It was ten minutes’ drive along the highway into town. August slowed momentarily at the only rest area, it was unoccupied, but her eyes flicked there out of habit. We had looked there for Jedda – a shoe, a scrap of dress, a scruff of hair. Nothing was found, not the jelly sandals Jedda was wearing that day, not her school uniform either. August was distracted by the side of the road as she drove, distracted by roadkill and the shreds of tyre treads scattered there, by the knot in her guts. She thought, in a panic, to pull over suddenly, to sort through the wallaby bones and black rubber for something. Imagined kicking through the rubbish and finding a girl’s pelvis simply overlooked. She didn’t pull over though. I’m not mad, she told herself. That’s a crazy-person thing to do, and then she wondered what difference it would make anyway, the discovery of Jedda, her in bones, bones no longer pecked by crows. There wouldn’t be any comfort for everything they’d lost.
In her mouth she tasted the sulphur sickness of the passing world outside the window, her thoughts jumped to her books back in England – the ones she loved, that would calm her in this state: Khayyam, Yeats, Plath, Borges, Rumi. She’d traced the words of the poet Tagore, when he wrote that Every child is born with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man. ‘But what does it mean,’ she asked aloud to the road, ‘when a child is taken away?’ She knew it was man that was to blame. She knew she was to blame. She couldn’t quiet her mind. ‘Happy thoughts,’ she said aloud, and all the bad memories jumbled together instead without chronological order. Think happy thoughts, she willed like sparking a flare from a dark ship.
Locusts’ bodies splattered against the windshield. She saw them as myth animals, X-ray prawn appendages, dragonfly wings, edible to humans and toads.
Locusts? They never used to come this far south. After the dam they did though. Yes, they did then, she answered herself. The dam couldn’t stop the river completely, it just controlled it. Nothing could completely stop the river. The river bends time, what happened at the river goes on for us forever. Forever?
August and Jedda would trace their journey, their girlish fingers against the thick glass of the TV screen, down the east of the country, heading towards Massacre. They used to draw crayon pictures of the cane toads following the locusts. The toads were slower, never quite catching up. The locusts would arrive, and eat and leave, and the toads would come after. Those toads had looked around with baffled, rumbling stomachs and gobbled up the native mice and the blue-tongued lizards instead. August remembered that. Remembered how they had to coax the dogs up inside, the working dogs who loved nothing more than catching toads and inadvertently poisoning their own rumbling stomachs. The country, after all, was an experiment of survival of the fittest, of the unravelling. Darwin was even the name of a town in the north. Think happy thoughts.
Flame trees were turning in the hot wind as she passed High Street and ventured instead down to Vegemite Valley where no kids were playing on the streets. August passed Aunt Mary’s house, where she had brought up her son, and where her door remained open for the priest always. She drove at a crawl, looked into the open wounds of the cousins and second cousins and wayward schoolmates’ homes that she recognised. She saw no-one. She passed a house decorated with wind chimes and hanging plants that had a LOCK THE GATES sign perched ahead of the drawn front-window curtain. She pulled up at the curb to make out the small print that ran at the bottom of the sign: fuck off rinepalm. She had the unnerving feeling of being watched and glanced over at the neighbouring house, and indeed a shadow of a person, someone she vaguely recognised from school, was standing at the window. The man’s face was stony. Suddenly he was joined by another man at the window and she watched as they watched her.
She didn’t feel like the angry teenager who ran away, the one people noticed, but a sad shell of a woman, looked through. Like her mother. She locked the door, began to turn the car around, intimidated but unafraid, and ventured back into High Street where only people she didn’t recognise at all congregated. She wanted to keep driving past the new coffee-shop seating spilt under huge umbrellas onto the footpath, past the pram babies and toddlers and their parents, the shops that had filled in where space used to be. Wanted to drive past the department store and its extended window displays that had spread an entire block. Neither the coffee shop nor the department store was wrapped in green mesh. August drove past the original cream sandstone buildings where old signage was still painted above the new pharmacy. Next to it was the real-estate agency and a for sale sign hung in its window. Above the real-estate agency, a ghost sign was painted in a font from an earlier era: FARM & STATION SUPPLIES: WE STOCK – IRON. LIME. CEMENT. BARBED WIRE. FENCING. IRON GATES. ETC. The new shops and the old rubbed shoulders, as if hope and despair played a fouled hand on the same table.
