Dung Ly

— Karen Lethlean

You have to understand, he was my only son. Like so many others he’d left school and didn’t have any burning ambitions. He’d had various jobs, part time, but nothing you might call a career. Although he talked about, well he’d even filled in the paperwork, so I suppose it was more than talk, trying to get a place in the Engineering course at the University of Sydney. Writing your names on forms doesn’t mean you are in, or that you have signed up for the thing.

Then he got the letter, just after his nineteenth birthday. He was to report to the Commonwealth Employment Service for a medical. He’d been conscripted. Other boys were pedantic about listening to the draw on the radio and kept an ear out for their birthdays. But not our Brad, he never went straight to the pub, or slapped others on the back when the numbers skipped over their day. Or sought out the company of pals and sink a few coldies — as if this negated being called up to fight a war.

I suppose Bradley was too busy going out, playing in his bit of a ‘band’. Not really my type of music but he liked it. He was pretty good too, so I’d been told. Sure, Brad did sink a few drinks occasionally. Or spent time getting in a bit of surfing. He never gave the war in Vietnam a second thought.

I wasn’t there when the letter arrived. My wife called and said there was a letter from the government addressed to Brad. He was in his room playing his guitar.

Brad had talked about enrolling in the Army, not long before, trying to get into engineering. I mean he thought it might be a foot in the door to a course later, get the eighteen months ‘Nasho’ done with, then knuckle down to some real study. Test out if he was going to like being an engineer by building bridges over jungle creeks; maybe blow up a few things.

When that letter came he’d just finished with his girlfriend, lovely girl, but she’d ended it. I can’t say I blame her. Brad didn’t, and well he didn’t seem to show much enthusiasm for things engineering. He just went real quiet, stayed in his room, and then before you knew it he was off to Puckapunyal.

Ten weeks basic training, thrown in the deep end with those drill instructors, waking up early in the morning: if your bed wasn’t made so tight they could bounce a twenty cent coin on it, the whole thing would be pulled apart. Your gear had to be hung up neat, no messy cupboards. Ten mile runs, twenty mile marches in full packs, constant pressure, weapons training, physical training, the whole bit. Bradley said some of the boys would whimper after lights out.

He was working with bayonets, shooting targets. The instructors made recruits shoot into 44 gallon drums of water. Show them the holes in the other side, gaping holes in the other side where the bullets passed through and the water was gushing out. Told them this was what they’d look like if they got hit. Holes in metal, nothing compared to what might happen to a human body, prepared those boys for nothing but fear. Like the cruel bastards wanted those poor boys shitting bricks before they’d even got there.

After basic training it was about a month and a half down in Ingleburn. Bradley wrote and told us this was where the military prison was. After that his letters started coming from Queensland, the land warfare centre at Canungra. Each time they moved him he left the people he’d met for a place where he didn’t know anyone. All this shipping off to new locations must have been really tough on a lad so used to having his friends and family around. After three weeks at Canungra he had a week of what they call ‘pre-embarkation’ leave. Bradley came home.

His mother took one look at him and burst into tears. He had lost so much weight. But he had gained something too, a troubled look, like all this was weighing him down. He wasn’t the carefree lad anymore. World of troubles on his shoulders; going off to the Asian jungles to fight a war, poor kid. For most of the week he moped around home. Except for the last night when he went to visit his ex-girlfriend.

They put him on a bus out to Richmond air base then flew him to a place called Thanh Son Nui near Saigon. My skinny son Bradley in a Hercules transport plane, I just can’t picture it. After his first few footsteps in the country he was off to Nui Dat where he joined a battalion, 3RAR. He didn’t know a bloody soul there — no one.

The first day he was there, he was sent out on a night ambush. The group with Bradley had a job to rig up Claymores, that’s a command-detonated mine. Attached to the covering are electrical leads connected to what they call ‘clackers’. Troops set these things up, and when VCs are within range they can set off an instantaneous explosion.

Some mines had been set up in trees on the route villagers took at night smuggling food to the Viet Cong. Bradley was part of a group lying in ambush. Now apparently they had to wait in utter silence, not a word, not a movement. Well, they waited a few hours in the middle of the Vietnamese jungle. What must he have been thinking? What goes through a young man’s mind at a time like that? They waited a few hours and sure enough a group of villagers came their way, men and women, with food under their arms. They had to be VC sympathisers moving about, because there was a curfew and no one else had any other reason for being there. In the dark it was difficult to see which were men and which were women. They’re so skinny anyway; it’s hard to tell their womenfolk, especially at night. Two or three of them were carrying children, babies on their backs. The commander saw these children and let them all pass without a scratch. You see, it was hard to imagine any of the villagers taking their babies along to smuggle food to the VC. And any attempt to question them would’ve divulged the Australians’ position. So they let them go and continued waiting. It was more than two hours before another group came the same way, carrying more provisions. It occurred to the commander that the babies must be some new tactic or trick the villages had come up with to lend a cloak of innocence to their movements if they were caught. The 3RAR boys had heard of nine-year-old children coming into bars where the troops were relaxing and blowing themselves up.

Having mulled it over after the second group of villagers had gone through, his commander ordered that when the next lot came through mines were to be detonated. It was a smaller group the next time. Only one child could be seen. Bradley was one of the boys who hit the clackers. Not one villager survived. That was his first night in the country.

A night lying in ambush doesn’t entitle you to anything. It’s part of the job, a job he didn’t apply for. The next day Bradley was at a place called Binh Ba. It’s a rubber plantation the French established before the war. I don’t know how much sleep he had but can’t have been much, how would you sleep after you’d seen a group of villagers, knowing a kid was amongst them, blown to bits? Troopers were always in this kind of sleep-deprived state, he can’t have been the only one. Eyes half open, not able to lift tired limbs, fogged out; and these are the soldiers engaged in open warfare.

At Binh Ba his platoon were fighting in close, out in the open. Bradley was in a field, they said. And children were running all over the place from a nearby school, trying to run out of the line of fire. Bradley was yelling at the children, “Dung ly! Dung ly!” which is the Vietnamese word for ‘stop’ and waving his hands around.

A child was running towards him, not knowing whether Bradley represented safety or danger, I suppose. When the little girl got close enough Bradley stood up and caught her, covering her with his body. He was just a child himself, trying to save another young one. At the moment he stood up to catch her, that’s when he was hit the first time. He fell on the little girl and, in that position the second bullet hit him and crushed his skull. He was, after that, unrecognisable. Some of the bullets were probably our own fire. Nobody there knew him as a friend, or brother, or even someone who might need to be protected, no telling if he was on the same side.

At least they could tell our son from his identity tags. Two days in Vietnam, that was all he lasted. Still, I don’t blame the place, hell, I don’t blame the people. Children on both sides were the real victims.

His mother only talks about childhood, or youthful doings. Things he did at school, where he used to surf, his bad language from the soccer goal square, even beginnings of his first romance. She has many stories about him from that time I’ve never heard before. She’s angry with me. I’ve tried to find out something about all this, how I might be responsible. I never gave Bradley the idea for any heroics. Anyway he was conscripted. It was not as though he was schooled in war stories and military adventure.

Engineering, that’s what it was. I did encourage him, but not enough; I should have pushed him more. I should have made him enrol sooner, I should have wetted his ambition, isn’t that what a young man needs? Safely in that engineering course he could’ve grown older discussing the Vietnam War over dinner like the rest of us.

 

 

Karen Lethlean was born in Perth in 1956. She is a triathlete and teacher at a Senior College. Writing has always an interest and is now proving an outlet for creativity. She has had some success with competitions and pieces being published in collections (most recently The Fake One appears in an anthology Journey: Experiences with Breast Cancer) has become a way to prove to students that teachers ‘can do it!’ She hopes to see her memoirs published some day.

 

Historical note: The events of this story are as a result of my husband’s recall of winning a conscription lottery draw. Thankfully his military service did not eventuate due to a change of government. Nonetheless he lived in fear like so many of his peers, stating “I was happy to do my duty, but not kill anyone!” Some tales of his friends also inform this story. I also tried to imagine how my students, who are only just younger than these conscripts, would deal with the Vietnam experience.

 

 

Mosquito Coils and Holidays

— Grahame Maclean

 

When my brothers and I were young our family owned a wonderful holiday house in a tiny Northern Coastal town called Wagstaff, which we called ‘Waggy’.   The house was named Te Whare Ra.   Our Dad told us it was Maori for house in the sun.  It was indeed a house in the sun, a house that smelled of mosquito coils and fried fish.

Our Dad had been a long distance runner, lean and muscular, but not very tall. He was the source of all knowledge.  He knew about fish and boats and birds and remembered times and dates and when stuff happened.   He showed us how to walk the mud banks in the bay looking for clusters of worm holes.   We carried an old jam tin, open at one end.  Finding the tiny holes we would place the tin open end down and stamp on the top shoving it into the sandy mud.   The air inside the tin injected into the sand with a whoosh that sent the worms shooting into the air.   Dad reckoned bream couldn’t resist these worms as bait.  There was no Fisheries Department ‘bag limit’ in those days.  We simply stopped fishing when we had caught enough for dinner.

 Mum had frizzy black hair.  She was a quite well known artist who had sacrificed a career to marry my father.  She was taller than him, so that when talking to him she would scrunch her shoulders and bow her head slightly.  We never discussed how she would bend to talk to Dad which always told us that her love for Dad bore no conditions, although for many years we felt that deep down Mum didn’t really look forward to holidays at Wagstaff, and only endured it for her family.

 Our mother conducted a war on mosquitoes.  She told us many times, mosquitoes carried the deadly polio disease; if we were bitten we could end up in an iron lung.   “Filthy buggers,” she called them after a Waggy local told her that mosquitoes urinate first on the spot they bite you!

 The local Aussie brand mozzie coils were not favoured by her.   She claimed that the Chinese ‘Tiger’ brand, only available from Moran and Cato in Sydney killed them fastest.

We lived on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, but Wagstaff, only forty-five miles away was a full day’s journey in 1947.   Three, or perhaps four, times a year we travelled by bus, ferry, tram, steam train and, finally another ferry, to get there.

At holiday time, already packed, we’d be out of bed at five for a hurried breakfast of Crispies, margarine toast and Billy tea.  

 We would then walk to the bus stop near the school.  Dad and Mum’s bag was a big brown leather cabin trunk; we had our Globite school cases and also ex-army disposal gas mask bags over our shoulders, stuffed with groceries not stocked by the shop at Waggy.

 Our bus stop was a fair walk on normal days even without luggage, but at holiday time Dad carted our things in the garden wheelbarrow.   He had arranged with Mr Howe, the local shopkeeper, to park the barrow in his backyard ready for our return.

 The bus to Manly Wharf started at Narrabeen and by the time it got to our stop, there was standing room only.   Passengers already on the bus, seeing our pile of gear, frowned in silent impatience while we stacked everything onto the back platform.

The conductor, purse-lipped and scowling, made no comment, offered no assistance and cleverly ignored Dad’s very caustic, “thanks for your help mate.”   He just yanked his peaked cap closer to the top of his nose, blew a terse single note on his whistle and we were away.

 Buses in the mid-forties were the famous Albion Bulldog double deckers, many still camouflage painted following the war.

