This Red Earth Read online

  ‘Bernie, are you sure you’re all right?’ He squeezes my hand.

  I squeeze it back and make another attempt at a smile. ‘I think I’ll have to go and have a bit of a lie-down. Must be the heat.’

  It’s not the heat, though; it’s not that hot today, but I am flushed through from the inside. I have an idea, a fear, of what it might be, but I don’t know enough about all that. My curse is three weeks late; you don’t get your curse when you’re – Hughie, I can’t even think it.

  I’m not in my room five minutes before Gordon’s in through the window, having taken my lie-down for code, and I don’t mind that idea at all. ‘Where does it hurt? I’ll have to kiss you better,’ he says, unbuttoning my blouse, kissing my shoulder, kissing my frown and I tell him: ‘Everywhere.’ I can’t have enough of him. I’m ferocious for him. You don’t want this sort of thing if you’re whatsit, do you? I remember reading something in the Woman’s Mirror, tips on how to avoid hubby’s attention when you’re – You go off it apparently. But I’m not off it. What am I going to do without it for eleven months? What have I done? What am I doing. Not being quiet enough right at this minute. ‘Oh, yes. Oh, darling.’

  Mental.

  ‘Are you travelling home, sir?’ the reporter asks him at the flying-boat terminal, asking him if he’s going all the way to Southampton, home to England, and Gordon laughs bright as the sky this morning. ‘Not likely.’ Kicking the swag at his feet, happy, he’s so happy, and they start chatting, about where Gordon’s from and where he’s going. Nyngan. Rabaul. Change planes at Townsville. He’s so excited to be going, to be adventuring, he can hardly stand still, and it’s impossible not to be excited for him. With him. For all that it seems impossible he’s going at all. World championship mental.

  You are not going to cry. You will not. Not. Not. Cry.

  I squint across Rose Bay, into the glare coming off the water. This is why Mum’s not here: she’d rather eat glass than risk a public display. And why Mrs Zoc isn’t here either: Mum’s possibly still consoling her in the front yard where she started on her display as soon as the cab pulled up. It’s Mr Brock and Dad who should be here, shaking Gordon’s hand, wishing him bon voyage; and why are they not? I squint harder at the glare, at the not-fairs.

  ‘Would you mind, miss?’ the reporter is asking me a question now.

  ‘Pardon, mind what?’ I squint at him tucking his pencil behind his ear, grubby lead-smudged fingernails.

  He says: ‘It’s for the Herald.’ As if that will make a difference to my answer.

  ‘A photo.’ Gordon puts his arm around me. ‘Where did you go off to then?’

  ‘Nowhere,’ I say, automatic as my hand going to his hand at my waist to press him tighter to me. ‘A photo? Of course. What for?’

  ‘A nice Aussie story, something different from the usual,’ the reporter says and calls over to his photographer, who’s outside taking pictures of the bay.

  I pinch my nose and give Gordon a posh twangy newsreel commentary. ‘It’s a beautiful day out here on Sydney Harbour as Mr Gordon Brock of Nyngan is farewelled by his fiancée Miss Bernadette Cooper of Coogee, before leaving on the Qantas Flying Boat Cooee, bound for oil exploration in the deepest darkest New Guinea.’

  ‘You are beautiful,’ he whispers in my ear and I have no trouble smiling, for him, with him, wishing I could see for a second what he sees in me, which makes me feel a lot more than beautiful. What is it? This feeling. Fear. Somehow exhilarating. Some sort of possibility I’m not yet aware of. But I want to be.

  ‘Oh Georgie, that’s too outrageous!’ a woman shrieks a laugh across the other side of the terminal, from the middle of a group, three chaps and three gels, near the doors to the jetty, the smart crowd, identifiable by that certain look, contrived casual; all polo shirts and twin sets, they are a pen-and-ink for a Hordern’s Sporty Knitwear ad. They’re gathering their coats, coats too heavy for this summer’s day, must be going home, I suppose, done this flying business before, Georgie, and one of the girls turns as the flash bulb goes off again at us, peering over her shoulder: What’s so special about them? Everything. I smile at her too. Isn’t it obvious? We’re a nice Aussie story. Truly. Rock bought a new pair of moleskins especially. With the blazer and tie he’s an ad for Bushie’s Back O’ Bourke Outfitters and Saddlery, while I am –

  ‘Passengers for the QEA Royal Mail Service, please make your way to the punt at the end of the jetty,’ a uniformed man with a great booming voice calls into the room. He’s carrying a megaphone, but doesn’t need it. ‘All aboard!’

