THIRTY-NINE
August parked opposite the town council. Joey was yelling at her to get back into the car. She shut the driver’s door behind her. He leant his head out the passenger window. ‘If you’re not back in five minutes I’m leaving, just like you and fucking Eddie left me at the pharmacy!’ he jeered.
August got back into the car and shut the door. ‘I didn’t leave you that night,’ she said, searching his face.
‘Just joking, aye. Go on, do your crime, Gondi.’ He threw his hand towards the council building.
August rested her head against the seat, realising how tired she was, but tried again. ‘We were just off our heads, Joe. I’m sorry Eddie told you to keep watch. We were just kids.’
‘I know that, still don’t know what the hell we were doing there. Dumbasses.’ He looked out the passenger window, away from their talking.
After a minute of silence she asked him clearly, kindly, ‘What was it like?’
‘Crap.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s not your fault. I was a fucking troublemaker, I was.’
‘It was Eddie and my fault, it was us, not you.’ August took his hand. ‘I’m sorry, cousin.’
‘I forgive ya.’
‘Do you remember when Poppy put that sign outside Prosperous?’
August asked.
‘Back door?’ she caught him grin a little in the High Street light.
‘Nah, that was Nan. The other one.’
‘Nup.’
‘No Grog, No Cash, No Yarndi, No Good Times Here.’
Joe let out a single ha. ‘I remember now.’
‘’Member family got pissed off – said he was typecasting us?’
‘Nah. Did they?’ He looked at August.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I heard them talking like that. I was lying near the front door when it used to be open, it had a screen with metal diamond shapes and I was lying there playing with my eyes. Like, looking at the diamond shapes and then adjusting my vision and looking out to the acacia trees and then back and forth.’
‘You always were a little weirdo,’ Joe chuckled quietly.
‘I remember thinking that my eyes are special, I can make them do this wild blurring thing. I can see things how I want.’
‘And?’
‘And then I could hear everyone arguing out on the back deck about this sign. Arguing that they weren’t this and we weren’t that. Defending ourselves in our own home.’
‘Mmm?’ Joe said, waiting for August to get to the point.
‘I just remember thinking we should all lie here and see how cool our eyes are. I was hoping they could see what I saw.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Seeing two things at the same time. Here and there, close and far, now and before.’
‘Is this before Jed …?’
‘After,’ August said. ‘Poppy was so paranoid, wasn’t he?’
‘He was just protective.’
‘He was a didadida.’
‘I remember that word! What’s that?’ Joe asked.
‘Plover bird, I think.’
A minute of silence passed before Joey asked, ‘What’d Aunt Nicki do?’
‘She has a dictionary that Poppy wrote, and she hid it and maybe used it to get money from Rinepalm, but probably not. There’s something important in whatever Poppy wrote, though. I have to see it now.’ August said all this breezily, having calmed down.
‘Where is it?’
She pointed up to the council building. ‘Third floor.’
Joe got out of the car and closed the door behind him. August watched him through the windshield as he strode across the street.
She came to and jumped out after him. Pulled her hoodie over her head, and hissed to Joey, jogging to keep up, ‘How we gunna get to the third floor?’
She followed him around the back of the library. It was dark, no streetlights shone there. Joey dropped to the ground, fumbling in the raggedy grass.
He stood up with a dark mass in his hands.
‘Smash it,’ he said, and August saw his wild grin in the darkness. He took a few steps away from the library window.
‘Move back,’ he said.
August walked over to him and grabbed the rock. ‘I’ll do it. Let me – I’m not on probation.’
She stood there with the rock hiked on her shoulder, balancing it with both hands. She thought she was like Atlas then, holding the weight of their world. She hurled it at the window, it damaged the chook-wire-reinforced glass, but didn’t shatter it. She went and retrieved the rock. Joey checked the side of the building and nodded that the street was clear. Then August realised she wasn’t Atlas. She was Sisyphus. What good would it do to smash a window? Raid a council office? Look through an office of paper for a pile of paper? What was she thinking?
But August wasn’t thinking, she was feeling. She felt strong and powerful enough not to throw the rock. She turned and dumped the boulder behind her. ‘Poppy liked the library,’ she said.
Joey broke into a loud, bellowing laugh, enunciating ‘Ah ah ha ha ah.’
‘Should we go back to Prosperous?’ August asked.
‘Let me throw it.’ He picked up the boulder.
