I was walking from the car park to Sandy Bay Beach to meet my sister Max. It was five to six, and already the sun was up, the light golden, the sea breathless. Years ago, when I first began travelling for my work, I kept a diary. I came upon it when I was packing up the Brooklyn house and moving to Manhattan after Ben and I split. Reading back over it, I was exhausted by myself. The travel schedule. The meetings. The sheer number of people I had contact with on any given day. Sharing this with my daughter, Tavvy, she said, ‘Mum, don’t you know that keeping a diary is meant to be about writing the high point and the low point of every day, and what made the low point bearable? You can’t write it all!’
I wondered what the high point of today would be. At 11 am I had a meeting with the Bruny Progress Society. Bruny Island, I’d discovered, had more interest groups than street names. The Bruny Progress Society did not see eye to eye with Bruny in Action. The two groups fundamentally disagreed on the meaning of the word progress. The Bruny Progress Society was against the bridge, and they were against the fish farms, which they said had ruined the Huon River and were utterly destroying the channel. They were also against any further tourism development at Adventure Bay until there was a proper planning scheme that was based on projected visitor numbers, not on the handful of residents who lived there permanently.
Bruny in Action had been started by a local and very successful cheese maker who believed that the bridge was the epitome of progress. His followers believed the bridge was the bright future for Bruny, its businesses and its landowners. The cheese maker and Farris were bitter enemies and there had been several very public showdowns at community events. Bruny in Action was funded, in part, by the biggest aquaculture company. Also, interestingly, they were funded by Friends of China, a tourism body that had sprung up to help Chinese tourists on their Tasmanian visits. Friends of China was funded by the Tasmanian government and, I discovered, by the Shenzhen Association, which was a front group for the Chinese Communist Party. This, in itself, was not unusual, I quickly discovered. Most organisations in Australia with links back to China also had links back to the Chinese Communist Party. It wasn’t advertised, but there was plenty of research.
The Adventure Bay Residents Group was against the Adventure Bay Friends Group and the Birdwatchers of South Bruny did not see eye to eye with Birdlife Bruny. The latter had sprung up only with the arrival of the bridge project, whereas Birdwatchers of South Bruny dated back to the 1950s, so I was told. Then there was the BFG, which had attracted a lot of people who didn’t agree on anything else but did agree a bridge was not what Bruny needed.
A few marriages were split down the middle, wife in one camp, husband in the other. Children and grandchildren, too. A grandmother or grandfather was in the Bruny Progress Society while a child or grandchild was in the Bruny Friends Group. The Adventure Bay Progress Society, an offshoot of the Bruny Progress Society, had got a spike in membership a few years back when the government had tried to log the hills behind the bay.
‘Pretty much like sucking the lilies out of the Monet, to wipe out those forests,’ one of the Progress Society people said. ‘Same with this bloody bridge. You finally find a bit of peace and, suddenly, the whole bloody world wants in. Want to be able to drive right to it.’
‘It’s like expecting daily flights to Antarctica but no harm done to the place,’ said another. ‘Well, it’s the same here. You can’t have wilderness and crowds.’
‘It’s like porridge and pesto,’ said the Monet wit. ‘Some things just don’t go together.’
If you google, you can find a counter showing the world’s population. It ticks fast because around three hundred and sixty thousand people are born every day and around one hundred and fifty thousand die. Net result: the population of greater Hobart is being added to the world every twenty-four hours. Glaciers are melting, soil is drying out, sea levels are rising. We’re a tumour, the human race. And like a good tumour, we’ll keep on growing as long as we can. This is possibly today’s low point. I think Tavvy would want me to work harder for my low point, because this is not a new thought. Luckily, at that moment, I spotted Max.
She was coming down the path wearing a pink beanie and dark glasses. I grinned. Here was my sister. Not thousands of miles, four airports and the whole wide Pacific away, but here. Here, on her home turf. Maybe this was the high point of today. We had always looked alike, even though we only shared fifty per cent of the family genes. I was the tall version, she the short one. But still, we’re a pair. Light brown hair dyed variations of ash blonde, unusual amber eyes, our mother’s cheekbones and small ears. Our hands honed by piano lessons, our calf muscles by ballet. Max had been better at both than me. I grew too tall to ever look right in a pas de deux. I’d had an urge to learn jazz piano, but I wasn’t allowed.
‘Jazz is for drug addicts,’ our mother had said, and that was that.
By twelve, and five foot nine, I gave up ballet. By age fifteen, and six feet, I gave up piano. Just flat refused to go to lessons. ‘You have to stop growing, Astrid,’ Mother said. ‘No man will ever marry you.’
People suggested basketball, and I did play for a couple of seasons, but the truth is when I was younger I was pretty uncoordinated. I used to like jogging until I got shin splints. Swimming suits me. I like walking too. I’ve done some yoga over the years.
Though she won a few events through school at the Hobart Eisteddfod, it wasn’t music that called Max; it was activism. Max out in the south-west protesting the damming of the Franklin River. Max in Western Australia protesting something—maybe forests, maybe gas exploration, I can’t remember. Max with the Aborigines and their tent embassy in Canberra.
