Gibber’s Creek Gazette, March 1972
The Lions Club wood raffle was won by Mrs Andrew Green, with $67.82 raised for the Gibber’s Creek Hospital. Lions Club President, Mr Martin Sampson, thanks all volunteers. Baked goods are still needed for Friday’s street stall.
JED
Jed waved cheerily to Miss Elsinkop, her tutor, as she raced out the doors of Ursula College, then shoved her bag into the back of her blue sports car.
Miss Elsinkop would know perfectly well that:
a. Jed was heading off to Gibber’s Creek mid-week — why else would she carry her suitcase? And that:
b. Jed had no permission to do so.
But Miss Elsinkop would say nothing. No one would. Because after two and a bit years at ANU and Ursula College, Jed’s tutors, lecturers and even the dean knew that Jed Kelly would get high distinctions even if she cut every lecture; and that if they threatened to fail her for non-attendance, she’d just grin and say, ‘Okay.’
The wealthy, generous and . . . to be honest, not modest, thought Jed . . . beautiful Miss Kelly could also get away with wearing clothes that were slightly too gorgeous to bring to university. Rumour said that Jed Kelly’s clothes came from Paris designers in the 1920s and ’30s, via her great-grandmother’s wardrobe, altered to fit Jed’s generous curves.
Rumour was right.
Today’s dress was low-waisted green silk with dappled autumn leaves, leaving her arms bare; they were brown from helping to dag sheep in the summer holidays. Her long dark hair was topped with a floppy hat and a scarf that exactly matched the dress. Only her sandals were modern: the wedges worn by half the girls at college.
Jed’s tutors and lecturers also knew that even if this girl missed the occasional lecture, she cared deeply about their subjects. Jed Kelly was not at university to learn her way to a profession, nor, as many girls still freely admitted, to find a husband studying for a suitably lucrative profession. Jed might also turn up at her tutor’s office at lunchtime, almost dancing with excitement about a research paper she’d discovered. Her essays were insightful and sometimes disconcertingly original.
Besides, Ursula College, and even the entire Faculty of Arts at ANU, listened when Matilda Thompson summoned her great-granddaughter to Drinkwater. Mrs Thompson had become a generous donor, now that her great-granddaughter was a student at ANU. Mrs Thompson was equally generous in making it quite clear that if she wanted a small favour in return, it would be granted.
No, thought Jed happily, no one would object to her taking a few days off. The days of people ordering her about were gone.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’
A vision in a purple-fringed micro mini skimming the tops of legs made even longer by sheer purple stockings and silver stiletto sandals stared at her with Cleopatra eyes outlined in glittery purple eyeshadow.
Jed grinned. ‘Home.’ It was such a lovely word. At last she had a home.
Julieanne put her hands on her hips, sending the bells on her bracelets ringing. ‘You mean Deadsville?’
Julieanne had visited Gibber’s Creek with Jed just once, after the girl in a silver 1920s fringed sheath and headband had sat next to the girl in green velvet hot pants and matching long boots, giving the finger to the wolf-whistling boys in the back of the lecture theatre.
It had been love at first fight, when Jed and Julieanne argued over Descartes’s theory of knowledge and what if a brain kept alive in a bottle only thought it was alive, making ‘I think therefore I am’ totally unreliable, while the blokes looked on, uncomprehending.
Julieanne had as little respect for ‘normal’ as Jed. She was an embassy brat, born when her father had been third undersecretary in Ghana. He was now first secretary in New York. Two days in Gibber’s Creek, with no discos or boutiques, and where discussions centred on cattle prices and ‘How much rain did you get last week?’, had been enough.
Instead she had brought Jed into her world: demonstrations against the visiting South African Springbok rugby team; marching in moratoriums against young conscripted Australians being sent to the Vietnam War; arguing about Germaine Greer and should women lead separate lives from men to free them from inevitable tyranny; drinking coffee and eating raisin toast at Gus’s till midnight.
The only place Jed refused to accompany her was the union bar, with a fake ID to prove she was over twenty-one. Alcohol for Jed would always be associated with drunkenness, violence and fear. And Julieanne, being Julieanne, had listened with sympathy and understanding to the parts of Jed’s life she wished to share.
‘Back to Deadsville,’ agreed Jed companionably. ‘Want to come?’
