Gibber’s Creek Gazette, 2 December 1972
It’s Time, by Jed Kelly
Three years ago I watched a man walk on the moon. They said it couldn’t be done, the older scientists and engineers. Impossible. How can you fit a computer vast enough to guide us to the moon in a rocket ship that would still be light enough to be blasted from this earth’s gravitational pull?
And now many are once again saying something is impossible: that a government can change after twenty-three years.
Up in Canberra, public servants in the Departments of Defence and Foreign Affairs are burning papers and looting filing cabinets, because they believe the party they have for so long thought of only as the opposition or even the socialist enemy might actually come to power. They know what the winds of change are singing above the Canberra hills: it’s time.
Time to care for the elderly, who cannot afford the company of a cat. Time for children, crammed in temporary classrooms, unless their parents can afford private school fees. It’s time for proper pensions, and an Arbitration Commission to settle industrial disputes instead of strikes that cripple our economy.
Editor’s note: The above is a paid political advertisement placed at the insistence of the owner. It is not authorised by the Australian Labor Party of Australia, or the editor of this paper.
Earl’s Court, London
Darling Jed,
I’m here! And you’re there and I bet your brain is full of elections and scones. But if you are just the tiniest bit bored, hop on a plane and in just twenty hours and a couple of stopovers you’ll be here!
London is totally fab. So fab I can’t tell you because I am still jetlagged and Sue has nearly finished in the bathroom — there are eight of us crammed into three rooms and the ‘bathroom’ has a toilet, 6,324 cockroaches and a bath the size of a coffee cup.
Mostly I just wanted to say ‘good luck’. I know how much this election means to you. Go get ’em, girl.
Love always,
J xxxxx
JED
Jed woke early, then lay in bed and watched the flies crawling patterns on the ceiling. Go get ’em? If only she could. Because election day was for not doing things.
Not writing another article for the Gibberer, because it would be tempting fate to write of a victory that hadn’t yet happened, and she would be too angry at Australia to draft an obituary for dreams if Gough Whitlam or Nicholas lost.
She wasn’t even a member of the Labor Party or old enough to vote, and even if she had been older and a fully paid-up member, the Labor blokes wouldn’t listen to a woman.
Nor could she see Nicholas to wish him luck, because . . .
Because.
She got up, slowly, dressed even more slowly, in a not-very-mini skirt, a politically neutral green. Sandals. Stockings? No, too much for Gibber’s Creek on a Saturday morning. She should have checked with Matilda. The perfect ensemble to wear at a polling booth while you handed out how-to-vote cards was exactly the kind of thing Matilda would know.
She looked at her watch again. Another two hours till she had to be down at the primary school. She and Scarlett were rostered for the first shift, nine am to noon. The Labor Party had refused Leafsong’s request (through Scarlett) to feed the Gibber’s Creek volunteers, insisting that the party would distribute their own official bundles of sandwiches.
Leafsong and Scarlett were already seated at the kitchen table. So, to Jed’s surprise, was Carol, wearing flared jeans instead of overalls, and an It’s Time T-shirt, sharing scrambled eggs on toast.
‘Yours is in the oven,’ said Scarlett.
Jed grabbed her plate using a tea towel as an oven mitt. ‘Are you coming down to the polling booth with us?’ she asked Carol.
‘Might as well. Sam is going to meet us there.’
‘To hand out how-to-vote cards? I thought you were the alternative society?’
Carol took a mouthful of scrambled eggs. ‘A decent government and the rise in alternative societies aren’t necessarily incompatible.’
Which was not quite what she’d asserted a few months ago. But Jed just said tactfully, ‘True . . .’
‘Fascism leads to fascism. Revolutions happen not when things are at their worst, but when things begin to get a bit better and people can hope.’
Jed looked at Carol with interest. That was actually a point worth discussing, almost worthy of Julieanne. But not today.
She ate her eggs instead, drank tea, then poured more into a Thermos. They found hats, and argued for five minutes till at last Leafsong put one on so Scarlett agreed to wear one too, while Carol grinned, her own floppy red felt hat already on her head.
Boadicea sped between the paddocks of sheep, munching away, supremely unaware that anything important might happen today.
Or might not. And that failure would matter deeply. Desperately. Because if Labor lost now, it meant the majority of Australians were too what? Conservative? Dumb? Timid? All were possible reasons today’s voters might reject the change that was so evidently needed . . .
Failure today would mean failure forever.
It was easy to find a parking space, even on this Saturday. Jed looked at her watch. A quarter to nine. A strange quacking noise in the distance resolved itself into ‘Vote Briggs, your Country Party candidate’, spoken through a megaphone. The car drew up, plastered with posters. A hopeful woman in a quite gorgeous straw hat offered Jed a bunch of Country Party how-to-vote cards.
