Gibber’s Creek Gazette, October 1972
Where Next After the Snowy? by Jed Kelly
At last the strength of the vast Snowy River has been harnessed to provide electricity. Men from all across the world came to work on it, from Greece, from Italy, from Yugoslavia, from Malta. Our nation owes those men for making possible one of the greatest engineering feats in the world.
Yet now, when those strong, skilled, experienced workers try to get jobs in the city, they are discriminated against, and called reffos, wogs or dagos.
A Whitlam government would make discrimination like this illegal. But it will also give us projects as great as the Snowy Mountains Scheme.
Across Australia our minerals are exported with Australia receiving less than a cent per tonne in royalties. A Whitlam government will ensure that all Australians get a fair return for what are our minerals. It will ensure proper infrastructure: ports and railways that mean our mineral wealth can be developed, with the profits staying in Australia for all Australians instead of flowing overseas . . .
JED
Boadicea bumped slowly down the road to the commune, then more speedily along its track.
JohnandAnnie still sat on the dome’s deck. Were they perhaps a living sculpture? And, good grief, it looked like the Annie part was pregnant again. The goats gazed at Jed from a well-fenced enclosure with the easy confidence of animals who know they can escape, but only when it is in their interests to do so.
So why a ram?
Both mud-walled cottages had survived winter’s rain. Thick solar panels sat on each roof, and other thinner ones too. Carol pedalled industriously in front of her cottage on what looked like a bicycle without wheels, while an old twenty-four-gallon drum churned behind her.
Jed parked under a fledgling apple tree and hauled Scarlett’s wheelchair out of the luggage rack, then tactfully left Scarlett to make her own way to Leafsong and the outdoor kitchen as she climbed the hill to the cottages.
‘Hi,’ she said to Carol.
Carol nodded, her sweaty face unwelcoming. She wore a sarong, bare feet and, an accidental peek confirmed, no underwear. Obviously not the clothes to wear to a meet-the-candidate gathering.
Jed tried again. ‘Coming tonight?’
Carol stopped pedalling. ‘Elections are a delusion of superficial change,’ she puffed.
‘I don’t understand.’
Carol snorted, leaning against the handlebars. ‘What part of alternative lifestyle is hard to understand?’ Her gesture took in the gadget she sat on, the dome, the giant faded tent. Looking down the slope, Jed could see Scarlett talking excitedly to Leafsong as they made their way to the commune’s kitchen area outside the tent.
‘Don’t you see?’ said Carol fiercely. ‘Western society isn’t viable in the long term. We can’t keep consuming more every year, polluting the earth, cutting down forests, with humanity doubling every twenty years. One day resources will just run out. Society will crash.’
Carol gestured again to the mud walls, the dome, the paddocks of fruit trees and vegetables. ‘Self-sufficiency isn’t just a personal choice. When society crashes, from war or ecological catastrophe or when the oil runs out, places like this will keep civilisation alive.’
Jed glanced over at JohnandAnnie and Sunshine. ‘All seven of you?’
‘There’ll be more of us. There are places like Halfway to Eternity springing up around Australia. In the USA too, and in Germany and France. But we’re not just survivalists. This is a good way to live. A better way to live. Voluntary poverty, living simply because we want to. Showing you don’t need bourgeois capitalism to be happy. New cars, bigger houses, working at a crap job for forty years just to pay the mortgage on a crap house and a bigger TV set.’
‘I . . . see.’ Part of what Carol said made sense. But ‘voluntary poverty’ was all very well, as long as it was voluntary. She had been broke, starving, homeless. Her life had been simple, but it had most definitely not been voluntary. Nor was poverty voluntary for much of the world’s population.
Carol, Leafsong, Sam and probably JohnandAnnie all came from well-off families. They had security bred in their bones. If Sunshine was ill, if Carol had an accident, Jed would bet there were affluent relatives who’d come to the rescue. But saying that would only antagonise Carol further. Why didn’t Carol like her? She was likeable! Okay, her friends at school hadn’t liked her all that much, but Julieanne did.
The door of the other mud cottage opened. Sam came out, dressed in a shirt and jeans, his beard freshly trimmed. With his ponytail neatly combed, he almost looked short-back-and-sides conservative. He’d evidently been listening to the conversation. He grinned at Jed. ‘It’s a heck of a lot more fulfilling to build your home with your own hands than to buy a lookalike suburban box. Every bit of these houses has memories. Even food has more meaning if you know how it was grown and cooked.’
‘Plus it’s fun,’ said Jed amicably. The mud cottages were like a grown-up version of cubby houses. Sam’s inventions were an adult’s Meccano set. Which was not a criticism. Her great-grandfather had made his fortune and helped win two wars playing with bits of wire, valves and the laws of physics. She nodded at the pedal contraption. ‘And what is this?’
‘A pedal-powered washing machine,’ said Sam proudly. ‘I found the . . .’
Jed smiled as he described where each part had been scavenged. She waited till he’d finished. ‘But you didn’t make those solar panels.’
Sam looked up at the panels with affection. ‘Nope. Had to import them — the hot-water ones as well as the photovoltaics.’
‘Photovoltaic?’
‘They generate electricity,’ said Carol, leaning on Sam’s arm.
Sam didn’t move closer to her; neither did he move away. ‘The panels are enough to give us power for light and music, but not enough for big power consumers like irons and electric stoves and fridges. Not yet. Gas fridges and kerosene ones do exist though, and there’s no reason why they can’t be made in Australia. If enough people bought them, then it’d be cost effective. There’d be no need for coal-fired electricity plants polluting the world and losing forty per cent of their electricity as it runs along the wire system. But people won’t want solar panels till they’re cheap enough . . .’
