Fishing for Stars

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Yeah, the sausage-roll queen,’ I said sympathetically.

  ‘Yes, well, you know all that and the denouement, the return to Marg Hamilton. Part of the way back was to resume control of my body.’ Marg paused, leaned forward and kissed me on the forehead. ‘I couldn’t bear to think that it was all over for me, that I’d had all there was and the rest was simply growing plump and what women laughingly refer to as “comfortable”, when carrying any extra weight is patently anything but. So I started to lose weight and to tone the pubococcygeus muscle, or the PC muscle, with vaginal-tightening exercises.’

  ‘I don’t suppose I should ask, but is that done with a . . . you-know-what?’

  ‘You probably don’t want to know, Nick, but seeing you’ve asked, it’s done by tightening and pulling on the band of muscle that stretches from the coccyx to the pubic bone, as if you are trying to resist the urge to pee or fart.’

  We both started to giggle. ‘Useful if you’re caught short in the middle of a good movie?’ I managed.

  ‘Don’t joke. One of the benefits is that it reduces the risk of urinary incontinence, not uncommon in women my age,’ Marg replied.

  ‘It suddenly occurs to me that this conversation isn’t all that romantic,’ I said, ‘but it’s stuff men don’t know anything about and it’s bloody interesting. But if I may be persistent, we still haven’t come to the . . . er . . . offending item.’

  ‘Ah, the dildo,’ Marg proclaimed. ‘Well, I have a very sensible gynaecologist, who fortunately for me is a woman of my age and a very practical one. One of the PC-tightening exercises she recommended involves a Kegelmaster – not dissimilar to a dumbbell – you use it by tightening against it as it tries to . . . well, fall out. My gyno simply said, “Marg, a dildo is just as effective and a lot more fun; I personally recommend it.”’ Marg giggled wickedly. ‘One should always take one’s doctor’s advice, don’t you think, darling?’

  ‘Nice,’ I said, genuinely pleased that she’d confided in me.

  Marg jumped on top of me and said, ‘Darling, shall we benefit just once more from the results of the modified Kegelmaster?’

  ‘Oh, okay, if you insist,’ I laughed, ‘but you have to promise to be gentle.’

  I guess, as they say in the vernacular, I was double dipping. (Oops! Under the circumstances quite the wrong expression.) Anyway, having a bet each way. But the two glorious women in my life approached the act of making love so entirely differently that it was as if I was taking pleasure in two essentially different experiences: the exquisite subtlety and knowledge of the male erogenous zones that Anna possessed, and the joyous exuberance of Marg’s approach to lovemaking. In return, I think I learned to satisfy the desire of each in a completely different manner.

  Marg won her seat in the May 1982 state election on a count back, ten votes separating her from her Liberal rival, while Bob Brown in the neighbouring seat of Denison missed out almost as closely. This was almost certainly due to the perfidious campaign Robin Gray’s Liberals ran against him where they letterboxed every house in Denison with a copy of an article that had appeared in the Launceston Examiner many years previously with the headline ‘Doctor admits he’s gay!’, making sure that everyone in the electorate knew Bob Brown was homosexual.

  It is not unusual for the Libs and Labor to give a new member from either side some time to settle in, but the first member of the new Greens party enjoyed no such luxury; both traditional opponents lined up to be the first to chew her up and spit her out.

  The very idea that sufficient Tasmanians existed to elect a member of a new political party that stood for trees and rivers was totally abhorrent to the old guard, particularly in the year when the infrastructure was just about in place to build the first dams to flood a large part of the state.

  These dams would effectively submerge over a third of Tasmania’s south-west wilderness. On any map in any nation it was a sizeable area to change forever, to simply swallow in one great greedy gulp. Planning had been furiously underway since October 1979 when the multi-million-dollar scheme to build a 296-megawatt hydroelectricity project was announced.

  However, in this period the Wilderness Society hadn’t been idle either. Active membership had grown from the sixteen original members to two thousand nationally and the movement to save the Franklin and Gordon rivers was now on a much firmer base. If it had not yet attained a powerful head of steam, it had at least given off several good puffs, noticeable on an expanding national horizon.