She wanted to keep driving, but couldn’t. Couldn’t see her mother in perpetual detention. She mulled it over. What if she didn’t recognise me, was happy without me, was a disappointment, had never got better, but worse? She turned the ignition off opposite the green median strip that split High Street into east and west. That hadn’t changed, the divide had always been there, but she’d never noticed it before: in the centre was the sole statue of Massacre. A soldier in metal regalia, draped in ammunition and slouch-hatted, leant against his gun. The butt steeped in a tussock of watered grass that was a brilliant green, nothing like the pale green that spread in the rest of Massacre. A council gardener, at that very moment, lowered his hedge-trimmers to the base of the weapon, and snipped in ceremony around the edge of bronze.
There was something graceful about the council worker, everything respectful about his manner around the statue – it was something in his likeness to the soldier, muscular and youthful, that caught August’s attention. The bronze statue was puffed at the chest, certain in his stare into the northern middle distance. She knew that for some young people anything is something to look forward to.
She spotted a roller door being pulled against the shopfront and dashed from the car to catch the pharmacy before it closed for lunch. She took the cheapest toothbrush and scanned the ceilings for fire stains. There wasn’t a lick of black smoke anywhere, the entire ceiling was tiled in light boxes, the walls fresh with paint and the shelves stocked full with medicines and snack food. Last time Eddie and Joey were there too, but only Joey had been caught when the place was alight. She rubbed the thought out as she paid and took the pharmacy bag in her fist.
Around the corner she looked for a weatherboard house painted black, red, yellow on the suburban street. It was still there. Aside from out at Prosperous, the Aboriginal Medical Centre and Land Council chambers was where August had spent most of her childhood – doing after-school painting in the garage with the other kids, getting cavities filled and teeth pulled or a doctor’s note for being too sad to go to school. They all gathered there for gossip, all the Aboriginal residents of the Plains, the Gibsons, Coes and Grants from the Valley. Each of the families came together there in refuge, standing around the barbecue, laying almost-burnt sausages diagonally onto slices of white bread lined with sauce. They played Aussie Rules football, and everyone jumped high into the air to mark the ball, cheer, kick, tumble. She wondered if someone there knew about the mining on the farm, or knew about what was happening to them – the Gondis at the old Mish. Maybe someone was there to tell her what a good man her grandfather was, ‘What a respectable man, an honourable man’, they used to say. She peered through the dimmed windows. Empty. Every last piece of furniture in there was gone, gutted from the walls to the floors. Packawayable Place. As she adjusted her eyes she could see herself, but a different person – as a child on the street in the window’s reflection, as if her younger self were catching a glimpse of a person that she would one day become. The girl looked disappointed because, August thought, it was too late, she’d already become the thing. Think happy thoughts.
‘August?’
In the windows’ reflection she made out Alena Dimitri’s full mane of curls. She’d been neither friend nor enemy, just another student at the high school. Alena rushed towards her as quickly as she could wobble, thrusting her hand and ring finger at August and telling her she’d just married James, the Gadden boy. ‘Just last weekend!’ she beamed. ‘Haven’t seen you in ages!’
It was true, they hadn’t seen each other since August walked out of the school between classes in the middle of term. After that Alena and most of the other eighth-graders swapped rumours about what had happened to August Gondiwindi. The unlikeliest scenario was more or less accepted as truth – that she’d run away to join a circus, freak that she was. Alena looked at her now with a little leftover pity, and a certain anxiety as if the tragedy of a Gondiwindi might be a contagious thing.
‘How are you?’ August asked, taking her offered hand and dropping it. Looking at the full stomach between them, she imagined the baby, saw the curved spine, an X-ray innocently bobbing in fluid.
Alena rubbed her bump, cradled it like a watermelon. ‘Hanging in there – and you, you’re back?’
‘Visiting,’ August said, looking at Alena’s face instead.
‘What a relief! This town’s a dump.’
‘More than before?’
‘This place has been scrubbed off any tourist detours, that’s for sure.’
‘So you’re Mrs Gadden, aye? – they still do flashy racecars?’ August said, looking pointedly at her ring, smiling.
‘Do you know what makes money in this town now? Nothing except once a year when they export the sheep. That’s it, races don’t make anything. Everyone’s hanging for the mine.’
‘You know about the mine?’ August stopped smiling.
‘I know it’s out your way, isn’t it?’
‘On the farm, yeah.’
‘Something crazy, want to know something crazy? I was just thinking about you yesterday!’
‘Really?’
‘Got time for a coffee?’ she threw her thumb to the wide cafe.
‘I can’t, sorry,’ August said. ‘Jet lag.’ Then, showing some remnants of manners, she asked, ‘What’ve you been up to?’