And this wasn’t getting them to Nicholas’s introduction to Gibber’s Creek. ‘You promised me dinner before we went to the meeting,’ she said.
Carol looked from Jed to Sam. ‘I may as well come,’ she said abruptly. ‘As long as I don’t have to change.’ The last was a challenge.
‘Don’t worry. No one will notice you,’ said Jed kindly.
Sam bit back a snort of laughter. ‘Come and see the ram before dinner? It won’t take a minute.’
‘Yeah. Sure. I like animals.’
This time it was Carol who laughed. ‘It’s not a sheep — it’s a pump! A hydraulic ram.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I’ll show you,’ said Sam easily. ‘It’s a fascinating concept.’
‘I’ll go and change,’ said Carol.
Ha! thought Jed, raising a mental eyebrow, even if she couldn’t yet manage Matilda’s actual one. So Carol didn’t want to appear in public in a semi-decent sarong.
Sam led the way along the hill to one of the concrete tanks. ‘See, this pipe uses gravity to fill the tank from further up the river. Though it wasn’t a tank originally — it used to be a pipe under one of the local roads. I found it and repaired it.’
‘How can gravity fill a tank?’
‘A syphon. Rivers flow downhill, even if the slope is only gradual. We’ve got nearly half a kilometre of polypipe from there to here. If the pipe is full of water, and one end is in the river, when the water flows out the lower end more water is sucked in at the top. And the water from the tank runs the ram pump.’ He turned a blue gate valve. Water rushed into a long metal pipe leading out of the concrete tank. Suddenly Jed heard a rhythmic clunk, clunk, clunk down by the river . . .
‘It sounds like a frog with the hiccups.’
‘Can you see it?’
Jed nodded. The ram pump was a blue-painted oval bomb, with the metal pipe leading into it and the polypipe leading out of it, heading away up the hill.
‘The water pressure is enough to pump water even further uphill than the top of the syphon inlet. For every ten parts of water that flows into the hydraulic ram, one part is pumped up there.’ Sam pointed to another concrete tank, at the top of the hill, well above the dome and houses. ‘That means we can have decent water pressure without any electricity to pump it. And the ram pump is out of flood reach too.’
‘But a flood would sweep away your syphon inlet.’
Sam gave her a patient look. ‘What do you do when there might be a flood?’
‘Well, nothing actually. But Nancy or Matilda tells one of the men to drag Dribble’s pump out of flood reach.’
‘So we just haul the pipe out of the river. Afterwards we pour water into the top of it, thrust it into the river again, and as the water flows out this end it sucks in more from the river. And keeps going and going for years.’
‘Until another flood.’
‘We don’t need to water during a flood anyway. Disappointed you haven’t seen a sheep?’
‘No,’ she assured him. ‘It’s fascinating. Where did you get the ram?’
‘Had to import it from England. They use hydraulic pumps in Wales. The technology has been around for ages. But ram pumps could be made in Australia too if —’
‘If there were enough demand,’ she finished for him.
He grinned, supremely happy with his toys. ‘Yep. What’s the time?’
‘Yikes. Nearly seven. Where are the pies you promised for dinner?’
The pies were chicken and leek — Jed suspected there was one less hen scratching under the fruit trees than there had been a few days ago — eaten sitting round the fireplace.
‘They’re perfect,’ said Jed sincerely. ‘You’re the most brilliant cook in the universe.’
Leafsong flushed and shrugged. Jed gave her a two-thumbs-up sign, then blew her a kiss, exchanging gesture for gesture. She found Carol looking at her with almost approval.
And in the end everyone went to the Town Hall. It was a bit like the old uni game of how many can fit in a telephone box, thought Jed dazedly, Boadicea’s sump arriving unscathed on the bitumen. Scarlett sat on Leafsong’s lap, cradling plates of food. Carol (now in green overalls with flowers embroidered on the knees, and plaited brown leather sandals, and her lovely long blonde hair well brushed) sat crammed on Sam’s lap, Annie was on John, and Sunshine on Annie, and Clifford clung on to the luggage rack next to the wheelchair.
No police stopped them. Instead, it appeared, both local officers were already inside the Town Hall, the patrol car parked outside, along with an assortment of utes and cars from old Volkswagens to station wagons to Sam’s parents’ Renault. One young woman in a Driza-Bone and Akubra hat was even riding a horse down the main street, looking as if she had galloped in from the previous century.
Everyone piled out and headed into the hall. Jed hesitated, her back to the car. The horse rider gave her a friendly wave as her mount ambled around the back of the Town Hall, where presumably there was still a place to tie a horse up, and water it.
Jed stared at the light spilling from the Town Hall door. She didn’t want to go in there. Damn it! She had made a good life without Nicholas. Why did Matilda have to drag her into his life now? She didn’t mind doing articles for the Gazette. They were fun to write and, as Matilda insisted, this mattered. But to see him, probably have to talk to him. And meet Felicity.
The wheelchair stopped beside her. Scarlett had come back. ‘You’ll be right,’ she said softly.
Jed managed a grin. ‘Thanks, brat.’
‘You okay?’ Sam had returned too.
‘Yes,’ said Jed firmly.
‘You sure?’
‘Yes.’ But she was glad of Sam and Scarlett on either side of her as they climbed the ramp to the Town Hall — trust Nancy to make sure the Gibber’s Creek Town Hall and shops now had ramps as well as stairs. Scarlett and Sam were good bodyguards to have. And even better guards for her equilibrium.