ABC Local Radio, Gibber’s Creek, 11 November 1975
Tom Uren calls on supporters ‘not to let the candle fade’.
MATILDA
Matilda clung to her stick with one hand, the telephone receiver clutched in the other. Maxi lay at her feet, her head on one side as she tried to work out if what was happening concerned potential walks, biscuits, chicken scraps or a duty to defend her mistress.
‘Mum, I’m not going to drive you to Canberra tonight. Or even tomorrow morning.’ The voice through the receiver sounded scratchy, as it always did since the new automatic exchange.
‘Michael, this is important. The most important moment in our nation’s history. We have to be there!’
‘What do you plan to do? Storm the steps of Parliament House?’
She sat silent, the phone in her hand. For that had been exactly what she had assumed would happen, a demonstration larger even than the Vietnam moratorium marches, tens of thousands of Australians crying, ‘This shall not be done!’, forcing their way through police barricades, retaking the parliament that was theirs by right and by long and bitter battles. And she would be among them, an old woman leaning on her stick . . .
‘Mum, I don’t know what’s going to happen in Canberra,’ said Michael gently. ‘I’ll take you there if you really want to go. But I think you should stay here. Work on the election campaign. That’s what really matters now.’
Election. There would be an election. She had forgotten that, in her rage, lost in the memories of labour wars from seventy years ago. And if the people did storm Parliament House, what use would an old woman be?
Plan an election campaign? That was kind of Michael. But Michael knew as well as she did that Nicholas’s campaign would be run by those in Canberra.
For over a hundred years the owner of Drinkwater had owned true political power, could truly influence who represented Gibber’s Creek in Canberra, old Drinkwater first, and then herself, telling . . . no, advising employees who to vote for, even buying the local paper when its editor stubbornly refused to give the public the right information during World War II.
These days television wielded more power than a newspaper, and the national newspapers far more than ‘the local rag’.
The power she had today was exactly what her father — and her aunt and her fellow suffragettes — had fought for: a single vote for every man or woman across the land, including those whose skins were black and whose land was still being taken from them.
‘Thank you, darling,’ she said at last.
‘Mum, I’m sorry . . .’
‘No, you’re quite right. I wasn’t thinking. This is 1975, not 1895. Give the boys a kiss good night from me.’
She sat, the Doberperson in her lap, or rather one small portion of a Doberperson, the rest sprawled mostly over a sofa.
What now? Blood upon the wattle? Was that what she truly wanted? The words were as clear as if they came from outside the window, as if Lawson himself were declaiming them:
We’ll make the tyrants feel the sting
Of those that they would throttle;
They needn’t say the fault is ours
If blood should stain the wattle.
Would there be blood on the wattle now?
There had been blood of battle spilled on Australia’s soil: at the poor, failed convict scuffle at Vinegar Hill; in the bloody ten-minute clash at Eureka and the hours of carnage afterwards. The burning of the riverboat and shearing shed in her father’s battle for a man’s right to strike and belong to a union; her father’s death for the cause. How many suffragettes had been bashed by drunken, laughing men as they sought signatures for the petitions that would eventually lead to votes for women?
The savage battles of the Depression had left wounded too, as friends and unionists tried to fight the police who evicted families behind in rent or mortgage payments.
Yet these had been scuffles, not war. Ironically the most blood shed in Australia had not been in political fights for justice, but in a real war, though no one called it that, when her great-uncles and their ilk had slaughtered her great-grandmother’s people, first to subdue them, then in retaliation for speared sheep and, finally, for sport.
It was just a joke, James had told her so long ago, when she’d reproached him for boasting about ‘killing a buck’. She had tried to believe him then, loving him, fascinated by him. She did not believe him now.
Yet this new nation of Australia, only seventy-four years old, had been created not by civil war, but through referenda and the ballot box. For seventy-four years its most passionate divisions had been settled the same way.
But this?
The Doberperson whined and licked her face. ‘Down! No, good dog. Good dog.’ Maxi unfolded off the sofa and padded off.
And what if the people did storm Parliament House? Whitlam would have to take control again, simply to restore order. So many other nations had had civil wars — indeed was there any major nation that had not?
Could it, would it, should it come to that?
Something large and slimy landed on her knee. The lamb bone from dinner three nights earlier, Maxi’s most cherished possession. What more could a dog give you than her favourite bone?
Matilda rubbed the velvet ears. She should turn on the wireless. Or that dratted television. As she grew older, she realised that loving this small portion of the landscape, home of so many of her ancestors, meant also loving each bit that was joined to it, and each that was joined to that, till finally it took in the whole world.
But just now it was Australia that mattered most, this vast continent that wasn’t divided into many nations like Europe, Asia or Africa but, miraculously, felt that it was one.
She must ring Jed.