Bruny Page 4

  Nevertheless, despite its isolation, North Bruny had maintained a determined population of home and shack owners and I was one of them. Not that I’d spent much time there in the past thirty years. But from time to time I’d fantasised about coming home, sitting out on the deck watching my grandkids playing on the lawn. Leaving the world behind for a little bit of paradise. Though how I’d ever get Paul and Tavvy out of New York now … Still, it had been a dream. It was probably still a dream, if I thought about it. But dreams had run aground in my life a few years back when my marriage ended, and I hadn’t created any new ones. Mostly I’d just trashed the old ones.

  The Bruny Bridge was clearly a massive dream. A global statement. Yet it was here at the far end of nowhere. It begged a question. Why? Why was it so very big? Was that just the way of the world now? Taller buildings, bigger bridges, wider roadways, deeper tunnels, bigger wars, greater wealth, greater poverty, shadier politicians?

  Young Frank had been silent all the way, giving me time to take in the changes I was observing out the window of the chauffeured car. In Hobart, there were more people in the streets, and more cars on the road than when I was last here, but it was nothing compared to the rest of the world. There was a new highway that peeled off at Kingston and cut across the hills to Tinderbox. There were new houses glimpsed high on the hills. What wasn’t new was the vivid blue sky, the wide sparkling river and the feeling of being a very long way from anywhere. Especially anywhere that was crowded, dirty or dangerous.

  When we’d gotten out of the car at Tinderbox, I was glad I’d brought a good jacket. The breeze coming in from the west was cold. Tasmania has the most changeable weather I’ve ever encountered.

  In a movie, chief of staff Frank Pringle would be played by a twenty-something Paul Bettany. Frank had the vivid ginger looks and sharp features but none of the mischief of Bettany. Beaten out of him, no doubt, by the boys’ school education and the standard economics/law degree from Melbourne Uni, the same degree and university as JC—just thirty years later. This was the boy JC had charged with Tasmania’s strategic direction.

  ‘Well, you can’t miss it …’ I said.

  ‘If they’d blown all the suspension wires, we would have been stuffed. I think it was amateurs. Only one tower. Almost certainly those mongrels over there,’ he said, eyeing Dennes Point.

  ‘The Bruny Friends Group?’ I asked. ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘You can make a bomb in your kitchen,’ said Frank. ‘The joy of the internet.’

  ‘But they must have dived in the dark,’ I said. ‘That’s no simple thing, setting explosives underwater at night. In a current. And they’re heavy, bombs like that. They’d have needed special machinery. A commercial-grade oxyacetylene torch for one, to take out that anchor point. They knew what they were doing, whoever it was. And a boat like that. It was a stealth vessel, wasn’t it? Not the sort of thing you can rent.’

  Frank frowned at me. ‘You’ve been talking to the feds.’ He was referring to the federal police, who were now in charge of the whole investigation.

  I shrugged. ‘You pick things up in my line of work,’ I said. Maybe they’d used PETN in waterproof containers, but they’d have needed some way to transfer all that along the seabed. Couldn’t have done it with regular air either. The cost would have been huge, putting all that together. Definitely not the work of amateurs.

  ‘The UN,’ Frank scoffed. ‘What was the mandate? International peace and security?’

  I observed him.

  ‘Can’t say the world looks like the UN has made much difference, right now,’ he said.

  I waited. I was a long way from anywhere, here on this headland. That’s what I wanted to think.

  Frank went on. ‘Must be pretty good getting a gig to come home and settle the restless natives of Tasmania.’

  I wanted to say, ‘Must be good being chief of staff at thirty,’ but I didn’t. Instead I said, ‘You’re right, Frank. The UN is not perfect, but its mission is still sound. It’s idealistic, but what good mission isn’t? Of course, things go wrong at times. After all, it’s made up of humans.’

  ‘But with the US pulling out, and everything else going on,’ said Frank, ‘we all know it’s only a matter of time before Europe erupts. These days we need the Chinese on our side far more than the US.’

  ‘I saw the tourism figures,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not Chinese tourists that are going to make the difference—it’s investment.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  ‘That’s what the people of Tasmania need to understand.’

  ‘You know, Frank, I always think that international cooperation begins with two people.’

  ‘Is that how it works?’ he asked.

  I was twenty-six years older than him. I’m paid to be nice.

  ‘It is, Frank, it is. And I’m a pragmatist. We’ve got a long summer ahead. Anything else you want to get off your chest?’

  ‘I told JC it was a mistake getting you involved,’ he said.

  ‘You and everyone else, I expect. But sometimes JC is his own man. I know that’s never easy for advisers to accept, but here I am.’

  ‘It’s so wrong,’ said Frank. ‘You’re his sister. No matter how the premier and your sister want to play it, it looks bad and it’s going to backfire. Probably on all of you.’

  ‘And, Frank, I’m a Tasmanian. I happen to own a house right across there. You a Tasmanian, Frank?’

  Frank shook his head.

  ‘Where did you grow up?’ I asked. I knew the answer, but it usually doesn’t pay to let people know you’ve backgrounded them.

  ‘Northern Victoria, up on the Murray,’ he said.

  ‘Your family still there?’

  He nodded curtly. They were. His mother had a clothing store. His father owned the local service station. Frank was a country boy made good.

