The White Earth (17 page)

His disappointment over the old man’s secret work had long since faded. The newsletter was an impressive piece of work, and his uncle was the president of an organisation with hundreds of members. A few hundred didn’t sound much, but after all the stapling and folding, William appreciated just how many people that really was. And it was a serious business — amazing to think that his uncle was battling something as large and powerful as the entire Australian government.

‘But what
is
Native Title?’ he asked at one stage. It seemed to be the central issue, but nowhere in the newsletter was it fully explained.

‘A disaster,’ the old man replied, head buried in the ledger. But when he saw that William was waiting in puzzled silence, he put down his pen. ‘The truth is, at this stage, no one has a clue what Native Title is. That’s the problem. The government is still drafting the legislation. But all indications are that it will be terrible for people like us.’

‘Why?’

‘Why?’ His uncle leant back in his chair, sucking his lips at the vastness of the question. ‘Well, one of the things it means is that someone like me won’t have a say any more about what happens on my own property. It’s already pretty bad. Right now I can’t do things like clear trees or build a dam without the government wanting to know about it. Native Title would make it even harder. But that’s not all. The worst of it is that I might not even
own
the land any more. Not outright. Other people could come along and say they owned it as well. People who haven’t had anything to do with the place for centuries. And I wouldn’t be able to do a thing without their say-so.’ He leant forward again. ‘There are lots of aspects to it and you’ll hear all sorts of rubbish about this and that, but don’t fall for it. Deep down, it’s purely a question of property rights.’

William wasn’t sure what property rights might be, but the idea that someone else could claim his uncle’s station, that seemed disturbing. Especially now.

‘What people?’ he asked.

‘Minorities. Elites. Activists.’ The old man regarded William’s confusion for a moment, then sighed.‘Aborigines, of course. Who else would it be?’

William got back to work. Aborigines? He thought of deserts, and dark-skinned figures with spears, but he had never met a black person. There weren’t any even in Powell, as far as he knew, so it was hard to see what connection they might have with Kuran Station. Then he remembered what the men in the national park had said about marks on bunya pines, and about the clearings on the hilltops. But that was long ago, surely.

The big radio that sat in a corner was kept switched on, and they listened to it as they worked. The old man preferred news broadcasts or talkback shows. Most of it was of no interest to William — wars overseas, or peace talks, or stories about the economy and the unemployment rate — but he took cues from his uncle, paying attention to the items that induced angry mutterings or nods of approval. These reports were mostly about rural issues. Between the drought, and low prices for grain and livestock, and high interest rates, it seemed that things were bad everywhere.

But the old man’s deeper rages were reserved for the reports that dealt directly with the government. William learnt quickly that his uncle hated the prime minister, Mr Keating. That was no surprise. Mr Keating had won the federal election held earlier in the year, and William knew that this was considered an awful thing in the Powell district. Nobody liked the prime minister. But his uncle didn’t seem to like the opposition leader, Dr Hewson, either. That did surprise William, for there was no one else from whom to choose, was there?

Late on the second day his uncle tuned to a station that was actually playing a live broadcast of parliament sitting in Canberra. It had an empty, echoing sound over the radio, and seemed very dull, but the old man rocked testily back and forth in his chair as the politicians declaimed.

William ventured the question:‘Who did you vote for?’

‘I didn’t vote.’

‘I thought everyone had to.’

‘That’s the law, but to hell with them. They can’t make me choose sides.’ The old man lifted a copy of his newsletter. ‘I’m on my own side.’

‘But…’

‘But what?’

William let it drop. He could sense displeasure threatening in the old man. He went back to sorting the pages. He was down to the last few. But his uncle continued watching him, and then reached out a hand to switch off the radio.

‘Don’t ever be too impressed by the authorities, Will. Politicians, police, the courts, the councils. I know they sound big and important, and they’ll try to make you do all sorts of things throughout your life. But it’s all just noise. You have to make your own decisions in the end.’

William nodded dutifully.

‘Don’t you nod at me!’

