Fishing for Stars

by Bryce Courtenay

  I recall how I reacted when Marg told me what they’d done to the Lea Tree. ‘Jesus! Haven’t they learned anything in two hundred years?’ I yelled. ‘They’re still carrying the mindset of their forebears! How could anyone burn a three-thousand-year-old tree to the ground, leaving behind their triumphant signature in the form of a crude and ignorant sign?’

  ‘Nick, it’s only a few ingrates. Tasmanians are, generally speaking, a very nice bunch.’

  ‘Like the Babbages?’

  ‘Nick, you’re being unreasonable! You know they’re only another exception at the other end of the social strata. There are plenty of both kinds on the mainland. Stop being cross with Tasmanians.’

  ‘I’m not cross with Tasmanians!’ I protested. ‘I’m cross with humankind!’

  ‘God, you can be a pompous prick sometimes, Nick!’ Marg replied. And that’s all the thanks I got.

  The postscript to the proposed damming of the Franklin–Gordon rivers and near destruction of the south-west wilderness came in 1987 when Sir Geoffrey Foot, Associate Commissioner of the Hydro-Electric Commission, by now a toothless tiger, admitted that the power forecast for the flooding of the Franklin–Gordon had been ‘too optimistic’, all but admitting that the entire project would not have been economically viable and was unlikely to recoup the initial investment.

  Marg returned to her duties as a parliamentarian, her attention switched to logging and, in particular, to all creatures great and small, the ultimate victims of the destruction of natural habitat. But now she was striking at the very soul of Tasmania. Logging the old-growth forests has been a birthright for some rural Tasmanians since their forebears had been sentenced for the term of their natural lives to the vicissitudes of life on one of the most pristine and beautiful islands on earth. These poor wretches were never to return to the excremental hovels in the vile city slums from whence they came. With not much call for their previous occupations of purse-snatching, robbery with violence, horse-stealing, forging, prostitution and crimes against the Crown, they took to chopping down trees for a living.

  Some of these early timber-getters stuck to the axe and cross-cut saw, but all finally arrived at the petrol-driven chainsaw and bulldozer. Sharp teeth and brute force brought to bear on the old-growth forests allowed them to prosper mightily and become powerful in the land. Foremost among these pioneer woodsmen were John and Thomas Gunn, both respectable settlers and initially builders, who saw the potential of the abundant natural resource and the cheap labour available to harvest it. They founded their timber company in 1875, twenty years after the last convict was transported to the island, thus creating the slogan ‘Jobs for timber workers’, still beloved by Tasmania’s politicians and dusted off at every election.

  Today Gunns, a public company, can be said to rule over the tall timber of Tasmania; Marg had found herself a formidable and uncompromising enemy every bit as determined to have its own way as the once recalcitrant Hydro-Electric Commission. It is perhaps of passing interest to note that the notorious Robin Gray, retiring at last from active politics, but not before it was revealed that he’d held back $10 000 of election donations stashed in his freezer, now sits on the board of Gunns Limited.

  As Marg repeatedly told me, the company has about 1500 square kilometres of plantation timber and is Tasmania’s largest private property owner. It has become the largest woodchipper in the southern hemisphere and is now one of the largest loggers of old-growth forest in the world.

  Marg was well aware that while I was prepared to listen to both my partners’ scorn, the one for the other, I had also sworn not to transmit the invective and judgments, although I had reason to believe that both women had come to secretly regret it. They both longed to have a conduit for their spleen and each worked assiduously to get me to make them the exception.

  I had long since learned that what may seem to be gossip to many men is essential information to many women. I call it bitchery, they regard it as vital intelligence. Neither woman did things by halves and in their own spheres they thought big and acted even bigger. As each developed their personal power base, their antipathy and scorn for each other increased. ‘Anything you can do I can fundamentally oppose’ seemed to be the rule by which they played. I sometimes wondered if the Green Bitch and Princess Plunder were reassured that they were on track by the degree of opposition they received from each other, a little like the way they used my taste as a guide to their shopping – they never bought anything I liked.