She grabbed it from him, like she wanted to grab it from Jedda long ago. ‘We can’t, Joe! We’ll talk to your mum tomorrow, we’ll get her to talk to Aunty. We can’t smash the library.’
‘It’s just a window.’
‘Yeah, I know, but Poppy loved this place. Wherever he is right now he’s shaking his head at us.’
He was still then, and quiet, as if Poppy had himself arrived and told him to quit disturbing the peace.
‘We go back to Prosperous,’ August suggested.
He shrugged. ‘And after that?’
‘We stop the mine.’ The words came out of her mouth as if they were the first sure things she’d ever said.
‘Yeah. Let’s go.’
They walked back to the Mazda.
‘Reckon we’re too old for crime?’ August asked.
‘Nah, it’s just we’d definitely do the time.’ He clapped his hands together, wide-mouthed and proud of the rhyme.
August turned and parked outside the driveway. From high up in their seats they inspected the field: the flames had been mostly doused but the fire still smouldered in places; a paddy wagon was being fed with a handful of protesters.
‘We can stay in Prosperous.’ August angled the car towards the house.
‘Yeah, it’s fine now,’ Joey laughed. ‘Just a little grass back-burn, aye.’
They brought doonas and pillows from the attic room, made a camp on the verandah and fell into the down in their day clothes. They looked out to the now-contained fire.
‘How was the city?’ Joe asked, his face subtly lit, propped on his elbows.
August was propped on her elbows too, looking out. ‘Did your mum tell you why we went?’
‘Nan said to return your hire car. You’re staying?’
‘Yeah,’ she said, and looked over to Southerly. The house lights were dark. ‘And …’
They faced each other, their heads on the pillows, but August couldn’t make out Joe’s face. She could only hear his slow, deep breathing in her direction.
‘There’s Gondiwindi artefacts in the city, at a museum. We went to see them.’
‘Yeah?’ Joey was speaking in sleepy, slurred words already. ‘Hah?’
He was silent.
August closed her eyes and dreamt of drenched England. A market erected at the dawn stillness, in the centre of the stone-bed street. Children skipping. Every ripe memory of an imagined childhood played like a reeling colour film, plump shining vegetables, sick-sweet fruits.
‘Check me, check me. Got it? Fe fi fo thumb, thumb. brrrrrrrrr, bdddddddd. This just in, the cat sat on the mat. Ready?’
August turned her head and saw a news reporter standing in front of a cameraman in the field, beside Joey’s Mazda. The sun was a dull circle in a green smoky sky.
‘I’m here in the rural drought-stricken community of Massacre Plains. Throughout the night, violence erupted on this former farming property where local police officers were forced to defuse a situation engineered by environmental protesters. Protesters have been arrested throughout the night, though, as you can see, around forty remain, in what is known as a “lock-in”. Negotiations are forthcoming. Rinepalm Mining has federal approval for a two-kilometre, 300-metre-deep tin mine, a boon for the local economy with work to commence in the next few days. Amanda McMurray, reporting from Massacre Plains.’
August watched the woman suddenly slouch her shoulders, the cameraman lower his camera, and jumped up. She grabbed Joe from the back of his hoodie and dragged him into Prosperous.
She slid the door across and locked it. Drew the never-used sheer curtains across and pulled the blind over the kitchen-sink window.
‘News people are here. Cameras.’
Joey got to his feet, he looked excited, fixed his hair with his fingers. ‘Really?’
‘Come, look from upstairs,’ she said, and sprinted to the attic window.
Through the Lutheran rose they could see a few stray vehicles, one police car. Everything seemed calm for that moment. August looked out towards Southerly but couldn’t see Eddie.
Joey followed her back down the stairs to the landline ringing, she picked it up and said nothing.
‘Hello?’ Nana asked.
‘Nana?’
‘You’re there?’ she said, shocked.
‘Why’d you ring, Nana?’
‘To see if my house was still there, I think.’
‘Everything is fine, no more fire. Joey and I are here. Don’t come though, it’s still a bit disordered.’
‘Are you both okay?’
‘We’re fine.’
‘Is Edward okay up there?’
‘Everyone’s fine, I promise. Just rest and I’ll come see you soon, at Aunt Mary’s?’
‘Yes, darling, come here when you’re ready.’
Aunt Missy got on the phone. ‘August?’ she said, and sounded as if she were moving with the phone to another room. ‘What’s happening there?’ she whispered.
‘News people outside, there’s a police car, some protesters are still out there. Why?’
‘Well, I wanna come, I wanna protest too.’