Julieanne gave an elaborate shudder. ‘Let me guess. Mrs Matilda Thompson has instructed you to be with her for the end of the world. But Gibber’s Creek is the end of the world already.’
Jed laughed. ‘I can’t see Matilda believing a plague doctor’s ancient prophecy.’
‘Ha,’ said Julieanne. ‘It’s all a beat-up. Nostradamus’s prophecies are so vague they might mean anything. Just promise you won’t come back engaged to a sheep farmer.’
‘I promise. Cross my heart. I’m not getting engaged to anyone. Ever.’ Jed pushed back a flicker of memory: Nicholas’s lips on hers. If she had never mentioned marriage, would Nicholas have pushed her away? Her father’s two disastrous marriages should have taught her that for her ‘wedded bliss’ was poison.
‘What is there for someone like you in Gibber’s Creek, except sheep and marriage?’ demanded Julieanne, who planned to head to swinging London as soon as she graduated — Carnaby Street, Mick Jagger concerts, and a network that would with determination, brilliance and a few buckets of mascara help her become a lead reporter or possibly a columnist for a magazine like Rolling Stone, and not ever ever ever a writer for the women’s pages.
‘Gibber’s Creek has everything,’ said Jed, grinning, because there were some things that even Julieanne could never understand. Or at least not until she had got the magic of ‘going overseas’ out of her system. ‘Anyway, I like sheep.’
‘Me too. With mint sauce and gravy.’
Jed took the corner out of the car park a little too fast, just for the fun of it, waving as Julieanne waved back, smiling, exasperated, the sunlight shining on her bracelets and fifteen rings, one of them a Catherine de Medici poison ring from which she would sometimes slip a little white powder into her coffee, to shock the others at the table. Only sugar, of course. Shocking people was fun, whether it was with fake arsenic or a sports car.
But Boadicea is a lovely car anyway, thought Jed, turning the radio up so that Leonard Cohen sang at full pelt along the road past the CSIRO. Extravagant, especially with the customisation to cope with Scarlett’s wheelchair and the bar that helped the crippled girl hoist herself in and out of the low seats. Impractical too, because the Canberra weather either fried you or spat at you with ice, and by the time you had her roof up Boadicea was half filled with hail and the leather seats still felt damp a week later.
A Simon and Garfunkel song now — ‘I Am a Rock’, her favourite. She turned it to full volume as Boadicea sped over the bridge across Lake Burley Griffin, filled at last with water, what old Campbell had called ‘a bloody waste of a good paddock’; past Parliament House, long and gleaming white, and the shabby tent and bark structure and tiny smoking fire of the new Aboriginal Tent Embassy, protesting for the rights of the Indigenous people to the ancient continent they had inhabited for so long.
The parliamentary rose gardens bloomed on either side, a ludicrously uninhibited clash of colour and green grass. Boadicea followed the road along the artificial lake and the tree-lined avenues of Kingston.
Three years earlier, before she had inherited the money that gave her freedom as well as riches, Jed had assumed she’d go to Sydney University on a scholarship. But that had been when she and Nicholas had planned to live together.
Nicholas would finish his sci-fi book, transmuting the horrors of the Vietnam battle where he had lost his legs into a made-up future warfare. She’d shop, cook, clean and help him write, in between going to lectures. And he would care for her, this girl with no money, no family, no past she wanted to admit to, even to herself.
Nicholas had once known her better than anyone in the world, even if he did not know she saw ghosts or, rather, glimpses of the past and future in places where time was thin. She had even seen a glimpse of a future Nicholas the first time she had met him, a shock of a love for a man she had only just met. She would love an older Nicholas, and so she loved the younger one.
But Nicholas had deserted her when he felt her inheritance meant she no longer needed him. Gone to the mountains, to stay with a friend’s grandmother, Flinty McAlpine, who, of course, was also a darling of Matilda’s, because down in this quarter of New South Wales it seemed all good people knew and loved her great-grandmother. Gone to fall in love with Flinty’s granddaughter, Felicity, to become engaged to her. To be, Jed hoped, happy. She had tried to put that glimpse of future love behind her. She hadn’t seen him since.
There was no reason to go to Sydney University after that, except her newfound Great-Uncle Jim’s offer to live with him and his family, an option both of them were too tactful to admit they regarded with horror. Jed briefly considered the University of Queensland, where some of the girls from her high school would be only one year ahead of her. But there had been no friendships there strong enough for anyone to believe the horrors of her home life, much less support her after her rape by her stepmother’s boyfriend or through its tragic aftermath.