  If I may be presumptuous for a moment, I came to think that both sought my approval for different reasons. Anna, naturally secretive, needed the constant reassurance that I loved her, while Marg, who was a determined proselytiser, confident of her objectives, simply took my love and affection for granted and thought I must be secretly on her side. In the matter of hydroelectricity I was always able to be ambivalent; after all, progress and energy march hand in hand and it’s possible, especially with the threat of global warming, to put forward an argument for hydroelectricity. But in the matter of trees she was probably right. More cardboard boxes, low-grade paper and toothpicks do not advance the progress of civilisation.

  While I kept to my side of the bargain and seldom if ever passed on from one to the other the information they shared with me, they constantly surprised me by how much they knew about each other’s current activity. Marg would sometimes tell me stuff about Anna I didn’t know myself, while Anna would do the same, neither losing an opportunity to belittle the efforts of the other.

  I discovered that for both the new facsimile machines that were rapidly replacing the telex network were vital. Anna had installed one of these at Beautiful Bay and of course another in her Melbourne office and no doubt elsewhere, while Marg had the use of several in Parliament House.

  To know what she knew about Marg, Anna obviously had someone in Tasmania spying for her, while Marg, of course, had her old Fremantle mate, Roger Rigby, head of the Defence Signals Directorate in Canberra, who kept an electronic intelligence eye on Indonesia from their listening station at Shoal Bay near Darwin. They followed the careers of the Indonesian military, including, I have no doubt, Major General Budi Til, head of the army’s legal department. While they were obviously more interested in his military career than in his civilian activities, they nevertheless collected information on both, aware that the two were often closely aligned. As Budi’s commercial interests in the archipelago closely mirrored those of Anna’s, Marg had no problem spying on her.

  Once she was ensconced in parliament and had her teeth well and truly fastened onto the activities of the local logging industry, Marg turned her interest to logging in the forests of Indonesian Borneo and, as I indicated earlier, on the consequences of deforestation for all creatures great and small. In 1984 the first of many pictures arrived at Beautiful Bay via fax. It was a gruesome image of five headless orangutan corpses, behind each of which stood a smiling forest worker holding up the head of the creature that lay sprawled at his feet. The caption read: This was done by one of Anna’s logging gangs(ters)! There was no doubting the veracity of the information – in the background stood a bulldozer, on the door of which was painted TT with the words Til Timber directly under the initials. Anna always loved twinned letters.

  I waited with some real trepidation for that evening’s phone call and I was right to be apprehensive.

  ‘Nick, did you get my fax this morning?’

  ‘Yes, darling, awful. Very regrettable.’

  ‘Is that all you can say?’

  ‘Well, really, there’s nothing one can say. It’s bloody awful, heinous!’

  ‘Nick, it’s got to stop!’

  ‘Marg, you know the rule.’

  There was silence, then she screamed down the phone, ‘Fuck the rule! If you don’t stop it I will!’

  ‘Now, Marg, careful, darling.’

  ‘Careful! No, Nick, you be careful! And don’t call me darling! Not today!’

  ‘If I break the rule Anna will
demand the same rights. You know that.’

  ‘Ha! What can she do?’

  ‘Marg, Anna is a very powerful woman.’

  ‘And I’m a member of parliament and not without some influence. That’s bullshit, Nick, you’re trying to squirm out of this!’

  While it was an unfortunate choice of word, I ignored it. ‘If I am it’s for the sake of you both.’

  ‘Both of us! I don’t care about both of us! Fuck her! Fuck you! I care about those poor hapless creatures!’

  Marg in her student days would occasionally use the ‘f’ word in the pejorative sense, but never like this. I sighed, attempting to remain calm. ‘I’ll talk to her, pretend I got the information elsewhere. I can’t believe she’d tolerate this kind of thing going on if she knew about it. Besides, she’d know they’re protected animals in Indonesia.’

  ‘Nick, don’t patronise me! Of course she’ll play ignorant, cry crocodile tears, promise to have the timber workers involved arrested. She’s not stupid!’

