straight, quivering with excitement, ‘you have to wonder what the question was.’

  The moderator, a fellow from the university on the coast, someone he vaguely knew, a professor of that sham excuse for a subject, Cultural Studies, himself shambling and overweight, offered him time to address her points before questions were taken from the floor.

  ‘How are people on the coast supposed to be provided with water?’ he asked, politely, generously, attempting to bring some rationality back into the debate. ‘Or are you proposing that we shouldn’t allow anyone else to come here to live? That we lock the doors and keep everyone out? A little enclave of middle-class privilege?’

  The set-up on stage designed to appear convivial, as if they were engaged in a fireside chat, the chairs at a slight angle to each other, glasses of water on the coffee table. Familiar territory, except that, being Winderran, the chairs were old lumpy things hauled out of someone’s lounge room. You might sink into them without hope of retrieval. And the standard lamps were just for show, the stage was illuminated by a bank of lights which prevented him from seeing beyond the first couple of rows. No sympathy there, just angry people, arms crossed like so many Spartans at the pass.

  ‘Thanks for the question, Guy,’ she said, become, it seemed, a budding politician, patronising him. ‘And you are correct; there are some who think we can’t allow as many people to live here as want to, who argue there is such a thing as carrying capacity. I’m not buying into that debate. What I think is if you legislate for water tanks on every new build you won’t need to destroy an important part of the hinterland by constructing an expensive and anachronistic piece of infrastructure fifty kilometres from where the water’s needed, and then pump it to that location.’

  ‘You can’t be serious,’ he said, laughing. ‘This is gimcrackery.’

  ‘I’ve rarely been more serious in my life,’ she said, her colour rising. ‘With due respect, Guy, you’re not going to convince us by making smug comments. We’re trying to address the way development occurs in our own backyard. Why is that such a radical proposal?’

  ‘Because you’re talking nonsense.’

  Someone booed. Several others hissed.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

  ‘Well the dam’s going to be up here in the hills, you don’t have to pump things anywhere …’ he wasn’t sure if this was exactly true, but there was a logic to it. Water tanks for Christ’s sake. ‘And then consider the cost … and the means to monitor and maintain the system, the spread of mosquito-borne diseases …’

  But she’d come armed with statistics, no matter how spurious. ‘According to independent studies the cost of a water tank adds less than two per cent to the price of a new build … these funds would be recycled many times over in the local economy, generating real jobs … if you legislated for this you’d get the same volume of water as in your dam where it’s needed, for less than a quarter of the price. It’s the same principle as solar panels on people’s roofs. Are you opposed to them, too?’

  ‘I think,’ he said, unable to believe that he had allowed himself to be drawn down this path by a woman speaking in slogans, ‘you are proposing simplistic solutions to complex problems.’

  ‘I’m not being simplistic, Guy, I’m being deliberately complex. I’m proposing individual supply solutions instead of major infrastructure. I’m proposing we embrace that future. This is a new age of infrastructure delivery. Dams are old technology. They don’t work, they don’t last, they’re dangerous and we don’t want one here.’

  The hall erupting. The academic choosing this moment to jolly up to the microphone to ask for lights to be brought up and questions taken from the floor. Probably old scores being settled there, too. He’d no doubt offended the man at some point or other. In a place the siz
e of Queensland it was impossible not to have.

  If there was anyone in the room in favour of the dam, they held their tongues. Speaker after speaker – they were supposed to be asking questions but the moderator didn’t have the capacity or the inclination to discern a question from a diatribe – attacked the dam (and him) for reasons ranging from the specious to the outright mad. It shouldn’t have worried him, but it did. It infuriated him. Nobody listening. This hall full of people committed to their little dreams of opposition, their fantasy of always losing out, as if they weren’t living in the most prosperous culture in the world.

  The point was, he gave opinions all the time. He appeared on First Edition once a month with Sheila; wrote for the national broadsheet; was a regular speaker on radio; sat on several Arts boards and contributed book reviews to a raft of magazines besides. For all this he held few illusions about his place in the popular imagination. He’d never made the mistake of assuming a lot of people were paying attention. And yet this little snippet – this little rant at the end of the book show – took off, attracting praise and invective from the most surprising quarters. How refreshing it is to hear an artist standing up for infrastructure, wrote one pundit in the Oz, you have your Wintons and your Flanagans wittering on about the environment as if they had a God-given right to lecture us, being given all sorts of platforms to express their utopian fantasies, but here we have one of our better writers calling to account the woolly thinking of the Left, talking up practical solutions to intractable problems.

  Most likely, even then, it would have died a natural death, only that it came to the attention of Peter Mayska. An invitation was passed through Bain to come to his house. ‘He’s keen to meet you,’ Bain said, refusing to give more detail, promising only that he wouldn’t be disappointed; the meal would be without par.

  A sleek charcoal BMW came to pick him up, driven by a well-built character in a tight black suit and chauffeur’s hat who said little but whisked him through town behind tinted windows on the tail end of a Sunday, the sky doing that wonderful thing it does in autumn and spring in these parts, silhouetting the trees, sharply delineating each and every branch, rendering the valleys soft and mysterious; the view, it must be said, enhanced, the uneven surface of the road neutralised, by fine German technology.

  Mayska had bought one of the declining dairy farms out past Elmhurst and turned it into a horse stud, complete with imposing wrought-iron gates and painted post-and-rail fences measuring out the roll of hills. Lamprey had never visited, nor expected he would. Australia likes to think itself a classless society, requiring even its oligarchs to dress like their inferiors, to talk in the same way, to appear to want the same things. It doesn’t mean they have to mingle.

