Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds (10 page)

‘Don't you worry, Ronald,' he said. ‘Once the house is built, things'll settle back down.'

I
n the 1960s and '70s big Martin Elliot, when he had enough grog under his belt to loosen his dreams, would threaten to knock down his Mangowak Hotel and build a new one made out of the local stone. The larrikin publican had noticed that the escarpments and low-rises in the bush at the back of the town were filled with a quality limestone he couldn't believe that no-one was bothering to quarry. In the Western Districts where he grew up, people scorned other building materials in favour of stone – bluestone mostly, or the soft sandstone from Adelaide, or a white limestone from north of Bendigo – but in Mangowak the only buildings not built from timber, brick or fibro-cement were the two original homesteads from the 1860s, the six meteorological buildings on the headland, and St Catherine's convent out the back beyond the Bootleg Creek. With an eye perhaps infuenced by his childhood, Martin Elliot could see the particular qualities of the local stone in those old Met Station buildings and in the high walls of the convent: the pink veins running through the blond rock, and the contradiction inherent in all
good, well-quarried stone: a sense of feather-lightness in a material almost as heavy as lead. He had a vision of a bright new hotel made out of it, something fair dinkum but a bit salubrious, a large two-storey affair that would face southwest to look across the ocean.

But on a quiet midweek morning in 1976, big Martin Elliot's dreams of a new hotel were scuppered for all time. After a lazy breakfast of leftovers from the previous night's mixed grill, followed by curried eggs, Coco Pops, and his usual morning game of pinball in the poolroom, he took off on his 60 cc mini-bike to waste a couple of hours riding through old fire tracks in the bush behind the town. The mini-bike was his vehicular version of casual clothes and often his huge frame could be seen straddling the tiny Honda, speeding across the cleared shortcuts of the town ridge, on his way out back for some R & R. But this time, as he yanked the throttle to climb up the Bootleg Creek track, a thing he'd done countless times before, the Honda's tyres failed to grip on a huge slab of ironstone jutting into the track where it ran closest to the gorge. The bike came out from under the big publican and he went tumbling over the edge, down the steep escarpment to the rocky creek bed below.

It took him a day and a night before he was able to drag his smashed-up body out of the Bootleg gorge and up the slope of iron-barks on the other side. Eventually, at around ten o'clock on the morning following the accident, he was picked up by a passing ute on the Dray Road, a couple of hundred yards south of the Mexico bend. His injuries were extensive and for three days he lay in a critical condition in the hospital at Minapre, as everyone gathered in the bar back at the Mangowak pub, praying that he'd make it through and marvelling at how he had managed to pull himself up out of that gorge. Eventually, just after dawn on the Sunday morning, Martin Elliot passed away in the hospital, due predominantly to the kidney damage he'd sustained in the fall.

The following autumn, ten months after Big Martin's death on
the mini-bike, two brothers, Ian and Brian Birdsong, as if they'd heard the publican calling from the grave, took a lease on a northeast facing hill a few miles up the Dray Road to begin a small quarry. The Birdsong family had been in the area since Ian and Brian's grandfather Silvio, or ‘Silver' as he became known, first arrived in Minapre as an itinerant worker on the building of the Ocean Road in 1927. They, like him, had a reputation for being wild. Even as small children the Birdsong brothers were renowned vandals, thieves and, by their teens, drug-dealers. Most people in the town gave them a wide berth.

What no-one knew, however, was that running deep in the Bird-song family was an affinity for quarried stone dating back to the days when their ancestor, Luigi Cantoduccelli, was known as the ‘maestro of the tufa' that arrived on the docks in Messina and Palermo from further north on the Italian peninsula in the early 1800s. Silver had often talked to Ian and Brian about the times he spent working stone with the Maestro before he emigrated. But when the Birdsong brothers opened their little quarry on the Dray Road in early 1977, everyone in Mangowak thought big Martin Elliot's stone dream had fallen into the wrong hands. What could those two loose cannons possibly be thinking?