  ‘Well then, what else can I do?’

  ‘She’s got to stop logging! She has a major concession that covers two-thirds of the remaining orangutan habitat!’

  ‘Hey, wait on, she’s not going to do that,’ I protested.

  ‘She’d better!’ Marg threatened.

  I tried to defuse the situation a little. ‘How come you know all this?’ She was right, but I was the only one outside Indonesia who could know the extent of Anna’s timber concession.

  ‘Never mind, just let me say there’s more where that came from.’

  ‘Marg, be sensible, Anna won’t brook any interference from me. She never has, why would she now?’

  ‘If she doesn’t . . .’ Marg stopped short.

  ‘What?’

  There was an audible sigh on the line. ‘Tell her, then it’s all over between the two of you,’ she said calmly. ‘Nick, if you’re associated with her and anything comes out, your own reputation will be at stake. You’d be better off getting her out of your life.’

  It was my turn to be angry. ‘How dare you! Apologise immediately!’ I shouted, her sheer effrontery leaving me shaking with rage.

  There was silence, then in a bright voice that didn’t deceive me for a moment she said, ‘Okay. I apologise but —’

  ‘You’re going to put our relationship, you and me, on the line?’ I suggested, still bloody angry.

  ‘Certainly not! I’m not the one who’s slaughtering God’s innocent creatures! Why should I be punished?’

  ‘Jesus, Marg, you can be an obdurate bitch!’

  ‘I resent that, Nick! Let me tell you about these remarkable simian creatures. In that photograph are two mothers, each with an almost grown child, in orangutan terms, teenagers. The fifth is an old man, though probably not the father of either child. The orangutans are the last of the great apes surviving outside of Africa. Already logging has killed off one-third of them. Eighty per cent of the forests in Indonesian Borneo have been destroyed – that’s the biggest area in which they’re found – and Anna has almost two-thirds of what remains!’

  ‘How do you know all this?’ I demanded.

  ‘Nick, don’t interrupt! Orangutans live social lives, with the mother caring for the child for longer than with any other creature in nature apart from ourselves. They have the intelligence of a five-year-old child. Would you wilfully murder a child of five? What you see in that photograph are five separate murders in three different parts of Anna’s concession! Anna’s timber gang are actively hunting them down and killing them. The vile bastards are going to eat them!’ Marg began to cry.

  I waited a moment or two. ‘Please don’t cry, darling,’ on this occasion the ‘darling’ going un-challenged. ‘I’ll talk to Anna, that much I can promise. But please don’t pin your hopes on it. That timber concession is worth tens of millions and there’s a kickback to the President’s family. And then she’d have to get Major General Budi Til to agree, it’s not only her decision.’ I was conscious of breaking the rule and telling her about Anna’s business affairs.

  ‘That evil bastard!’ Marg spat. ‘Anna better watch it with him.’

  ‘What do you mean by that? She’s known him since he was a kid! She paid for his education, put him through university. He’s like a younger brother to her. They’re business partners; he’d never turn on her.’

  ‘Maybe he won’t have to.’

  ‘Ferchrissake, Marg, what are you trying to say?’

  ‘East Timor.’

  ‘East Timor? What, the invasion by Indonesia? That was 1975, nine years ago. It’s old news.’

  ‘Watch this space.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  Marg ignored my question. ‘Nick, you have to decide. You’ve been sitting on the fence too long! I don’t care how you do it, but the endgame is Anna stops logging and leaves the jungle for the orangutans!’

  ‘Marg, that’s completely unreasonable and you know it!’ I protested, almost shouting down the phone. ‘I may get her to save some small part for them, but not the whole concession. Even if she could – and she can’t – she’ll never agree.’

  ‘Nick, as it is, what’s left is not really enough, but at least it’s habitat. In Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei there was a total of 123 000 000 hectares of habitat, of jungle; now there’s only thirty per cent of it left, and nearly twenty per cent is Anna’s timber concession. She has to save all of it! Every inch!’ I could hear a bell ringing in the background. Then Marg said, ‘I have to go. The bells have gone for a special evening sitting of the house. Oh, by the way, I have more photographs, but I’ll hold them until I hear from you. Love you, darling.’ With this she rang off.