  The house a case in point. It was understated on approach, a long low roof with a raised portico at its centre, very Japanesey, lots of recycled timber. Fine, high-strung fillies tossing their heads and kicking their heels as the car crept past on raked gravel. Broad Moreton Bay figs stretching out their shadows. An impression of humility which was dispelled, however, on entry, when it became clear that the building was vast, cut into the hillside facing away from the road. The owner of Mayska Coal & Gas coming to open the door himself, escorting Guy inside and down wide marble steps to a boundless foyer dotted with sculptures, a grand piano up against five-metre floor-to-ceiling glass, telling him how glad he was that he could come, that he’d been wanting to thank him for sorting out the incident with his son a few weeks previously.

  ‘I did little,’ Guy said. ‘I simply asked a doctor I know for help.’

  ‘Yes but you knew the right doctor in the right place. Your assistance was invaluable.’

  ‘And your son, he’s okay?’

  ‘He’s fine. A bit of rough and tumble, no more than that. The usual adolescent stuff. To be honest, the boy needs to step up.’ Waving the question aside, encouraging Guy to take in the view, which was as spectacular as it was unexpected. A wide patio giving way to a formal garden that in itself sloped gently to a large farm dam complete with pier and boathouse, ducks on the surface granting perspective; polo fields beyond and from thence the distant hills; glimpses, in the teal dusk light, of ocean off to the east. Wealth on an unprecedented scale, opulence beyond imagination, the little security cameras blinking high up in the corners.

  ‘We’ll eat in a moment but I thought you might like to see some of the house first. You are an appreciator of art, am I right? I have a few pieces you might enjoy.’

  Mayska in white shirt and slacks, cashmere sweater draped over his shoulders, tall, loose-limbed, fit, grey hair worn slightly long at the back, receding from a forehead shining with that polished skin the wealthy always seem to attain, as if they do actually eat their gold, which, who knows, might be the case, although it’s more likely to be a result of something that happens in those curious day-spas; nubile young women buffing their faces with rare rainforest plants or Icelandic stones so that they appear before you radiant with health, sans spot or blemish.

  Directing him from the foyer through a large square arch into another wing of the building which had, it seemed, been constructed for the sole purpose of housing his private collection.

  ‘Aldous is in here somewhere,’ Mayska said, calling out. They followed the disembodied voice, finding Bain at the rear of the gallery, where the face of the excavated rock, lit from below, acted as an artwork in itself.

  There were a couple of Rothko’s, a Pollock, the requisite Picasso (not one Lamprey found easy on the eye), three Namatjiras and a sampling of bark paintings, but also, amongst the impressionists, a Cézanne; a small painting in an elaborate gold frame hung on a wide expanse of polished concrete, delicately lit, glowing in the perfectly humidified air; its richness, the painter’s left-leaning landscape with its pigeon-roofed houses brought into its power against the industrial blandness of the wall, which was probably what it was supposed to do, but Cézanne could surely never have imagined his canvas appearing thus. A painting like that was enough in itself for a day, hard to concentrate on anything beyond it, even on the marvellous Giacometti on a plinth in a room by itself. To have such a thing in one’s possession … this, Lamprey thought, must be the whole purpose of a private collection, to impress, not just with wealth but also taste, a demonstration of sophistication beyond the reach of others.

  A meal was provided. They chose dishes from a menu. Wines that only the gods should drink to accompany them. The three of them at an antique table against the glass, in their own private restaurant, begging the question of staff and superfluous food, the whole enormous production of which Peter Mayska was the creation, or creator, Lamprey couldn’t make up his mind which, wanting to dislike the man but finding him entertaining, a raconteur whose only crime was to like the sound of his own voice (something he’d been accused of himself) and a tendency to draw attention to his journey out of poverty a little too often, even if it was, each time, as part of a story.

  On closer inspection, under the disguise of a stylised beard, Mayska’s face was deeply lined around the eyes and mouth, showing the marks of his earlier life prospecting in the north and west, lending him a slightly bohemian cast. He sat back in his chair watching them finish their main course, regaling them with an anecdote about his parents’ escape from the Bolsheviks. Lamprey was impressed despite himself. It had been a remarkable rise. That, in a single lifetime, a man might climb so high. Come to such estate. Just the mathematics of accumulating all that wealth; the doubling of capital it must have required. Lamprey had recently read a woman writer describe such men as leading with their dicks. He’d been surprised by the crudeness of the analogy both in the sense of the approval the woman granted and the practicality of the description, but watching Peter he saw what she meant, age having neither emasculated him nor rid him of his desire for power, possessions, women, dynasty, respect. He wasn’t satisfied, was still reaching. On his third wife. Lamprey, taking a mouthful of wine (what was it, Grange? Hill of Grace? Th
e stuff had been decanted so he’d never know and was too polite to ask) watched and listened and contributed where possible, but he did so as a writer first, taking notes, savouring each detail for later use, wondering, also, at the naivety of inviting a man like himself to such a place. Did they think he wouldn’t use it? That he wasn’t alert to their pretensions? Perhaps Mayska believed that when they became as large as this, your own Cézanne in your own gallery, they took on enough gravitas to wash critique aside.

  The trouble being that for all his close noticing of Mayska he wasn’t paying attention to their agenda. Not just the wine having its way with him. It turned out it wasn’t his help with Cooper at the camp which had provoked Mayska’s interest but his little outburst to Sheila.

  ‘A man like you,’ Mayska said, after they’d moved onto the brandy, ‘we could use in the Senate.’

  ‘What do you mean, a man like me?’

  Lulled by the largesse, but not comatose, not yet. We could use? What on earth did they take him for? And why the we? Why was Bain allowing Mayska to do the talking on his behalf, or on behalf of his Party?