Jed did know Canberra, or rather Queanbeyan. She had squatted there in those months of wonder when she washed dishes at Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station and had been an insignificant part of the greatest technical triumph of humankind, as Neil Armstrong stepped down onto the moon. She almost decided to try to buy the derelict house she’d lived in then, but a house needed tending, especially a house that was half fallen down, and she had a house, the one Matilda and Tommy had bought for her between Matilda’s Drinkwater property and Nancy’s Overflow, a house Scarlett had cheekily nicknamed ‘Dribble’.
You didn’t need another house when you had a home called Dribble. And living in college meant she didn’t have to cook — after years of washing up to earn money and eating leftovers meant for the garbage that had, just, kept her from starvation, Jed now had an aversion to anything that hinted of kitchen. College also meant someone else washed your sheets. And ANU was only a three-hour drive back home, now the highway had been upgraded.
Jed grinned as the car zoomed up the hill out of Queanbeyan. What was home? Her house by the river? Or the mansion that was Drinkwater homestead? Her great-grandfather, who had lived there with its owner Matilda, his second wife, was dead, but Matilda, though no kin of Jed’s except by love and even deeper bonds that neither spoke of, was family. And family was home, wasn’t it?
Home could just as easily include Overflow, where Matilda’s son Michael lived with his wife, Nancy, on the property made famous by Paterson’s poem about Nancy’s grandfather, Clancy, who had gone to Queensland droving when neither his family nor society would accept his dark-skinned wife.
Home was also Gibber’s Creek: the town as well as its outlying paddocks of lichened rocks that looked like dusty sheep, and dusty sheep that looked like lichened rocks; the leaf-strewn billabong sleeping by the river, where she had arrived, starving, almost too scared to keep on living, and met a man called Fred who’d claimed to be a ghost and who had at last become one, in a fight with a psychopath to save girls like her from rape and death.
Deadsville? For all her experience of the world, Julieanne had no idea.
Home was the smell of sheep droppings on hot soil, the taste of gum leaves in the air, the puff of air from the soft wings of a powerful owl on your skin at night. Home was knowing people loved you, accepted you, needed you as you needed them.
It didn’t matter exactly what home was. Just that now, at last, she had one.
River View looked just the same as it had during the uni holidays, the wooden cottages among the flowerbeds, the river snaking between its banks of white sand, abandoned by a thousand years of floods. The cottage where Nicholas had stayed was . . .
No. No thinking about Nicholas.
‘Jed!’ Scarlett’s wheelchair scooted towards her. ‘We’ve been invited to a PARTY!’
‘Matilda never mentioned it.’ Jed opened Boadicea’s door and swung the bar out for Scarlett to grab. She knew better than to help her.
Scarlett heaved, swung, settled, then reached over to press the release lever on her wheelchair. It had taken years for Thompson’s Engineering Works to design a motorised chair so light, so strong and portable. Jed regretted deeply that wheelchairs like this were still available only to the patients of River View. Each chair had to be individually made to suit the body of the one who’d use it: enormously expensive. Perhaps she should start a foundation to supply them to others . . .
‘Jed!’
‘Sorry. What were you saying?’ She started the car again.
‘The party’s at that commune, tomorrow night. You know, Halfway to Eternity.’
‘What?’ Jed glanced at her. Scarlett’s short hair flickered in the wind. A lovely wind, rich in sheep and river smells . . . ‘How did you get invited to a commune?’
She had heard of the commune, of course. Janice on the telephone exchange had told everyone at church and the CWA. The gossip spread across the entire district. Seven young people — none of them married to any of the others — had put down the deposit to secure the McAlpines’ lower paddock, instead of a neat farming family of husband, wife and three children.
Jed even knew exactly how much they had paid for it. Janice listened to every conversation and always passed on the juicy bits.
Jed had never bothered to ask more. She wasn’t interested in ‘alternative’ lifestyles. In her experience the only people who wanted any such thing already had extremely comfortable lives to leave. Jed wanted what those people had known and rejected: being part of a loving family, security, deep in an existing community. ‘What do you mean “we” are invited to a party?’
