That next week, the Chinese workers came. Two hundred and eighty-nine of them. The number had been carefully considered like a discount price at a bargain store. The first of them were met at Hobart airport by both JC and Maxine and various government ministers. I attended too.
The workers were bussed to their refurbished quarters at Brighton’s old refugee camp to settle in. That evening they were bussed to the festivities. The Chinese dragon dance was colourful, the free community yum cha was attended by thousands. Dumplings were drained from steaming saucepans and scooped from hot woks by an influx of Chinese student volunteers from across Australia, all impeccable in kitchen whites and chef’s hats. At the Derwent Entertainment Centre, a concert was staged for all the bridge workers and their families, Tasmanians, mainlanders and Chinese. The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra played with a famous Chinese conductor and soloists from both China and Tasmania sang. Afterwards there were fireworks from barges on the Derwent. And the Chinese Buddhists filmed everything.
Our whole family attended, save for Dad. Mother came in a red wig and cheongsam, flanked by the devoted Phillip.
‘A cheongsam?’ I whispered to Phillip. ‘Really?’
‘I couldn’t talk her out of it,’ he sighed. ‘You know how she is.’
‘I do,’ I said.
That night I dreamed that I was trying to pitch a tent. My daughter Tavvy was with me. All the tents were somehow incorrect. I had only a fly, but I pitched it against a wall and was happy with it, even though it was ridiculous, as things are in dreams. But when the rain started, Tavvy disappeared and I was alone. I watched the rain begin to flood the paddock, making wide shallow puddles and pooling between hillocks of grass. Now it was impossible for camping. I saw a wooden structure. It was overgrown with bushes but it had once been a children’s playhouse. Above the foliage was a tower stained by the rain. A tower would be fine to sleep in, I thought. But the only way up was via a narrow beam. On the other side of the narrow beam, Dan Macmillan appeared. He didn’t offer me a hand. He simply persuaded me I could do it myself. He pointed out places where I could put my foot to negotiate the vines. He reassured me that I wouldn’t fall. I walked. He smiled. Then I woke up.
I didn’t like dreaming about Dan Macmillan. It felt unprofessional. As I showered, the dream kept coming back to me. The silly fly I had pitched. The puddles in the ground and the whole field awash with water. The dark tower overgrown by bushes. Dan assuring me I could balance and walk.
I thought of the dream again as I sat across from Dan in the morning briefing at Tinderbox. He was wearing a crisp, white shirt and I thought of him ironing, and that led to me thinking of him showering, and that led to me wondering if he still made the bed military style. His house was literally down the paddock from mine at Bruny. When I took walks I sometimes heard music playing, and I’d thought about whether I should invite him up for a beer one evening. But I didn’t. He was younger than me. I had no idea what he’d make of such an offer.
This morning’s briefing wasn’t like other morning briefings. Normally Dan briefed his team leaders on exactly what needed be achieved. They got an hour-by-hour weather forecast and the schedules for barges and deliveries. I made sure Dan also got press updates so his team were forewarned of the coming evening’s likely media. This meant that when they got home to eat dinner or muck about with the kids and the telly blurted out something about the bridge, they were already informed.
But tonight was the first night of the Chinese workers. Frank Pringle had come south with me for the morning meeting, behaving as if he was the acting Premier.
‘So, the moment has come,’ Frank said. ‘In the next twenty-four hours, labour in Australia will change forever. We’ll no longer have to wait for years to build things or to acquire technical knowhow. We’ll have the use of workers from across the world. Experts in their field will be able to work anywhere they can be valuable. This means a significant shift for the world’s workforce. Geography has been conquered. We’ve seen this happen in the UK with Eastern European labour and in the US, where for years they’ve enjoyed the benefits of a cheaper workforce thanks to the Mexican border.’
Ah, Frank, I thought. You’re a little behind the times with this speech given Brexit and the wall between the US and Mexico.
‘Here are just some of the projects these workers have been employed on to date,’ he said. He flicked images onto the large screen behind him of bridges across canyons, across water, flyovers across cities, rail bridges and car bridges. It had been my idea to give everyone some sense of the skill of these workers. I’d got the images from May Chen. Whether any of it was true, and these workers really had been behind these projects, we were about to find out.
The Tiananmen Square moment happened in 1989. I was finishing my postgrad studies in New York. It shook us all. Since then, the human rights abuses had continued. People go missing every day in China. Particularly human rights lawyers and activists. Anyone who is deemed to have insufficient social credit can disappear. Artists, actors, academics and poets. The control of the Chinese media has been effective. It’s very rare for dissent to escape the national borders.
In my game, human rights are not theoretical. It’s not whiteboards, round tables and talking points. Prison in China is interrogation cells and cages, crowded quarters and a crushing, calculated system of torture designed to make any prisoner, no matter how innocent, confess to whatever the Chinese government wants them to. No lawyers, no phone calls, no contact with the outside world until it suits the government. If you won’t comply, there are always family members to incarcerate and torture as well. I was sure these workers newly arrived in Tasmania would all put the Chinese Communist Party above their own interests. There would be no deviation.