 As they did back then, a man sitting offered Mum his seat.   She accepted graciously, sat, took my little brother onto her lap and middle brother made to stand between her knees holding the back of the seat in front.   Meanwhile I stood proudly in the isle with my Dad, feeling very grown.  At Manly Wharf the seven o’clock ferry, Barragoola presented more problems.   Without the wheelbarrow our luggage needed two trips from the bus terminal to the ferry. 

If the bus into Manly was even a few minutes late (which it often was) Dad would have to race back for a second load, while Mum, arms folded defiantly, stood blocking the end of the gang-way so the deckhands couldn’t cast off until Dad got back with the rest of our possessions.  We had to board by a sloping wooden gangplank to the bottom deck.  Once there, we could stand at the engine room rail and look down at the steam engine crank-ends thumping away as they turned the propeller.

 Musicians on the ferry entertained passengers with fiddle music and a plonky old Paling piano.   After we passed Bradley’s Head the musicians would walk among the passengers shaking a collection box.   My Dad, in holiday mood, always popped in a deaner.   This must have been generous because the bloke would come back later and ask Mum if she had a request. She always asked them to play Clair de Lune, which ended with Mum having wet eyes and passengers applauding politely.

 We were at Circular Quay by twenty to eight.   Then there was more unloading and carrying, across Alfred Street, past Customs House to the Loftus Street tram terminus.   With so much luggage, we couldn’t take older ‘Toast Rack’ trams and had to look for the newer ‘Corridor’ models with a destination sign reading ‘Central Station via Eddy Avenue’, which went right onto the station concourse, saving us another long carry.

 The tram stopped beside a line of men known as ‘Trollty Porters.’   For two shillings these blokes would grab your bags off the tram and heap them onto two wheel platform trolleys, known as ‘Barra’s’, and cart your things to the train.

Central Station was wonderland for us boys — nineteen covered platforms, the air thick with soot, steam clouds and noise.  It was the most exciting place on earth.  Right from waking that morning we would be endlessly discussing the possibility that a C/38 Class loco would be pulling our train.  

Dad would always get us to Central with time find our carriage, settle Mum down, who, by now being a little stressed, was pleased to sit quietly and read the Weekly.   This done, Dad would take us along the platform to the engine where we were hoping to find the huge green and black 38 Class loco or perhaps at the very least a Garrett Class panting clouds of steam and boiler valve clank.

A friend of our father’s was a train driver and standing on the platform beside the engine Dad would start a conversation with our train driver.

“Hello mate,” he’d say, “You wouldn’t know Ernie Butler would you?   He’s a mate of mine that drives goodsies out of Everleigh Yards into the Central West.”

It didn’t matter to Dad if they knew Ernie or not.   The conversation was only about getting the driver to let us climb up onto the footplate of the engine.   Dad must have been pretty engaging because the conversation invariably ended with us climbing up.  Once my little brother Locky asked the driver if he could blow the whistle.   The driver clicked his open pocket watch and, seeing it was twelve minutes to departure said, “Hang on a minute, little mate.   You can give ‘er one long pull when it’s ten minutes to go — lets the passengers know we’ll be leaving on time at 10.30.”

Dad lifted him up, and hanging by the whistle chain, gave it a full ten-second blast.  The public ignore boarding instructions and have even less respect for published departure times.  The whistle blast clears the station and fills the carriages allowing an on-time departure

At exactly 10.30 we pulled out:  it was a C/38, twelve passenger carriages and four mixed freight.   We stoped at Hornsby and Brooklyn and an hour and a half later, Woy Woy where we left the train and it goes on to Brisbane.   The Woy Woy Channel wharves are across the road from the station where Murphy’s ferry Victorious is waiting.   The final part of our wonderful journey is the one hour trip around the Brisbane Water bays to Wagstaff.

 

Te Whare is a five-bedroom fibro and corrugated iron cottage built on piles.  The back half is on land and the front, where the bedrooms are, over the water.  Tide causes the water to gurgle as it flows around the posts.   This is the music of Wagstaff holidays, music that sees us off to sleep and gently wakes us in the morning.

We have two boats, one a sixteen-foot half cabin launch with a Blaxland Chapman engine and one, a ten-foot rowing skiff.   We fish the bays in the skiff but if the weather and tides are right we take the launch around Half Tide Rocks and fish the ocean.

When the tide is low the mud banks in the middle of the bay are clear of water.  A combination of this, a hot day and no breeze brings the mozzies and our Mum becomes a fervently murderous killer.

We remember Mum as a woman of uncommon class and style.   She would put up with the odd fly, but spotting a mozzie wrought a radical change in how she saw the world and Waggy in particular.  One technique was to take a tea towel and flapping it in the air, herd them into room corners where she would hit them with the old Mortein pump sprayer.  

 Mum was never known to use coarse language but when chasing and killing mosquitoes we’d hear her softly saying things like, “Piss off you little bastards; this’ll stop you,” or “bloody little mongrels.” 

We were quite proud that our mother knew some swear words.   And we once caught some mosquitoes in a peanut butter jar and let them out in the kitchen, shouting, “Mum, here’s one,” just so we could hear her swearing.   Sometimes we would whisper “piss off little bastards” to each other for no reason other than to spend the next hour laughing.

The Tiger mosquito coils Mum preferred came in square green and yellow boxes.   They were ring pressed, partly joined into each other.  Separating without breaking them was difficult but she had it down to an art form.  She could separate the coils slipping them onto the little tin holder things with one hand whilst striking a Federal match to light the coil with the other.

 

The house was owned by my grandfather William and he, Grandma Ada and our Aunty Dollie would often be there with us during holidays, which was why there were five bedrooms, one for Grandma and Grandpa, one for Mum and Dad and one for Aunty Dolly.   The other two, the largest rooms in the house, had six beds in one and four in the other and that was where we slept.

 Grandpa said that our Mum was “Mozzie bloody mad!”   He explained that they spread dengue fever, not polio as she would have us believe, a fact our mother ignored for the rest of her life.

 

Countless tides have flowed around Te Whare house piles since those cherished holidays.   Grandpa, Grandma, Dad, Mum and Aunty Dolly have all gone now, leaving only much treasured memories.

 There’s still a couple of packets of Tiger Mosquito Coils in our garage and sometimes in the warmth of a summer evening with a glass wine I light one and let the smell of the softly coiling smoke carry me back to Waggy.

 

 

A rugby/surfing tragic from Sydney’s Northern Beaches, Grahame Maclean, became a radio presenter copy writer, eventually being overlooked for a job on Australia’s first T.V. station, that unfairly gave the gig to Bruce Gyngell.  Marriage and a need for security found him working for Ampol Petroleum.  Several management courses later and a career in corporate, success allowed Grahame to live on Sydney’s Pittwater where he races his yacht, Hello Again.  Married twice, with six kids all now useful adults, he is retired and fishes away the hours at Stockton, Newcastle. He is the founder of The Stockton Quill Society writers’ group.

 

 

Yellow Pearl

— Sophie Constable

 

Kimiko didn’t hear that the pearling lugger had docked early; the bathhouse sat apart from the chatter of the house. Pearls of water dripped from her leg like the notes of the shamisen, echoing from the iron walls.

Davidson dressed in the candlelight. Kimiko sank deeper into the bath water, watching. Mud-stained moleskins slid up hewn calves. Suspenders snapped over silent, wiry shoulders. She could watch him all night.

Davidson took her head in gentle rough hands and kissed her. “See you in a month, Ningyo.”

A month. She ducked beneath the waterline, resisting holding onto him: Missus’d be out in a minute. The bathwater soothed her lips and cooled the threatening tears. A month wasn’t long, really. Not when you knew he was coming back. Fossickers had to travel, but when he found those gems, he’d be back for good. For her.

He caressed the top of her head one last time.

The door opened: his quiet presence washed away by the clatter of men talking, girls giggling, glasses clinking. Closing her eyes, she could see Eiko dancing on the mat, Nats pouring sake, the men lounging around, wide-eyed, eager, polite. A busy night — Missus would be wanting her. With a small sigh she pinned her hair up with a chopstick and reached for a towel.

Through the doorway came glimpses of the town below. A yellow pearl of a moon that Kimiko fiercely ignored. Luggers cramming Broome’s salt-cured docks, unloading pearl-shell, loading stores, the planks alive with men. Mud streets winding between corrugated huts, a reef fostering a spicy brew of rum-sellers and brothels. Opium edged the hot, salty night breeze.

The House stood above all that, the trickle of plucked notes leaking out from a different world.

Then the shamisen fell silent, and the other sounds tightened. Feet patter-running. Sharp whispers. Voices edged in argument. Drunken singing ascended the hill to the House. Trouble.

Kimiko threw on a bathing-robe and hurried into the House’s radiance just as the shouting started.

Cards, fans and shawls sprawled across the sitting-room floor. Men stalked towards the entrance.

“Get Missus’s purse!” Eiko ordered, arms full of tea-cups.

Kimiko scanned the rumpled sitting-room. “Where … ?”

“Kim, the Diane docked early!” Nancy jostled past, darting upstairs.

“And hide the sake!” Eiko hissed.

Kimiko spun. “Nancy … ?”

Then Jiro was before her. His face red with drink, still with surprise, taut with anger. Kim’s hand froze pulling her bathing-robe over her bare shoulder. Horror gripped her gut.

If Kimiko had known the lugger had docked early, she would’ve wiped off the lipstick, swapped her kimono for a cotton blouse and sensible skirt and hurried home to meet her brother.

If Jiro’d given her the yellow pearl he’d smuggled back to shore, rather than to his precious fiancée, Kimiko wouldn’t have been short. She wouldn’t have started working at the House at all.

Now there was no time for all that.

Cornered by her brother’s fury, Kim’s blood drained dry.

“Imo-uto,” Jiro hissed, slurring only a little. “My little sister!”

His fist held tight. Like a rock. She knew what rocks felt like. The Han boys had shanghai’ed her once, shouting, “Riben guizi! Riben gou!” But she wasn’t a devil or a dog. No matter what Japan was doing to China, she was just Kimiko. The Kimberley had borne her in its womb: its sapphire waters, white sand and blood-red rocks had mothered her where her own mother had slipped beyond memory. Japan’s wars felt very far away.

Suddenly Broome didn’t feel safe. Not when her brother was staring at her like a stranger.

He grabbed her wrist. His fingers unforgiving as handcuffs, he dragged her through the melee and into the night.

Kimiko tripped after him, struggling to lift his fingers from her arm. Her mouth bone-dry.

He didn’t once look at her. Just kept dragging, his free hand clenched into a fist. Jiro, who never drank, who never visited brothels.

“Jiro,” she pleaded, her words wobbly with tears, “Oniisan, please!” She pulled up the shoulder of her robe; it slipped down again. Jiro jerked her faster. “Jiro, you’re hurting me!”

Then a smack, a grunt. Jiro on the ground, another man pushing him into the dust.

“Don’t you dare touch her!”

Davidson.

Kimiko forgot to breathe.

Davison’s silhouette against the night sky blurred: two men leapt onto him. They forced his arms behind his back. Pinned him down. Held him still.