Startled, William glanced up. The grandfather figure of the last two days had vanished in an instant. The prophet of the shooting stars sat there, glaring coldly.

‘You have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about! What have you been thinking? That one day I’ll just hand all of this over to you, and that’ll be that?’

‘No…’

‘You’d better believe I won’t!’

William looked away, shocked.

But his uncle rose angrily to his feet.‘Now you listen. No one handed me anything. I should’ve had this property sixty years ago. Instead I had to fight my whole life to get it. But you know what? It’s better that way. Because things like this station can’t just be given to you. You have to earn them, like I did.’

The old man strode across the office. He came to the fireplace and, grabbing the rusty iron bar that served as a poker, jabbed at the logs.

‘Governments! I used to vote, yes, and all they ever did was make up laws that got in my way. Whitlam was the one who started it — I watched that man give away money to any fool who asked for it. Suddenly it was okay not to work, the government would pay you anyway. They’d pay you to waste your time at university. They’d pay you to smoke drugs and march on the streets, they’d pay you to rip your own country apart. And they laughed at idiots like me. They hated us. Even though all the time we were the ones footing the bill.’

The flames leapt up, so that William saw his uncle as a dark shape before the fire, surrounded by ruin and rubbish, the rage rising in his voice with the flames.

‘We threw Whitlam out and Fraser came in — but nothing changed. No one gave a damn about you unless you were waving a placard. You had to be a migrant, or black, or homosexual. But God help you if you were a normal Australian, let alone a farmer like me. We used to be the backbone of this country. But not to those people. To them, we were the biggest problem. We were fascists. We were destroying the environment. We had to be controlled. Fraser went and Hawke came in, and things just kept getting worse. That’s when I gave up voting. Why bother? Parties, politicians — they’re all exactly the same.’

The firewood was sparking and spitting, and the old man stamped at the embers on the floor.

‘They don’t even like the way people like me
talk
any more. You can’t say a thing without someone calling you racist or sexist or some other sort of bigot. No one cares that farms are going broke right across the country, that people are dying of misery out here. You have to speak nicely, lie nicely, that’s all that matters. Now we’ve got Keating, and he’s the worst yet. If he gets his way, rural Australia is finished forever. So yes, I’ll fight him and his Native Title. No one is taking one square inch of my land away. I’ve kept this station alive despite everything the world has thrown at me. And I did it alone.’

The old man turned from the fire at last, the iron bar still gripped in his hand.

‘And you! You spend a few weeks here and you think all you have to do is wait for me to die! Well, it won’t be like that. You have to earn the right. You haven’t earnt anything. So don’t you
ever
nod at me like that!’

William didn’t move. The flames crackled and writhed, but everything, the fire and the room and the shape of his uncle, was blurred by the tears in his eyes. He’d been doing his best, to help, to grow up. What had he done that was so wrong?

‘Don’t cry, for Christ’s sake.’ The old man dropped the iron bar, took a few random steps about the room, stopped again. He waved a hand at the desk. ‘Look. Just finish off those newsletters. And clean up some of this mess. I’ll address the rest of the envelopes tomorrow.’

He turned towards the door, hesitated. ‘You have to understand. Nothing is easy … and I can’t leave this station to someone who’ll just give up when things get too hard.’

And with that he was gone.

William blinked away his tears. He sniffed, then unfolded himself, remembering the handful of pages he carried. He took them to the stapler, and then numbly worked his way through the last few copies of the newsletter, stapling and folding and sliding them into the envelopes. He didn’t feel useful any more. He felt cold, even with the fire bright behind him.

The work was done. William looked about the office, littered with crumpled papers and torn envelopes and scraps from the sheets of stamps. He gathered them up and placed them in a bin behind the desk. All he wanted to do now was creep back to his wing of the House and hide in his bedroom. But then he saw that one of the desk drawers was open. Something gleamed in there, amidst piles of old cheque books and ink pads. It was a large keyring. William stared. It held half a dozen keys. In his mind was a picture of the door on the landing of the central staircase, the door that led to the second storey. And the doors on the other staircases, at either end of the House. Locked doors. Without even thinking, he lifted the ring out, slowly, so as not to jangle it.

