Gibber’s Creek Gazette, October 1972
Vote Labor for Women, by Jed Kelly
I talked to a woman cleaning the public toilets last night. She’s a widow, but the few dollars’ pension this government allows her does not even pay the rent on her council house. She works ten hours a day, six days a week, while her oldest daughter looks after the younger ones. For this she is paid $19.50 a week. The basic wage for a man is $54 a week, and with overtime, in this woman’s job, he’d bring home $120 a week — six times what she is earning.
The McMahon government says men must be paid more than women because men provide for their families. But women support families too. This is why the Women’s Electoral Lobby backs Gough Whitlam in the next election.
I am a woman. If I married, I would not be allowed to be a permanent public servant, or a teacher, or a nurse in many of our hospitals. In Broken Hill I would not be allowed to hold any job at all. Married or not, I can’t take an apprenticeship as a mechanic or engineer.
Women who have been beaten by their husbands must try to hide with their children, because if they are found their husbands can divorce them for desertion. The husband will be given custody of their children, no matter how vicious or violent he has been. Couples who have committed no crime against each other, except to grow apart, must live together in bitterness, with no legal cause for divorce.
Women’s rights affect us all. A Whitlam government will legislate for no-fault divorce and make the welfare of the child more important than who was right or wrong in a marriage . . .
JED
Jed walked to the billabong after lunch while Scarlett had a nap at Dribble. Scarlett’s body grew stronger with each month of relentless therapy, but the effort of doing things others found normal, even serving a meal, exhausted her. It had been easy to persuade her that if she were going to the meeting at the Town Hall tonight, she needed to rest now.
Or perhaps Scarlett realised Jed needed some time alone.
The road looped a long way from the river here, out of potential flood reach, but the billabong was only a ten-minute walk across the river bend from Dribble. Rivers meandered more than roads, but they took you through what mattered most: snarls of native raspberries, the fruit fatter, more pungent and more hardy than the tame garden varieties; tangles of driftwood for campfires; the song of water, which you could hear every time you listened.
She headed over the sandbank to the billabong. It looked the same as it had when she was first there, nearly four years earlier.
She sat against a tree, the same tree that Fred the swaggie had sat against that night. She had been starving, scared, scarred, and desperately hoping to con Matilda and Tommy into accepting that her dead mother had been Tommy’s long-lost granddaughter, because even if there was just a thread of possibility that she was, Jed had no proof.
And Fred the swaggie had fed her sausages and courage and claimed to be a ghost, a soldier who had officially died a hero in World War II, but who secretly returned each year to the district to make sure his sister and the woman he loved were happy.
Jed had glimpsed Matilda and her father there, far in the past, just before the troopers arrived to arrest him. The troopers had been good men, Matilda had told her once, as horrified at her father’s accidental death as was the old man, the ‘squatter mounted on his thoroughbred’, her father’s grandfather, though he had never acknowledged Jim O’Halloran as his grandson because of his Aboriginal heritage.
Good men had caused the death of another good man at this billabong by enforcing the laws of those who owned Australia in those years, who could call on the laws they had themselves made to protect both power and property.
Australia had changed dramatically after Federation, the new national government abolishing child labour, creating a basic wage and giving votes to women. Could Australia change so fast and deeply once again?
Jed gazed at the gum leaves drifting towards the river in the faintest of hot breezes. She had seen herself there too, older, happy, with a boy who called her ‘Mum’. She had smelled sausages again that day, and known that they were ghost sausages and that Fred, if he were still there, was truly a ghost too.
And she had not come again.
She was not afraid of ghosts. A soul could leave the body but . . . something . . . remained. Especially, perhaps, in places where time grew thin, for time was not a line, not always. Here at the billabong past and present lived next door to each other.
Had she loved Fred? She had never considered that. The old man had saved her life twice, had given her food and courage. And, yes, she loved him. Love came in more flavours than ice cream.
She shut her eyes. And suddenly the smell of sausages was there again, the flicker of flame heat on her legs. The tolerant amusement of a man who had decided to own nothing, and by doing so owned each step of the land he walked on, every place he chose to build a campfire.
‘You there, Fred?’ she asked, her eyes still shut. Because seeing the past or future was one thing, but Fred had died in a fight with the murderer who had nearly killed Jed. Fred had died stabbed and bleeding, and if he appeared like that now, she was not sure she could face it. ‘I never did thank you.’
Was that a chuckle, or the wind? ‘I . . . I just wanted you to know. It’s all good now. I finish my uni degree this year. I’ve got a family. Everything I’ve ever wanted, except that I’m not sure what I want next . . .’
‘Are you all right?’
Jed opened her eyes. Sam’s bearded face looked down at her. He wore a faded flowered shirt, the same stained shorts he’d worn at the party, Blundstone boots and socks and a sweat-stained Akubra hat, his ponytail hanging down incongruously behind it. He looked half Gibber’s Creek farmer, half hippie, and even more like a friendly Yowie. He held a bicycle, a normal-looking two-wheeler.
