This Red Earth Read online

  It bursts out of me: ‘No, Dad. You can’t go.’

  ‘Yes, Bernie, I’m afraid I have to. You don’t need to worry too much on my account, though.’ He starts pouring his beer, but I’ve caught the torture of sadness in his eyes before he looks down. He assures his perfect quarter inch of froth: ‘I’ll still only be minding the young fellas; you know I’m too old to do any real soldiering. I’ll be stuck out in the desert helping the kids to get skinnier, marching them out to the pyramids. That’s all.’

  And I’m old enough now to know you’re lying too, Dad.

  ‘You’ll have to make sure you get some good pictures of the wedding for me, love,’ he says.

  I lie in return: ‘Course, Dad.’

  The only thing that’s giving Mum away is her grip on my hand as we watch the parade up Martin Place. She’s so brave to come out to this, risking a display. But how could she not? This could be the last time she ever sees the love of her life. She’s so stone-faced she’s a statue, not seeing the way the troops pass three by three through this avenue of banks, past the cenotaph like a great snake devouring Lest We Forget, not seeing the ticker-tape snow falling all around us, only watching for the head of the next company to appear, waiting to see him.

  A few feet away, a girl rushes out in front of us and flings herself at one of the boys, kissing him, and a policeman drags her off, her Breton halo tumbling off her head. There’s a display for you; I’m raising an eyebrow at it as Mum’s fingers dig deeper into my palm and she says: ‘I did that exact thing. Twenty-five years ago, almost to the day. Your father got in such trouble for it from his captain, too.’

  Ha. Well, there you go. Always more to the story, isn’t there? Mum and Dad. They’d only met the fortnight before he set off for the Great War, at a tram stop, so the story I know goes, the greatest love story ever told: the boy from Gilgandra and the girl from the Paddo slums who couldn’t wait to get away, but had to wait five years, a wait that was worth it, for he was as true as his word: he came back, and he came back for her.

  Come back again, Dad.

  How Mum hasn’t dissolved into a small ocean of display a hundred times over in the last five minutes, I don’t know.

  I go back to watching for Dad again, up on my toes as if that might help, and I see Colin Quinn instead. Marching with the auxiliary trades. He looks good in the uniform, making him broad and tall and, incredibly, out of what must be a thousand in this crowd, he sees me too and grins across the barrel of his rifle. Take that as a reminder that miracles do happen; will happen; must. I wave. The pipes and drums of ‘Australia Will Be There’ roll into ‘Waltzing Matilda’, and then I see him: Dad.

  ‘Dad!’ There he is at the head of his company, and all I can see is my dad. My heart would be breaking into a million pieces if it wasn’t thumping so hard and fast with pride.

  Mum releases my hand and waves with both of hers, shouting: ‘Oh, my wonderful man!’

  Her smile is the light of the world, nothing less, and with it the only choice left to me becomes clear. I can disappear into my grief, into this small warm-ball nothing of my own design, or, daunting as it is, I can be brave myself.

  Life is as wonderful as it is cruel. Get used to it. Get on with it.

  Be as brave as my parents are.

  But can I?

  GORDON

  ‘You get paid a quid a year for it,’ Johno laughs, handing me a mug of tea. ‘Don’t be shy.’

  ‘I’m not being shy,’ I tell him. He’s trying to talk me into joining the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles, the militia up here, while we’re having a billy, hanging about camp waiting for our hoisting engine to arrive for the rig. But it’s a difficult issue for me. I wasn’t even allowed to join cadets at school.

  ‘There something wrong with you?’ Johno’s not shy about much at all. And he’s not knocking me either. He’s genuinely interested. He’s a good bloke. I like him a lot.

  So I’m straight with him. ‘No, there’s nothing wrong. It’s that my father wouldn’t be happy if I did any sort of military service.’

  ‘Oh, righto. Fair enough,’ Johno nods, pouring himself a brew, ‘and that’s your business, too. But you do realise you’re going to have to do some kind of service, get ticked off the list, don’t you? Unmarried and twenty-one, you’re expected to get the national service training at least. They’ll catch up with you and you’ll be shanghaied back to Townsville or Darwin to do it. It’s not like you’re in a protected occupation here.’

