Even unfinished, bombed and listing to one side, the Bruny Bridge was still an extraordinary piece of design. It towered over the channel, dwarfing the hills and dominating the sky. It was a curved six-lane single span, far bigger than the Derwent Bridge that crossed the river to Hobart. Hobart was a city of one hundred and twenty thousand people. Yet this huge bridge—longer, higher, wider—was taking people to a remote island with a population of only six hundred.
Living in Manhattan, I’ve learned a distinct appreciation for bridges. The UN is on the East River. For years I crossed the Manhattan or the Brooklyn Bridge, cabbing back and forth, or taking the subway through the tunnel to Prospect Heights, until we moved to the East Village, after Ben and I separated. Such an inadequate word—separation—for that chaos, but if you’ve been through it, you’ll understand. I’ve seen impressive bridges in my travels. Seen quite a few blown up too. The former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Enough said. But this bridge was truly audacious. Perhaps Washington Roebling felt the same when he envisioned the Brooklyn Bridge back in 1869. Though let me say, every time I look at the Brooklyn Bridge, I see the largely unrecognised Emily Roebling, his wife, who got the thing finished after Washington got the bends and was bedridden. She was the first female field engineer and she learned it all from scratch. Same thing with Canberra, Australia’s capital city. The architect mentioned is always Walter Burley Griffin. He had the lake at the heart of the city named after him. But it was his wife, Marion, who drew up the plans. Don’t get me started.
The Bruny Bridge had been designed by the winners of an international design competition—Santiago Calatrava and Satoshi Kashima—legends of bridge design. The result was spectacular, even in its injured state. Considering it was costing two billion dollars, I supposed it ought to be.
Standing beside me, observing the damaged bridge, was Frank Pringle. Frank was JC’s chief of staff and number-one adviser. He and I had just come from a meeting on the rebuild program with my brother and a room full of people in the premier’s boardroom back in Hobart, a twenty-minute drive upriver. I had just witnessed my brother in action as premier of Tasmania for the first time. He’d been premier for almost eight years but, watching him, it was still a little unbelievable.
He’d introduced me very formally as Dr Astrid Coleman from the UN, proud to have this connection even though I wasn’t here under that brand. I was here as an independent consultant, though ‘independent’ had taken a battering in the media, given my family connections. JC hadn’t called me Astrid in decades. I was always Ace, since we were teenagers. Because they were my initials, and because I was good at poker and Cheat. Any game where I have to hide the truth, that’s always been my specialty.
Across from the executive building, where we were meeting, was Parliament House. I felt as if I had grown up in those green-carpeted corridors, visiting my father’s office, sitting in the gallery while he debated gambling licences, forestry licences, hydro dams and new schools. He was a politician for forty years, our father. Minister of this and minister of that, but never premier or even deputy premier. Now his son was premier, but for the other side of politics. None of us had quite forgiven JC for that betrayal of Dad’s legacy.
The meeting in JC’s boardroom had not been easy. The forensics on the bridge were still incomplete. Divers would be down there for days yet, but it was evident what was required. Repair the bombed tower. Repair and re-tension the damaged vertical cables. Rebuild the road sections. Sounded easy in principle, but on a massive structure nothing was simple. Still JC had been adamant.
‘Whatever it takes, this bridge has to be open, and the traffic flowing, on March the fourth. That’s why you’ll have an extra three hundred skilled workers and the budget to get it done,’ he’d said. JC’s an inch taller than me. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s two-hundred and fifty pounds now, and it’s not muscle. I’ve lost track of metric living in the US for so long. He’s a big man.
The chief engineer was also tall, but lean with long grey hair that made him look unsettlingly like Gandalf. He was loath to commit to a new schedule when the damage was still being assessed. Mick Feltham, the bridge director, had been equally adamant. Escalating the schedule spelled trouble. More than trouble, it spelled death. He reminded us that twenty-six thousand people had died to build the Panama Canal. Under a fanatical director, they were crushed in tunnels, drowned in concrete and died in the thousands from yellow fever, just to get the canal finished so the bridge director could collect an enormous personal bonus. Mick Feltham was not that man. He wasn’t prepared to have a death on his hands because of an unrealistic schedule. But the word ‘bonus’ had hung in the air.
I could see JC weighing up what kind of a bonus it would take for Mick Feltham to get the job done. Then he placated the man. This was how he got his nickname—not because J and C were his initials, but because he can be convincing in an almost biblical way, even when you know you’re being worked over. JC has that most dangerous attribute: charisma. People warm to him. People trust him.
‘Nobody wants a death, Mick,’ JC said. ‘I don’t want a death on my hands. None of us do. We’re not expecting you to risk lives. But I trust you to solve this.’ He’d paused and smiled at Mick Feltham. ‘You’ve done this kind of thing before, Mick. That’s why I knew you were the man for the job. It’s been a long few years. Your family’s probably worn out by it too. But it’s so close to completion. Look at it this way—if we don’t have the bridge finished by March fourth, we let the terrorists win. We let terrorists win the world over. You don’t want that. I don’t want that. Our families don’t want that. None of us want to live in fear. This bridge is a symbol, Mick. You know that. It’s a symbol of hope. It’s a big, beautiful, literal and metaphorical bridge between old Tasmania and new Tasmania. A new vision for Tasmania. Real prosperity. And you’re the man we’ve trusted to deliver that for us.’