Jed scrambled to her feet. ‘Yes. Just talking to myself. What are you doing here?’
‘I thought I saw smoke. There’s a total fire ban today. Wondered if anyone was camping here. It’s drying off early this year.’
Jed nodded. Gibber’s Creek could transform winter’s jewelled ice spiderwebs to brown baked hills and potential bushfire within a week, and then change even faster to frozen drifts of hail. ‘No fire. Just me.’
He frowned. ‘I’m sure I saw smoke.’ He lifted his nose, a little like a dog’s, sniffing the air. ‘I can smell it. And sausages cooking too.’
What the heck. This bloke lived on a commune and wore a ponytail. Who cared what he thought? ‘I smelled the fire too. I even felt it on my skin, though I didn’t see it. The billabong’s haunted, you know.’
‘Is it now?’ Sam looked at her, neither believing nor disbelieving.
‘By a swaggie who was kind to me. He died fighting a murderer —’
‘You mean Fred?’
Jed stared. ‘You know about Fred?’
‘Of course. The girl Fred loved was my mum.’
Jed had forgotten that. ‘She told you?’
‘About being Belle the mermaid at the circus? And how Fred loved her? Yes.’
‘Your dad didn’t mind?’
‘No,’ Sam said gently. ‘Dad’s always known it was him Mum loved, right from the first. Said that was what got him through the war, knowing Mum would wait forever if he didn’t make it back.’
‘So you believe in ghosts?’
‘Do you?’
‘I . . . I think I must, if I’ve come here to talk to Fred. I’ve never seen one though.’
The wind whispered around her — or was it Fred? — ‘Tell him. Tell him . . .’
She said in a rush, ‘But I do sometimes see bits from the past or future . . .’
She waited to see Sam’s reaction. She had never told anyone about her visions, except Matilda and Nancy. Matilda believed her, because her friend Flinty saw people from the past or future too, on the rock below her farm. And Nancy probably believed her, or at least accepted that Jed herself believed.
She waited for Sam to laugh, or recoil. But he just nodded. ‘Dad said Aunt Flinty believes the rock below their farm is like that. Somehow time is . . . wobbly. Not so solid.’
Jed had also forgotten that Flinty was Sam’s aunt. Family connections around there were worse than tangled wool. ‘Does your dad believe her?’
‘Aunt Flinty brought Dad up, after their parents died. Dad says she’s the strongest, most practical woman he’s ever known, except maybe for Mum. So, yes, I reckon he believes her.’ Sam looked at Jed with gentle curiosity. ‘What do you see?’
And suddenly she told him — about the boy from the past who had been her friend as a child, the woman from the future with the strange vehicle, Matilda and her father, the couple at the future ruins of Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station, the child who called her ‘Mum’, even the glimpse of herself as an older woman. Everything . . .
Except, of course, about seeing Nicholas, far in the future and knowing not just that she loved him, but feeling the warm tendrils of his love for her, stronger than a wonga vine and even more enduring.
‘Well?’ she asked.
‘Interesting. I’d like to know more about the future car you saw.’
‘Sorry. There wasn’t time for a technical explanation. I don’t even know how my own car works anyway. Do you think I’m crazy?’
He smiled. It was a good smile. ‘I’m the one who was sure he saw a fire that isn’t here. And smelled sausages.’ He sniffed again. ‘Smell that? They’re back again.’
And so they were. She grinned at him. ‘There’s a meet-the-candidate do at the Town Hall tonight. Scarlett asked me to pick up Leafsong. Do you and Carol want to come too?’
Boadicea would fit five, just. She’d need to go carefully over the ruts.
‘Fine by me. I’ll check with Carol. What time?’
‘I’ll pick you up at seven-thirty.’ The world seemed lighter. She could face Nicholas better with a small crowd of her own, not just Matilda, Nancy and the others who Nicholas knew well, but people like Leafsong and Carol who weren’t part of that crowd.
‘Come a bit earlier, while it’s still light. You can see the new ram.’
They were going to raise sheep at the commune too?
‘Sure.’
‘Better still, come at six and have dinner. It’s pies tonight,’ he added with satisfaction.
‘I know,’ said Jed with a chuckle. ‘Scarlett said Leafsong made them in the Drinkwater kitchen.’
Sam laughed. ‘I reckon an oven to use as often as she likes is even better than getting paid.’
‘You don’t have a proper oven yet?’
‘Only that wood-fired one. I still haven’t worked out a way to regulate the temperature.’
‘What did you make it from?’
He grinned. ‘An old truck brake drum and legs from an iron bedstead. See you tonight.’
The scent of sausages was stronger as he cycled off.