  I walked onto the verandah and poured myself a stiff Scotch. A squall was passing through and the bay beyond was invisible behind the driving rain belting down on the tin roof. Marg’s phone call was, of course, perfectly timed. Anna was due to arrive in the morning and I hadn’t any idea how I was going to approach her. I knew I hadn’t a snowball’s hope in hell of getting her to drop the Borneo timber concession, much less preserve it intact as pristine jungle. I knocked back the Scotch in two gulps and poured another with a heavy hand.

  Marg was being both arrogant and unreasonable to the point of near insanity. The threat that she had photographs she’d release to the press was going too far. On the other hand, Marg was a fanatic. So was Anna, and going too far with both of them was pretty well how they habitually operated. While they had different objectives they shared a similar mindset and were equally stubborn.

  I told myself this wasn’t the Franklin River and democracy at work; this was Indonesia, where nobody gave a tinker’s cuss for the creatures of the jungle. In theory they were protected, but this was merely window dressing for the West; in practice nothing was done. Trees, habitat, river systems, wild creatures – they were all up for grabs. Nobody thought about the future, it was all about money, millions upon millions of dollars.

  And then a crazy ‘what if’ thought struck me. Maybe Anna did have sufficient money to buy the concession outright, then just as quickly I dismissed the thought as absurd. But no other idea occurred to me and I started to wonder what might be involved.

  She could work out the ultimate value of the timber in advance, then forgo her share of the profits, and she might be able to persuade Budi to do the same. He could hardly refuse. After all, he owed her everything. Then she could pay the usual percentage raked off by the Suharto family, probably not much more than ten or fifteen million dollars. It was a big ask, a huge ask, and I didn’t like my chances, but it was the only way I could think to go. I could probably give her a couple of million dollars towards the settlement with the President’s rapacious family, maybe a little more. I decided to call my accountant first thing in the morning.

  Suddenly I felt resentful. ‘Fuck, Marg!’ I shouted into the din of the rain on the roof. Wasn’t winning the Franklin enough? But I knew she was right in one respect. I could no longer s
it on the fence. It was now constructed of barbed wire and if I had any balls it was time to choose the side on which to make a stand before I was deservedly emasculated.

  A little later I began to think about what Marg had said about Budi and Timor. I recalled speaking to Anna just a few days after Indonesia’s invasion of the tiny country when the five Australian journalists were shot. It had reminded me painfully of the assassination of the Australian sailors on the beach in Java. It was an image that has never left me. For weeks after the deaths of the Balibo Five I’d wake up screaming, the whole Java beach thing replayed in a nightmare, but this time, with the sailors, were the five journalists, their bodies riddled with bullets and blood pumping from their throats.

  Anna had been in Indonesia the week it happened and I was anxious to question her about the incident. She arrived on the island during the afternoon, and we were soon, as usual, drinking champagne on the verandah before dinner. ‘How are the Indonesians reacting to the invasion of East Timor and the news of the five journalists killed? What do you think really happened?’ I asked.

  ‘What the news report said – they were caught in crossfire between the two sides.’ She sipped her champagne. ‘As for the locals, I don’t think the deaths caused much of a stir. Violent death is pretty commonplace in their society. Last week the price of cooking oil went up; to them that’s the truly tragic news.’

  ‘Jesus, it’s a weird world! But I guess you’re right – if it isn’t happening to us, we don’t care! But you can’t help thinking it’s rather strange. The journos were not all from the same media organisation. Bloody strange that they should all be in the same spot at the same time.’

  Anna shrugged. ‘Bad luck, I guess. Balibo is not a big town and it’s built in the Portuguese style more or less around a large square. That’s where most of the fighting took place. It would be quite logical they’d be found there. It’s horrible . . . their poor families,’ Anna concluded.