‘You and me, of course. And I met a girl. She’s my age, maybe a bit older. Her name’s Leafsong and she can’t speak.’ Scarlett considered, then added, ‘DOESN’T speak, anyhow. I need to discuss disorders of the larynx with Dr McAlpine. Anyway, the party is tomorrow at four o’clock, to celebrate the end of the world.’
‘How did this Leafsong girl invite you if she can’t speak?’
Scarlett looked at her with the gaze of one whose life has been shaped by pain and loneliness and unwavering determination. ‘You don’t always need words to communicate.’
‘True.’ Jed had promised herself to Matilda tomorrow as well as tonight, for whatever mysterious reason the old woman had insisted Jed come home now. But Matilda went to bed early. And if she and Scarlett arrived to find themselves among pot smokers and free love — Jed wasn’t having Scarlett exposed to any of that — they could leave again. ‘What else is new?’
‘I got an A in English.’
‘That’s not news.’
‘Huh. Wait till you hear this. I got a C for geography!’
‘What? Scarlett O’Hara with a C? Impossible!’
‘Mrs Newbry didn’t BELIEVE me when I said Venice was sinking.’
‘Did you give her the references?’
‘Of COURSE! She said, “That’s the best joke I’ve heard all week,”’ added Scarlett bitterly. ‘And when I insisted that it was true — I might just have raised my voice but only a LITTLE bit — she gave me a C and told me I was lucky she didn’t fail me for rudeness.’
Jed shrugged. ‘Just get yourself to university, brat. They’ll believe you there. As long as you have references.’
‘You don’t need geography to do medicine,’ Scarlett said smugly.
Jed grinned. The kid had a right to be smug. Jed didn’t need the glimpse she had seen of the future Scarlett to know this young woman was going to become a doctor.
‘Do you mind if I drop you off at Dribble? Matilda asked me to dinner, just her and me. She wants to ask me something.’
When Matilda ordered, you obeyed. And not just for love.
‘Of course. As long as there’s food.’
‘Matilda asked Anita to leave supplies. Cold roast chicken, apple pie, egg and bacon pie for breakfast, one of her ginger sponges, and a salad that just needs the dressing added.’ Jed had no compunction about leaving Scarlett on her own. River View was as good as an institution could be for children with disabilities, but the one thing it couldn’t give them though was time by themselves.
Scarlett sighed with happiness. ‘That means I get to chew chicken bones while watching TV with no one saying mind your manners. AND there’s a decent movie on tonight. And you NEVER say, “Don’t stay up late. You’ve school tomorrow.”’
‘Stay up as late as you like. It’s good to see you, brat. I’ve missed you.’
‘I’ve missed you too.’ They grinned at each other as the sheep ignored the small blue car and its occupants. Sports cars never brought hay. In a sheep’s world sports cars were supremely unimportant.
The long dinner table at Drinkwater was set with just two places, and one vase of autumn roses from the garden, their perfume as sweet as the lemon polish Anita used to shine the sideboard. At each setting were placemats, butter knives, entrée knives and main course knives, soup spoons, dessert spoons and three forks. Two wine glasses for each woman, and a water glass, even though both would probably refuse the wine. When Matilda Thompson asked someone to dine, it was done properly.
The only out-of-place note was a plump black and tan dog, lying on its stomach in the doorway, her nose two centimetres into the dining room, as if to say, ‘I am a good dog. I am not allowed in the dining room, but noses do not count.’
The Doberman puppy had been a gift from Jim and his family three years earlier, after Tommy died. A nice thought, a puppy to keep his newly widowed mother company and be a watch dog too at night, now that no servant or nurse lived in, but Jed had watched the slight horror on Matilda’s face before she assembled the proper look of delight for son, daughter-in-law and grandsons.
Had Jim become such a city man that he had forgotten dogs stayed outside at Drinkwater? And did a Doberman belong in that land of kelpies and border collies with odd mixes of dingo?
‘A Doberperson,’ Jed had said to try to break the tension.
Jim blinked. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Well, she can’t be a Doberman. So she has to be a Doberperson.’
Jim’s expression showed exactly what he thought about saying Doberperson or, for that matter, chairperson instead of chairman, not to mention a great-niece who wore vintage silk and lace and had chosen ANU where, for all he knew, she might be attending anti-Springbok demonstrations or hippie love-ins, instead of finding a husband of ‘our sort’. But Jim, despite his stuffiness (‘Too much boarding school,’ Matilda had sighed. ‘But there was no choice.’), was also kind.