Jiro got up, touching his lip. He picked up a lantern. Studied him. Glanced at Kim. “Who is he?”

The others — his lugger crew-mates — searched Davidson’s pockets. Held out a wallet, notebook, papers.

Jiro read.

His glare snapped up.

His fist lashed out. Davidson staggered.

“Jiro!” Kimiko cried.

He held the notebook out. “Intelligence officer,” he hissed. Her breath caught. “Alien Surveillance.”

“A spy!” The crewmen’s grip loosened. But Jiro’s glare remained fixed.

“What do you want with my sister?” Jiro’s voice crawled towards him, dangerously soft.

Davidson grimaced. “Nothing, I …”

“What do you want with her?” Jiro’s words echoed into the night.

“Jiro-san, sh,” the smaller crewmate breathed.

The ribbons of Jiro’s jaw muscle tightened. “You’re right, Toku. Not here.” He grabbed Kim’s arm. “Take him to the ship.”

“Let me go.” The whites of Davidson’s eyes glowed in the moonlight. “I was only worried for the girl. Kim–”

Jiro’s backhand stole his words.

Kimiko sagged. Davidson knew her name. Her real name. She had been under investigation, a menace to Australian security. The enemy.

Jiro took her hand. Shivering, Kimiko let herself be guided through the streets ‘til Jiro led her into their hut and latched the door.

His chest heaving, the rhythm of his anger slowing.

Kimiko collapsed into a chair. Her hands flitted over the robe’s hem. “You shouldn’t have hit him.”

Sweat leaked down Jiro’s temple. “He attacked me.”

“He was defending me!”

He stared. Her eyes dropped.

“Don’t believe them, imo-uto. They tell nothing but lies.”

His bitterness stung. This is not my brother, Kimiko thought, smelling the rum in his sweat. Her gaze rose half-way: his fist, still crisp.

“What has happened, Ani?” she whispered. She reached for his bloodied hand, caressing it with a corner of her robe. Still it held tight. Trembling. Her fingers unfurled his.

In the shell of his palm: the yellow pearl, like he’d plucked the moon from the sky.

“Oh, Jiro.”

Tears streaked her brother’s cheeks.

“She said… She said she couldn’t marry me.” A shaky breath. “The law says she wouldn’t be Australian anymore. She’d have to register.” Register as an alien, he meant, but pain closed his lips.

Kimiko bowed. The Yellow Peril. She whispered, “I’m so sorry.”

He kissed her forehead, tipping his palm into hers, cupping her hands warm in his.

And then he was gone.

 

• • •

 

The hot breath of the build-up swallowed all, night and day. Sweat covering you as soon as you rose from the bath. The thought of allowing another’s flesh to break the water’s beads, to press against you: almost unbearable.

Except when it was Davidson.

Don’t you dare touch her!

Kimiko screwed her eyes shut. She rolled, her sheets twisted around her like a snare. The heat wrapped her up fever-like, stuck the mattress to her side.

She opened her eyes. The yellow pearl glowed from the table-top.

Thunder rumbled outside: an empty promise.

Kimiko sat up.

She grabbed the pearl.

She ran for the docks.

This late, only a few drunken sailors lay cocooned with their bottles in the gloom. The wet slap of waves lip-smacked the pylons beneath. At the end of the wharf, Kimiko padded up the Diane’s gangway.

The cabin door was locked. She pressed her ear against it.

“I told you.” Davidson, tired, but firm. “She’s not under suspicion of any kind.”

“Then why do you know her name?” Jiro. His voice a razor.

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

The sound of fist hitting flesh. Kimiko flinched.

“Leave him, Jiro. We’ll row him out to the creek. Another drunk drowned in the Harbour: no one will even blink.”

“No.” His voice so determined. “This is my imo-uto at stake. I must know.”

“He’s Special Branch, Jiro-san.” Toku slipped into a Japanese whisper. “He will be missed. If you won’t let us kill him cleanly, you have to let him go. Which will it be?”

Kimiko strained to hear. The waves lapped.

Boots strode up the cabin’s stairs. Kimiko jumped back. The door handle jerked, held.

Kimiko lowered herself over the edge of the hull just as the key scraped and the door opened. Three shadows slipped past, onto the dock, murmuring in debate.

Hanging, she looked down at the milky waters of the bay. Imagined the crocs and sharks beneath the surface. With a shiver, she hauled herself onto the deck.

But the door was still locked.

Damn.

Slowly, she looked back at the water.

Slowly, she lowered herself in.

Even in the hot season, the water felt cold. Her petticoats swelled up like jellyfish. Edging forward, she reached a porthole. The ship was empty, sitting high in the water: the porthole left open a crack. She wedged her fingers inside and forced it open. She wriggled through and landed like a fish on the cabin floor.

“Kimiko!” Davidson twisted in his chair.

“Sh!”

He fell silent. His gaze shadowed her as she toured the cabin, collecting a bowl, a knife, a rag.

“You didn’t tell him. About us.” She squeezed her skirts into the bowl. Glanced at him.

His breath strained against the ropes. “I didn’t want to get you into trouble.”

She stepped closer.

His eyes followed.

“More trouble, you mean.” She touched the wet rag to a cut above his eye. He winced.

“You’re not in trouble with us,” he went on. “I went to the House for surveillance, yes. There are people of interest there. But you … you were … are, different.”

She squeezed the rag into the bowl. “We’re not at war.”

“Australia and Japan? No. Not yet. But you know it’s coming.”

Her rag paused on his cheek. “And what then?”

His gaze faltered.

Her gaze hardened. Deportation. To Nagasaki, a homeland as familiar as Mars to her.

“I should’ve let them kill you.” Her voice shook, but she refused to cry again tonight.

“It won’t change anything.” His voice just above a whisper. “The war will still come. Others will find you. And I’ll … ” He looked up at her, his eyes bright in the moonlight. His voice quiet but firm. “I’ll still love you.”

She held his gaze a second longer.

She cut him free.

But he didn’t run. He sat, his hand held out to her.

Her hand pressed against her brother’s pearl in her pocket. She turned her face away.

“Go.”

And then she was alone.

 

 

Sophie Constable is an Australian author whose short fiction has been awarded in the Northern Territory Literary Awards, the National Year of Reading Short Story Competition and the online La Campanella Awards. Her novella, Written in the Clouds is available through Amazon. She is currently working on an unruly adolescent of a novel that makes her dog look obedient in comparison.

 

Historical note: Prior to WWII, half Broome’s population was Japanese.  The White Australia Policy of 1901 made an exception allowing Japanese to work and reside in Australia, however they were subject to surveillance and restrictions; undercover intelligence and police officers compiled dossiers on every Japanese person.  As such, in June 1941 arrest warrants were issued containing each Japanese resident listed by name, with instructions for them not to be enacted until ordered. Almost every Japanese person in Australia, their spouse (regardless of nationality) and children were arrested and interned within twenty-four hours of the outbreak of war in the Pacific in December 1941.

 

 

A Sensible Girl

— Rowena Holloway

 

I’m a dreamer; everybody says so. Mum’s always telling me to get my head out of the clouds and just the other day I overheard Mrs Allington, my employer, tell one of her boarders, “Saunders is a rather nice girl, but she is always dreaming.”

Even my sweetheart, George, agrees. “Lottie, girl,” he says, “it’s all right for you to have your pretty head in the clouds so long as you keep your feet planted on the ground.” He says he can’t run the best garage in all of Adelaide with a wife who can’t keep her mind on facts and figures. Owning a garage is George’s dream. I tell him his dream is so real it’s infected me. He just laughs. At least, he used to laugh, before he went off to war.

I bite into my apple. Cook said I should take a leg of chicken for my lunch in Botanic Park, but that would only remind me of George and the picnic we had here before he left. So handsome in his uniform, he was. He told me I was to keep him tight in my heart so that I’d never forget him. I said I never would and kissed him, right there in the park where anyone could see. Later, on the crowded platform as the whistle blew and the guard yelled, “Aaall clee-ah,” I kissed him again.

A baby’s crying pulls me from my daydream. The young mother places the squalling baby in her pram and nods at me with a soft smile. Her name is Julia. She lives just the other side of Hackney Road. We’ve talked once or twice. Her man and George enlisted on the same day.

To take my mind off George, I watch the motorcars moving along Botanic Drive. Today, the first day of April sunshine, there are many people in the park and several cars parading by. George says them that can afford motors go past our lovely park to show off what hard work can do for a man. Mr Viners, the butcher, calls George a dirty capitalist and says that it’s the role of the working class to maintain the fabric of society. Mum says there wouldn’t be no society without a woman to keep hearth and home, but I’d never repeat that to Mr Viners.

Old John, who works at the garage, which me and George are saving up to buy, he’s been teaching me a little about engines. So far I’ve only really learned to crank-start a car. Old John says he’d bet sixpence to a penny that most motor problems start with a stall on account of the young ones don’t know how to treat the machines. That’s why he’s teaching me to drive. My George will be so proud of his dreamy girl when he returns this Christmas. I’m certain that by then our boys would have brought an end to the Great War.

That day at the station my handkerchief fluttered farewell as I smiled through the dirty steam. My tears didn’t fall until the train had shunted well around the bend heading for a ship in Fremantle. If Mum had seen me bawling in public she would have scolded the skin off me, but nobody minded. All us girls were crying into our handkerchiefs: boarding house maids like me, smart girls in tiered skirts that showed their white-stockinged ankles, even old women in stiff black gowns with crow wings on their hats.

In my little spot in the park chirping rainbow lorikeets swoop to and fro on the branches, as if unable to settle, nestling in pairs then taking flight in a burst of chatter. I usually enjoy their games. Lately they are too much like Mrs Allington, who jumps at every pull of the door bell. A peek through the curtains and any sign of a postal uniform is enough for her to collapse into a chair. “You go, Saunders,” she says. “I can’t bear it.”

For over two months now there has been no word of Mr Allington. He’s over in Egypt like my George. I wrote George about him, but he wrote a short note back that infantry don’t know much about them in the Light Horse.

Our resident boarder Mrs Robinson, who is very active in the war effort, has told us that bad news will come by telegram first, but Mrs Allington heard of a woman who got the CO’s letter first and now she fears any kind of letter. Mrs Robinson says she should be more worried about the short rations, the mud and rats in the trenches, and the sickness that plagues those at the Front. She says it won’t be long now before all those in Egypt are sent there. The doctor has told her she is not to speak of such things as it plays on Mrs Allington’s mind so. Doctor says I must make sure my employer rests, and carry smelling salts with me at all times. Even now I have them in my pocket.

Before my George left and Mrs Allington got so weak, I would sit here in the park dreaming of a different life, wearing white dresses with comfortable waists and lace hanging in points near my ankles. Once, on this very park bench, I lifted my skirts just a little. Though there was no-one to see me, I blushed when the breeze caught my ankles. It was as if I’d stepped out without my chemise.

I don’t dream of fancy dresses anymore. I dream of George. I try to imagine what it’s like over there.

A flash of red on Botanic Drive; a beautiful motorcar with a long bonnet and open carriage roars, pushing past the others. Its engine sounds like one of those big cats George and I saw at the circus when we first stepped out. If only he was here to watch. He would tell me all about the motor then laugh at me and call me a tomboy, but he would be ever so pleased. I know he would. Just as I know he would be pleased if I could somehow join him at the Front.