August held the receiver, nodded to Joey. ‘Your mum wants to come protest?’ she smiled.
Joey nodded, sprinting on the spot, throwing punches into the air.
‘Are we doing this?’ August said to Aunt Missy.
She whispered, ‘Yes. I’m coming now. Shh.’ She hung up.
‘What do we do now?’ she asked Joey.
‘Let’s just rumble on the front line!’
‘I thought you were on probation, that you hated the hippies?’
‘I thought they’d be banging drums and shooing incense, not going sick.’
‘What are we gunna do about Aunty Nicki?’ she asked Joey, by now jittery with excitement.
‘We go talk to her after.’
August stirred instant coffee into two mugs, flung the blind open and looked out into the field. She thought how for so long she’d been living her life in a box of to-do, like a never-ending winter, her own long hibernation. She had lived her life as if it were full of potholes, tripwire, landmines, too scared to move properly. But she was here, she thought, and she cared about something and for her family for the first time in forever. She reckoned she wouldn’t fall into quicksand on the edge of town.
Joey was lacing his sneakers. ‘They want to take land that wasn’t theirs to take, land was given that wasn’t theirs to give! The buck stops here, motherfucker.’
August handed him the coffee cup. ‘Don’t get crazy.’
‘Oh, I’m crazy for it.’
‘Don’t hurt anyone?’
‘Never, but I’m gunna go smash some stuff up …’ Joe sluiced the coffee she’d made down the sink. ‘There’s no fucking time for that.’
The phone rang again, August picked it up.
‘Hello?’
‘You fucking Abos better get the fuck out of this town!’
The line dropped out. She didn’t know who it was, though the caller sounded like a teenage girl.
‘Who was it?’
‘Prank call,’ she said. The insult stayed inside the phone receiver as she sat it back down. Nothing could touch her. Maybe the girl was frightened of the world she didn’t even know properly, maybe no-one ever told the girl on the phone about the great land and the great people who’d survived all this time.
They stood out on the deck with their hoodies tight over their faces and ignored the reporter when she kept calling out, ‘Excuse me? Excuse me?’
August looked up at Kengal but the camp appeared packed away; over at Southerly the windows were drawn and the door closed. The field hadn’t burnt completely, there were still hundreds of acres wanting harvest. When they were kids, she used to imagine what happened to the wheat after the trucks came to empty the grain from the silos. Bakers in every country pounding wheat heads, grinding, milling, adding yeast, salt, oil, sugar, fire. Breads rising all over the world from what was grown here.
‘You wanna?’ Joey asked.
‘Should we wait for your mum?’
‘She’ll find us,’ Joey said, eyes glittering, his mouth certain as he turned to the horizon, staring out into the distance.
He took her hand and they descended the steps, trampled through the potato bed, and walked over the smouldering black field of Prosperous Farm to the protesters chained against the tractors lashed with clearing logs.
As they walked August thought that grief ’s stint was ending. She whispered to Jedda and to Poppy: I am here.
She looked for Mandy as they got closer to the three tractors parked near the drilling sites. A big banner hung from the forks of two tractors that said ‘RESIST’. Mandy was chained around her waist against the drilling fence, her hair still in long braids, her arms above her head holding a white plastic barrel, her mouth open and drinking from the spout. August thought she looked brave, or careless, that Mandy had a way of moving her body that August remembered feeling, only as a child. Mandy passed the container on when she saw Joey and August, stretched her arms out beside her, like Aunt Missy had done at the museum.
‘Fellow water protectors!’ Mandy exclaimed as they neared.
Joey yelled back, correcting her, ‘No, we’re the custodians of this land.’ He confidently turned to the five other people lashed against the wire fence, ‘And we’re going to stop this motherfucking mine.’
The handful who had heard Joey’s proclamation cheered. He turned to August and she nodded, smiled, put her hand out to receive the chain from another protester.
‘Welcome,’ the protester said.
‘Welcome,’ she said back to him.
After a couple of hours of chanting and water breaks Eddie came outside. He marched angrily across the burnt field. ‘Hello?’ he yelled, confused.
‘Hello!’ they yelled back in unison.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’
Joey screamed at him, maybe the way he’d always wanted to. ‘Back off, Falstaff. It’s our land.’
‘It’s the fucking mining company’s now, you dickheads.’
Joey cut him off. ‘We are the company and the government. This is our minister, second female prime minister, in fact!’ he said, and pointed to August. ‘I’m the president, we co-run this country, and these guys,’ he pointed around to a few sheepish faces, ‘are our Senate and board members.’