So a Doberperson she remained. Matilda named her Maxi, after cleaning up her third puppy mistake, short for ‘Maximum Mess’.
Matilda sat in her usual place at the head of the table, her posture still erect, her face in the gentle light of the candles showing few of the wrinkles of her ninety years, spooning up her consommé. Jed spooned too, careful to scoop towards the far side of the bowl as Matilda was doing.
‘How did the shearing go?’
‘It went,’ said Matilda dryly. ‘Which is the best you can say about shearing. And shearers. The wool classer is a vegetarian now! Have you ever heard of a vegetarian wool classer? Come one more centimetre into this room,’ she added to Maxi, ‘and you will not get any leftovers.’
The Doberperson moved infinitesimally backwards.
‘But your father was a shearer!’
‘And I knew him for two days.’ Matilda’s father had been a union organiser too, killed at the billabong just beyond what had been the Drinkwater boundaries in a set-up to get him arrested for sheep stealing, to calm the escalating violence of the shearers’ strike.
The small tragedy by the billabong had eventually led to his daughter becoming the largest land owner in the district and to the song ‘Waltzing Matilda’, sung at first in defiance and then with sentiment across the nation, as its origin as an early labour movement song was almost forgotten.
‘I’d like to be here for the shearing one day though. Maybe next year.’
‘You’re not staying on at uni after you get your BA?’
Jed shrugged. ‘No. I’ve enjoyed it. But I don’t want to do Honours or a PhD.’ Julieanne had urged her to try for a scholarship to Oxford. And she did love history and philosophy. But enough to spend her days in academic offices, libraries and lecture halls?
‘What will you do? Thank you, Anita,’ to the woman who took their soup bowls. Jed waited till Anita had served the prawn cocktails. Fresh prawns of course, probably couriered down from Sydney with one of the shipments to the Thompson’s factory outside town, an advantage of being the mother of the chairman and managing director of Thompson’s Industries.
Maxi yawned. Prawns were not interesting until they became leftovers.
‘I haven’t had time to work out what I really want.’ Jed shrugged. ‘Until three years ago all I could think about was surviving, or qualifying for a job that would pay a woman enough to live on. I’ll just live for a while. Plant a garden at Dribble. Lend a hand at River View or with the sheep.’
‘Ah.’ Matilda dissected a prawn neatly. ‘That is one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about.’
‘You’ve got a job for me?’
‘In a way. Two jobs, really. The first one would take four or five days a year at most. If you want it.’
‘I’m intrigued.’
‘You’re meant to be.’ Matilda’s look said, ‘You understand me very well, child.’ ‘You remember the terms of your great-grandfather’s will?’
‘It’s hard to forget a will that leaves you one cent less than a million dollars,’ said Jed wryly. At the time of his death, Tommy had honoured her wish not to be a millionaire. But she was, now, for she couldn’t spend even the interest on nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents, even by giving hunks away to whoever she met who was in need. Not to charities. Jed had a deep suspicion of charities, especially those set up for children. She had seen too much to trust in their goodwill.
‘Ah, yes. Well.’ Matilda looked as though she was wondering how to present a main course of crocodile and have Jed accept it. ‘Tommy’s will. There was a matter we didn’t mention at the time. It wasn’t in his will, as such, and of course you had been through so much —’
‘Spit it out,’ said Jed with a shiver of apprehension. Was Matilda going to say there was no money left? Jim was her trustee. Surely he wouldn’t have lost her money! ‘And I don’t mean the prawn heads.’
‘As you know . . .’ Matilda paused as Anita came back in to collect the prawn cocktail glasses. Maxi followed her hopefully as she left the room. ‘Your mother sold her shares and other assets before she left her first husband and vanished with your father. Presumably any money left at her death went to your father, and then to his second wife.’
The hated Debbie. If Dad had left any money on his death, Debbie would have long since spent it on booze. ‘Yes?’ said Jed encouragingly. What was so bad that Matilda had to string it out?
‘Years before Tommy met you he created a family trust. It gives Jim a forty-nine per cent interest in Thompson’s Industries, and that same share of its profits, as well as his salary as president, with the remaining fifty-one per cent of shares, voting rights and profits to be divided between myself and Tommy’s children — if, and only if, they take up positions as directors of the firm. All Tommy’s children, or their descendants after his children’s death. That included your mother.’