Last month, when George had been gone for nearly six months, I dared to ask Mrs Robinson if there wasn’t some way a girl like me could help with the war effort, that I’d heard that in Belgium there was a woman driving an ambulance. She turned to stare at me as I helped place the fox around her neck, for it was a chilly day for March.

“Where do you get your ideas, girl?” She fixed me with a frosty eye. “The Government in its wisdom would never allow it. Quite right too.”

I kept my eyes low, for Mrs Robinson could stare a girl out of her wits.

“Knitting, girl!” she said. “Mittens, mufflers, socks. That’s what they need.” She turned away, tutting about the cheek of young girls today.

Julia’s baby is crying louder now. “Time for his tea,” Julia tells me, struggling to push the high wheels of the pram through the thick grass.

Every day I think of what Mrs Robinson had said about conditions at the Front. What must it be like for George who only ever dreamed of keeping motorcars purring like kittens? When I told my Mum I wanted to help with the war effort she said I must leave that to my betters. I burst out that I could do what I liked if only I’d been a boy. She turned as pale as the turnip she was peeling.

“Well, I never,” she said, two cherry spots on her thin cheeks. “To think I’d see the day when one of my own family thought they knew better than God as made them.”

Since then I spend an extra hour every Sunday praying for my immortal soul. I’m dreadful sorry for what I said, but every day I see young women walking arm in arm wearing the short cloak and long white aprons of the Nursing Corps.

A horn blasts. A woman screams. The red motorcar has done the circuit and is now bearing down upon Julia and her baby. I’m on my feet and haring towards them, aware of the baby wrapped tight in his pram and the open-mouthed horror on the driver’s face. Julia screams again. The car swerves. It clips the edge of the pram, tossing it aside. A tangle of blanket and wailing baby tumbles across the grass. Julia staggers and collapses. The motorcar jumps the curb, its big wheels biting into the earth before it lurches to a halt.

The squalling baby is red-faced but unharmed. I bundle him up and crawl toward Julia, hampered by the wriggling child and my heavy skirts. Shoes and boots crowd me. Voices rise and drown each other out. I order everyone to get back, half aware that Mum would be shocked to hear me speak so to my betters.

Julia is pale and silent as I check for injuries. She seems unharmed. I remember the salts in my pocket and wave them under her nose until she squirms in protest.

Her eyes fly open. “My baby. My baby!”

I tell her that I have him. That everything is fine. A policeman is called. Julia and her baby are helped home while the young woman driving the car is let off with a warning. Soon there is nothing left to show for the event but the grass stains on my petticoats and the muddy tyre ruts.

The driver lays a delicate, leather-gloved hand on my shoulder. “I say, you’re a sensible girl to have in a crisis. I don’t suppose you’ve thought about nursing?”

“No, Miss. I mean . . .” I smooth my skirts and dare to raise my eyes to her. “I want to drive an ambulance.”

“You can drive?”

“Yes, Miss. That is, I’m learning.”

She fits the crank handle to the car and turns it three times. The car splutters but doesn’t start. I show her what Old John has taught me. Soon the car is purring and she is perched on the driver seat, her silk scarf settled around her dark waves. Finally, she gazes down at me, taking in my grass-stained skirt. I drop my eyes waiting for the same reprimand I had from Mrs Robinson.

“Don’t stand there daydreaming,” she says. “Hop in. I can’t promise you an ambulance, but I can get you close enough.”

 

 

Rowena Holloway is an Adelaide-based writer of novels and short stories, dabbling in articles and poetry when the mood takes her. When she isn’t writing, Rowena walks her dog and thinks about writing. Her first novel was a semi-finalist in the 2010 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award and a short story was selected for the 2011 anthology of Award Winning Australian Writing.

Historical note: The Australian Imperial Force (AIF) was one of the few armies made entirely of volunteers. The 9th Light Horse Regiment was raised at Adelaide. It was initially sent to Cairo but by 1915 saw action in Gallipoli. Australian women were encouraged to maintain society and one famous advertisement rallied women to knit mittens, gloves and scarves for their men overseas. At the start of the war the Red Cross formed Voluntary Aid Detachments, which soon came to be largely comprised of women. Yet it wasn’t until 1916 that the Government recognised the VAD as auxillaries to the medical corps.

 

 

The Lake People

— Frances Warren

 

The house was on the lake, well not really a lake, though Beth insisted on calling it that. The lake was really a dam, man-made and dubbed Blue Rock Lake (dam, damn it). Beth had squealed when she’d first seen the house, a sound that made Dan want to squeeze his eyes shut and hold his hands over his ears or maybe just tell her, “Shut the fuck up.” He did neither, instead he bought the three bedroom house. Beth called it ‘The Lake House’, Dan called it ‘The Dam House’ or ‘The Damned House’, depending on his mood and Lolly, their seven-year-old daughter, called it nothing at all. And they were the reasons that Dan had bought the house — Lolly’s ongoing silence and Beth’s ongoing squeals.

Lolly was their only child and she had never uttered a single word. It was Beth’s leaking tears and rage at Lolly’s silence that had driven them from the city, “No more pitying looks from your sisters, acting sure their little shits are so superior,” Beth often said. And Dan, though not entirely sure that his sisters had ever acted in such a way, nodded and murmured agreement. Blue Rock Dam was hours away from any friends or family and it was Dan that had found the ‘special school’ in town (how Beth had fumed) for Lolly and it was Dan that had organised a ‘compassionate work arrangement’, where he commuted once a fortnight and did the rest of his work from home — as an architect it wasn’t difficult. Dan found that the change was good. There was a stillness to the country that he hadn’t expected and he liked it. Everything was slower here, even Beth slowed her incessant worrying over what she called ‘Lolly’s problem’. She still took her to the child psychologist for an hour and a half a week and the speech therapist (she has no speech, goddamn it) for an hour a week and she still combed websites about autism and Asperger’s and hearing problems (no discernible hearing loss) and learning difficulties and language disorders; but these things lessened, lost their urgency. One month after the move into the lake house (damned house) Beth spoke of going back to teaching and began looking up professional development courses, “to get back into the swing of things.” Dan took long walks around the lake and things were getting better until the day that Lolly spoke.

It was dinnertime and Lolly leant with her forehead against the kitchen window to watch the sun slip, orange and glowing, behind the mountains that bordered Blue Rock Lake and said, “Who are the people under the water?” Her voice was soft, her diction clear. Beth’s water glass fell, tinkling to the floor and for a moment Dan felt that his heart might stop. Then he was moving and he knelt by his daughter, who had just spoken her first words — not Dada, not Mama — but, “Who are the people under the water?”

“What people, honey?”

“There,” her finger pointing through the twilight to the lake, “The Blue Rock people: I hear them, under the water.” Then Beth was there beside them,

“I don’t think there are people under the water Lolly,” and her voice shook.

“Then who rings the church’s bells Mummy? And the crying and talking, who makes those noises, Mummy?”

“What church bells, Lolly?”

“There’s no bells hon, just water,” Dan said.

Lolly shook her head, frustrated, “Not always Daddy, the people were there before, before the water, in the mines and the hall and the farms and before them the dark men with the dreams — words I don’t understand — they’re always still there Daddy.” Then the child shrugged and turned back to the window and wouldn’t speak another word. So, Beth cleaned up the glass and Dan served up dinner, which no one ate and Beth wrote down the conversation “for the psychologist” and emailed the specialist and Lolly fell asleep and the dark water of the lake held its secrets.

Later in bed, Beth asked, “How does she even know what church bells and mines are?”

“I don’t know, she probably saw it on TV, she can listen you know.”

“Why hasn’t she spoken ‘til now?”

“I don’t know Beth, let it go.”

Let it go — the next day he Googled it [Blue Rock Dam history]. There were only four entries, three of them spoke of megalitres and hydroelectricity and Gippsland’s water supply. The fourth was a Wikipedia entry that read, “The dam, known as Blue Rock Lake was named after an early goldmine in the region. Construction ran from 1979-1984. The dam can hold 208,000 megalitres …”

“But what was there before?” Dan murmured, but that was a question that Google couldn’t answer.

A few days later, Dan asked the neighbouring farmer, Johnny, as they cut back the trees along the dirt road the two properties shared, he answered, “Well, it was before my time, but there were a few buildings. My father used to talk ‘bout it. There was the hall and a church, and of course the mine, there were houses and all too I think. Why you asking?”

“No reason, just curious I guess. Did you say a church?”

“That’s what my Dad told me,” and they went back to hauling branches and that seemed to be the end of that.

Lolly did not speak, though Beth stepped up the specialists and research with manic determination and all her talk of returning to teaching was forgotten. Dan continued to walk the lake edges with Lolly and as the summer heat grew, the water level dropped. One day, six weeks after her first word and first sentence and first question, Lolly paused mid-step and grabbed Dan’s arm, “See Daddy, they’re the Ghost Gums and they’re all dead and green at the same time,” then she laughed and ran careening along the lake shore. Dan looked across the water, to where she had pointed, the water had dropped far enough that the top of long drowned trees poked their thin, dead fingers above the dark water.

Two days later, Dan asked Johnny as they hauled more branches, “What sort of gums grow round here?”

“Ghost Gums mostly, at least they’re the real tall ones,” and he gestured at the trees towering above them. Though the day was hot, Dan saw that he’d broken out in goose bumps and he carefully neglected to mention Lolly’s latest words to Beth, who was already worrying at the last conversation like a terrier at a dead rat.

It was late summer when Dan heard the crying. He sat up in bed, awake and adrenalin pumping as the sobs drifted through the sleeping house. He ran to Lolly’s bedroom, she was sitting up, wide-eyed, but silent, “See Daddy, the little boy from the lake is crying, he woke me up.” Twenty minutes later Dan had searched the house and walked down to the lake, as he reached the shore, the crying stopped. He didn’t wake Beth and went so far as to caution his daughter, “Don’t tell Mummy, she worries,” but Lolly had only turned over and gone to sleep.

Dan saw Johnny at the store, a week later and asked, “Is the lake safe to swim in? Have any children ever drowned?”

But Johnny had just shook his head, “Not in my memory — of course they found the body there.”

“What body?”

“That young boy, baby really, only one or two years old, murdered and dumped off the dam wall. What, must have been ’97 or ’98, all history now.”

“Yeah, all history now,” Dan went home and didn’t speak to Beth of Ghost Gums or dead babies at all.

As summer drifted into autumn, Dan walked the lake, sometimes alone, sometimes with Lolly. She didn’t speak, but that was okay, because now Dan was listening to the lake. And Dan heard church bells and the fall of the pick axe on quartz and the murmurs of miners voices and older voices too, unintelligible and singing and mingled with the beat of clapsticks and bullroarer. And pied currawong called and bellbirds and he swore the notes came from the lake, not the trees above it. Late at night, if it were still, he heard a baby cry.