  No, not yet!

  I grab Gordon’s hand. Don’t go. Not yet. Inside, I am all over the shop like a madwoman’s lunchbox, and yet I am walking along the jetty with him, holding his hand, and then letting go of his hand as he gives me one last kiss. ‘I’ll telephone or cable as soon as I can. I love you, Bernie.’

  ‘I – I’m going to miss you, Rock, my darl–’ is all I can manage to tell him without throwing myself across the gangway.

  One very very last kiss and he’s the last onto the punt that takes him out to the plane. He disappears into its belly, the propellers start up across its great white wings and it sets out, gathering speed across the water, and then it is in the air and I’m clutching my jasper B in my pocket with my heart wanting to fly out of me after the plane as it glides up and over the Bridge.

  And as it does I hear myself cry inside and out: ‘Hughie save him!’

  ‘Aye.’ The man with the megaphone chuckles softly beside me. ‘An aeroplane is a wondrous thing until someone you love is in it.’

  I watch it grow smaller and smaller, as if this great metal pelican might somehow carry all my hopes for the future into the future. Our future. Please, Hughie. Please let these choices we’ve made be the right ones. The best ones. For us.

  For me.

  PART TWO

  JANUARY 1940–DECEMBER 1940

  GORDON

  ‘I suppose you don’t notice the view after a while,’ I say to the hostess, who’s just asked me if I’d like something to drink, twice, because I can’t take my eyes off the view. I’m on the edge of my seat.

  She smiles, like she’s used to catering to five year olds. ‘Not at all, sir. It’s different every journey, always changing.’ She looks out the window too. ‘Like an opal – I could never be bored of looking at the colours.’

  An opal. That’s a good description. All the blues and greens of the waterways and the dairy pastures of the Hunter we’re flying over. But it’d be black underneath: there’s a lot of coal down there.

  ‘So, would you like something to drink – tea and biscuit, Scotch and crisps?’

  Scotch and crisps? It can’t be eleven o’clock yet. ‘No thanks,’ I smile at her. ‘I’ll wait for lunch.’

  Lunch on an aeroplane. I’m on an aeroplane. Flying. Through the air. One hundred and eighty miles an hour. How good is this? When the chief of exploration, Mr Taylor, told me that my travel expenses entitled me to one return air ticket per annum, you could have scraped me off the floor. I expected to be put on a ship, third class. Air travel is that expensive – £65 to Rabaul, £220 all the way to Southampton – the directors of Southern Star are either very confident of striking oil or they have money to burn. They, and their main backers, the Service Station Association and several transport and manufacturing chiefs, are in a hurry too. Britain supplies most of our petroleum through the Anglo-Eastern Petroleum Company, who have a monopoly over the Near East trade and up until a couple of years ago had complete control over Australian exploration – there’s a racket for you – and now they’re charging a premium, rightly or wrongly, because war needs oil like nothing else.

  The responsibility I’ve been charged with is like nothing else too. The job is straightforward enough: all I have to do, as the field geo, is supervise the drilling, with the aid of comprehensive Anglo-Eastern maps and data, and report back to the chief geo and Mr Taylor in Rabaul with my findings. Easy as join the dots
. But the amounts of money involved, the stakes. It’s a long way from university prizes for hypotheticals and orienteering. It seems like five minutes ago I was at school and now I’m here.

  Looking down on where I went to school: the New England tablelands. Wheatfields stretching up along the Divide: a great wall of gum trees. Amazing from the air. I’d be down there right now, preparing to tramp out mapping bauxite, if I wasn’t here, in the sky, eight thousand feet up. I suppose I’ll do this a few times over the next three years. I can’t wait to do it with Bernie. She will love it. I’d kiss her right now if she was here, kiss her properly, and I could, too: I’m the only one in this little cabin of six seats aft of the wings. We might explore the luggage hold next door, too. The thrills we are going to share. Can I believe my luck? No. I still can’t believe Bernie lets me kiss her at all.