It wasn't long before the town's cynicism was overwhelmed by curiosity. People began to take trips out along the Dray Road to the Birdsong quarry to see what Ian and Brian were up to. And once a few people started having a peek at the new sixty-foot gouge the brothers had cut into the hill, the word quickly got out that Ian and Brian, inexplicably, seemed to know what they were doing.

By the time the ‘sea-change' real estate boom hit the coast in the mid to late 1990s the blond stone from the Birdsongs' quarry was the building material everyone dreamt of using but couldn't afford. It cost $200 per square metre but on comparing its quality with its price in the general market, prospective purchasers of the stone
found that it was worth every cent. It was, in fact, mid-Jurassic limestone, of the perfect age and density for use as a building material. It could be handled and fashioned with relative ease and its pinkish ripple had the kind of effect sought after by stonemasons for centuries.

For Dom Khouri, of course, money was no impediment. As soon as he was made aware of the local stone he had no hesitation in deciding to use it. In fact, he couldn't believe his luck when he visited the Birdsong quarry and found the two black-eyed brothers hefting blond blocks about with what was obviously some kind of innate foreknowledge. Although their names didn't betray it, Dom Khouri knew straight away that these two lawless looking characters, covered in hair and dust and as wiry as the surrounding eucalypts, were somewhere, back along the line, from his part of the world.

Three days after Dom Khouri's visit to the quarry, the local builder that he had contracted, Dave Buckley, informed the Bird-song brothers that his client would be needing more stone from their quarry for his ocean-facing wall than they had sold in total for the last two years. Needless to say, Ian and Brian Birdsong got quite a surprise.

Dom Khouri's house was to be built into a large and complicated frame of cyclone-resistant steel, and after the excavation was finished and the footings had been placed into the hole from its deepest point right back to the level closest to the entrance on Merna Street, the frame was put in place. From that day on, it seemed to Ron McCoy that just about every tradesman in Mangowak was at work on the site. Carpenters, electricians, plumbers, plasterers, sculptors, swimming-pool builders, landscape gardeners, pavers, carpet-layers and, of course, glaziers. The house, which initially had aroused some protest in the area, was paying for the mortgages and winter holidays of half the town. What at first had seemed a building that
would somehow threaten the bush-democratic atmosphere in the town and accentuate Mangowak as a destination for the rich and glamorous was, in fact, the most long-lasting and interesting prospect that any of the tradesmen had ever worked on.

For the most part, Dom Khouri had decided to use local tradespeople rather than his own construction team, putting to the back of his mind any concerns he had about whether or not they would be up to the job. He was philosophical and believed in people's capacity to fulfil their potential under good direction. Once he'd settled on the tanned, much respected sixty-year-old bachelor Dave Buckley as his builder, he had allowed no doubts about whether or not the locals could do the job. Sure, the stonemasons had to come from Sydney, due to the irregular, even idio syncratic demands of the ocean-facing wall, but Dom Khouri reckoned on the fact that the local tradesmen of a small town would know, better than most, that life was all about accomplishing one task at a time, section by section.

‘Let me and the architects and David look after the big picture,' he would say to his wife, Isabelle, in a calm tone, ‘and the craftsmen with good guidance will join the dots we give them to join.'

As work progressed on the house, Ron began to enjoy having all the familiar faces around. And the site wasn't anywhere near as noisy once the earthmoving machines had gone. The main noise that bothered Ron now, even more than the stonecutters and the angle-grinders, the power-saws, the popping nail guns and the jackhammers, was the commercial radio that the workers liked to listen to. The sound of it blared over the clifftop from 7.30 am to 5 pm every day, classic hits from the sixties, seventies and eighties, surf reports, newsbreaks and advertisements. Min was far enough away in the house for it not to intrude but for Ron it developed into a true bane. His idea of music was assaulted by the cacophony, the extraordinary fact that it never ceased, until song after announcement after jingle after song became nothing other than a racket.
But he had no way of expressing his disturbance, except by sighing every day at 5 pm when the boom-box covered in stone dust was finally switched off and the construction site fell quiet. He consoled himself with the thought that Dom Khouri, the very man who had brought the building site into Ron's life, would himself dislike the music his workers were playing.