At the bridge, the afternoon workers were still onsite. Enormous cranes were working on either side of the bridge. They were rebuilding the tower from the seabed up, repairing and re-tensioning cables, doing the prep work for the road segments. Barges carrying huge floodlights were in place, powered by generators, making the place as bright as midday. I spotted Dan Macmillan ahead. He nodded when he saw me.
‘You have something to do with that?’ he asked, indicating the Tinderbox camp behind them and the BFG camp ahead on Dennes Point. Both were eerily quiet. Up on Tinderbox hill, there was a modest bonfire. It was a warm, still evening and the sound of an acoustic guitar and singing drifted in from time to time over the construction noise.
‘Are they really singing “Kum Bah Ya”?’ Dan asked.
‘I think so. International song of peace.’
Dan shook his head.
‘It’s only temporary,’ I said. ‘But let’s enjoy it for now.’
I had worked overtime getting the two BFG camps to agree to let the new workers begin in peace. Australians were good at racism. I was still asked regularly, when people gauged my nationality, how Australia could treat refugees the way it did. But these bridge protesters were not racists. They were activists protecting their patch, their way of life, their economic wellbeing. They were trying to preserve, not destroy. If they protested the first few nights, while the workers were getting underway, and there was an incident or, worse, a death, they would be blamed. The government would forcibly remove them. Show over. The Tasmanian protest laws made that very clear. It was only while they maintained their distance and didn’t interrupt the work that they were tolerated.
A siren went off. Buses were arriving. Buses with Tasmanian tigers and Chinese dragons entwined and grand vistas of the finished bridge painted along their sides. Here was the night shift. A sea of Chinese men in orange high-vis vests and white helmets disembarked. Within the group was a small cohort of men and women in suits, also in high-vis vests and hard hats.
Interpreters, I thought.
Behind us the workers from the afternoon shift were gathering. Dan stepped forward. He picked up a microphone. It was wireless, connected to a PA to one side. Now he had workers all around him. He offered the other microphone to a Chinese woman who had stepped forward.
‘I’m Dan Macmillan,’ he said. ‘Bridge foreman.’
The interpreter began translating. Everyone remained standing.
Dan continued. ‘Welcome. Huan ying.’ Some of them nodded. ‘So here it is! And you can see we’ve got some work to do.’
The men at his back were watching. The air was tense. The Australian workers were observing the new arrivals like a patient observing a brain scan, wondering what the doctor will tell them.
‘Nothing on this bridge is more important than your safety and the safety of the men on your shift,’ Dan continued. ‘Here we are on a near perfect night. The weather is calm. The sea is calm. We are calm.’
Already he had them, interpreter and all. He stood with ease, as if he was speaking to each of them individually. He continued laying out his expectations for protocol and systems while they were onsite. This was what he did. This was what he was good at, melding men into a workforce.
It was such a risk. How could all these men, given the cultural divide, determine together exactly how tight the bolts should be screwed and the wires tensioned, en masse, as one mind? And it wasn’t just here. Over at the manufacturing site, all the components were being constructed. Steel sections were coming in on barges and being craned into place. Everything relied on expertise and skill and cooperation. It was easy to forget that. Human endeavour relied on cooperation. The construction of buildings, ships, aircraft, dams and bridges, all the great monuments to civilisation.
War was the defeat of that cooperation. In the process, it destroyed the labour of countless human beings. Perhaps that was its greatest flaw. It eviscerated the output of lifetimes. It laid waste the lives of women and men and made of them gravel and dust. The arrogance of that was staggering. But here was a man trying to coalesce a group to do quite the opposite. To give of their minds and bodies to create an engineering feat that would carry people across water for generations.
When Dan wound up his talk, a mixed crew of Australian and Chinese workers and interpreters was transferred onto barges that took them to the Bruny side of the bridge. The remainder flowed onto this worksite and shadowed their counterparts in this hour of crossover.
‘They cannot see themselves as adversaries,’ Dan had said to Mick Feltham. ‘You are asking for sabotage if you let that happen. I know the costs will increase. But we cannot trade budget for safety.’
Mick had given him until New Year. Three weeks of this hour of shared shift—the changeover—with Australian workers and Chinese workers. But after that, it was back to the standard quarter-hour changeover. Feltham had been immovable.
‘It’s not even his money,’ Dan had said to me, as we’d left that heated meeting.
‘Small-minded decisions are not special to the army …’ I said, quoting him.
He nodded. ‘Too right.’
It’s not just small-mindedness that’s driving Mick Feltham, I’d wanted to tell him. This will be his parting achievement. So, no, it’s not about money. It’s much more than that. It’s his legacy.