  I look out at the Divide again now, as if I might see past it. See Dad, in want of sharing all these good things with him too. He sent word through Jim that he’s got more work tank-sinking on a cattle station at Tibooburra. He shouldn’t be doing that work. In Tibooburra: the end of the road before desert, all the way to Perth. In January. It’ll be a hundred and fifteen degrees there today, at least. You can fry an egg on the bonnet of your ute. Dad and I have done that, too, just to do it, and it’s a favourite school-holidays memory. But it’s my turn to look after him now. Maybe he doesn’t want to know about that most of all, doesn’t want looking after. It bothers me, though. Makes me cranky, actually: I’ve never given him one moment of worry, and he’s off – in flaming Tibooburra? Well, at least I won’t have to worry about him not turning up to my graduation: I won’t be in town myself. He’ll find out I’m engaged and off in New Britain from the bush telegraph via a third-hand copy of the Herald and there’s nothing I can do about it.

  A golf ball comes sailing up through the cabin to take my mind from it. A golf ball? Followed by one of the gels, as Bernie calls girls like this one. Waving a putter in the air as she says: ‘Ahoy there, hello! Sorry about that.’ Swaying not just because of the movement of the aircraft: she looks like she’s had a Scotch and a crisp, or maybe two. She throws herself down into the seat next to me. ‘Oh, but hello again. I know you, don’t I?’

  ‘Um.’ I’m not sure if I recognise her, maybe from uni: Bachelor of Filling in Time, or someone’s girl?

  She says: ‘Wilma – Wilma Handley-Endicott.’

  That name is sort of familiar, Handley-Endicott is a director of something – an insurance company, or is it a bank? Don’t know, and care less. City money and plenty of it. But I do now think I might recall her face, from a party, back in first year, involving togas and a chemistry experiment called zombie juice made from barbital salts and Pimms. I didn’t stay long at it; not my idea of a good time.

  She says: ‘Never mind. Want to join us? We’re playing golf in the promenade saloon.’ She points her putter at the passageway, towards the middle of the plane.

  As much as it would be interesting to see how a game of golf might be achieved in these conditions, I say: ‘Thanks, but no, I’m happy here.’ Point out the window, at the view.

  She shrugs, ‘Well, you stay happy then,’ and wanders out again, calling: ‘Georgie, I can’t find it. Can you get another ball, sweets?’

  She didn’t even look for the lost one, and that finds the Presbo in me. Playing golf, on an aeroplane, drunk in the middle of the day, probably stay that way for the next ten days to Southampton and every day. On permanent holidays, that lot. Can’t stand them, people who don’t work. Even the richest of the graziers’ sons I know are always expected to work. But the blokes on this plane, three of them that look like their fathers own a hair oil factory, come from a different world, a different country. One called Home. I heard one say to the other on the punt up to the plane: You can draw out the doctorate for the next ten years if you have to. There’s a way to get out of your national service. PhD in playing golf drunk in an aeroplane, for a decade.

  Leaving it to Mr Cooper to put on the khaki again. No thought for whatever else he’d rather be doing, whatever else he might have had planned, not even sure he’ll make it to our wedding: Too far off to say, son – but don’t tell our Bernie that, will you? That’s enough to put me off my aeroplane lunch.

  No, it’s not. Mr Cooper doesn’t want me doing anything other than exactly what I’m doing now. Avoiding the military, and having more fun than a grown man probably should landing and taking off again at Brisbane. And then again at Gladstone. Then finally Townville, with a splash that comes right up past the window, and where I’m to leave the home service for the Oceania Mail, or will tomorrow, for a job that’s just as necessary to the war effort as soldiering, maybe even more so.

  ‘Goodbye, sir.’ That nice hostess sees me out with a smile and a wave. ‘Enjoy the rest of your journey.’

  ‘Thanks, I will.’ I wave back as the humidity hits me like a wet blanket lobbed from a great height. This is a hot I’ve not experienced before: my swag doubles in weight as I step down into the punt. I look across the water to the jetty, not sure if I should take my jacket off now or wait till I’ve met Mr Johnstone here, the drilling engineer, a Mr Michael Johnstone. Mr Taylor described him as a man of the tropics, and an old hand at exploration on New Britain; formerly of Pacifica Mining, gold prospectors. We’ll be flying out together in the morning. Can’t see anything much but the outlines of ketch rigging and warehouse roofs, though: looking straight into the late-afternoon sun.