The federal minister, flown in that morning, looked like he might shed a crocodile tear. His name was Aiden Abbott, but on social media he was known as Aid-n-Abet and he was the Minister for National Protection. His portfolio stretched from border protection to internal affairs and he was enormously powerful. With his dark suit and balding head, he might have come straight from the set of The Sopranos.
‘Anything you want to add, Minister?’ JC asked.
‘The prime minister sends a personal directive: Make it happen,’ said Aid-n-Abet. ‘So, Mick, I’m here to make sure you have everything you need in order to make it happen. We’re giving you the workers. We’re getting you the steel. We’ve called in a world-class conflict resolution specialist to settle the protestors.’ Here he nodded to me. ‘We’re doing all we can to assist you.’
I could see that whatever bonus Mick Feltham was going to ask for, the feds would pay. I wondered when that would occur to Feltham.
JC turned back to Gandalf and asked him again if it could be done. The chief engineer looked sadly at Feltham, then at JC, and said that, as he’d said before, more investigation was needed. They’d only had a week and they were still assessing the damage. The suspension cable had been damaged back at the anchor point, torched, and that was going to present some problems. But it was the footings deep in the seabed that were the real issue. Until he knew repair was possible, he couldn’t be sure.
‘If it can be repaired, are we good to go?’ JC asked.
The chief engineer took a breath and said, ‘Yes, Premier,’ guessing correctly at last that this was all he was really there to say.
The federal minister nodded. He applauded everyone’s commitment, slapped Mick Feltham on the shoulder and told him he was a good man, shook hands with the chief engineer and said he had every faith in him, and then Aid-n-Abet was gone back to Canberra via a fifteen-hundred-dollar-a-head fundraising lunch with JC and party donors at the famous art gallery just outside Hobart, while Frank and I came down to the site.
It was a breathtaking view. We had stopped at this vantage point on the headland above Tinderbox so Frank could show me the bridge. In Hobart, upriver, the Derwent was probably about the same width as the Hudson between Manhattan and New Jersey, but here at the mouth of the river it was four times as wide. Blue-forested hills stretched away on the far shore towards the Tasman Peninsula, one-time convict headquarters of the British government. The bleakest, coldest, most savage of all the British penal settlements. When we were growing up, the idea of a convict in a family’s past was scandalous, but now it had become fashionable to claim a thief, a forger, a con man.
Between Bruny and the Tasman Peninsula was Storm Bay, a wild, exposed bit of sea that can be as benign as a lizard in the sun and then as fierce as a she-wolf protecting her cubs. Beyond the broken bridge was the northern tip of Bruny, and the village of Dennes Point. North Bruny has always been a far more remote destination than South Bruny, although it didn’t start out that way. The first ferry service across the channel ran between Tinderbox and Dennes Point back in the 1800s. Later the service moved down the channel to Kettering, with its mirror-calm harbour nestled under deep green hills.
Dennes Point lacked sufficient rainfall, a pub and a service station—the staples of any town—to draw the hundreds of shack owners who had built their weatherboard and fibro cottages on South Bruny, where there was regular rainfall, shops, cafes and an essential pub. There had been a shop at Dennes Point when we were kids, but it had closed long ago.
Nevertheless, despite its isolation, North Bruny had maintained a determined population of home and shack owners and I was one of them. Not that I’d spent much time there in the past thirty years. But from time to time I’d fantasised about coming home, sitting out on the deck watching my grandkids playing on the lawn. Leaving the world behind for a little bit of paradise. Though how I’d ever get Paul and Tavvy out of New York now … Still, it had been a dream. It was probably still a dream, if I thought about it. But dreams had run aground in my life a few years back when my marriage ended, and I hadn’t created any new ones. Mostly I’d just trashed the old ones.
The Bruny Bridge was clearly a massive dream. A global statement. Yet it was here at the far end of nowhere. It begged a question. Why? Why was it so very big? Was that just the way of the world now? Taller buildings, bigger bridges, wider roadways, deeper tunnels, bigger wars, greater wealth, greater poverty, shadier politicians?
Young Frank had been silent all the way, giving me time to take in the changes I was observing out the window of the chauffeured car. In Hobart, there were more people in the streets, and more cars on the road than when I was last here, but it was nothing compared to the rest of the world. There was a new highway that peeled off at Kingston and cut across the hills to Tinderbox. There were new houses glimpsed high on the hills. What wasn’t new was the vivid blue sky, the wide sparkling river and the feeling of being a very long way from anywhere. Especially anywhere that was crowded, dirty or dangerous.
When we’d gotten out of the car at Tinderbox, I was glad I’d brought a good jacket. The breeze coming in from the west was cold. Tasmania has the most changeable weather I’ve ever encountered.