This was wrong, he knew. He had no business in his uncle’s desk, stealing keys. He certainly had no business going upstairs. The housekeeper had told him that on his very first day. His uncle had repeated the order. William held the keys before him, dreadfully fascinated. He almost put them back. But an anger was stirring in him now, at what the old man had put him through. And if he was supposed to grow up, if he was supposed to be strong and make his own decisions, then why should he always do what he was told?

Directly overhead, he could hear noises. The sound of something heavy being dragged, and footsteps, pacing back and forth on an echoing floor.

William put the keys into his pocket. He slid the drawer closed and, already afraid, slipped away into the halls.

Chapter Eighteen

B
Y 1941, JOHN WAS BACK AT WORK IN THE HOOP MOUNTAINS. With the war stimulating demand for timber, Oliver Fisher had expanded his sawmill operations and needed a supervisor up on the hills. Manpower was short, so John, even with his bad leg, got the job. Dudley, meanwhile, had been assigned as a gunner in the Eighth Division AIF. His formation had shipped out for the battlefields of Libya,but along the way they had been diverted to garrison duty north of Singapore. Dudley, in his letters, sounded fit and healthy, and somewhat bored.

It seemed to John that maybe hostilities would pass his friend by. But then the Japanese armies rolled down the Malay peninsula, the Allied forces retreated in disorder, and Singapore fell. Suddenly Japanese bombs were dropping on Darwin and Townsville. Panic gripped the country, and there was no question of standing aside now — John volunteered immediately. He was rejected and sent back to his duties in the mountains. All he could do was join the militia, and with other timber-cutters he formed a troop that was designated as a guerrilla force. In case of invasion, their job was to hide out in the hills and, using their local knowledge, disrupt any enemy activity in the area. But even with the war raging all about, the Powell region seemed a sleepy and unlikely battleground.

What made it all the more galling for John was that even Harriet had donned a uniform, enlisting in the Australian Women’s Army Service. She was posted locally, however, so at least the two of them were still able to meet from time to time. Their chief concern in those days was the fate of Dudley. The Eighth Division had been routed, and the survivors had passed into Japanese captivity — but was he one of those survivors? There was no mention of him in the casualty lists, but nor did his name appear on the Red Cross lists of those in the prison camps. He was simply missing in action. John and Harriet vowed to each other that they would not give up hope, but as the months went by without word, their talk of Dudley took on the tone of mourning. And in mourning him, they were steadily drawn closer together, and closer to betraying him.

Still, it was a shadowed courtship, for without Dudley around there was less laughter, less joy, and there were days when Australia itself seemed destined to fall. But in those grim months, at least John felt that there need be no more doubts about himself and Harriet. It was only the two of them now, and things like financial security or her father’s approval no longer seemed to matter. It was just a question of waiting until a decent time had passed in honour of Dudley, and until perhaps the war situation improved. And indeed, as 1942 progressed, things looked brighter. In the Pacific, the Japanese fleets were in retreat, and in New Guinea their troops had been brought to a halt at last. The threat of invasion receded. It was time, John decided, to speak.

But then came word from the Red Cross — Dudley was alive after all! He had finally turned up in a prison camp. There was no report on his condition, and frightening stories were already circulating about Japanese treatment of the POWs, but it was still the best possible news. Harriet was overjoyed — and yet John found himself confused by his own reaction. Relief, yes, but he was also aware of a sudden fear. Had Dudley been the one Harriet was waiting for all along? Had she turned to John only out of grief? They had spoken no direct words of marriage, after all. So what would happen when Dudley returned home, aglow with the glamour of war? What would her choice be then? John strove against these suspicions, but they refused to go away. More bitterly than ever he was convinced that, after the war, the world would belong to the men who had fought it. The world, and with it the one woman he wanted.