The autumn nights grew longer and Beth didn’t notice that her husband had lost weight. She didn’t see the circles under his eyes, nor the grey invading his hair. Her days were taken up with ‘fixing Lolly’s problem’ and her nights were spent with too much wine and not enough love. Beth didn’t notice when her husband took to wearing ear-plugs to sleep, nor the fact that they did not seem to help. By early winter, Dan spent most nights on the porch watching the lake and listening. Once, at the beginning of May, Lolly joined him and said, “The lake people are loud for you now Daddy,” and he only nodded and bundled her back to bed.

In mid-June Dan went for a walk and he did not come home. Then, there was the aftermath that follows such a disappearance, the police (were you fighting ma’am?) and SES and locals combing the bush, the divers and boats dragging the water. In the bustle of activity no-one at all heard the last thing that Lolly ever said, “He’s with the miners and the farmers now and the dark men dreaming. I hear him. Daddy’s gone. He’s with the lake people now. Daddy’s all history now.”

 

 

Frances Warren lives in Gippsland and teaches History and Psychology at a rural high school. She lives next to Blue Rock Lake, a man-made dam that was created by flooding a mountain valley, including homes, a church and gold mines. This short story is loosely based on events in the district and the townships surrounding the lake. 

 

 

Done Right

— Donna Fieldhouse

 

Lachlan Dunn lifted his eyes from the book he was trying to read. He studied his uncle in the dim lamplight. “What you all done up for?”

Thaiter grinned and finished tucking his clean shirt into his trousers. “It’s me birthday. I’m off ta the Cosmopolitan for a couple.”

“Your birthday?” Lachlan laughed.

“You’ll note. I’m done right. Clean and shaven.” Thaiter did a spin and twinkled his eyebrows. “I might get lucky tonight.”

“Ah …” Lachlan smirked. “Have you got ya mighty ‘Dunn Spirit’ in ya back pocket cause I reckon you might need it if lucks what ya wantin’.”

Thaiter winked. He lifted his dirty worn hat from the table. Placed it on his ginger head and ambled across the room. Lachlan grinned and let his eyes drift back to the pages of his book as the door groaned behind Thaiter.

At the Cosmopolitan, Thaiter leant against the bar and waited to be served. James Gibbs, the publican, was in deep discussion with a man who had a fancy case filled with papers. Thaiter wondered who the stranger was and what was so important it had James keeping his customers waiting.

“Hey, James! A man could die of thirst waiting for a drink around here.”

James jerked his head, served Thaiter, then went back to his conversation.

Thaiter headed to his usual table and sat with Hugh Munro the blacksmith, William Paton the baker and Old Tom Bolch. “What’s goin’ on there?”

Will glanced toward the bar. “Some townie bloke tryin’ to sell insurance. He came to the bakery this morning.”

“What ya mean … insurance?”

“You pay him so much money every year and if somethin’ happens to ya place, like a fire, they’ll give ya enough money to build yourself another one.”

“Jeeze … that don’t sound right to me.” Thaiter frowned. “How much money he tell ya you’d have to pay?”

Will shrugged. “To tell the truth, Thaiter I wasn’t taken much notice. He came as I was getting me loaves out of the oven and the bloody dog grabbed his trouser leg.” Will studied the stranger once more. “You know the silly bastard didn’t stop talkin’ the whole time and didn’t realise I wasn’t listening to what he was saying. He didn’t even notice that Boxer had chewed half his leg off.”

They laughed and started a game of poker. Hugh dealt the cards while Thaiter went to refill their glasses.

“Come on, James! It’s me bloody birthday and I’m mighty thirsty.”

The townie smiled and stepped toward Thaiter. “Clancy Dutton from Dutton and Doyle Insurance. Many happy returns, Mister …”

Thaiter gingerly shook his hand. “Dunn … Thaiter Dunn.”

“Nice to meet you, Mister Dunn. I’m here to tell you good folks about the wonderful insurance package Dutton and Doyle are offering.”

Thaiter raised his hands in protest. “No use talkin’ ta me mister. I don’t own no business.”

Clancy slapped Thaiter on the back. “You don’t have to own a business to have insurance, Mister Dunn. Dutton and Doyle sell life insurance too.”

Thaiter’s brow crinkled. “Gibbs! Give us a tray would ya!”

Clancy Dutton went on to explain why every man should have insurance of one kind or another.

“Look, Mister Clancy …”

“Dutton. The name’s Dutton. Clancy Dutton.” He grabbed Thaiter by the hand once more and shook vigorously. “Thaiter I’m so pleased to be able to have this opportunity to talk to you about the wonderful insurance package Dutton and Doyle are offering you hard working miners. Remote places like Irvineshore don’t get …”

“Irvinebank!”

“Yes, yes Irvinebank … don’t get such wonderful offers everyday like us city folks. So Dutton and Doyle thought why not make the effort. Let hard working men like yourself have the same opportunity. The same protection against disaster. After all its men like you who are the backbone of our society. If it weren’t for miners, Thacker, the country …”

“Thaiter! The name’s, Thaiter!”

“Ah … yes, err … Thaiter. Please forgive me I’ve met so many men. Interested men and as you will appreciate names are rolling all over the place in my head. Now as I was saying. Dutton and Doyle understand the needs of men like you and that’s why I’m here. To spread the word you could say.” Clancy pulled his shoulders back, laughed and turned his body to address the entire room. “Perhaps I should have been a priest … ”

Thaiter took the opportunity to escape the clutches of Clancy Dutton. He grabbed the tray of drinks and sat down at his table with a sigh of relief. Old Tom was laughing into his cards. Hugh hid his grin with his hand but William Paton beamed.

“Told you, Thaiter. The man doesn’t have ears in his head.”

In disgust, Thaiter looked toward the bar. Dutton had Herbert Armstrong, the manager of Jack and Newell’s Merchant Store, cornered.

Something told him this smooth talking townie was a liar, here to swindle the hard working people of Irvinebank out of their well-earned cash.

“If the bastard comes anywhere near me again I might find it terrible tough not to put a fist in his big mouth.”

 

It wasn’t long before Clancy approached the group. Thaiter’s jovial mood had vanished due to his alcohol intake and loss of funds. He leaned back in his chair, folded his arms across his chest and looked Clancy up and down.

He was a tall weedy man, whose sharp pointed features could almost be feminine if it hadn’t been for the five o’clock shadow on his chin. His suit was tailored and expensive. The dark bowler hat was far too clean for Thaiter’s liking. Some people had the opinion that if a man’s hat didn’t have a mark on it, he wasn’t an honest, hard-working man.

Thaiter had another theory. It could be a man might have two hats. One for working and one for church. Still … a man with two hats was a man who fancied himself a little too … much.

Thaiter didn’t like men who fancied themselves.

He unfolded his arms and stood up. “I’ve had enough of listening to you, mister!” He bellowed, lifted the edge of the table and turned it over. “I don’t trust no man whose hat ain’t got a speck of dust on it!”

Clancy fell backwards. The table came crashing toward him. Will, Hugh and Old Tom staggered to their feet swearing and cursing. Cards, money and beer scattered everywhere.

“Jesus, Thaiter! What the hell you think ya doing?” Hugh exclaimed.

“I’m sick of hearing the sound of this dandy’s voice. Fuckin’ insurance my arse! I’m gonna see he gets done right. Stand up, Mister Clancy from Fuckin’ Doyle and Dick cause I wanna see how much protection this insurance of yours can afford ya!”

Old Tom whispered to Will Paton to run and get Lachlan.

Thaiter bent and grabbed Clancy by the collar. He jerked him to his feet and shook him. “I’m a disaster about to happen, Mister Clancy Dandy Dutton or whatever ya fuckin’ name is. So … I’m waiting … ” Thaiter looked around the bar. “Any of you blokes see that insurance he’s talkin’ about … ? Is it coming yet, to protect him?”

The room exploded with laughter. Thaiter pushed Clancy on the floor, reached for one of the tumbled chairs and held it above his head. “Hey, Gibbs! Did you buy any of that insurance from this bloke?”

“That’s enough, Thaiter!” James Gibbs came around the counter. “The man’s just tryin’ to make a living like the rest of us.”

“Pig’s arse he is! Sounds to me he’s trying to swindle you mob and I’m here to make sure me mates aren’t done right outa their dough.”

“How about you put me chair down or it’ll be you that’s out of dough.”

Thaiter grinned and staggered backwards. Clancy, now on his feet, lunged at Thaiter and drove his fist into Thaiter’s side. The chair smashed to the floor. By the time Thaiter righted himself Clancy had removed his jacket and was prancing around with his fists held high in front of him.

“What the hell is that?” In disbelief Thaiter burst into the laughter. “He’s dancing the highland fling!”

Clancy positioned himself in a Queensbury boxing stance. “I’ll show you I’m no dandy, Sir. Ready yourself, if you please.”

Standing flat-footed Thaiter spat on his palms and raised his fists. He grinned again as Clancy skipped backwards and forwards. A sharp slap-like punch caught Thaiter on the face. He shook his head.

Clancy gave a satisfied nod. “That’s an example, Sir, of what you will have to endure if you wish to continue.”

“Jesus, Mother Mary and Joseph.” Thaiter roared and landed a heavy blow on Clancy’s chin. Clancy dropped like a rock. The crowd cooeed and thumped their feet on the floor.

In the excitement Thaiter lifted another chair and slammed it down. Mimicking Clancy he danced around the piece of broken furniture.

Gibbs grabbed him by the arm. “That’s enough, Thaiter. I ain’t having you smashin’ up me place!”

Thaiter, adrenalin pumping, thought Gibbs was having a go at him so shot a punch. It caught James on the shoulder. With that another man took a swing at Thaiter.

 

Lachlan strode through the door as Thaiter knocked the man backwards with a blow to the stomach. He stepped between the two men and held his hand out to Thaiter. “How about you give it a rest, eh?”

“Get outa me way, Lachlan. This bastard wants a piece of me.”

“Yeah … well you can finish it tomorrow.”

Thaiter pushed Lachlan on the chest. “I said, get out of me way.”

Lachlan stood his ground. “And I said enough.”

Thaiter thrust his body forward to shove Lachlan aside. Lachlan rammed Thaiter backwards. Thaiter stumbled. When he regained his balance he held up his fists.

“So it’s come to this has it? Me own family turnin’ against me.”

“You’ve had enough, Thaiter. So give it away.”

 

Clancy roused and watched his short, bow legged opponent throw a punch at the newcomer. He took a mental note to remember to offer the newcomer some insurance.

 

“Ah … fuck, Thaiter.” Lachlan ducked. “You’re gonna make me hit ya … ain’t ya?”

“Come on big man! Let’s see what you got.” Thaiter shaped up.

“Jesus, Thaiter. I just want to get back to me book.”

Thaiter lunged.

Lachlan sidestepped. He waited for Thaiter to straighten up then let go with a right hook which dropped Thaiter to the ground.

 

Then again, Clancy mused. The newcomer might not need insurance.

 

As if he were a sack of potatoes, Lachlan lifted Thaiter and slung him across his shoulders. He cocked his head at James Gibbs. “Sorry, Gibbs, he didn’t mean no harm. His birthday … a few too many. I’ll see he comes back tomorrow to make amends.”

“No worries, Lachlan.” Gibbs lifted the upturned table and grinned. “Thaiter’s not a bad old fella. Just got a little too much ‘Dunn Spirit’, hey?”