‘But my mother was dead!’
‘Tommy didn’t know that for sure,’ said Matilda gently. ‘I think he always hoped, just enough so that if she did ever return long after he was gone, she would know she hadn’t been forgotten. Tommy wanted to divide the income equitably after his death, but also to ensure that the businesses he built up were treated with . . . compassion, not simply as financial enterprises.’
‘Do I inherit my mother’s directorship?’ asked Jed slowly.
‘If you wish to. Not until you are twenty-one at the end of the year. But I wanted to give you time to think about it.’
‘It’s really only four or five days a year?’
Matilda nodded. ‘Or less. Often just the annual general meeting, which is held here. The directors take no part in the day-to-day decisions. They only involve themselves on larger matters.’
‘Do you want me to do this?’
‘Yes,’ said Matilda.
‘Why? I don’t need the money,’ Jed added.
Matilda smiled, the Empress of the Universe smile that had so infuriated Jed when they first met. ‘Money can do good things.’
‘Like River View.’
‘And giving people jobs. Anyone who lived through the Depression knows jobs matter, how hopeless life can be if there is no chance of one.’
‘How many people does Thompson’s Industries employ?’
‘Ten thousand, four hundred and twenty-one. As of 30 June last financial year. It varies a little. Mostly making wirelesses and television sets. We still have several government contracts for . . . other things . . . but they are on a need-to-know basis.’
Jed blinked, not just at the exactitude of the answer but the sheer size of Thompson’s Industries. ‘How many work at the factory here?’
‘Only twenty-six people these days. The Gibber’s Creek factory was Tommy’s tinkering place, really. During the war it was more important, as security was easier to ensure where a suspicious stranger would be conspicuous. Tommy and his engineers could work on new designs. Design work is done in Sydney these days.’
‘Are there new designs since Tommy died?’ Jed asked bluntly.
Matilda smiled. ‘Yes. Jim is no engineer. Nor a genius, like his father. You need to love to tinker with the universe to be a genius. But he knows how to employ them.’
‘You still haven’t said why you want me on the board.’
‘As it stands, your mother’s voting share is held by all of us, including Jim. That means Jim can outvote Michael and me. If you take up your share, then, if necessary, you, Michael and I can vote against him.’
‘When might it be necessary?’
Matilda raised an eyebrow, or the pencil line that replaced her almost invisible white brow.
Jed grinned. ‘Does Thompson’s Industries have equal pay for equal work by women? Can girls become apprentice mechanics? Engineers?’
‘Not yet,’ said Matilda calmly.
Jed’s grin grew wider. ‘Then I’ll do it. Of course.’
‘You don’t want to know how much money you are going to make each year?’
She considered. ‘Not really.’
‘Good answer. The church teaches us that it is harder for a rich man to enter heaven than it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. But it is quite possible for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, as long as the camel is dead, chopped extremely fine, and you have a lot of patience.
‘I have always thought that instead money is like water. Let money flow to you and past you, like swimming in a river, and it’s good, because then that money can be used for good. Keep it and you will drown. But most rich men don’t even know they’re drowning. That looks delicious, Anita. Thank you,’ Matilda added as Anita carried in a tray on which was a roast shoulder of hogget and vegetables, Maxi escorting her proudly, as if to say, ‘Many thieves would have stolen this great family treasure. But I, Maxi, have foiled them.’
Jed waited while Matilda carved the meat, offered her vegetables from the dishes, still stunned into silence by the offer of a directorship. A chance to make real changes in a business that employed over ten thousand people. More to digest than roast pumpkin, roast potatoes, roast parsnips, roast onions, fresh green peas. Jed grinned again. Real food, not college food, which was heavy on cornflakes, corned beef and coleslaw. She picked up her first knife and second fork.
‘Apple pie for pudding,’ said Anita, smiling at her eagerness to eat.
‘Wonderful. Scarlett will have scoffed the pie you left at Dribble. Thank you for that, by the way.’
‘A pleasure. Always.’ Anita left.
‘Maxi, out,’ said Matilda. Maxi took up her position in the doorway again.
‘Do I need to talk to Jim?’ Conversations with Jim left her feeling he had patted her on the head.
