We could have taken a boat across from the construction site, but I’d requested otherwise. I’d also offered to go on from Tinderbox alone, but JC had insisted Frank accompany me today. I think he wanted to show Frank that his objection to me being here was unwarranted.
It had been a long time since I’d been on the Bruny ferry. And despite what everyone said, I was sure it wouldn’t be operational in a year or two. The bridge would do it in. There weren’t enough ferry devotees to make it worthwhile. It was the market reality. And I wanted to understand the communities that would lose all the passing trade.
We drove through the tiny suburbs of Howden, Margate, Snug, past Coningham and Oyster Cove, along the winding rural road until we descended into Kettering. From there the road continued on to Woodbridge and eventually wound back to Cygnet, if you didn’t veer down Ferry Road. All these places named in honour of our British overlords. The new King of England is still Australia’s figurehead. If the crowd at the airport, and the people I’d observed in the streets and shops were anything to go by, Tasmania was still almost entirely an Anglo-Saxon population of people schooled in British manners, habits, food and government. It was possible Tasmania had changed, beneath the surface, but I doubted it. Other than people who looked like tourists, I had hardly seen a non-Caucasian person.
The channel used to be a place of orchards—cherries, apricots, apples. The apples had mostly gone in the seventies when Britain joined the European market. Tasmania had grown an abundance of potato varieties back then too, but they had gone when one of the multinationals insisted on farmers growing a single potato variety suitable for making fries. A few years later, with all that diversity lost, the multinational moved on to another country with cheaper labour, better subsidies. Looking at the countryside with its weatherboard farmhouses, paddocks, fences and tidy gardens, I wondered if the latest venture was alpacas or health spas. Sheep’s cheese or sloe gin.
The Bruny ferry crossing is twelve minutes or so. The wait was much longer. There were vehicles lined up across the bitumen car park in neat lines. I went into the cafe with Frank and got coffee. I took it back to the car and ate my sandwich. It was a Reuben and I wondered if someone thought of that especially for me, coming from New York. If so, I appreciated it. The silverside was good. The sauerkraut was excellent and the cheese just right. Not toasted but delicious. I was suddenly homesick for New York. The trees had been bare when I’d raced home to pack for this trip. The wind rushing through Union Square had grown icy in the weeks I’d been gone to the Middle East. Suddenly everyone was in black puffer coats and beanies.
When you live in the East Village, you can walk two blocks and wonder what part of the world you’re in and if you’re safe. Near the East River, in Alphabet City where the avenues go by letters, even today the code is still A for adventure, B for beware, C for caution and D for dead. I live in a fifth floor walk-up on East 4th Street between Caution and Dead. It’s fine to go to the grocery one block over, but not to the one across the road. Sometimes it’s good to be a white person and feel unsafe. It reminds me what my children have to go through every day. What the people I work with go through every day. Of course, for most women, fear is a state of daily awareness. But at six feet tall and trained to defend myself, I’ve probably had less of that than many women. I love the East Village. I love its edginess that’s so unlike the West Village. I love the little library on Tompkins Square Park and the coffee at Third Rail and Momofuku’s shrimp buns and chicken noodle soup. It was hard to believe I was there just the other night with Tavvy and Paul having a last dinner before I left again. Though they’re both grown up, and I leave Manhattan often, something about being here, waiting for the Bruny ferry, made me feel very far away from them. I hadn’t given them this. In a way, I thought I’d been saving them from it. From the smallness of a life here in Tasmania. I’d escaped. I’d wanted them to have a different life. A bigger, more colourful, more international life. Well, they sure got that, but maybe I’d been wrong. That’s the downside with parenting. There’s no going back.
The chauffeur started up the car and drove us onto the ferry. It was the same old beast as the last time I was here. Salt-sodden, rust-eaten, painted up and practical. A double-decker ferry carrying buses, a couple of trucks bearing the branding of building contractors, residents, and all those tourists in their rental cars, all keen to see Adventure Bay, Cloudy Bay, the lighthouse, the Neck. It was easy to spot them. They were the Asians and Indians with their cameras and slightly jaunty holiday wear at odds with the practical clothing worn by the locals. Clearly Manhattan wasn’t the only place where the black puffer jacket was the outdoor uniform. My briefing notes told me that South Bruny had an abundance of visitor accommodation, cruises, fishing trips, shops, cafes, wineries, history and diving. On the long pristine beaches, fairy penguins came ashore after dark, shearwaters nested in the sand dunes and there were dawn vistas from isolated lookouts. Two hundred and fifty thousand tourists a year were proof that whatever Bruny offered, people liked it. It made sense to build a bridge. So why was everyone so het up about it? Why had someone wanted to blow the thing up? Was it just that Tasmanians will protest anything that comes in the guise of progress?