‘Just teaching until maternity leave, I’m assistant teacher at the public school – six-year-olds, mostly – first grade,’ she smoothed the fabric of her dress over the watermelon again. ‘That’s when I was thinking of you, at school yesterday.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah, we got sent these activity packs, different ones for different grades. They’re from the mining company.’
‘What’s in them?’
‘Oh, just kiddie stuff, really, but you know – I saw the site proposal. Hubby is happy for the contract work that’s gonna come in – but yeah, heaps of greenies are chucking a tantrum.’
‘What’s it got to do with the school, though?’
‘I don’t know, primary-school propaganda. The kids get to build little cardboard things and pretend to put them in the ground and then there’s these multiple-choice questions: What is great about having a mine? A. Jobs. B. Jobs. C. Jobs?’
She threw her head back laughing then, her mass of curls lifted away from the conversation.
‘You really want to see them? I can drop them off – you staying with your grandparents?’
‘Yeah. I mean, Poppy died.’
‘I heard,’ her face scrunching into distaste, ‘I’m sorry.’ She sighed as if for the two of them.
August could feel jet lag had buckled down on her. ‘I should go – I need to help Nana.’ She raised her hand and held up the pharmacy bag, as if it were proof.
‘She okay?’
‘She’s okay,’ she nodded, and lowered the bag.
‘I’ll drop the stuff off Monday?’
‘No worries.’
She hugged August’s shoulders briefly and pecked her cheek.
Before August walked back to the rental she took another look into the empty windows of the Aboriginal Medical Centre; she breathed against the glass, a hot breath that made no steam in the dry air. As she stepped onto the street a twin-cab ute drove past too closely, too slowly. Below its tinted windows in discreet silver letters the words RINEPALM MINING stretched along the length of the white, shining body as it sailed towards the town’s end.
On return she daydreamed that the week after she wouldn’t fly back to London, she wouldn’t take the train to Guildford, not the taxi back to the White Horse in Shere, not carry her backpack up the iron stairs out the back of the English pub and sleep, wake, repeat. Not finger those dog-eared books of faraway poets until her next shift, not drown her hands in scalding soapy water and work off stuck gravy and Yorkshire pudding from plates. Not back to the scent of stale ale and starched aprons. That’s what she imagined she wouldn’t do.
Pulling into Prosperous and since shown, she could see the three drill sites in the field, and the roofs of high Rinepalm utes parked alongside. Inside, the sound of things being moved came from the old preaching room. August walked to the doorway and found Elsie in there taking a lid off a tea chest.
‘I’m back, Nan.’
Her nana looked animated in her long-sleeved black cotton dress that brushed at her bare ankles. She looked up at August. ‘Ed came looking for you.’
‘I’ll see him later. Can I help?’
‘Mmm-hmm.’
Elsie knelt on the carpet and August did the same, a pile of cloth cut into squares lay between them. Elsie took a framed photo of Albert and sat it in the centre of the cloth, then wrapped it like a baby swaddle. They’d never had photos in rounded frames, not like the antique oval ones of someone else’s ancestors that August had seen in England. Years before Elsie had run the mothers’ groups in that same room, where the girls chatted and practised the fold and pin of cloth nappies. The girls who came for free frozen meals and whose reluctances were only stoked seeing the walls hung with idols. Then they’d be in the kitchen, Elsie and her audience of new mums, their faded prams hustled together on the verandah, there Elsie would show them how to stew sugarless apples or mash up salt-free vegetables for baby. Bub never needs salt or sugar, okay, girls, her nana would say. Salt and sugar are no good for bub.
Elsie leant over the tea chest and placed the wrapped photo of Poppy into it. August picked up another picture, it was of a group of people dressed in knee-length shorts and elbow-length shirts standing outside a bus. Both her nana and poppy were there, though they stood apart. She knew it was the Freedom Ride trip. The photo in its large frame always rested against the wall in the living room, ornaments arranged around it as if it were the centrepiece of the house.
‘Should I wrap this too?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘What was it like?’
Nana momentarily regarded the photo in August’s clutch before returning her attention back on her own. ‘Bumpy.’
‘No, really?’
Elsie squeezed her eyes together as if trying to remember or push it away. Finally she said, ‘We had hope that people would become happy.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘We were young and hopeful, I guess.’
‘And now?’
She looked at the photograph and cloth she was working on and pressed her lips together. ‘I think people need to make a different thing that makes them happy.’
‘Is that where you and Poppy met?’