‘Jim will tell you to just endorse his decisions. Talk to Michael. He’ll tell you why Jim’s beliefs sometimes need a little modifying.’
‘Such as?’
‘I have, for example, never even bothered to put equal pay forward as a motion.’
‘Ah,’ said Jed. ‘Jim isn’t going to know what hit him.’ She pushed more gravy onto her potato hungrily. Food always had more flavour at Drinkwater.
‘Jim is going to know exactly what hit him,’ said Matilda dryly. ‘His mother’s soft-hearted misguided good intentions, his brother’s convictions, fostered by a truly equal marriage, and the long experience of his great-niece making do on “women’s wages”.’
A time Jed would much rather forget. She needed time to think about what the role of director might mean. ‘I’m going to a party tomorrow night,’ she announced, to change the subject.
‘Really?’ Matilda raised an eyebrow as if to say, ‘Why didn’t I know of this already?’ ‘Who is giving it?’
‘The commune down the river. One of the girls there asked Scarlett to come, and Scarlett asked me. And a good thing too,’ she added. ‘I don’t want her going to that sort of place unless I’ve checked it out.’
‘I suspect it’s harmless,’ said Matilda. ‘Blue’s son Sam lives there.’ Her tone implied that no McAlpine could be involved in anything unsavoury, even in this new world of free love and recreational drugs. ‘Do you think I might come too? I’m curious.’
Jed stared at her. ‘Go to a hippie party?’ There’d be people smoking dope, at the very least. Probably nudity. Possibly even a love-in, though Jed had never actually heard of one happening in Australia. She hunted for a suitable excuse. ‘It’d be uncomfortable.’
‘My dear girl, I can still tolerate a shearing shed in midsummer. I am sure I can cope with a hippie commune.’ The old eyes turned sardonic. She’s enjoying this, realised Jed. ‘I can also cope with nude men and women swimming in the river.’
‘How did you . . . ?’
‘Binoculars,’ said Matilda crisply. ‘No, I’m not a voyeur. I was looking for lambing ewes. Nor will I be worried by smoking . . . what do you call it these days? Weed? Pot?’
‘I don’t call it anything. I don’t use that stuff.’
‘I should hope not. Opium was the drug in my day. Laudanum. Chemists sold it for everything from arthritis to a cough. I used to give a spoonful every hour to my mother . . .’ She stopped.
‘Your mother was . . . an addict?’
‘Certainly not! My mother died of cancer, though that wasn’t the term they used then. And in pain, as I couldn’t afford enough laudanum, not on a twelve-year-old girl’s jam factory wages. We never saw daylight in those days. Worked fifteen hours a day six days a week for pennies and a bit of bread and jam. Ah, the grime in Grinder’s Alley . . .’ She looked up from her roast hogget to find Jed staring at her.
‘Tell me about Grinder’s Alley,’ said Jed quietly.
Matilda smiled. ‘A factory with its machinery held together by bits of wire and Tommy’s tinkering, huddled buildings that were more soot than house; smoke-grey sky in the day and darker grey at night. The workers were mostly women or children. You didn’t have to pay children much. Or anything at all. Starving, the lot of us, and no way to change it. Women had no vote, and not enough men cared. The rich ruled the country.
‘And then it changed. Because people like my father fought for the right to be part of a union: battled for eight hours’ work, eight hours’ play, eight hours’ sleep, eight bob a day. Eight bob was enough to see you right back then. And women like my aunt fought for votes for women and women got the laws passed that outlawed child labour. We thought we were making a perfect world back then. Just give the working man a vote, and a party to vote for. Give women the vote and the world would change.’
‘But it didn’t,’ said Jed flatly.
‘Oh, yes it did. The world always changes. But getting votes for women didn’t change it enough. The same party in power for twenty-three years now: people who have built up their own empires of power. There’ll be no more change for good unless we fight for it. That’s why I asked you to come home this week.’
Home, thought Jed. A lovely word. ‘I thought you might want me here for the end of the world. That’s what the party is to celebrate, by the way. Nostradamus’s end of the world tomorrow night.’
Matilda grinned. It was the grin of an urchin from Grinder’s Alley. ‘Not the end of the world. The opposite. This year Australia is going to elect a new government. Gough Whitlam’s government. And that’s the second job I want to offer you — to help Gough Whitlam win.’