 

 

Donna Fieldhouse lives dual lives. One with her husband and three children — the other in her head. She took up writing because she didn’t want to be ‘Just a Mum’. Since childhood Donna has told herself bedtime stories to put herself to sleep. She is sure this is why hundreds of characters live inside her head and keep pounding on her skull to get out. Donna has also been published in the Stringybark Stories anthology Between the Sheets.

 

Historical note: The Cosmopolitan was a hotel owned by James Gibb who was one of the founding tin prospectors of Irvinebank in Far North Queensland. After having sold his rights to John Moffatt (mining magnate of the period) Irvinebank became one of the largest and most successful tin mining towns in its time. Gibbs Creek which runs through the town is named after James Gibbs. Hugh Munro was the town's blacksmith, Will Paton the baker and Herbert Armstrong was the manager of Jack and Newell’s Merchant Store in the 1890's. Lachlan, Tom, Thaiter and Clancy are figments of my imagination.

 

 

Tin Barn

— Peter Court

 

William Napier Garden arrived from the old country within a hardwood ship and a cloud of settlers. They were not the first to fall upon this scarifying land but they felt like it as they tore the native trees into the shapes of houses made from distant memories. Gum and Mallee log in place of stone and tile, dirt for cobbles. The hardwood ship, like the locust cloud of inappropriately dressed pale bodies, would never return to its place of birth so William Garden bid to tear its buxom frame apart. The heavy stone that had weighted the ship to stability was hauled away to build the houses of the powerful, those ornate personalities who represented the King, reclining on the other side of the globe in his silk and perfume. All that remained of the vessel were these wooden boards and staves with which the shuffling thinness of William Garden gave birth to the skeleton that eventually became the heart and soul of this tin barn. Finally, after years, he was pleased with his tin barn. It hunched above the packed earth and humbled the surrounding wooden establishments. Branocks, the two storey, grey wood home of the Branock shipping agency looked like piggy-backed dwarves next to the fully-formed muscularity of the tin barn. Their roofs sat side by side in the smoked air but whilst Branock’s lean entrails were filled with little wooden rooms, the wide stance of Garden’s tin barn was filled with air, space and farming equipment.

Franklin O’Meare had also boarded that bloated wooden ship as it bobbed on the rancid waters of Dublin harbour. The salted rot fell behind him as he ducked within the stained wooden bowels of the vessel. He was a short man, but large enough to hold the dreams of a pioneer. He bore within him the soul of a distant land. And a hideous thing that would, one day, be known as cancer. It was the cancer, not the adventurer’s soul, that eventually turned his proud chest to hacking and finally, beneath the cold pale hand of his fluttering wife, snuffed the soul from him as he lay leaking on the planking bed of the bloated ship. So now, later, those same planks breathe in the free space at the head of the tin barn, the porous hardwood gently exuding the heart of the little pioneer and his nation shaped passion. This indefinable scent of his life taints the flavoured air within the tin barn, an unusual smell, but not unpleasant. In fact, the hatted customers will mutter, it's kind of comforting.

In Ireland they were dying now. Whilst the scattered strangers stopped in at the tin barn, the vital potatoes on the far side of the planet had turned rotten — black hearts eating them from within, and so more boats came. The ships had full bellies, these new arrivals did not. They were full of something that can only come from a land of sudden failing where nature disappoints and humanity fails to be human. They came as escapees, crushed by the soil of the land they had loved and dumped in a land so strange it could never recognize them. And so, even as the earlier settlers convinced themselves that this place was theirs, new building was needed. Further down, toward the sluggish creek that the ebullient natives called ‘Red Gum Forest River’, away from the busy normality of the smiling tin barn, the earlier settlers piled hasty brick and local stone to build a destitute asylum. It was not the new building that was destitute or insane. This was a role played by the new immigrant women, deserted wives and other common detritus of human dilation. The brick and stone are cold, unyielding. It will not hold the sense of the people who have passed through. It is not like the wood of the ship that now holds up the tin barn and is oozing with the compressed giddiness of the individuals who have given their lives in its arms. The thick stone asylum is full of fleeting misery, brokenness, loss. The thin tin barn is complete with life.

A huge horse, mythical in size and heaving flanks, is hauling forward barrels from the new brewery. The milky fragrance slaps and giggles in the kegs as it is rolled down the wooden ramps and into the cool crypts beneath the sifting dirt of the streets.

For thirty years the yawning happiness of the big tin doors have seen the future scurry in and out armed with gold or food stuffs from their land and then loaded with ropes or tins, steel tools and hard leather as they left. Around the barn the city of tents has vanished beneath the pride of newly quarried rock from the squat hills. Soon the men with thick, dusty skin will find the wonder of bluestone and then the little settlement will change again as the squat little pubs become majestic hotels. But for now, the big market was a moment of jubilee, a leap forward for the tiny little town. The central market brought together the growers and sellers of the soils value under one loud and prosperous roof. A place of bright and joyful berries, baffling carnival accents, deep and important conversations over bulging vegetables. The town would now be fed with modern efficiency. And looking down the newly cobbled road, looking upon this red brick market, was the tin barn.

Many didn't finish the long journey from blarney to the mistakenly named terra nullius. Children were born aboard the bloated, wallowing vessel as it huffed and puffed the endless black seas. Some of these children never knew of land, never felt solid foundation. They were born on water, died on water and left joyous imprints of wide skies and endless travel. These little people remained ingrained, part of the wheezing vessel. Eventually they filled the tin barn, bringing their pollen of restless innocence and their unformed, unfrightened futures. The tin barn was forever misted with an invisible essence of beautiful childishness.

Now they have used concrete to secure the feet of the bridge across the river, now the big town will no longer be snapped by the fluid whimsy of rare floods. Reinforcing concrete with cold steel allows the men to make more of their land, to build up and out, no longer making ‘enough’, now making an edifice. Three, four, five storey buildings are sprouting out of the infertile soil and the town is reaching up. Its voice is breaking and muscular structures are rising around the ever-useful tin barn. And concrete has covered its floor. Limestone and potash, the tiny bones of ancient creatures, torn from distant hills, crushed and ground up and finally laid to rest here beneath the heavy boots of the craftsmen and the delicate leather of their customers. The tin barn now has a belly full of furniture and the rich tang of wood sap torn by the band saws and planes of the men, young and old, who reshape the trees into something useful. This is the stuff of homes and houses. This deep honey, five draw bedroom chest with pugnacious inlays of mother of pearl will be handed down through forgetful hands, an heirloom of scratches, pieces of history etched into its wooden hide. These workshop pieces will absorb the story of themselves to carry into the photo albums and videologs of approaching generations.

Steel and concrete bristle from the little city, youthful, manly stubble. As cranes wheel and diesels roar the tin barn looks on. Shadows fall upon its new corrugated iron head and war falls upon the world as dry, poisoned leaves. Winter follows, the old country and the new cringe under the ashes of their children, burning on distant soil, driven by prevailing winds of fear and confusion. As in every place, the military come to town and find within the tin barn a space of suitable size and position. This is what the military always seek. Now they use the concrete floor and the vast reaches of space to prepare the next battalion to feed into the hungry belly of the distant argument. Cabinets fill with paper, the paper fill with names, the names fill with hope and history. Louisa Curtis sits anchored behind a small, tin desk and moves the paper about, keeping it neat and organised, for this is how war should be waged. So many young faces come through here. Nervous, excited, passionate. This is how Louisa sees war. She sees their handsome mouths smile and wink, offer suggestive lips. She never sees them screaming, never sees the spittle of blood, the vomit of pure fear, the hard, bone-dry prayers of inhumanity. She sails her tin desk blissfully through the war, surrounded by the slowly dripping presence of those first settlers, weeping from the bold supporting beams above and beside her in the tin barn. She never wonders what trick of the soul allows her to enjoy the war years but, in her pastel nursing home, a lifetime away, she would feel the deep, guilty maggots eating her. And she would never understand.

 

The art of building higher and higher has seen the value of a simple square of dirt grow greater and greater. The ground itself is forgotten beneath the investment of architecture and technology, for it is the thin air that now holds the people of this city as they step out of elevators high above the tin barn and scurry about on nylon carpet. In the dark of evening she is one of the horde, her face of polyester, she is made from bits of magazines and she lives here. Only here. The tin barn has always been here, its age evident in the wrinkled skin of old posters and long gone paint. Graffiti has become urban art upon its grandfatherly flanks and the joists and beams lean upon themselves, exhausted pensioners, waiting. The sign hanging above the glass front is carefully distressed to match the character of the barn. The sign speaks of “Traitors Nightclub” but the harsh light of day tells more of oxidizing tin and rust. Within the cavernous musk the honeyed light paints the old barn with an angry softness. Earlier, when mist still furred the morning air, these men arrived with their shouting vests and snarling machines, their breath stinking with coffee beans born in a far away land. The future is here, it has come. Today the tin barn must die.

 

 

Peter Court is a radio announcer who also loves to write. He lives in Adelaide where much history has unfolded and been buried without ever being documented. Tin Barn is a tribute to all those amazing old buildings that created our past but couldn't survive our present.

 

The Clearing in the Forest

— Linda Carter

 

The boy climbs swiftly, ignoring the scrape of rough bark. He reaches his sturdy sitting branch and settles, the pine tree’s spiky trunk scratching his coarse cotton shirt. He sits securely, one bony elbow crooked, bare feet tucked up tight. In this secret hiding place he’s high above their shingle-roofed orchard cottage. Made from old shipping timber, so Vater tells him; hardwood frame, weatherboard walls, teak for floors and ceiling, Oregon board linings from fruit cases.

The boy understands numbers because of the pastor’s schooling. Knows the Ardwendt family home — built two years before he was born — is now twelve years old. Vater likes to smile at day’s end, when a special variety of apple tree is established in the rich soil, or the season’s pruning is done, or the ripe fruit has been harvested and taken to distant markets. Then weary workers gather under the verandah’s angled roof for cool drinks, steaming hot tea, Mutter’s rich plumcake:

“We work so hard. Such achievements.”

“Sehr gut.”

“Nein – es ist wunderbar!”

Like a clear-sighted eaglehawk, the boy watches the land. Patch-worked orchards stretch for miles, sliding down sloping hills, protected from wind by tall-reaching rows of dark pines. He can name all the German families whose properties sketch a green and gold tapestry as far as his eye can see. The pioneers came in 1853 to take up land in these outer eastern reaches of Port Phillip, after the charcoal burners and woodcutters had cleared as much as they wanted. The gardeners planted wheat and vegetables, crops for the farm animals, grape vines and cherries and finally the orchards. And, Vater says, the Monterey pine windbreaks were the gift of a baron!

Over there, glowing in the western sun, is the golden-brown roof of Tante Johanna’s new house, built by her English husband; it peeps between branches of yellow box gum, the best for honey. Onkel Edgar Morrison, tall and dark-whiskered, calls his nephew ‘Henry’ rather than Heinrich, and sometimes takes him out in the dray on Sundays after church, when he and Johanna visit his family.

Perched in the pine tree, Heinrich’s dark blue eyes follow the brushy creek line criss-crossing the valley. He can see the faint footpad — a well-worn path linking their two families — through olive green bush, fodder-sown paddocks, tree-studded squares.