Ron sought Dom Khouri out whenever he was around and Sweet William felt, during the daily card game in the new shed, that Ron had taken to talking about his new neighbour an awful lot. Try as he might, as he shuffled the fresh deck of
VOLTAREN
cards, or sipped his stout, to have a normal conversation about the fluctuations of his barometer or the smoking of trout, Sweet William found Ron would invariably lead the subject back to the building next door. Or to one or another of Dom Khouri's other interests, some charity he was donating to, some public museum he was building in Queensland. Sweet William conceded that Dom Khouri could well be a decent bloke but he had little doubt in his mind that Ron was getting quite carried away. He'd always known Ron to be childlike at times so he didn't say anything, preferring to concentrate on the cards in his hand, to keep talking about the weather and the smoked trout, and to wait for the whole shenanigan to blow over.

Dom Khouri had hardly any time to visit the site at all – he was a very busy man. So Ron would wander over to the boundary every hour or so in the afternoons and watch how things were progressing and chat with whichever tradesman was near. He didn't know the stonemasons from Sydney of course, but almost everyone else was familiar to him from the pub, if not just from around the town in general. Dave Buckley was never too busy for a chat and he also talked to the painter Givva Way, the electrician Joe Conebush, and to the carpenter Darren Traherne of course, and the plasterer Dusty Miller, and the other tradesmen, most of whom had come to live in town for the building opportunities after the 1980s bushfires,
but some of whom he could remember from further back, even as small children. He'd stand on his mown slope, directly adjacent to where Dom Khouri was installing a giant outdoor bar area looking right onto the Two Pointers, and the blokes would ask him questions about how the fish were running, or what could be expected from the weather, and he would grill them a bit on how they were going about what they were doing. They'd talk about the tensile strength of modern-day nails, the price of pavers, the weight of the larger sheets of glass, etc, and meanwhile the building would be taking shape around them all, the stone from the Birdsong quarry would keep arriving in truckloads for the ocean-facing wall, wheelbarrows would continue rippling up and down the planking ramps, and the days of raucous radio and industrious banter would pass on the cliff where once only the McCoys, the bristlebirds and the wild thrush had reigned. And then Ron would wander off back over the slope to tinker in his shed or cut some timber for the Rayburn. He'd stand and think about the progress, he'd try to estimate end-dates for particular jobs like the wiring or the flooring or the low stone wall on his boundary side. He'd rig a drum-net for the following morning or flick through the local rag for items of interest, but everything he read seemed to bear some relation to Dom Khouri's house.

He found that even if he wanted to, he couldn't get away from it so long as he stayed at home. And when he did take off in the early mornings or late at night to comb the slopes and the flat, the shoreline and the promontories, his new neighbour's enterprise was often still in his head. It was a thing to wonder about, to tinker with in the mind. Sometimes he went so far as to dream at night that he had taken over Dave Buckley's job and was following Dom Khouri's wishes, implementing his new friend's operatic vision. And perhaps, at the end of a long day, Dom and he could relax together in that topnotch outdoor bar, rest their stubbies on the lovely ledge
of Birdsong stone, and talk about music, about Dom's favourite movies, about Beniamino Gigli, and about Leo Morris, and the pleasurable days when Ron first learnt to play the organ.

But then he would be woken by Min's coughing or by sudden plovers in the night, and he would lie there in an uncomfortable state between worlds. Min would cough again and through the walls he'd be reminded of the reason he'd sold the land in the first place. Without even going back to sleep he'd dream that all the stonework was beginning to slip and fall on the high ocean-facing wall, the ornate wrought ironwork of the verandah was popping loose, and that somehow, as the new man in charge, it was his fault. He'd shudder and get up and go outside for a pee on the lemon tree. The tang of the night air would break the creepy feeling. And he'd be alone again, on his clifftop and under the stars, and in the darkness the building next door would only constitute a vague lump, a hulk, a shadow. In a deepened state, he'd wish for the whole thing to go away, he'd stumble back to bed in his slippers, and it would.