We had other dreams for Clapstone. It wasn’t supposed to turn out the way it has. But who’s to say what was supposed to happen? Not us, not any more. These days we only have the past to go on, and that can only tell us so much.
When we think of our town’s beginning, it always starts with clouds. White clouds time-lapse across the landscape in a procession, either weather or campfire smoke. There’s a puff of soft grey gunpowder. Funeral smoke. Rainclouds lingering on fresh-cleared land. Then the clouds of chalk and lime and gypsum, which made whitewashed cottages, whitewashed missions. We weren’t there, we don’t remember it in person. By the time our people settled, it was farms.
The farms appeared from a smudge of white dust. Sandy topsoil stirred up behind a horse, then a plough, then machinery. Chemistry marched in, white mist sprayed with spreaders, leaving the black marks of birds on the ground behind. The sea kept coming to blow the clouds away. It was still reliable then.
It was never good country; the farming was an act. Our people, or the people before them, came for a rumour. A long time ago someone found a nugget in the river, and named the river Luck. It was an optimistic moment. It must have been a nugget that was dropped from a pocket in the first place, because no-one ever found another one. People dug holes in their paddocks, turned up only bones.
Scratching wheat out of bad land just made it worse; once all the trees were out it started to sag, and with each consecutive year the topsoil washed further out into the salty swamp that separated the farms from the dunes. Crops slumped around half-filled holes in sandhills. The swamp rose up and the holes festered into tiny poisonous lakes, salt and algae painting them pink. Sheep were tried, but drought ruled the country, sweeping through at will to transform the animals into decorative skeletons. The dams turned sour with salt and sulphur, and the swamp spread and dried. People dug a little quarry upriver, pretending they weren’t still looking for a nugget, and found a few bits of decent bluestone. Once they’d built a pub out of it they wandered in and sat down, and that was more or less how they decided to stay.
Clapstone.
That river, the Luck, which curled its question mark around Clapstone’s waist, should have kept its promise. There might not be gold but at least there would be water. Lots were staked. Funds were borrowed.
Water was fickle.
It rained everywhere but Clapstone. One year, wheat was too hard to grow; the next it was too cheap to sell. The Luck River turned out to be ephemeral. Drought came and went, and came and overstayed its welcome. Big farms bought small farms, ran them at a loss, tried to inflate prices. Eventually people drifted east to work, or west to mine, or north to drink and disappear. The big farm was sold offshore and then abandoned. Clapstone was left with a quarry hole and a watering hole, a little strip of main street. Most families moved on without bothering to tack their surnames on signs above the unsealed roads, but a few stayed put.
There was still the river, sometimes. Luck could change.
West of here, the earth was more generous. The resources boom was in full rattle, and it thirsted for energy. People had known for years that there was oil in the gulf, but now there was the technology and the incentive to extract it. A huge refinery sprang up to process the results, just near enough for what was left of Clapstone to catch the stink when the wind was right.
Expectations were adjusted. The country was already damaged. Jobs were hard to come by, and the oil refinery’s by-products had to go somewhere. Aspco Asphalt’s plans were fast-tracked.
It was another optimistic moment. Two big barrel-shaped silos of hot mix and a metal stack piping cheery white vapours into the air like a cartoon train. From Clapstone, the silos looked like punctuation marks at the end of the row of pink hills that separated us from Hummock, the big town on the highway sixty kilometres north. They gave the old hills a declarative mood, even a jovial one. Aspco brought jobs at last, right to our doorstep. Times were good; we felt we had made the right choice to stay. We were newcomers then, or our parents were, but we already valued loyalty, tenacity. Facing forward into the future with our feet planted firmly on ground we knew would hold us.
