Gibber’s Creek Gazette, October 1972
It’s Time to Save Our Country, by Jed Kelly
There is a lake in Tasmania called Lake Pedder. Some say it is the most beautiful in the world. The Tasmanian government intends to flood it, to turn it into a vast dam to generate electricity.
In Sydney and in Melbourne, union green bans mean the workers strike to try to preserve the houses and communities that are the heritage of all Australians. Even our Great Barrier Reef is threatened with oil spills.
A Whitlam government would create a national heritage register to list places of national significance — places that belong to you, to all Australians. We cannot let a powerful few deprive us of what is truly ours.
JED
Jed woke early, despite the late night.
Sam. She smiled at the memory. A nice man. He made her feel happy. She imagined he made Carol feel happy too. Most people would feel happy with Sam.
She slid on a 1930s pale green linen sundress, grabbed a piece of toast and the speech she had stayed up to type the previous night, then headed off in Boadicea. If she waited till mid-morning, Nicholas and Felicity might well wander up to the main house with Mah and Andy for a cup of tea, which would mean she’d be obliged to talk with them.
At Drinkwater she nosed Boadicea into the parking space under the oak tree, and ran up the stairs to the veranda. Someone stood up, a little awkwardly, from one of the shaded chairs there.
Nicholas.
No, she thought. I don’t want to talk to you. If I stay away from you, I can’t fall in love with you.
But she could not say that. She was Jed Kelly, brilliant student, noted eccentric, and she would not humiliate herself . . .
‘I hoped you’d come by early,’ said Nicholas.
‘I’ve just come to give Matilda some notes.’ Better not say a speech, she thought, or he’d want to talk about it. She continued towards the door.
‘Jed, can we talk?’
Jed Kelly, confident modern woman who made rude gestures at anyone who dared call her a ‘girl’, was helpless. ‘Yes,’ she said.
Nicholas picked up his stick from beside the chair he’d been sitting on. He limped down the stairs. She followed him to the old swing and garden chairs. He sat in one chair. She sat opposite. A bit like an interview, she thought, slightly hysterical.
Nicholas leaned forwards, his arms on his knees. ‘How are you?’
It wasn’t a simple social enquiry. ‘Good. Happy. I’ve enjoyed uni.’
‘And when you finish your degree?’
‘No idea. I think Matilda wants me to edit the Gibbering Gazette.’
He laughed. ‘Have you called it that to her?’
She smiled. ‘Matilda doesn’t want to fire the editor, but he’s due to retire soon anyway. But I’m not going to take the job. I don’t mind writing the odd article, but that’s it.’
‘They’re damn good articles.’
She flushed. ‘Thank you. But you’ve found what you want to do, haven’t you?’
A pause. Then, ‘Have I?’
‘Ah,’ said Jed. She’d been right. Nicholas was standing as a candidate from duty, not conviction.
‘It’s a good thing to do. I do know that. And I don’t seem to have another book in me right now. Maybe I only ever had that one story to tell.’
‘You have Felicity.’ There. She had said it.
‘Yes.’ And yet, once again, his voice wasn’t certain. ‘At least I do if I get in. I’ll have a proper job then, something to offer her now that my career as an author seems to have gone nowhere. We can buy a house near Rock Farm and Flinty.’
‘That’s what Felicity wants?’
Nicholas nodded. ‘She spends all her holidays at Rock Farm now, and any weekend she can get away. She plans to take over the horse stud as well as build up a veterinary practice. Did you know her grandfather died of pneumonia last winter?’
‘Yes. I’m sorry.’
‘Flinty is managing okay.’ He gave a rueful laugh. ‘Flinty always manages. But one day she won’t be able to, not without help. Felicity and I want to make it possible for her to stay in her mountains as long as she lives.’
There was as much love in his voice when he spoke of Flinty McAlpine as there was when he used her granddaughter’s name. More, perhaps. ‘You’re close to Flinty?’
‘She’s stubborn as a wombat and about as reasonable. Won’t even go to Sydney for a surgeon to look at her back, though it’s hurting her worse now . . .’ He met Jed’s eyes. ‘And I love her, grumpiness and all.’
‘Well, she is your fiancée’s grandmother.’
‘That’s not why . . .’ He hesitated. ‘Jed, I haven’t told anyone else this. Not even Felicity. You know you told me about seeing into the future or past?’
‘Yes,’ she said cautiously.
‘I never quite believed you. I didn’t not believe you,’ he added quickly. ‘It was more . . . suspended disbelief. But up in the mountains there is a rock, a huge, flat rock with a view down the valley. And after I . . . went away, I met someone there and I fell in love. The only trouble was that she was fifty years away, in 1919.’
‘What was her name?’ Though she knew before he replied.
‘Flinty McAlpine. Jed, she had so much courage. Even when she became crippled too, like me. She understood about what I’d been through in the war and what it was like to come back, among people who could never know because they had never been there. Flinty had seen how war had changed Sandy and her brother. She heard her brother’s nightmares. I think she loved me too, though in a different way from Sandy. She’d loved Sandy all her life. We both knew, right from the start, that we could never be together.
‘Then one day I wheeled myself out of the fog on the rock, into now, and there was Flinty. Except this Flinty wore jeans and an Akubra and had come to call me up for lunch.’
Jed shivered. She believed him. Possibly she was the only one in the world who could believe him. Except Flinty. ‘You saw Felicity.’
‘Yes. Seventeen, just like the Flinty I had left.’
‘And you decided to marry her.’
‘She makes me happy,’ he said simply. ‘Felicity is the mountains and riding through the wildflowers. It just seemed . . . meant.’
‘Why haven’t you married already then?’
‘Flinty is worried I love Felicity because I’m in love with the seventeen-year-old Flinty. Felicity can’t get married till she’s twenty-one unless her parents give their permission. And they won’t because the whole blasted family still do whatever Flinty tells them to.’
‘Including you.’
‘Including me. This standing for parliament was her idea, and Matilda’s.’
‘Try explaining that in a letter to the lovelorn column of the paper,’ Jed said lightly. ‘I can’t marry my fiancée because her grandmother thinks I am really in love with her.’
‘I do love Felicity,’ he said slowly. ‘But there’re many kinds of love.’
‘And Felicity is a nice safe vanilla. Sorry. That was bitchy.’
‘Our lives fit together,’ said Nicholas quietly.
‘And ours didn’t?’ She held up her hand. ‘Don’t answer that. I know they didn’t. We’d have been bad for each other. Protected each other far too much. How does Felicity like the idea of being a politician’s wife?’
‘Rock Farm is only five hours from Canberra.’ Nicholas grinned. ‘As long as I don’t become prime minister and have to live in the Lodge, it should work out nicely.’
‘Not much chance of that with Gough Whitlam,’ Jed said wryly. ‘The only one who could ever challenge him is his wife.’
‘Margaret? I’ve met her. She’d make an even better PM than Gough. But no one would ever vote for us with a woman as leader.’ He stood. For a moment she thought he was going to hold out his hand to her. He didn’t. She was glad. She didn’t want to touch him. Or wanted to too much.
‘Thank you for the draft speeches,’ he said. ‘Yes, I know they came from you, even if you didn’t sign them. And those articles in the Gazette are going to make a difference.’
‘Anytime,’ she said lightly.
He nodded, smiled, then headed down the garden towards the gate and Andy’s place. Jed watched him for twelve seconds, then resolutely turned and walked back to the main house.