  ‘Aren’t I?’ I nearly drop my mug. I’d assumed this sort of exploration work would be considered essential industry – because it is. I say: ‘Bull.’

  ‘No, mate, no bull,’ Johno laughs again. ‘But if you join up here with us, then you can tick off your obligation – and have some fun at the same time. It’s only target practice out on the rifle range and a few marches now and again. Nothing too cracked. I enjoy it.’

  I know he does. When he’s in town, first thing he does after drinking is get back out bush again. He goes out with his militia mates, hunting feral pigs with this bloke called Sven, a Norwegian giant who only ever wears a shirt on NGVF parade or when dancing at the club, and is otherwise a metallurgical chemist. Cracked. The Territories attract some interesting people, and I know I would have a great time with that mob doing just about anything. Except military training.

  ‘Anyway.’ Johno screws up his nose, the way he does whenever he’s got bad news for you, like the native labourers aren’t turning up for work because they’ve gone fishing, or the hoisting engine for our rig is going to remain on the docks indefinitely because the local witch doctor is blessing it. But he says now: ‘I reckon it would be a good idea to make yourself handy with a rifle.’

  ‘I am handy with a rifle,’ I tell him, a bit browned at the suggestion I might not know how to look after myself. Dad gave me my own .22 when I was ten, and taught me to get a rabbit for myself, for necessity. I can hit dinner between the eyes at fifty yards. ‘But why should it matter out here?’ I ask Johno. You don’t need to shoot anything to eat well in this country: food really does just fall off the trees.

  Johno gives me that look, the emu blink that says, Shit, you are a kid, before he says: ‘There’s a war on, you dozy bastard. Don’t expect the blackfellas to fight off the Krauts for us if they decide they want their colony back. They don’t owe us anything, Brockie.’

  ‘It’s true.’ Rico, our carpenter, joins us, rolling a smoke. Rico Micallef: he’s from Melbourne, via Malta, and he’s been taking contracts in New Guinea for even longer than Johno. He says: ‘People here have long memories, and I don’t blame them. I was down in Kokopo when the RAAF planes came and dropped the bombs on those villages – the payback for them killing those copper prospectors. Remember that, Johno?’

  ‘Heard about it,’ Johno says.

  And I say: ‘What bombs?’ They’re having me on. Not unknown for them to string me along with a tall one – man-eating pythons, giant face-sucking leeches, flying pigs, et cetera.

  ‘Bad business.’ Johno looks into his tea, not having me on. ‘These two idiots, poking about where they shouldn’t have been, going into a women’s hut, and then everyone’s shocked when they get speared. The RAAF rains jam-tin bombs down on the villages along the coast at Kokopo in response – the wrong villages too. It was pretty disgusting.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’ Christ.

  ‘Yeah oh right. So you see, Brockie, it wouldn’t take much for them to turn Nazi on us if the opportunity arose. You know, the Krauts treated them better than we do, the Lutherans getting their kids in school and that. We give them one school, three miles out of town at Nordup, and start interning the Lutheran missionaries. We give them bugger-all in return for all we take.’

  I take a moment to consider our position a bit more carefully. My position specifically. I’m sitting on a log outside a tent, in a jungle, somewhere on the northwest tip of the Gazelle Peninsula in the middle of the Bismarck Sea, only twenty miles crow’s flight
from Rabaul, but twenty thousand years from civilisation. In front of me sits our derrick, the eighty-five-foot mast of our rig that will hold the drill rods, which has been constructed with the assistance of native labour, when they could be bothered, or when they’ve run out of tobacco. We’re waiting for them now to haul two tons of hoisting engine along a track that’s as muddy as it is steep, through forest that dense it could close over again come the next shower. Why? So that we can make a small consortium of professional gamblers and petrol-station owners unbelievably rich.

  At a rough estimate, on this island there are maybe fifty thousand blacks. Who would really know how many there were? There are not more than two thousand of us, in the town, including Chinese shopkeepers. But here, right here, there is me, Johno and Rico, and a boilermaker who, like the engine, hasn’t turned up yet.