A bristling seedy-brown cone dangles overhead, just within reach; he won’t have to stretch and wobble in a slippery clatter that will set the puppy off with a warning yap. Today, no one is watching. Mutter paces inside their small timber home, tending baby Tomas who is crying faintly and has been all morning. Vater is somewhere over the hill, helping raise the barn for another family. Little Hedwig’s fair plaits and half-turned face are distorted by the eight-paned window; she sits in the main room that is both kitchen and parlour, pulling a blunt needle and thick yarn through fabric scraps, practising stitchcraft under Mutter’s distracted gaze.

Heinrich holds the scaly branch with one hand; reaches forward, twists the short stem until the cone drops gently, trickles down the trunk, bounces and bumps, thuds onto the needle-soft ground. A large bird caws, beady-eyed, flaps heavy black wings and skews away from deep within the next tree.

“Heinrich, wo bist du, liebchen? Schnell, bitte!”

Mutter’s voice is strained, a sudden urgency that sends him slithering, heedless of noise, breaking into a low run on landing, meeting the chubby brindle pup as it bounces round the corner and they fall through the doorway together, legs tangling and bumping.

“Heinrich, Henry, I need help now. Miss Margaret. Und Tante Jo. Schnell!”

Mutter switches between English and German so Heinrich knows she is deeply worried. The baby is red-flushed and damp, tiny forehead screwed up, back arched, white fists pounding, a bubbling swell of milky fluid seeping from its mouth. Mutter shushes and rocks, jiggles and pats the frantic bundle, dabs at a wet yellow stain on the shoulder of her faded gown. Heinrich props in front of Tomas as another drop of silky milk falls from the baby’s lips followed by a gush that runs onto the wooden floorboards. Then Hedwig whimpers, her pressed hands hiding pale cheeks; unblinking eyes, hazel-pale as speckled bird’s eggs, fix fast on her big brother. She calls the puppy to her softly — “Tischer, Tischer!” — and cuddles it close, her golden head on the silky coat. The little dog squirms playfully then rests, legs splayed, panting lightly.

Heinrich grabs his dusty boots from behind the door, stumbles outside, scrunching through crackling gum leaves and feathery grass. Crests the hill and rushes down to the closest farm to deliver Mutter’s urgent plea to the English lady who helps sick people, then another mile to Tante Jo’s house.

Past the wattle and daub church that Vater helped to build, where all the children in the district learned their words and numbers before the school was moved further away.

Past the dark cemetery shaded by cypress where he sometimes visits Annaliese, who died before he was born. The sister he never knew –—“eine kleine schwester” — sleeps among mossy mounds, leaf-strewn stones, with a border costing ten shillings, so Mutter told him, when they tidied the grave last year. Heinrich does not stop there today.

 

By Sunday baby Tomas lies quietly, not much better, but at least keeping the milk down. Hedwig strokes his cheek and murmurs little words of kindness. Heinrich prowls restlessly, eyeing his worried parents, keeping out of their way, waiting for a decision about the community picnic that will be held on flat grassland, not far from the mudstone quarry where the stones are hauled out for houses and roads. Heinrich really wants to escape the sour-smelling cottage.

Mutter finally agrees, only after many careful words with Vater, that they can visit the new barn — just a short drive for fresh air, not far away, to admire Vater’s fine ‘kraftwerk’. Vater adds, with a quick nod towards Mutter, that they might join the other orchard families that afternoon, if Tomas has not become too fretful,

Hedwig folds napkins and tucks pewter cups and plates into a wicker basket heavy with sandwiches and fresh fruit. Heinrich helps Vater pack the dray; holds reins at the horse’s head while Tomas is carefully handed up to Mutter.

The old bullock track rumbles beneath the wheels. Heinrich and Hedwig bounce on hard board as Vater tells stories of rainbow-seekers making their way to the goldfields years ago, pushing barrows filled with belongings. Some became sick-fevered, lost their way in life, he says, with a flick of sun-dappled hands that hold the trailing reins, a shrug of broad shoulders that chose not to follow those hopeful dreamers to the dusty diggings, a tap of sturdy boots that lead him to a clearing in the forest instead.

The barn, set where two roads meet, belongs to a house much larger than their own. Vater points to the steep pitch of the roof, the nailed timber shingles. Braced half-doors at one end of the barn are propped open, stables still empty. Heinrich jumps down from the dray to run his hands over smooth bluestones, asking why they do not have such a barn, just a small shed. Hedwig claps her hands as powder grey pigeons flutter away from louvred casement windows in the upper gable. Mutter lets Tomas suck on her finger; his face is turning pink and his forehead is wrinkled again, Heinrich notices.

Vater walks ahead when they arrive at the picnic site, carrying the basket and rug; Tante Johanna runs to meet them, her arms reaching out for the sleeping baby, her hands on Tomas’s flushed cheeks with a questioning look at Mutter. They hurry away to sit with the other women on blankets in the shade, watchful of flies heading for platters of food and children zig-zagging across grassy flats near the creek, trailing shouts and easy laughter.

Onkel Edgar and Vater talk with a group of men gathered near the jagged rocks. Their muted words float and echo off stepped-stone walls, not meant to be heard. Heinrich sidles past, slips behind dangling shrubbery and up the steep grassy edge, crouching beside slabs of golden stone. Vater has a folded paper in his hand, the one he has kept hidden in his jacket for some time, and Heinrich wants to know what it is all about, and why adults stop talking when children are near. Heinrich thinks something bad must have happened here, a few years ago, near where they live — or perhaps it was further away, another district, or on the other side of this new land they came to live in. He leans forward, itchy weeds tickling his nose, his slight form hidden behind rocks in dappled shade at the top of the old quarry:

 

Beside the scar tree near the bend in the river … ’twas when they moved the mob on … before our time, we have our families to … much worse, other places … heard about the west coast massacre … can’t undo what’s been done, no matter how … both sides, dreadful deeds …

 

A shuddering sigh flows down Tante Johanna’s stiff back; she whispers to Mutter, whose eyes sparkle with unshed tears, and they push dark thoughts away, behind them. Then Tomas wakes with a start — whining, squirming, coughing — and the women at the picnic form a circle of concern, comparing symptoms, offering advice, keeping younger children away from the sickly baby.

Overhead, Heinrich knocks a stone that clatters into the men’s secretive conversation, chipping it to sudden silence. He flattens himself like Tischer hiding in the grass; feels his ankle being tugged from behind, turns with a smothered laugh (the adult’s mysterious conversation forgotten) and rattles down the slope in a rolling chasing game with other boys. They clatter through a scree of shells and river pebbles and splash across trickling water, boots muddy and damp.

The dozy afternoon slips into an early twilight of hazy grey skies, peach-gold and blush-pink. The black crow cries in the sky — waang, waang — and swoops low over a creek diverted, deep hollows water-filled for the creeping orchards. The swampy gum bends, the pale paperbark leans, silvery leaves reflecting in the shallow dam, wind ruffling the flat surface. A sleek platypus submerges in the whispering creek.

White gumtree dwellers no longer trap fish and eel in the water, or dig for murnong in the fertile ground. The abandoned midden rests surrounded by straggling gum trees, an orchard of Black Achan pear trees, a grand house sprawling sideways on a hill.

 

The clearing in the forest is troubled and uneasy.

 

 

Linda Carter is a Melbourne-based writer, traveler and former teacher. Her music and education features appeared in newspapers and magazines in the late 90s. She received ‘Highly Commended’ for a short story in 1999, then put writing ‘on hold’, dedicating the next decade to family and finances. Since 2008, Linda’s travel features and photographs have been published occasionally. Recent short story awards include one ‘Commended’, two ‘Highly Commended’, one ‘First Prize’, and publication in Stringybark Stories anthology, The Bridge.

 

Historical note: ‘Waldau’ — a German word meaning ‘a clearing in the forest’ — is now the suburb of East Doncaster in Melbourne, where my family moved in 1971. From the 1850s, German (and English) families cooperated and inter-married, established orchards and farms, founded schools and churches. The land had already been partially cleared by itinerant woodcutters and charcoal burners, and no longer used by the Wurendjeri (‘white gum tree dwellers’). Today’s Ruffey Lake Park offers historic buildings, photoboards, Monterey pine windbreaks, and the remains of a quarry, to help me re-imagine pioneer orchardists and farmers in these outer reaches of Port Phillip district

 

 

Water or Speed

— Karen Lethlean

 

I’d climb the giant River Gum out behind Gran’s shack and pretend to be the lookout boy on a pirate ship. “Aye, aye Capt’n’. Reefs ahoy! Make haste to the island of buried treasure!”

Slithering down was always worse than getting up there. Without fail I’d have splinters and bits of bark stuck in fingers, and stains on my skirt.

I’d run full pelt down the yard, upturned broom between my legs. “The horse has seen a snake and bolted, can’t stop him General.”

I’d slosh laundry water out to Nanna’s struggling vegetable garden, sudsy grey spillage slopped onto already half-dirty skirt, “Don’t worry ma’am, we’ll put out the fire. We are the district’s best station.” As the now empty bucket was carried inside I noticed, as if for the first time, how the light summer cotton skirt stuck to my leg, and flapped it about in a half-hearted attempts to dry the cloth. I’d become a butterfly.

“I’m way too fast for your net, you silly scientist.”

The bucket dangled between my legs and I tripped into the dust and skinned one knee. Drops of bright red blood began to stain my skirt hem as I peered out across the shimmering paddocks. It’s then I noticed the sleeping form of my grandmother. I crawled across the dirt path leaving a moist trail behind me. I am a snail! Waving my antennae I tried to hypnotise Nanna, but she snored on. I can see little flecks of dust under one eye, and a dribble from this morning’s soft boiled egg still on her chin; she snuffled but does not wake. Little, widely spaced grey hairs formed a small beard around her chin. I reached out to touch the hairs.

Nanna opened one eye. My antennae stiffened with fright. “Why do you have hairs on your chin?”

“Cause they keep my face warm at night.” She giggled and her teeth moved about.

“Your teeth are loose again, Nanna.”

“All the better to eat you with!”

I squeal and tumble backwards off the edge of the verandah.

“Heavens, go clean yourself, hurry up, you do realize that John is coming around to say good-bye. You do know where he is going?”

I shook my head and watched a lizard peer out from a crack between the house timbers.

“Off to the war. He’s going to fight in the islands, help stop the invasion.” The wrinkles on her face seemed suddenly deeper and I noticed a tear form. Nanna pulled a lacy handkerchief from an apron pocket and blew hard.

“He’s visiting Lewis’s new wife Bess, they got married before Lew left for the fighting in Europe …”

Uncle John always was one of her favourites; I remember Nanna’s fingers passing through his unruly curls as if she alone could fix some kind of order into their blonde mass. She’d say something like, “This is my second youngest, did well at school, played in the ruck.”

“The party’s on today isn’t it?”

Linda’s birthday, town was only five miles away, but there’s no way for me get there … except … unless. Fear prickled down from my scalp all the way to my little toes. I raced inside feeling as if I’ve just been pulled backwards through a hedge.

The Party; who will have a new dress? How many frills will be around the hem? Cakes, red drinks, playing boogieman after the adults have collected around the barbeque fire.