‘Why do you think Tasmanians are so upset about the bridge, Frank?’ I asked, sipping coffee.
‘Because everyone here is inoculated against change. And the worst of them are the sea changers and tree changers who have done more to change the place than anyone.’
‘But it makes sense, yes, to let tourists have better access to Bruny? I mean, they’re coming anyway,’ I said.
‘There’s plenty of room,’ said Frank. ‘The place is booming. People ought to be grateful.’
‘Yet people smell a rat. Is it the size of the bridge? The two billion dollars? I mean, the scale of the thing, it doesn’t quite add up, does it?’
‘What’s to add up? Tasmanians complain all the time about being the poor cousin and then, when the federal government finally gives them a golden goose, they turn up their noses at it.’
‘So there is no other agenda? Something everyone’s missing?’
‘You’ve been here twenty-four hours and you’re already talking conspiracy theories?’
We were parked on the lower level of the ferry, so I got out of the car and took the stairs to the upper deck. There, leaning against the railing, I surveyed the channel. It was dark denim blue. A five- to ten-knot south-westerly was ruffling the water. I breathed in the salt air. Most places I’ve travelled, I’ve found beauty, but in Tasmania, each time I come back, I get hit with it all over again. The beauty here is of a different order. Something to do with the light and the air that is so crisp and unpolluted it almost hurts to take a deep breath at first.
Further along the deck, a young woman emerged from a minibus in a floral dress with a garland around her head. Other women emerged from the bus, also in floral dresses and high heels. One had a camera, and she began to photograph the garlanded woman, who posed as models do, assured of her beauty, at ease with her body and her smile, slightly embarrassed at all the attention. The breeze was stiffening as we moved into the channel, and the wind blew her dress up, revealing black lace underwear. All the women laughed.
‘Come together, ladies,’ said the photographer, and snapped them as they cuddled and laughed. Being November, it occurred to me that this was probably a Melbourne Cup party. Australia’s favourite horse race inspired social events across the country. Even in Hobart.
I noticed that men were emerging from the cars around the women. As if they could smell the scent of fresh oestrogen, these older men in blue singlets or polo shorts, with their beer guts and jowls, sauntered about taking off their caps and rubbing their balding heads, puffing out their chests, nodding to one another and covertly staring at the women, like roosters assessing the hens. Are you serious? I wanted to say to them. Don’t you know how old you are? They are never going to look at you!
Along the railing, three Chinese women had dressed for this ferry crossing in blue striped t-shirts, white pants and sneakers. They photographed one another, but when they saw the male attention the floral women were getting, they moved further down the railing. They looked a little lost.
A passing yacht heeled to starboard, heading up the channel. The Chinese woman returned to their car. The floral women resumed their seats on the minibus. I looked north and took in the dramatic expanse of bridge, huge even from this distance.
Driving off the ferry, we followed the traffic up over the hill. At the North Bruny turn-off, only one other car took the road to Dennes Point. The rest of the traffic headed south.
The road had been upgraded, widened and sealed in anticipation of the bridge. Gone were the tight gravel corners and corrugated surface. Now it was a four-lane tarmac carved through farmlands. Only as we reached Dennes Point did the roadworks end, and we diverted to the old road. We could see the last section that, when complete, would sweep over the hill, down past the 1800s red-brick farmhouse, to the bridge.
We passed my house on the left. I didn’t mention this to Frank. Perhaps he already knew. I was relieved it was on this old section of road away from the bridge traffic. So was the new cafe and local art gallery that had opened a few years back. And there was the bridge up close, winged, injured, a giant beast fallen on one knee.
We pulled in by the jetty. It had been upgraded too—lengthened and widened for equipment and supplies. We got out and walked a short distance along the shore to the headquarters of the BFG.