  At the Federal Labor Conference in July, the New South Wales premier Neville Wran, a powerful figure in the Australian Labor Party, together with his wife Jill, came out strongly against the building of the dams and, mainly due to their efforts, Federal Labor adopted as policy the no-dams case.

  This certainly counted as a significant win for the movement, but as Labor was still in opposition, as far as Robin Gray, now Liberal premier, was concerned, it was a toothless tiger and he simply thumbed his nose at Federal Labor.

  Marg was a single flea on the hide of the Hydro monster and with both sides so closely aligned to the Electric Kremlin, as the Hydro-Electric Commission had been dubbed by some wag in the Wilderness Society, she simply became an object of derision, the daily joke in the House.

  Marg would often call me at the end of a difficult day and burst into tears, but I don’t think she ever for one moment lost her resolve. The battle-hardened Wilderness Society was not easily thwarted and in a series of mass rallies they collected forty thousand signatures on a ‘Save the Rivers’ petition, presented it to state parliament and quite noticeably tweaked political noses.

  This must have had some real effect, because Russell Ashton, the head of the Hydro-Electric Commission, showing the typical autocratic arrogance of the Electric Kremlin, declared, ‘If the parliament tries to work through popular decisions we are doomed in this state and doomed elsewhere.’ So much for democracy at work and, of course, the premier Robin Gray decided to heed this self-serving advice.

  This time Marg couldn’t take it on the chin. Forty thousand Tasmanians simply couldn’t be dismissed or ignored as ratbags, she maintained in a speech to the House that was accompanied by the jeers of both Liberal and Labor. I recall how on one of her now daily phone calls she could barely contain her anger. ‘Nick, it’s not the derision of the politicians – I’m one of them now and I suppose I have to accept what’s coming to me – it’s the bloody-minded arrogance of the Hydro. They really think they’re omnipotent and can do as they wish.’

  ‘Well, my dear, it seems as though they can,’ I replied.

  ‘It isn’t even an issue that will be decided at an election,’ Marg fumed. ‘The opposition has the same point of view and that’s why they got rid of Doug Lowe. The Franklin–Gordon doesn’t even get debated! We spent the entire session today discussing the price of potatoes!’

  But Marg wasn’t completely right. Doug Lowe, before he’d been deposed as the Labor premier, had proposed to Fraser’s federal government that the south-west wilderness area, incorporating the Gordon and Franklin rivers, be submitted for World Heritage listing. Fraser agreed. With an election looming, he was keen to neutralise conservation as an issue, now that Federal Labor had taken up the no-dams issue.

  At the time the World Heritage gesture was seen as futile in the face of the absolute determination by both sides of state politics to proceed with the damming of the rivers, but it would later come to be regarded as the one critical action that saved the wilderness. It also showed that men of conscience and independent thought such as Doug Lowe can still occasionally be found in politics, even if their chances of success are minimal.

  Marg, echoing the Wilderness Society, seemed to think the heritage listing wasn’t going to make a huge difference. ‘It’s just politics,’ she asserted. ‘Local Labor won’t take any notice but at least it put us on the international agenda and gave me a rare moment of satisfaction in parliament.’

  ‘So what does that tell you?’ I asked
.

  ‘That we’ve got to go outside Tasmania? Even outside Australia? Yes, we know that. It’s not about the local pollies and the Hydro – they’re never going to change. All our efforts must be directed at Canberra and overseas. Australia must be made to look foolish and backward in the eyes of the outside world.’ She paused. ‘But our rejection of Doug Lowe’s original compromise to save some of the wilderness isn’t helping at the moment. The mainlanders don’t understand that it’s a complete ecosystem and can’t simply be halved. They, the media, think Lowe’s compromise was a reasonable suggestion and we should have accepted it while it was available. Now it no longer is. But we’re fighting back. Yehudi Menuhin helped by launching a booklet that set out the whole issue and it seems to have been a great success. He knows everyone who is anyone, not just in Australia, and we’re hoping that will have some effect.’