  I spill my tea as I realise: Bernie can’t come and live here. I don’t want her to. I can’t guarantee her safety. I won’t be able to look Mr Cooper in the eye and say she will be all right. Because I won’t be with her to protect her should we have a situation. Once we start drilling, I’ll be gone fairly solidly for six months, till we get down twenty-five hundred feet or so, into the basalt capping stone the Anglo-Eastern maps tell me we’ll find or till the rainy season bogs us, and after that, if the core samples are promising, I’m to keep on down to six thousand feet, before starting on another hole, and then another, and possibly another until a decision can be made on where to spud the wells. There’s my three years laid out. How am I going to tell her?

  ‘Didn’t mean to put the wind up you.’ Johno gives me a nudge, spilling my tea some more. ‘You can pay me back on the rifle range, ay? Since you’re so handy.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. I look at the back of my hand, brushing the drops of tea off my knee, and I’m not sure what sort of a shot I’d be if a situation happened right now. The knuckle is still that tender in a grip. I have enough trouble with a tennis racquet. So I stare at the fire, and put in a good effort at ignoring the idea that I might have made a bit of a mistake coming to New Britain.

  I’m sure I hear a twig snap behind us. But as I go to look over my shoulder all I see is a wagtail hopping about on the ground near my bedourie. She’s just like the ones at home, only maybe a bit bigger.

  ‘Don’t worry, mate,’ Johno says. ‘Newton’s second law of thermodynamics is always there for us when no one else is.’

  ‘What?’ I don’t understand the joke.

  ‘The perpetual contest between chaos and equilibrium,’ he says, not joking. He tosses the dregs of his tea at the coals. ‘War and peace,’ he says. ‘There’s no escaping it. It’s only natural. Everything is, isn’t it, until we decide we don’t like it for some reason. We like beautiful volcanic islands until they explode, we like a nice fire until it burns the house down. We like German engineering until there’s a war. We like guns until we get shot. It’s only perception. Everything creates as much as it destroys – humans, volcanoes, trees, ants, bacteria. Everything.’

  He points up at the sky. There’s a harpy eagle circling high above us. Then he thumbs over at the derrick: ‘We make a clearing in the forest here for the rig, destroy a whole heap of shit for it, but that makes a place for small birds and wallabies to forage, and it makes a place for that eagle to forage too. Who’s the bad guy there, mate? Everything’s a shitfight, if you think about it, right down to the atomic level. Everything’s good. And here’s as good as anywhere for a good old shitfight, isn’t it? Keep your eyes and your mind open, ay? You’ll be right.’

  I’ll have something to wonder about for the next thousand years at least. This is why I like Johno. I think he’s probably a genius. I look over my shoulder again. The wagtail’s still there, hopping about, and as I look at her this time, I remember I saw one go a kookaburra over territory once, out at Blackie’s Camp. Fearless. She won, too.

  Johno’s on his feet now. The sound of the natives’ singing is coming up the track, and I’m quick on my feet, too. A train of bamboo litters is arriving: they’ve got all our gear. When I see they’ve brought up the load of our rods as well, I can’t wait to get into the drilling. With any luck, we’re going to get the rig going this arvo. And Johno is right: it’s only perception, isn’t it. Suddenly, I wouldn’t be anywhere else.

  ‘Hard work starts for you now.’ Rico slaps me on the shoulder, then picks up his tool belt. He’s counting the days till the end of his contract, about nine hundred to go.

  I’m not. I’m thinking: yes. Work starts now. After all these weeks of planning, my job is finally about to begin.

  One of the natives waves at me from under the weight of the boiler, calling out: ‘Ello, boss.’ But I don’t know which one he is. They still all look the same to me, these ones that come up and work for us: fuzzy gold hair, white smiles, brown skin and red sarongs.

  ‘Who’s that one?’ I ask Johno.

  ‘To-An,’ he says. ‘And he doesn’t give a shit about Newton’s second law of thermodynamics. He goes to church on Sundays, like a good little black boy should.’

  Johno starts jogging over to the rig, calling out something in their Kua-Nua language, and I’m stuck, as I always am, watching the way he is with them. He’s been working here a long time, I know, but I’ve never known anyone to give the respect he does to a black, talking to them in their language, not pidgin. He laughs as easily with them as he does with me or anyone. He’s laughing now, scaling up the derrick with one of them, easily as he can scale a palm trunk, racing one of them, making me wonder if he is one of them. He’s not. He can’t be. He has a degree. From Queensland Uni, too. I suppose he’s just an anomaly I’m lucky enough to have coincided with.