‘No, thank you. I’m here for Labor.’
‘Oh. Well, good luck then.’
Extraordinary. But then people were nice. Mostly.
A figure approached on a bicycle, and it turned out to be Sam, carrying a giant bunch of Labor-red roses in the bicycle basket. ‘From Matilda,’ he said, leaning his bike against the playground fence and presenting a serviceable china vase to Jed.
Jed laughed, lowering her face into the petals and drinking up the scent. Trust Matilda to think that their how-to-vote table needed decoration. On the other hand, Matilda might be right.
More megaphone squawks, which resolved into the ‘It’s Time’ theme. A van pulled to a stop with vast images of Whitlam plastered on both sides and equipped with bundles of how-to-vote cards ready for distribution. Jed stepped forwards . . .
By ten am, the volunteers were in full swing. Gibber’s Creek was heeding the old adage to ‘vote early’, if not, hopefully, the additional ‘vote often’.
She and Scarlett, Sam, Carol and Leafsong shared the footpath with a ruddy-faced gentleman wearing a sports coat despite the December heat, handing out the cards for the Country Party; a small and slightly greasy man who represented the Nazi party — no, sorry, the National Socialist The-Holocaust-Was-a-Fabrication Party — and who, just possibly, had dreams that he might be transmogrified into a representative of the master race; and Mrs Weaver, who had taken Jed’s chair in the shade and was now feeding yet another small kangaroo, wearing an It’s Time badge on a ribbon around its neck, courtesy of Scarlett and Leafsong.
Mrs Weaver was not handing out anything, nor had she taken a how-to-vote card. The aliens, it seemed, did not have a political position, even if her kangaroo did. But she had brought buttered scones with blackberry jam, which they had all eaten, the Not-a-Nazi taking five, as if National Socialism meant not eating breakfast.
Families with kids holding melting ice blocks. Carloads of teachers from the school. Father Michael, who said, ‘Bless you, my child,’ to Scarlett as she handed him a leaflet, in a way that made it clear how he was voting. But most people took cards from every party, even from the Nazi man.
‘Will you exterminate all Jewish people and those with dark skin if you get in?’ asked Jed.
‘Of course not.’ The small man seemed affronted that Jed hadn’t read his party platform. ‘They will simply not be allowed into positions of power. Nor will communists,’ he added warningly, glancing at the leaflets in her hand.
Jed wondered whether to tell him that visiting communist China did not make Gough Whitlam a communist, especially now that conservative President Nixon of the USA had been to China too. But if the poor man was deluded enough to think his party could — or should — be elected, there was no point arguing the finer points of politics with him. She was faintly ashamed of even questioning him.
A clean white station wagon — conspicuously clean where most pale cars were the brick colour of the local dust — pulled up at the kerb. Three women and two men of varied ages, dressed in white as pristine as their car, stepped out. The man she had met at Nicholas’s first introduction to Gibber’s Creek emerged from the driver’s seat, once again in a white suit.
Jed offered him a leaflet. He smiled, showing teeth almost as white as his clothes. American teeth, thought Jed, able to dazzle at twenty paces. But his accent was educated Australian.
‘Thank you. Though there’s no need to give us how-to-vote cards. It would be a pity to arrive at the polling booth without having made a well-considered decision.’
‘Then I hope you’re voting for Gough Whitlam.’
Stupid. She should have said Nicholas Brewster, because that was the name on the Gibber’s Creek ballots. Anyone who wrote Gough Whitlam down instead of putting the number one next to Nicholas’s name would waste their vote.
‘Whitlam will win the election,’ said the man. He might have been stating that the sun would not roll over four times at lunchtime.
‘I’m glad you think so.’
‘The election result is easy to calculate scientifically.’
‘Psephology,’ said Jed, showing off, ‘is scarcely an accurate science.’
‘It depends how it’s done.’ He held out his hand. Jed shook it automatically. But then she’d shake a vampire’s hand today if they might vote Labor.
Then wait with a pointed stick till they came out.
The stranger held her hand a little too long, still smiling. ‘I’m Dr Zacharia.’
‘Doctor of medicine?’ She thought Dr Dougherty had taken over Dr McAlpine’s practice.
Dr Zacharia glanced at Scarlett, handing a how-to-vote card to a couple with three small kids, then back at Jed. ‘Yes. We’re doing some interesting research at our place outside town. It’s out on the Back Creek Road. Perhaps you’d like to visit us, Miss Kelly?’
‘You know who I am?’