  I didn’t comment that there was something very funny about one of the world’s greatest violinists in a sense fiddling while Rome burned. I simply couldn’t see a truck driver from Strahan, the town chosen as the launching point for the Franklin River project where unemployment was three times the national average, getting too excited by the violinist’s contribution or the booklet. These glossy brochures always seem to bolster the spirits of the converted and arouse the suspicions of the doubters. (Where did the money come from to print that?) It’s a curious paradox that in Australia protesters have to be seen to be battling without resources to be considered legitimate. Nearly two hundred years of battler versus squatter seem to have conditioned us so that a well-organised and properly financed protest is generally regarded with considerable suspicion. Printed placards don’t work; it’s always crayons on cardboard and silly chants against seemingly well-organised arrogance and indifference – rags versus riches.

  ‘We’ve also invited David Bellamy to come over. We’re crossing our fingers he’ll agree,’ Marg went on.

  ‘Who’s David Bellamy?’ I asked.

  ‘God, Nick, you’re hopeless! Only one of the world’s best-known conservationists! He has a program on the BBC that’s watched all over the world by tens of millions of viewers.’

  ‘That’s good,’ I said, not knowing if it was. Outside pressure is fine, but actual interference from elsewhere sometimes alienates more than it helps.

  ‘We’re planning a blockade when the bulldozers start coming. Thankfully we have quite a lot of lead time. Our intelligence tells us the Hydro can’t really get underway until early 1983. Hopefully Bellamy will come. If he does there will be worldwide publicity. Nick, you’ll be happy to know it’s non-violent, but the time has come for direct confrontation. We’re planning several rallies in the lead-up and a lot more signatures.’

  ‘No doubt they’ll be as effective as the last lot were,’ I said, then immediately wished I hadn’t.

  Marg sighed and sounded uncharacteristically discouraged. ‘Nick, we’re learning, watching what’s done overseas. It’s all about pressure. Bob Brown says it’s about never taking your foot off the pedal, never letting the opposition relax.’

  ‘I must say, they don’t appear over-agitated at the moment.’

  ‘No, I agree. But Malcolm Fraser and the Libs look as if they’re on the way out and if Labor gets in they’re our big chance. It’s not Gough Whitlam this time, and Bob Hawke, the union leader, looks like challenging Bill Hayden for the leadership, but both of them are on our side. And in the meantime we must be seen to be applying the pressure, making a noise, being noticed, doing things. David Bellamy, Yehudi Menuhin, world figures like that can’t be ignored.’

  But it seemed they could. A poll showed sixty per cent of Tasmanians were against the Franklin River project. In an attempt to refute this statistic Tasmania held a deeply flawed referendum where it wasn’t possible to formally vote against the Hydro scheme, and yet almost forty-five per cent of voters voted informal and wrote ‘No Dams’ on their ballot papers, but this still didn’t make the slightest difference. In the history of state politics, Labor and Liberal have never been so totally united on a single issue while both deliberately ignoring the wishes of their constituents.

  Two months after Marg was elected, on the 22nd of July 1982, the Hydro-Electric Commission began to build the roads into the Franklin. At 11 p.m. on the 14th of December, both the Franklin and Gordon rivers and the south-west wilderness area received World Heritage listing. It was also the first complete day of the blockade, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Despite all the outside pressure, which even included the Fraser Liberal government offering Robin Gray five hundred million dollars to stop the project, he instructed the bulldozers and the police to move in and passed a law through state parliament making protest at the construction site illegal. The eternal battle, Mother Nature versus human nature, was about to begin with the odds stacked hugely against the rivers, the lakes and the forests, where the whine of the chainsaw cutting a swath through the tall timber was drowning out the birdsong.