  ‘Brockie!’ He yells down to me now. ‘Stop your dozing, mate, and get up here, will you?’

  Three weeks’ drilling and my shirts have got tight from lifting and bagging rock. I don’t doze. I am either at it or unconscious, triple-checking the core samples in my dreams. The blue and tan bands of the pyroclastic strata here, the ash and pumice, are consistently showing we’re drilling where we should be. I’m confident, I’m sure I am, so I decide to head back to Rabaul to report our progress, to get permission to continue with this hole.

  I have to go out with a native guide to get through the rainforest, and Johno arranges for To-An to take me. If he turns up. And he does, after a three-hour wait. Nine o’clock he wanders over, and I recognise him now by the chip on one of his front teeth. I’ve also learned that anyone would have trouble distinguishing one native from the other round here because they’re all brothers and cousins from just two families, and there are three sets of twins among them. They’re all mostly called To-Something, too, and all call each other to-lai, which apparently means mate, and does nothing to assist in their easy identification either.

  ‘Ello, boss,’ To-An waves, always with that smile suggesting he thinks the title might be a bit of a joke applied to me.

  ‘Hello To-An.’ I’m already walking, heading down the top of the pass, which has become known as the Slippery Dip after the loss of one of the rods – It slippy-slippy, boss. It did: all ten yards of it disappeared off the mudslide into the forest below, never to be seen again, not by human eyes anyway.

  He says beside me now: ‘Him rocks speak you good, ay?’ Apparently I also look funny when I’m inspecting the cores, as if I am talking to them.

  ‘Yes, the rocks speak very good, To-An,’ I tell him, and he laughs – at me.

  It would be good to have the language to tell him it might be funny but it’s true. I’m am talking to them, in a way, at least trying to work out what they’re saying to me. But the language gulf is too wide for anything much but instructions.

  That doesn’t stop To-An trying to chat. ‘Looky him, boss,’ he’s saying next.

  I’d rather keep my eyes on my feet in this mud, on this gradient, but I look up to where he’s pointing, in case it’s Ooga Booga, the vampire spider, or one of those flying pigs. But it’s only a wagta
il, hopping along a liana vine ahead.

  ‘Him belong you,’ To-An says, and he’s not laughing. ‘Him follow you. Him you clan.’

  My turn to laugh at To-An: I suppose he’s telling me this bird is my totem or some superstitious bull or other. Him doesn’t follow us any further down the pass, and To-An stops the chat with me. His face is blank. I’ve probably upset him. Well done, Brockie.

  After an hour or so the forest opens out a bit. The gradient declines, too, as the ground firms and the palms reach a height of a hundred feet or more. Incredible. Another world. The village we’re heading to, Kabakada, is to the east, but my compass tells me we’re going due west; I have no idea where I am. I might be a competitive hiker, but this is not the gum forest I know. It’s so thick with vegetation. Giant lilly pillies and beech are a canopy beneath the canopy of palms, and under them is another canopy, mainly of fat tree ferns. There’s no sense of the sun. The light is a green mist in every direction, all day, and I don’t relax until we sight the coast, where we start following the mangroves along the North Road, the only road, travelling east at last.

  It’s almost three by the time we get to Kabakada, which is the village To-An and all the brothers and cousins come from. We’ve been walking nearly six hours. It only looks ten miles on the map, but I know we’ve walked at least twenty, and you just can’t get any pace on in this humidity. I’m very glad to see the Southern Star jeep waiting for me at the back of the grass huts and frangipanis of the village. There’s smoke coming up from the women’s huts, but there’s no one else around. Must have gone fishing, further up the beach. The keys are in the ignition of the jeep; no one to pinch it either. What would a To-Something do with a jeep anyway? He wouldn’t be able to go into Rabaul, not without a pass from a boss, or the native police would wallop him, literally and conscientiously. I start the engine and tell To-An: ‘See you tomorrow, at dawn, when the sun comes up, here in Kabakada.’ And he laughs: ‘Yeah, boss.’ If and when it suits him.