  ‘That young Brock there?’ A hand reaches down for my swag at the jetty – hand belonging to a barrel chest that’s got some legs to it that are as skinny as they are hairy. In shorts. I shouldn’t have worried about my jacket. ‘Mick Johnstone – call me Johno,’ he says, and as I step up level with him I see him properly. He’s got black hair like a boot brush on his head, with big wide eyes and a nose that takes up most of his face: he looks like an emu, holding out his hand to me now, and saying: ‘Shit, you are a kid.’

  He can’t be more than thirty and I’m not that much of a kid, I’m thinking as I’m looking at the size of his hand and estimating the magnitude of the shake there. It’s not too big a hand and there’s nothing wrong with mine so long as you’re not too enthusiastic in the grip. I should have had it looked at, I suppose, but between momentous decisions I didn’t get around to it, and it’s really not an issue until – Right there, that’s it. About a seven out of ten and I make a corresponding sound approximating, ‘Yeah, g’day.’ But this Johno doesn’t notice. He’s already walked off with my swag.

  ‘We’ve just got time to get in for a quick one,’ he says, heading across the road to a pub.

  I look behind me, see my trunk being pulled up onto the jetty. I suppose it’ll find me in the morning with the mail. It had better: it’s got my books in it, my dinner suit and, more importantly, my photo of Bernie – that one of her in the white bathers. She got a copy of it for me, and it’s safely tucked in behind the cover of Professor Richardson’s Geological Formations of New South Wales.

  ‘Come on,’ Johno says, taking off up the road and round a corner. ‘Hurry up. This is North Queensland – you don’t want to get caught breaking the rules up here.’

  No, I see we don’t. We just get into the front bar of this pub called Ramages Tatts before being locked in at six on the dot, the blinds drawn down on all the doors and windows. But quick and one are not good descriptions of what will follow. Which is rum. Bundaberg rum.

  ‘Get it into ya, young fella,’ says a bloke at the bar, a Kiwi whose name I don’t catch first go with the noise in here. Works for Pacifica, I think he just said. One thing is clear: this end of the bar belongs to the miners, and mining technicians of all sorts, either coming or going from New Guinea, all about ten years older and louder than me, with handshakes that require anaesthetic. Doesn’t seem like a good time to mention I’m not much of a rum drinker, not a drinker of spirits of any sort actually. Stick with beer, in moderation, except for special occasi
ons. I still bear a scar on the back of my left hand from Mrs Zoc’s hibiscus, as a reminder of my last effort with Mr Cooper.

  So, when in Rome, I get it into me and discover why Ramages is better known to some as Damages. I’m halfway through my third ale chaser, necessary to putting out the fire in my throat, when I realise that any thought I had of calling in on Mrs Zoc’s sons this evening will have to be forgotten, not that I made a promise to her I would. They’re twenty-five miles away at a place called Two Pots via Horseshoe Lagoon, and I’ve just now found I seem to be missing my legs.

  No one light a match, and someone get me a fresh bucket, please. I’m never drinking rum again, or travelling by air. This New Guinea Airways plane is smaller, older, noisier, rockier and stinks of vomit. Notably, it also doesn’t have hostesses; it has a steward who looks like a shitty old salt with some experience in catering for halfwits. His eye on me. We leave the coast for the Coral Sea and I probably wouldn’t mind if he chucked me out the door and into it.

  ‘Get some more water into you, young Brockie,’ the Kiwi says, holding a glass in front of me. He is a surveyor and he’s called Errol, Errol Flynn, for his famous rescue of some native women and children when the volcano erupted two years ago, which he and Johno re-enacted for my edification some time last night on the staircase of the pub. Johno was one of the native girls and I was that edified I was crying with it. What Errol’s real name is, I can’t remember. Someone Flynn. My head is the volcano now. I can only submit to Errol’s superior knowledge of alcohol poisoning and get the water in me, before passing out again. I will see the Barrier Reef another time.