‘That day,’ Elsie smiled, letting herself remember. ‘And I left the same day, too.’
‘When did you meet back up?’
Nana kept wrapping and chatting, ‘I was meant to travel the whole country, that was the plan. But then I met Alb, and love threw a spanner in the works.’
‘Did you ever regret it? Coming out here to the farm from the city?’
‘Never, not with kids coming along as quick as they did.’
August just nodded as Elsie heaved herself up and headed into the living room, returning with a wide coolamon in her hands. She picked up a square of muslin for it.
‘I always loved that. Did Poppy make that one or is it an artefact?’
‘This? No, Poppy didn’t make this one.’
‘Where’d it come from?’ August asked.
‘Your pop and I went away, we took a Greyhound bus trip for our anniversary when you were little, we went right to the exact middle of Australia – the local women made them.’ Elsie held it up at August and smiled. ‘What a thing to see – all that red earth and all those flowers. It was special to us. When we came home he went and made his own coolamons too – he called them gulumans.’
August touched the lip of the coolamon, the thin rough red wood sloped into a long bowl, dark ochre and white were painted in intricate, blending patterns down the length of its base. Elsie covered it completely in the cloth. ‘You won’t keep it out?’
‘I think I’ll have to pack the entire house up soon. Anyway it’s not important anymore, these things. It’s his story – it goes with him now.’
‘Are there any artefacts? From the Gondiwindi?’
‘I don’t think so. There was a war here against the local people. In that war the biggest victim was the culture, you know? All this stuff—’ she lifted the wrapped coolamon out in front of her ‘—well, culture has no armies, does it?’ she said.
August bit the inside of her mouth and began to wrap the next frame.
Elsie put her hand at August’s ear. ‘Don’t be sad for his life, August. He had a very happy life. We aren’t victims in this story anymore – do you see that?’
They wrapped some more in the easy silence. Poppy the storyteller, not Nana.
A timer alarm buzzed from the kitchen and Elsie placed the lid atop the tea chest. She stood up and leant against the door entrance, turned back to August.
‘Please don’t be a victim, Augie. It’s an easy road, that one. I never let Alb walk it. The land, the earth is the victim now – that needs an army, I reckon. She’s the one in real trouble.’
‘Nana?’ August stepped out after her. ‘Why can’t you stop the mine? Why can’t people protest it? Isn’t that what you want? That’s what you meant – you had hope before?’
‘I don’t think so, Aug,’ she said, entering the kitchen. ‘Too many people want this to happen, everyone at that town hall meeting was for the mine. Everyone, darlin’, even Ed.’
‘Southerly Eddie?’ August asked, as she followed her nana into the kitchen.
She nodded. ‘It’s progress, isn’t it?’
Elsie washed her hands in the sink, then drew a bowl of cold water as August rested against the wall.
‘We did that,’ Elsie continued. ‘We protested in the street, for our rights and against the wars overseas. We protested with flowers, protested to save the river being dammed, peaceful protests.’ She looked out the back window. ‘We carried flowers in the street. Afterwards we threw the flowers on the side of the road when they all bent in the heat.’ She took a tray from the freezer and bent the plastic mould over the bowl until the ice cubes fell in.
‘It’s too late I think, Aug. We’re just a few small people, anyway.’ She drained a saucepan of steaming eggs and placed them in the ice water.
August shifted to the sink with Elsie, ‘I don’t think it’s right, I think something needs to be done. It doesn’t make sense to me.’
Elsie touched the pads of her fingertips atop the eggs, reading the temperature like a ouija board. ‘You can’t ask hungry folks to go on a hunger strike, bub. But …’ Elsie hovered above her eggs and then pushed her thumb into a sphere, cracking the shell.
‘You mean because the town needs jobs?’
‘That too. Forget it, Augie, it’s a done thing now.’
She placed the first shelled egg on a paper towel.
‘You said but? But what?’
‘But?’ she asked back to August and answered vaguely. ‘Well, food isn’t just the things you can eat. That’s all. You should take a walk. Have you gone down to the river since you’re back or what?’
‘I’ll take a walk, yeah,’ August said, absent-mindedly crushing the discarded eggshells on the sideboard.
August took her nana’s elbow and hugged her tight, she’d felt breathless, like she’d shed a skin. As if she had something she needed to say, finally, but then couldn’t find it.
With her hands in the water Elsie hummed the beginning of a tune.
‘I’ll see Eddie,’ August said. She looked back to her nana who was shelling eggs easily in the bowl of ice water. She didn’t look up.