Aunt Missy was walking through the blackened field. ‘Here comes your local MP right now. Vote well, son.’ Joe pointed to Aunt Missy, who was wearing a t-shirt that read Treaty across the front. She smiled wildly.
‘Joining in, Eddie?’
He leant in and they exchanged a small hug. ‘I don’t think so, Missy.’
‘You could right all the wrongs!’ she said, as if it wasn’t such a difficult thing to do. She held out her hand to take a piece of chain. ‘It’s not gunna fit around me!’ Aunty started laughing, buckling her nervous body and rattling her bit of chain against the fence.
A cheery voice came over a loudspeaker from the couple of police cars. ‘You are on government property, time to clear off, folks. No charges if you leave now.’
A protester helped padlock Aunt Missy to the fence and tied a bandana around her chin. ‘For pepper spray,’ the man said.
Mandy picked up her own loudhailer, aiming it back to the police, ‘We’ll leave when Rinepalm do.’ There was a box taped to the mouthpiece and her voice came out in autotune.
‘I’m not getting arrested, guys.’ Eddie threw his hands out as if giving up reason against insolent children. ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea, being out here. Sheep are scared shitless! They’re bringing in soldiers, it’s on the news. I’m outta here!’ Eddie turned away, shook his head and stormed back to Southerly. They didn’t say anything.
A policewoman passed him on her way towards them with something in her hands. ‘A GoPro camera,’ Mandy said. ‘Cover your faces.’
‘What’s it for?’ August asked, hiding her face under the hoodie.
‘They just try to fuck with your head, make us think they control the story, control the data – state control, you know?’
‘What was the fire for?’
‘Attention. Chaos.’
‘You guys could have burnt my nana alive!’ August was serious.
‘We came through the night before and built a fire breakwall, just a magic trick.’
August couldn’t see her face, but she sounded genuine. She believed her. She watched as three police paddy wagons pulled up near Prosperous.
‘There are more police than us,’ August said.
Mandy nodded out towards the dam, ‘More of us will arrive soon.’
But the field beside the dam was empty. The policewoman walked down the row of them against the fence and then a hundred metres or so to film the others chained to the clearing tractors.
The protesters started chanting under their covered mouths, ‘Re-sist, re-sist, re-sist,’ over and over. Joey joined in. Mandy turned back to August, her face still concealed. ‘Keep your face covered and they can’t have you. As soon as they have your identity they can do anything to you.’
‘What do you mean, do anything?’
‘You can’t make a move before someone’s watching, but if you stay off grid, cover your face, they can’t take you, your thoughts, the things you’re really angry about.’
August looked at her as she faced the police. ‘I’m nobody, anyway,’ she said.
Mandy turned to August. ‘You are somebody. But these days we can’t do anything as somebody, we can only do something as nobody. The nobody of everybody.’
August thought for a moment. ‘I don’t get it?’
‘When something is important enough that it’s personal to everyone,’ Mandy added.
‘Our problems are never anyone else’s, that’s how it seems.’
Mandy pulled the bandana down from over her mouth, and continued. ‘I agree that’s how it’s been. Look at it this way – when people travel overseas the first thing they do is learn a handful of words, learn the local language – please and thank you and hello and goodbye, maybe even where is the supermarket? People do it because it makes life easier but they also do it out of respect, don’t you think?’
August nodded.
‘And then we’re all migrants here, even those first-fleet descendants, we forget we’re all in someone else’s country. And too often we don’t have the vision, the respect, to bother learning the native language! To even learn to respect the culture where we live?’
‘Because it doesn’t make life easier?’ August asked.
‘Because we have to learn it’s personal – we learn that through looking after the land. That we’ll all continue not really having a collective identity unless we take a long and hard look back and accept the past and try to save the land we live on … that’s what I think.’ Mandy pulled the cloth back over her mouth.
To August it was true, this was personal. Further out she spotted Aunt Mary and her nana approaching. ‘My nana,’ she said, as Joey yelled, ‘Nana, come over here with us!’
As she drew near Elsie put her hands on her hips, stern like. ‘What are you lot doing?’ she demanded.
‘Nan – we’ve got to do something. Don’t you think?’ Joey said.
Elsie shook her head. ‘It’s a bit late, darlings.’
‘How long are you lot gunna stay out for?’ Aunt Mary asked, looking around at them all. ‘Missy!’ she barked, noticing her against the fence, ‘You’re too old for this!’