‘Very well funded, as you will see. They pretend they’re not a political group, so donations are tax deductible,’ Frank sneered.
‘Like churches,’ I said.
Frank did not reply.
BFG number two camp was very different to the one across at Tinderbox. Over there it was hippie music festival. Here it was neat rows of temporary cabins, portable toilets and shower facilities clearly marked. Rental recreational vehicles were parked in neat lines. People were seated at outdoor tables, engaged in conversations. There was an attention to order. And no music. People paused and observed us as we walked in. Frank’s suit and tie was decidedly out of place and I was grateful for the outdoor pants and polar fleece jacket I was wearing. I blended in. The blackboard outside the kitchen tent announced today’s lunch as vegetarian lasagne with garlic bread and salad at fifteen dollars a serve. There were water tanks and duckboard to protect the shoreline and almost a military air. Somewhere in this camp, I thought, were people who knew how to lay explosives. But why now? Why after almost four years? Why not wait until the day it opened, with all the politicians present to watch it blow? When the international media were going to be here in force for the whole event. Why now?
Maybe they got desperate. It was a long time to maintain a protest. Every day and every night. No, I decided. These people had sticking power. Four years, through one election cycle and into the next. Why, I wondered, not for the first time, were Tasmanians so good at protesting?
I recognised Gilbert Farris immediately. If you were casting Farris in a movie, you’d want a character actor. Michael Shannon would do just fine. The same sociopathic tendencies, easy smile and hard eyes.
Farris bought the property at the end of the beach a year before the bridge project was announced. He’d thought he was retiring from the world to work on his next great tome on the human species. But then people began crawling over his little bit of paradise. Bridge designers were imagining caissons and cables, engineers were considering wind and tide, torsion and tension. Soon enough, boatloads of workers were being ferried back and forth from the pier by his house and Farris’s haven was suddenly the scene of one of Australia’s most significant infrastructure projects in years.
I’ve known a lot of men like Farris. Because of the privileges afforded them, they are eminently employable. I’m menopausal. I know I can sound tough about men, but I’ve had fifty-six years for things to simmer beneath the surface and now they’re bubbling up. My daughter Tavvy—Octavia—calls them cis-gendered white males, but to me the ones like Farris are just husbands. They tend to have wives who for years worked full-time while their men built careers. Women who raised children, did the ferrying of provisions and sports bags, ran the social calendar, oversaw the homework and housework, the soccer fixtures and the swimming lessons, loved these men and ensured with all their care and nurture and support that these men of words, ideas and inventions fulfilled their greatness. And this greatness was made evident by the world bestowing that word—genius—upon them. And having had it bestowed, they carried this word as they might carry a great shield bearing their names and icons.
Maxine and I had both gone to a Catholic girls’ school. Our mother had not exactly behaved to type, but we had been trained to be good. Compliant. Well-behaved. Charming. Never laugh too loud. Never interrupt. Never tease a boy. Be of service. Do the housework. Make the beds. Cook the meals. Honour thy father and thy mother and thy brother. Pretend sex never happens.
Everywhere I’ve travelled, regardless of skin colour, religion, economic or political circumstances, it’s men who’ve created the violence and viciousness of the world. It’s the way it is. There’ve been a few exceptions, of course. Maggie Thatcher. Ruined the lives of millions in her own country and a few in the Falklands too. And Aung Sun Suu Kyi. I don’t excuse the savagery that’s happened under her leadership, but she never had the real power or authority. It was all show. The Myanmar military were always in control after she was elected. She spent twenty years under house arrest, under that same military regime. Lost her sons, her husband, and God knows what else.
One woman I knew, also in Asia, was under house arrest for three years. Every night, the militia sent in a different soldier to rape her. Every night. After three years, there was an election. Government was restored. She was freed. That’s what democracy can do.
But people get immune to violence when it’s all they know, and all I know is that men enact it everywhere. And usually they enact it in the name of some kind of God, even the God of Economics. I try not to go down this road, getting cynical, but it comes with the territory. Like the bad dreams, and the sweats that follow loud bangs or when I hear a child scream. I don’t sleep well. I get jumpy in four-wheel drives. It would be easy to think of it as PTSD, but who isn’t a little bit fucked up by the modern world?