But the prickles stay.

Inside, the house is dark because Nanna has pulled down all the blinds in an effort to keep out today’s heat. I stumbled into my room; found the dress, more by feel than sight. My hair seemed unwilling to be collected into plaits when I heard the motorbike.

John had already kicked down the bike stand and was balancing the dusty thing on the gatepost. His hair was more unruly than ever, even with the new short, back and sides exposing what might have been a strip of pink neck, except for road grit. His goggles had kept dust off two white-eye circles.

“You look like an owl!”

“And g’day to you too, Shirl.”

Nanna was tiny against his frame, daubed out in his muddy coloured uniform.

“Hey Uncle John, you’d be invisible wearing that in the dam water. It would be a great place to hide.”

“Hope I am invisible up there in New Guinea, with the Japs on my tail.” He held my hand and rested the other palm on Nanna’s shoulder while we ambled inside.

I remembered what I should ask, but it’s a struggle to get words out, my lips have begun to tremble. “Will you take me to Linda’s party?” I felt as if inside me had turned to jelly.

Nan’s face registered surprise, because she has seen me cowering under a blanket riding on her old tractor tray, which struggled to get over twenty miles an hour, smoking and puffing like some sort of dragon. Not to mention the time I wet myself when old Fred rigged up that flying fox and shoved each of us kids into the bucket and let go.

But John just smiled and said, “Sure I’ll take you, if it’s okay with Gran, so long as you don’t panic half way or else I’ll strap you to the windmill and you can fly around in the wind until the war is over.”

“I’m not afraid,” I say, knowing that this is the biggest lie to come out of my mouth this side of Christmas. Nanna must have noticed my goose-pimpled arms.

Before the dread in my throat could sneak out I am inside collecting necessities: nightdress, toothbrush, clean underpants, handkerchief, colouring book, pencils, while I could hear serious adult murmurings.

“Just a flying visit, Mum.”

“Prayers — that’s all I can send you away with,” said Nanna. She wrinkled up her face and even I could see real pain. “Come home soon.”

I put my arms around my uncle’s waist and Nanna leant forward to kiss me just as he kicked the old motorbike into life. “Hang on Shirl, here we go.” Nanna is swallowed up in a dust cloud and I’m torn from her by rushing wind.

I’ve had his ribs in a death-grip. I am a koala bear caught in a hurricane. Bang! The bike backfires. I’m a cannon ball flying through the air, Bang! Someone’s shot me.

Uncle John turned his face around in the wind and shouted, “You right kid?” I opened my mouth to scream but nothing came out. Everything blurred past: telegraph poles, fences, houses that seemed castles when I walked — now they were mere shadows. I clamped my eyes shut and whispered a type of chant I imagine was spoken in ancient temples.

Eventually I realised we had slowed down and come to a stop. There was a new noise overriding the buzz from my ears, which was my cousins laughing and no doubt pointing with mirth at my uncle prised my fingers from his chest.

“Phew! I can breathe again. You were hanging on so tight I thought permanent damage might be done, how was I going to explain the dents in my uniform to the sergeant?”

John busied himself chaining the bike to the shed. Still unsure on my feet, I tumbled inside and saw the table covered with a huge orange iced cake with tiny ballet dancing figures in the centre. Jugs of cordial, bread with sprinkles of hundreds and thousands, and my stomach whirled around on an axis: I just made it out to the side garden.

Aunty Mel made up a cot in the sleep-out, put a wet rag on my head, and left a glass of flat lemonade and dry biscuits.

A soft voice woke me out of a sweaty half sleep, “Feeling better now, Shirl?” It’s Uncle John.

“Were you ever afraid of speed?”

“Never, I love speed. But I’ll tell you a secret, I’m scared of water. Lived all my life only able to go in up to my knees. Can’t swim a stroke. Any talk of getting yabbies in the dam sends me into a cold sweat.”

I could tell by the look on his face that this was the truth, not him just trying to make me feel better.

“Don’t ever go swimming without someone with you who can swim, promise me?”

“It’s alright Uncle John, I can swim like a fish.” We shook hands and I cried. I heard the motorbike roar, and fade.

 

I spent the rest of that summer trying to understand what happened on that ride. How I thought I was going to die.

Three years later I no longer leap, slide and become all kinds of things when I’m with Nanna. I’m in seventh grade at school. My feet are too big, my knees too knobbly, my arms seem to be the wrong size for my body and nothing seems to fit me anymore. Everything has become more serious, our world quieter. I bring library books to the shack: seems like a hundred years ago I was on that motorbike.

And I think of him, what it must be like in those jungles, on those islands, surrounded by water, maybe sloshing though lakes, crossing streams or rivers of mud, sitting in monsoon rain with giant puddles all around him. We did get some photograph post cards. He’d written nondescript messages on the back. Things like; ‘Merry Christmas’ or ‘Happy Easter’, and on the other side pictures of smiling faces in slouch hats, or women squatting in market places, next to piles of pineapples.

The postman dropped a bundle of mail and there’s a letter with the AIF crest, I recognised the same rising sun symbol from Uncle John’s slouch hat. Nanna concentrated for a long time, holding the thin paper out at arm’s length as if any closer would risk infection by a terrible disease hidden there. She stretched her old thin arms away from her as if trying to bring the important words into focus.

She crushed the letter after reading. “John’s dead,” was a nearly inaudible whisper and she turned a tear stained face away from me.

I smooth the letter and read:

Taken prisoner Rabaul … ship torpedoed by an allied submarine… prisoners battened down in hold… all drowned...

I swear just then I saw a cloud of dust along the track, and felt the prickling of my arms just like that day I asked to ride on his motorcycle.

 

 

Karen Lethlean was born in Perth in 1956. She is a triathlete and teacher at a Senior College. Writing has always an interest and is now proving an outlet for creativity. She has had some success with competitions and pieces being published in collections (most recently The Fake One appears in an anthology Journey: Experiences with Breast Cancer) has become a way to prove to students that teachers ‘can do it!’ She hopes to see her memoirs published some day.

Historical note: While my uncle’s World War 2 experiences were seldom discussed, they form the foundation of this story. As well as serving in the Pacific, Lethlean brothers were also members of the famous Rats of Tobruk. The central character is drawn from Uncle Alexander (Barney) a story-teller of childhood adventures in the WA wheat belt. I tried to deal with the impact on families subjected to tragic loss as a result of war. The motorcycle ride is also a representation of learning to ride a push-bike and trying to teach my own daughter that skill.

Editor’s note: The Japanese refused to mark prisoner of war ships with red crosses, as required under international law. In addition they packed merchant ships carrying war supplies with POWs. American submarines could not tell which ships were carrying POWs and which were not and thus sunk many ships carrying prisoners of war. For example, the SS Rakuyo Maru which had 700 Australian and 600 British POWs on board was torpedoed by USS Sealion II on 12 September 1944. 541 Australians and 478 British drowned.

 

 

About the Editor

David Vernon is a full-time writer and editor.  While he is known for his nonfiction books about birth: Men at Birth, Having a Great Birth in Australia and With Women, he has turned his hand to writing science articles for newspapers and magazines as well as scribbling the odd short story or two.  Some would emphasise the word ‘odd’.  He is currently writing an Australian history book.  He is the founder of the Stringybark Stories Short Story Awards. David’s website is: http://www.davidvernon.net

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More stories please!

Feeling bereft that this book is over? You can find many more stories at the Stringybark Stories Award Website. All anthologies are for sale and are reasonably priced.

Visit: http://www.stringybarkstories.net

 

Acknowledgements

A book is the creative output of many people and therefore please indulge me while I thank a few people. Firstly, thank you to the writers who have so willingly entered Stringybark Competitions and thus given me an opportunity to choose their writing for publication. Secondly, I thank my family for allowing me the time to select, edit and present to you this wonderful collection of stories. Thirdly, thank you Virginia Ross for being so kind as to proofread this e-book. Finally, my appreciation goes to John Ubinger for allowing me to use his stunning photo on the cover of the book.

 

 

Cover design: David Vernon http://www.davidvernon.net

Cover photo: John Ubinger

Proofreader: Virginia Ross

 

Other titles by David Vernon at Smashwords.com:

The Umbrella’s Shade and other award-winning stories from the Stringybark Short Story Award

Our Name Wasn’t Written — A Malta Memoir 1936–1943

Between Heaven and Hell and other award-winning stories from the Stringybark Flash Fiction Award

A Visit from the Duchess and other award-winning stories from the Stringybark Speculative Fiction Award

The Bridge and other stories from the Stringybark Short Story Award

The Heat Wave of ’76 and other award-winning stories from the Stringybark Erotic Fiction Award

Marngrook and other award-winning stories from the Stringybark Australian History Short Story Award

The Road Home and other award-winning stories from the Stringybark Short Story Award

Into the Darkness — One Australian airman’s journey from Sydney to the deadly skies over Germany — 1939–1945

Between the Sheets and other stories from the Stringybark Erotic Fiction Award

Tainted Innocence and other award-winning stories from the Twisted Stringybark Short Story Award

Yellow Pearl — eighteen stories from the Stringybark Australian History Awards

The Seven Deadly Sins and other stories from the Stringybark Seven Deadly Sins Award

 

Behind the Wattles — 77 award-winning short stories from the Stringybark Flash and Microfiction Awards

 

Hitler Did It — and other short stories from the Stringybark Short Story Awards

 

Fight or Flight — twenty award-winning stories from the Stringybark Young Adult Fiction Awards

 

The Very End of the Affair — twenty-four award-winning short stories from the Stringybark Humorous Short Fiction Award

 

Valentine’s Day — twenty-three award-winning stories from the Stringybark Erotic Fiction Awards

 

Stew and Sinkers — thirty award-winning stories from the Stringybark ‘Times Past’ Short Fiction Awards

 

Malicious Mysteries — twenty award-winning stories from the Stringybark Malicious Mysteries Award

 

Side by Side — twenty-three award-winning stories from the Stringybark Short Story Award

 

A Tick Tock Heart — twenty-two award-winning stories from the Stringybark Future Times Award

 

Role of a Lifetime — twenty-five award-winning stories from the Twisted Stringybark Short Story Awards

 

Cocktails — twenty-five award-winning stories from the Stringybark Erotic Short Fiction Awards

 

No Tea Tomorrow — twenty-seven award-winning stories from the Stringybark Short Story Awards

 

Non Posso — twenty-eight award-winning travel stories from the Stringybark Short Story Awards

 

The Ghostly Stringybark — twenty-nine award-winning ghost and horror stories from the Stringybark Short Story Awards

 

Standing By — thirty-one award-winning stories from the Stringybark Short Story Award

 

Longing for Solitude — thirty award-winning stories from the Stringybark Times Past Award

 

A Nice Boy — thirty-two award-winning stories from the Stringybark Short Story Award

 

Gift of a Casserole and other Deadly Sins — Thirty-three award-winning stories from the Stringybark Seven Deadly Sins Awards

 

A Gentleman and a Scholar — thirty-four award-winning stories from the Stringybark Short Story Awards

 

Red Gold — twenty-seven award-winning stories from the Stringybark Malicious Mysteries Award