It was that trip that really got her thinking about politics. She came home and said, ‘Did you know the Aborigines weren’t allowed to vote until 1962? And that the first woman elected to the federal parliament was a Tasmanian?’
‘There’s always room for more,’ our father had said.
‘One politician in the family is quite enough,’ our mother had added. A quote that’s remembered with some amusement.
So far Max hadn’t opted for federal politics.
‘I can’t leave Tasmania with these short-sighted blokes in charge,’ she’d said, when we discussed it. ‘I can do more here.’
But had she?
When I hugged her on the sand dune, I was reluctant to let go.
‘You okay?’ Max asked.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘It’s nice to see you.’
‘You too,’ she said.
There were lots of dog walkers on the beach. A few of them glanced at Max, recognised her, gave a little nod, offered a ‘Morning’. Max nodded to each of them in return, said, ‘Good morning,’ and smiled. She is a very good public person.
We’d had years of being the children of our father at all the election events, the debates, the afternoon teas and barbecues. We were highly trained social creatures. But mostly, as we strolled along the shore, I could see that Max was trying to be anonymous. It was, after all, just after 6 am. Hence the beanie and the dark glasses, the grey marle hoodie and navy track pants that somehow consumed her form so that her five-two frame seemed even smaller.
‘Making progress?’ Max asked.
I gave her a bit of a rundown on the groups and clubs and associations of Bruny. The Day Walks Club as opposed to the Bushwalking Club, the Quilting Network and the Knitting Network.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’s straight out of The Life of Brian. You know, the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea.’
‘Quitter!’ we said in unison. You have to be a certain age to really appreciate Monty Python.
‘And that’s before any of the government departments or the political parties and their side groups—unions, business clubs and environmental groups,’ I said.
‘We are passionate people,’ Max said.
‘Present company included,’ I added.
‘Oh, they’ve tamed me, really.’
‘The Labor Party?’ I asked.
She sighed. ‘I’m a pale shadow of my former self. I think compromise is going to kill me.’
We arrived at the boatsheds at the far end of the beach and lost the view of the mountain. The Tasman Bridge was ahead, the godawful casino too—a seventies thermos of concrete and glass that had been emboldened by an eighties conference centre. It still had a revolving restaurant at the top that did a circuit every hour, but the bottom floors were given over to pokies.
Tasmania was the Nevada of Australia: the gambling state. JC’s last election campaign had been funded by millions from the family who owned all the casino infrastructure, the machines and most of the state’s pubs and clubs. There were no disclosure laws in Tasmania. It took years for the election funding figures to come out under freedom of information, and by then the electorate had surrendered to the inevitability of it all.
It nearly crippled Max, that election. And then, somehow, she rallied. ‘I will never watch democracy bought again; I’ll never play the game the same way,’ she’d said on one of our calls.
And now it was all beginning again. I was going to see firsthand the way Max was going to play the game.
We stopped for a moment and took in a narrow beam of light spearing the river. Granny used to tell us there were so many whales back in the first days of Hobart that you could have walked to the far side of the Derwent across their backs. Acres of whales breeding and birthing and then harpooned to light the streets of London. So many barrels of whale oil harvested in Hobart that it caused a glut in the market and nearly crippled the trade. By 1900, the whales in the Derwent were all gone. There hasn’t been a whale sighted in the river for well over a hundred years now.
Max was talking about the bridge. ‘I mean, I asked again and again for the raw data. The studies don’t add up. The metrics are all wrong. The projections are skewed. We had some huge fights, me and JC, on the floor of the house. But it was always a done deal. People love this idea of majority government, but what they forget is that majority governments run roughshod over due process when they don’t like what the people are saying.’
I frowned. ‘That sounds like heresy from a party leader.’
‘It’s always a fight. Why does it have to be a fight, Ace?’
‘But why? I mean, there are some basic things we could all agree on.’
‘Like a business plan for the state?’
‘Ha!’ she snorted. ‘I think JC believes the bridge is that. It’s too big a project for us to fight, so I’ve had to go along with it—publicly, at least. But in the party room, I’m the cat among the … well …’
‘Guinea pigs?’ I suggested. And we both chuckled.
‘And the people of Hobart …’ Max paused.
‘Are completely divided on this bridge,’ I said.
‘That they are,’ she sighed.
‘They’re divided on the salmon industry, too,’ I added.
There ought to be a name for the kind of overwhelm that happens when you realise there are too many things to fight. If it’s not environment, then it’s human rights. If it’s not human rights, it’s women’s rights. Law and order. Gun control. Invasive species. Water pollution. Tax reform. Refugee policy. Education. Health care. The list is endless. And the Australian healthcare system looks like a Mercedes-Benz compared to the burned-out jalopy the Americans have. That makes me more angry than anything, living in America. How the poverty is so vicious when so many people have so much. The divide is ugly and nobody wants to talk about it, not really. The poor people keep voting for the people who have everything—as if they honestly believe those people will change their lives for them. Meanwhile, the schools get more broken, people get dumber and sicker, and the rich just keep on getting richer and richer. It’s The Hunger Games, but nobody’s noticed. Australia is probably twenty years behind, but it will get there soon enough.