In a movie, chief of staff Frank Pringle would be played by a twenty-something Paul Bettany. Frank had the vivid ginger looks and sharp features but none of the mischief of Bettany. Beaten out of him, no doubt, by the boys’ school education and the standard economics/law degree from Melbourne Uni, the same degree and university as JC—just thirty years later. This was the boy JC had charged with Tasmania’s strategic direction.
‘Well, you can’t miss it …’ I said.
‘If they’d blown all the suspension wires, we would have been stuffed. I think it was amateurs. Only one tower. Almost certainly those mongrels over there,’ he said, eyeing Dennes Point.
‘The Bruny Friends Group?’ I asked. ‘I doubt it.’
‘You can make a bomb in your kitchen,’ said Frank. ‘The joy of the internet.’
‘But they must have dived in the dark,’ I said. ‘That’s no simple thing, setting explosives underwater at night. In a current. And they’re heavy, bombs like that. They’d have needed special machinery. A commercial-grade oxyacetylene torch for one, to take out that anchor point. They knew what they were doing, whoever it was. And a boat like that. It was a stealth vessel, wasn’t it? Not the sort of thing you can rent.’
Frank frowned at me. ‘You’ve been talking to the feds.’ He was referring to the federal police, who were now in charge of the whole investigation.
I shrugged. ‘You pick things up in my line of work,’ I said. Maybe they’d used PETN in waterproof containers, but they’d have needed some way to transfer all that along the seabed. Couldn’t have done it with regular air either. The cost would have been huge, putting all that together. Definitely not the work of amateurs.
‘The UN,’ Frank scoffed. ‘What was the mandate? International peace and security?’
I observed him.
‘Can’t say the world looks like the UN has made much difference, right now,’ he said.
I waited. I was a long way from anywhere, here on this headland. That’s what I wanted to think.
Frank went on. ‘Must be pretty good getting a gig to come home and settle the restless natives of Tasmania.’
I wanted to say, ‘Must be good being chief of staff at thirty,’ but I didn’t. Instead I said, ‘You’re right, Frank. The UN is not perfect, but its mission is still sound. It’s idealistic, but what good mission isn’t? Of course, things go wrong at times. After all, it’s made up of humans.’
‘But with the US pulling out, and everything else going on,’ said Frank, ‘we all know it’s only a matter of time before Europe erupts. These days we need the Chinese on our side far more than the US.’
‘I saw the tourism figures,’ I said.
‘It’s not Chinese tourists that are going to make the difference—it’s investment.’
‘Okay,’ I said.
‘That’s what the people of Tasmania need to understand.’
‘You know, Frank, I always think that international cooperation begins with two people.’
‘Is that how it works?’ he asked.
I was twenty-six years older than him. I’m paid to be nice.
‘It is, Frank, it is. And I’m a pragmatist. We’ve got a long summer ahead. Anything else you want to get off your chest?’
‘I told JC it was a mistake getting you involved,’ he said.
‘You and everyone else, I expect. But sometimes JC is his own man. I know that’s never easy for advisers to accept, but here I am.’
‘It’s so wrong,’ said Frank. ‘You’re his sister. No matter how the premier and your sister want to play it, it looks bad and it’s going to backfire. Probably on all of you.’
‘And, Frank, I’m a Tasmanian. I happen to own a house right across there. You a Tasmanian, Frank?’
Frank shook his head.
‘Where did you grow up?’ I asked. I knew the answer, but it usually doesn’t pay to let people know you’ve backgrounded them.
‘Northern Victoria, up on the Murray,’ he said.
‘Your family still there?’
He nodded curtly. They were. His mother had a clothing store. His father owned the local service station. Frank was a country boy made good.
‘Well, then, I expect you understand what it means to come from a place that’s in your bones.’
Frank shrugged.
Life is wiser than you. That had been my profound thought upon waking at 2 am. I have them from time to time, these little text messages that arrive in my brain. I think sometimes I should write them down. Thoughts for Life. But I don’t. If that little thought was true, then I had to trust that somehow Frank was the wise choice here for JC and for Tasmania. I had to trust that I was in the right place at the right time.
‘You think they’ll find them?’ I asked. ‘The bombers?’
‘Absolutely,’ said Frank. ‘Nowhere to hide.’
I looked down the channel at the hills disappearing back into the World Heritage-listed area that stretched all the way to the west coast, hundreds of impenetrable miles away. Sure, nowhere to hide. Unless you wanted to.
Looking across to Dennes Point, I thought I could see the roof of my house, though I might have been wrong. It had been so long. The houses continued right along the waterfront now, and there were more up in the hills.
‘It’s got busier over there,’ I noted.
‘Not really,’ said Frank. ‘All the action is at Adventure Bay. North Bruny will always be a backwater. The bridge isn’t going to change that. People will just drive right through. A bit of noise and they’ve made all this fuss for four years. Tasmanians will make a fuss about anything. Over there, and down at the other BFG camp you’ll see in a minute, they really think they can beat this bridge, but they can’t and they haven’t. Even with all their celebrity supporters.’
He paused and then he said, ‘Soon enough, someone is going to talk. And then people are going to go to jail for a very long time. No-one can keep a secret here. I’m sure you remember that. Now, if you’ve done enough sightseeing, let’s go.’