  And on the domestic front, a wilderness would become the battleground for the real contest between the two women in my life. It would not be over me that they fought, but over trees – Princess Plunder and the Green Bitch, the two in direct opposition for the first time, the one tearing down the forests of Borneo, the other fighting to save the trees. Later of course it would be tuna fishing and whales, the extinction of species due to lack of habitat or river pollution, carbon emissions and the atmosphere. I often wondered what might happen if ever I disagreed with one or the other violently and issued her with an ultimatum, that is, either me or the particular pursuit I objected to. I had serious doubts that I’d survive the challenge.

  I realised that the rule Anna had made in Japan – that I was not to speak to one about the other – was going to be a very important factor if I wished to have a peaceful as well as a sexually fulfilling life. If I accepted the negative barrage of words from each about the other without passing them on, then the triumvirate had a chance of surviving. Although I realised as time passed that each seemed to know what the other was doing most of the time and would sometimes come up with information that was news to me. Anna, I suspected, paid someone to keep an eye on Marg, though she never admitted it. Marg, as usual, went to the horse’s mouth. Her erstwhile boss in Naval Intelligence during the war, when she’d been stationed in Fremantle, was Lieutenant Commander Roger Rigby, who was now head of Australian Intelligence based in Canberra, his main responsibility being Shoal Bay near Darwin, the monitoring station responsible for close surveillance of Indonesia and its rulers.

  Anna now had investments in all Australian states and territories, for instance, she owned significant real-estate interests in the Melbourne CBD and at least two major parking stations in the CBD of every Australian capital city. She also owned more than a dozen franchised fashion label boutiques in Hawaii and on the west coast of America, and a fifty per cent share of a high-fashion workshop in Paris.

  Miss Sparkle, who had passed away in 1973, had left Anna a number of blue-chip investments in major Japanese companies and twenty-five pachinko bars in Tokyo, plus – surprise, surprise – a one-third share of the Jade House. These last two assets were overseen by Fuchida-san, who had forged a great friendship with Anna on her frequent visits to Japan. But by far her major capital investments and enormous profits were coming out of Indonesia where she was partnered by Budi, who by 1975 had achieved the rank of major general and been appointed head of the army’s legal department.

  It was this Indonesian aspect of Anna’s life that Marg could monitor through her old mate, Roger Rigby. ‘Princess Plunder can’t make an indecent move without my knowing,’ she’d boast as she expanded on the subject of Anna on her week-long visits, just as Anna held forth about the Green Bitch on her visits. They were obsessed as well as fascinated by each other. The depth of knowledge each possessed of the affairs of the other constantly surprised me, and there was little doubt that it added extra spice as well as spite to their lives. The e
xtent of their enmity and the lengths to which each would go to destroy the other was to be revealed in the future, but back then I was blissfully unaware of what lay ahead.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  ‘Five of our blokes are killed and our prime minister is full of mealy-mouthed words of regret but taking bugger all action to discover the bastards who did the killing. Crossfire my arse!’

  Nick, on the Balibo Five

  ON THE 12TH OF DECEMBER, two days before the blockade was due to start, Marg had moved to Strahan in the somewhat battered but indestructible Toyota we’d used on our original trip to Lake Pedder. She’d fallen in love with the old heap, with its diesel engine that refused to die, so when I left for the mainland I bought it for her from the friend who’d owned it. Now she resolutely refused my offer to replace it. ‘Buy me a new battery instead, Nick. Sometimes the old bloke won’t get out of bed and start on a cold morning.’

  Marg had sounded tired but elated when she phoned that evening. ‘Nick, we’ve arrived!’

  ‘Where are you staying?’ I asked.

  ‘In an old customs building that belongs to Parks and Wildlife. It’s vacant and close to the town centre, thank God. People are pouring into town from everywhere – a lot of mainlanders, young people – the first lot have already left for the campsite on the Gordon. I’m told they’re going to be sick as dogs crossing the harbour.’

  ‘Marg, you’re going to be okay, aren’t you? You won’t do anything silly?’

  ‘I’m not allowed to, Bob Brown’s instructions. The media comes first. I’ve got to keep my nose clean.’

  ‘Remind me to send him another cheque,’ I laughed. ‘Let the kids do the getting arrested bit. Tell me, what are the townspeople like?’