‘I keep asking myself who wins,’ said Max. ‘Who wins if the bridge is blown up? And it would be easy to think Farris and his supporters. All those shack owners at Adventure Bay who are fighting the hotels and the high-rises. Or the business owners who rely on the ferry traffic down Kettering way.’
‘But whoever did it, didn’t do it properly.’
‘No. They injured it … and an injured bridge creates a reason to enact the foreign labour laws,’ said Max.
We turned and headed back along the beach. I have a feeling there’s another version of me in the future. A relaxed, funnier me. Maybe I do a bit of painting. I have a fabulous lover. I drink peaty whisky, read all the classic novels by the fire and never open a newspaper. I’d like to know that woman. She might sit on the balcony of the Bruny house, looking out over the channel, watching dolphins. Did I want that great bridge to look out on every day? There were worse things to look at. It was a very beautiful design. It was the traffic and what the traffic meant I wasn’t sure about. But I’m not paid to want the bridge or not. ‘So you think JC got some mates?’ I asked very quietly, once the next passing dog walker was out of earshot.
‘No,’ said Max, shaking her head. ‘He’s many things, our brother, but I don’t think he’s that. But I do think, just between you and me, that someone in Canberra might have got busy. I mean it’s crazy, right, but it’s fishy. It’s only damaged enough to need a whole new round of skilled workers to finish it by election day. And they’re clever. It’s not replacing Tasmanian jobs, it’s in addition to—so who can really complain?’
‘Not a year’s worth of damage,’ I said. ‘Not six month’s worth of damage. Just the right amount of damage.’
‘You know, the second bomb that didn’t blow … that would have sunk any hope of having it repaired by the election.’
‘Same if they’d totally severed the suspension cable,’ I said.
‘The thick plottens,’ said Max. An old joke from childhood.
‘Yes, but you know what they say: if you have to choose between conspiracy and stupidity …’ I said.
‘Put your money on stupidity,’ said Max. ‘I know.’
‘There’re no leads at all?’ I asked.
‘You’d probably hear before me,’ she said.
There were boundaries and they were never clear cut. I reported to JC. I wasn’t free to discuss my findings with Max. How much Max knew, how much I knew, what JC told either of us, what I gleaned working alongside his people and in doing my job, it was a delicate process. To say nothing of the other job I was here to do that nobody knew about.
‘You love a good mystery, Ace. Doesn’t it feel like a mystery? We’re just missing the lead character. We need a heroine. You have the VIP pass. You can pretty much ask any question you like under the guise of “conflict resolution”. You’re perfect for the part.’
I gave her a glance. ‘You don’t think JC would notice if I started asking around?’
‘I think people would feel a whole lot better about the bridge if they felt in their guts that it was all as simple as the government wants them to believe.’
‘You’re working on me,’ I said.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘You’re right. It’s just, having you home, I actually feel for the first time …’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know. Like I’ve got my friend back.’
I nodded. ‘Me too,’ I said.
In paint, that colour on the horizon is called Prussian blue. Prussian blue is also an antidote to heavy metal poisoning, which is ironic because the Derwent River has received the daily outpourings of a zinc smelter just ten minutes north of the city these past hundred years or so, and it’s still going strong. Social licence is a powerful thing. Communities forget sometimes that they hold all the cards. They are the voters. The taxpayers. Society relies on a willingness for us to act as a group. Without the group, there’s anarchy. But within the group, there’s immense power. That’s why JC’s new protest laws were so effective. They deterred not just individuals but whole communities from speaking out.
I thought of Dan Macmillan saying, ‘Us little folk are relying on you big folk to make it work.’
I had wanted to talk more to Dan when he ran me over to Tinderbox in the Zodiac on Saturday morning. But after our initial greeting, neither of us spoke. The noise of the boat, the breeze and something about him had made me silent. He was hard to read, I thought. What had made him that way? His business partner had suicided a year before. That could do it. Deaths like that linger a long time. But it seemed to go deeper with him. I wondered what his story was.
I’d done a little research over the weekend. His company website had a brief bio noting he’d served in the Australian Army and had been deployed in East Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq. Rank—Corporal, 3rd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (1999–2003), Special Air Service Regiment (2003–2011). A paratrooper. There was no photo. No Facebook page or anything else either. No newspaper articles or court records. I did find two photos of him from a few years back with a young woman who claimed him as her brother and the uncle to the two children he was also photographed with. This must be the widow of the partner who suicided. Nothing else. Being ex-military Dan would have knowledge and contacts. But motive? And, more importantly, means? Who had bankrolled the bombing? Who had the means to employ a highly trained team to cripple a bridge in the dead of night and then disappear in a stealth vessel? I wondered if Dan Macmillan was the kind of bloke who might bomb a bridge?