‘Not that old!’ Missy cried back.
Joey spoke up. ‘We can’t do nothing!’
Elsie folded her arms across her chest. ‘We’re just the world’s quarry of choice and I don’t see any way around that. But without protest, we wouldn’t have our rights, none of us would have civil rights, the vote, decent working week.’ Elsie and Mary nodded to each other in agreement – they’d seen it all. Elsie bit her lip, calmly tapped her fingers and inspected all the riffraff before her, and then spoke again. ‘Well, I’ll cut some oranges then if you’re staying out, it’ll be thirty-nine degrees by midday.’
August reached out for her hand as she turned to leave. ‘We’re going to save your home, Nana.’
Elsie bent down to her in response and spoke softly, her face at her ear. ‘Home was Albert; seeing him come across the field, and him seeing me. No-one sees me if I stay here, August.’
August understood what her nana meant. She had lost a witness too, someone seeing her. She’d outgrown her big sister. But she’d also found the solace she felt in that moment, on the land, making it personal.
‘We’ve gotta try, Nana,’ she said back to her gently.
Elsie stood upright. ‘Yes, you’re right, you must try. I’ll be waiting for you at the house, but I can’t bail any of you out if you get arrested!’ She chuckled a bit, ‘Joey, come and get the oranges,’ and walked unhurried across to Prosperous. Joey unshackled himself and ran the distance after her. Minutes later he ran back with a string bag of fruit quarters.
Elsie was right. The sun blazed down as if the field were going to catch alight again, and then the new digger reeled into Prosperous. And after it, two military-green humvees revved into the entranceway. August rubbed her fingers against the velvet pile of the wheat stalks flattened beside her thighs.
‘Hold fast!’ Mandy yelled.
‘Mum, please go back to Prosperous now?’ Joey called from one end of the fence to the other. ‘I don’t want you to get hurt. Please, Mum.’
August looked over to Aunt Missy, where a protester was helping to unlock her. ‘I’ll be here in spirit!’ Aunt Missy said, and scuttled along the side of the burnt field, around the vegetable garden and up the stairs of Prosperous.
‘Hold fast?’ August asked nervously.
‘Stay strong, don’t let them break you.’ Mandy said.
First they water-hosed them, it didn’t cool them down but tore their clothes, and bit the skin showing. The hours passed and they still didn’t move. Across the field by the dam a crowd drew closer. It was a bunch of the mob from the Valley. They assembled with the help of the protesters. Aunt Carol Gibson let herself be locked against the fence, a bike lock around her neck. They all G’day’d each other and got back to the task.
Aunty Betty yelled out to August from her hold, ‘Sacred ground, girl.’
Mandy turned to August, ‘To riot is the voice of the unheard.’ She pulled out a small camera and filmed the police gathering ahead of them. The officers were wearing gloves and long sleeves, they were wearing boots, batons hung at their thighs, their faces shielded in perspex.
A protester rushed past them dropping earplugs and goggles into their laps.
‘Don’t fight back,’ Mandy said. ‘They can’t arrest us for sitting in.’
‘Okay.’ she said.
Hours later though, the protesters on the tractors threw back fist-sized rocks towards the water cannons, and as time drew on, as the sun began to set, the police squirted tear gas that made stinging barbs in their eyes, noses, throats.
Spray bottles of water were shared, people were crying, trying still to yell ‘Re-sist!’ until their voices were slowly silenced as the police made their final advance. Moved in on the inert of them, the peaceful, the passive. Some got carried away, others stayed lashed to the fence.
August had forever felt like she was a remaining thing of the past that she wanted to destroy, a face she wanted to scratch off, a body she wanted broken, her skin torn to shreds. She was feeling something close to that against the fence, hosed and chained. She was chained like the people, the Gondiwindi who came before her, but it was her choice then, she thought. It felt that everything was so close, that they could all feel the past, that it gnawed at their ankles. That it filtered into their voices as they screamed together ‘Re-sist!’ into the dying light. She felt whole, fighting for something, screaming in the field rather than eating it, tasting it, running away.
The sky above the Murrumby had changed from blue to white-yellow, to orange-pink to clear purple and, just before night fell, a Rinepalm bulldozer came through crushing the trees along the property, uprooting the dirt-stuck roots into the air. Then August heard Aunt Mary’s voice break, her boat snapped loose from the anchor and she wailed across the field. Aunt Nicki was standing beside her, the cassette recorder and a stack of pages in her hand.