The roads were surfaced. Prefab houses went up fast, in neat rows. The Commercial Hotel’s bluestone facade was rendered with cement, painted ochre yellow, and inside it was filled with men in grubby boiler suits and high-vis vests that smelled of crude. An institute was built beside it, because other towns had them, but no-one was really sure what it was for; we mostly used it for funerals. The old general store was converted to a bright new Foodtown. A primary school was trucked in by the company to encourage families to take up residence in the houses, owned by Aspco but leased at a reasonable percentage of the plant’s wages. As kids we trudged up metal steps and into one of those two tin portables. In each classroom, teachers had pinned a huge flow chart of the refinery process: crude to sour water, kero to residue. We absorbed our hydrocarbons with our times tables, and our own kids did the same.
For our generation, the course of life seemed tilted towards growth. The boom was infinite, like the ocean. Asphalt was in demand; highways and freeways were being rolled out across the country, roads widened and overtaking lanes expanded for the monster-truck traffic to mines and refineries. There were so many roads and car parks laid with Clapstone asphalt, it was said that if you put them end to end you could wrap them round the moon, and so Aspco took this idea for its logo: a little rocket was painted on the side of the silos, its black trail looping a cartoon moon that looked down kindly on the little town below.
Streets without trees were given the names of flowers: Kurrajong, Grevillea and Lilly Pilly. Playgrounds grew asphalt tennis courts and asphalt squares for handball. A Scout hall rose like an island in an asphalt lake. Aspco installed a metal rocket in the school playground, a fortress for tiny tyrants. A roundabout was built on the main street. Mayors came down from Hummock to set plaques, cut ribbons, say jobs and growth and depart wiping the dust from their hands.
Aspco Asphalt might have been a mouthful, but it was one we got used to spitting out. The company sponsored the Christmas parades and Junior Fire Brigade and Scouts, the netball teams and football teams and public parks, the RSL shed and the Institute, even kept the local paper going, right down to the colouring-in competitions on the Fun Page. Black Textas always ran out first.
On the outskirts of town, the old farmhouses sank into the soil, crippled by termites and subsidence; dust buried their barbed-wire fences, covered their backyard dumping grounds. We got punctures if we rode down to the sea, our wheels making brown marks in the soft earth where nothing much grew but pigface and saltbush and the three-cornered jacks that made our tyres flat and the walk back hazardous. Thorns punched through the soles of our cheap canvas shoes.
It was hardly worth the trip. The shallow coast was spiked with rocks, the odd industrial shipwreck in the distance. It wasn’t pretty; it wasn’t like a beach at all, really. The water stayed tepid and knee-deep a long way out, muddled by the gulf’s protection. Past the flaccid wavelets, it went deep all of a sudden, the seagrass frightening and full of life. The company built an asphalted jetty, a surfaced road on stilts with its own car park at the land end, to get out to the deeper water. Soon a few little dinghies knocked against the far end, jostled their outboards and Eskies, their nets stuffed into empty beer cartons.
Masses of cuttlefish swam up to breed in winter. We knew about it before, but only in the abstract. Now there were people who came to Clapstone just to see it, diving from the end of the jetty. Each to their own. We preferred to drive away to swim at a decent beach. We sometimes waded in the crabby shallows, joined to the slack mouth of the Luck, but the water never smelled right. You wouldn’t let your kids put their faces in it, in case it stung their eyes.
The plant didn’t make it any cleaner. There were emissions, gases, but we thought we knew the risks. Aspco had processes, monitors, masks. The company knew how to keep us safe. There were procedures for bad air in the town: when the wind turned, the school bell rang two short blasts and the children ran into their classrooms. Teachers slid closed their windows, pushed fabric snakes against the cracks under the doors. The new houses all had filtered air conditioning. Anyone left in the street could go into the shop, but to do so in a hurry felt ridiculous.
There were lung problems, here and there. A few children lost to tumours, but that was just bad luck. Everyone had headaches. Only Sam claimed there was meaning to them. We don’t blame ourselves now for getting caught up in her stories. We wanted meaning, direction. We wanted this place to be special somehow. But it’s just like everywhere else. Perhaps that’s what Ed meant when he said it was only a matter of time. On some level, through all the plans we made, we always expected something like this to happen to us instead. Something to go wrong, like the sea. A town is like a child, see: you might have dreams for it but it makes its own way, out of spite sometimes, and always out of your hands.