‘Gibber’s Creek gossip flies as fast as a comet,’ he said dryly.
Which was true. But Gibber’s Creek gossip had been strangely silent about a research academy of any sort on Back Creek Road.
One of the women giggled. And kept giggling. Dr Zacharia turned to her. The giggles stopped. Dr Zacharia looked back at Jed.
‘Will you visit us, Miss Kelly? Perhaps tomorrow? And, please, do bring your sister too.’
Jed forced a smile. Why didn’t she like him? Because he was too . . . pleasant. And just too slightly intent. He’s setting up a con, she thought. As old Fred had told her, that first night at the billabong, ‘You can’t con a con artist.’ But today there were more important things to think of than con men in white. ‘By tomorrow I hope we have a new government. A new future for us all.’
‘As I said, Gough Whitlam will win. And Australia will change, a little. But on 11 November 1975, it will change beyond recognition.’
‘How?’ asked Jed, startled by the precision of the date. Though possibly it just meant that Dr Zacharia and whatever funds he’d conned — or not — would have safely vanished by then.
‘You’ll need to visit us to find out.’
He left her with another of his dentist convention smiles, his followers behind him like a flock of white leghorn chickens.
Odd. She forgot him as a bunch of ringers clambered out of the back of a ute, wolf-whistling at her and Carol.
She exchanged an eye-rolling look with Carol. Jed usually made a rude gesture at any bloke who wolf-whistled at her. Not today.
At half past eleven, the Labor Party van arrived again, this time with sandwiches — ‘Frozen,’ said Scarlett, disgusted, as Jed put them on the table to thaw. The Country Party bloke, ‘Call me Reg’, offered to go and get everyone ice creams, if Jed could hand out his cards for him.
To her surprise she found herself with Country Party cards in one hand, Labor Party ones in the other. Nor did it matter, she thought as she offered both cards to an elderly woman with a little embarrassment. The woman seemed to find nothing strange in being offered competing how-to-vote cards. Probably they had all made up their minds already.
‘Call me Reg’ returned, hands crammed with double-cone ice creams, vanilla one side, chocolate the other. ‘I didn’t know what kind you’d like.’ Everyone got one, including Mrs Weaver and the National Socialist supporter, who tucked into his dubiously but hungrily, as if he wasn’t sure whether an Übermensch ate ice cream.
At five minutes to twelve, Dr McAlpine’s old Mercedes pulled up and he and Mrs McAlpine got out.
‘We’ll just pop in to vote, then take over from you,’ said Dr McAlpine, clapping his son on the back as Sam endured being kissed in public by his mother. Jed slightly envied both the mother and the embarrassment.
She was also envious of the McAlpines’ vote. Carol and Sam had voted already. Jed had envied them too. How dare Billy McMahon say she and everyone else under twenty-one were too immature to vote? Unfair for a country to conscript young men for war at nineteen, but not allow them votes to say what wars their nation ought to fight.
She surrendered her how-to-vote cards to Mrs McAlpine. Had this woman in her neat apple-green A-line dress really once performed bare bosomed as a circus mermaid? And stayed with a violent husband, until he and their marriage healed?
She would have liked to stay, to just possibly persuade some doubter or give guidance to any idiot who didn’t know which candidate was which. But she needed to get Scarlett home to have a rest before their late night at the Town Hall, when the world might change.
‘See you tonight,’ said Sam.
Tonight. Would Nicholas become the Gibber’s Creek MP? Why couldn’t her glimpses of the future come when called? Or show her the answers to questions such as: who will be prime minister on Monday?
Why hadn’t she asked someone, ‘Did Gough Whitlam win the 1972 election?’ If they’d never heard of him, it would mean he had lost. She could even have asked her future self . . .
She left Sam to ride his bicycle, and dropped Leafsong and Carol off at Halfway to Eternity, narrowly missing an affronted chook chasing grasshoppers.
‘I wonder who hens would vote for,’ said Carol.
‘Chooks are deeply conservative,’ said Jed.
‘I’m not so sure. They spend at least half an hour each evening discussing who is top of the pecking order. Maybe they have constantly changing minority governments.’
One of the hens flapped up onto Boadicea’s windscreen, leaving a small white trail behind her on the duco. ‘Anarchy?’ suggested Jed, shooing it off.
Carol shook her head. ‘Chooks are decidedly not anarchist.’
And you are definitely getting bored just building mud walls and growing corn, thought Jed, building an alternative society or not. She said instead, ‘Pick you up tonight?’
‘May as well,’ said Carol. Her wave was almost friendly as Jed drove off in a small cloud of dust and squawking chooks.