  ‘Well, then, I expect you understand what it means to come from a place that’s in your bones.’

  Frank shrugged.

  Life is wiser than you. That had been my profound thought upon waking at 2 am. I have them from time to time, these little text messages that arrive in my brain. I think sometimes I should write them down. Thoughts for Life. But I don’t. If that little thought was true, then I had to trust that somehow Frank was the wise choice here for JC and for Tasmania. I had to trust that I was in the right place at the right time.

  ‘You think they’ll find them?’ I asked. ‘The bombers?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Frank. ‘Nowhere to hide.’

  I looked down the channel at the hills disappearing back into the World Heritage-listed area that stretched all the way to the west coast, hundreds of impenetrable miles away. Sure, nowhere to hide. Unless you wanted to.

  Looking across to Dennes Point, I thought I could see the roof of my house, though I might have been wrong. It had been so long. The houses continued right along the waterfront now, and there were more up in the hills.

  ‘It’s got busier over there,’ I noted.

  ‘Not really,’ said Frank. ‘All the action is at Adventure Bay. North Bruny will always be a backwater. The bridge isn’t going to change that. People will just drive right through. A bit of noise and they’ve made all this fuss for four years. Tasmanians will make a fuss about anything. Over there, and down at the other BFG camp you’ll see in a minute, they really think they can beat this bridge, but they can’t and they haven’t. Even with all their celebrity supporters.’

  He paused and then he said, ‘Soon enough, someone is going to talk. And then people are going to go to jail for a very long time. No-one can keep a secret here. I’m sure you remember that. Now, if you’ve done enough sightseeing, let’s go.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The construction site was a village of demountables comprising the ‘offices’ of the bridge. It sprawled across a hill previously used for sheep, swelling the population of Tinderbox from forty-seven to four hundred and twenty on a daily basis.

  ‘We al
so acquired a private swimming pool,’ Frank said, pointing down the hill as the chauffeured car took the last curves to the site. ‘It never went through the proper channels with local government, so it became a bit of a compulsory acquisition. We filled it in.’

  Frank was a future despot.

  We passed under the flyover that connected the new stretch of highway with the bridge, and entered the site. We both stepped out of the car and showed our ID. Security had been drastically increased. We were scanned with a metal detector. I was surprised we weren’t x-rayed. How could anyone be trustworthy? What if Frank had another agenda? Maybe he was quietly an anarchist. Maybe I was. In my line of work, you learn to trust nobody, even when you’ve known them a very long time.

  Nobody had imagined a bomb. Maybe a little graffiti. Or a high-wire, attention-seeking activist wanting to be the latest viral sensation. But a bomb? This was Tasmania. Possibly the quietest place in the world.

  On the side of the small valley was BFG site number one—the Bruny Friends Group. There was a white farmhouse at the top of the hill and below it were tents of every shape and colour. Vans, caravans and cars were squeezed into every inch of a steep terraced paddock. In the middle of the paddock, either side of a big weathered marquee, were two twenty-four-sheet posters. One poster read: HALF DOWN, HALF TO GO with a cartoon of the bridge being blown up.

  The other read: NO FOREIGN LABOUR. PROTECT TASMANIAN JOBS—black type on a white background.

  After four years of protest, the encampment looked like a tired festival. Music was pumping through the air. People were wandering about or were seated on the grass watching the site below, or possibly taking in the view.

  ‘Quite a crowd,’ I said, as we got out of the car.

  ‘There’s been a fresh influx since the bombing. They think they’ve got wind of a victory.’

  ‘R.E.M.,’ I said, ‘“Drive”.’

  ‘They fire up early and don’t stop till the shifts are done,’ said Frank. ‘Apparently it’s become the Protest Playlist on Spotify. You get used to it,’ he added.

  ‘I guess you come and go,’ I said.

  He stiffened a little in his two-button suit. He had the current look, Frank. A nautilus shell of hair above a crew cut, the serious weightlifter body, the narrow size eleven shoes, the pale blue patterned socks. A man going to that trouble gets up around five every morning. I guessed the red hair had caused him problems at school. Maybe he’d had a bully for a father. The guys who look like they’ve worked out since their teens, there’s always a story. The pursuit of power was so often revenge for men.

  ‘It’s not the music that upsets people,’ Frank said. ‘It’s the chanting. The ferals tend to do that towards the end of the day, when everyone’s heading home. Surprised they’re here today. Maybe for your benefit.’

  I turned and looked up at them. I waved. A couple of people waved back. Step one in getting to know each other.

  ‘You’d think they’d be lauding the workers, not trying to destroy their morale,’ Frank said. ‘It’s just another front for the Greens.’

  The Greens. The political movement that had started right here in Tasmania back in the early seventies and birthed a global movement.

  ‘They really don’t know their history,’ said Frank.

  I waited.

  ‘Greatest lie ever told is that communism would be a brilliant idea if it worked. It’s actually one of the most evil ideas humanity has ever aspired to. Those people up there, they want people like you and me to pay them to sit about, live in their hay bale houses and wear their vegan shoes. They get raided pretty regularly for drugs. But they rebuild. Even the police have grown weary.’

  Or sympathetic, I thought. It’s always a mistake to think of protesters as ‘the other’. Usually they were your neighbours, sometimes your children and even your friends. The BFG, from what I’d read, were not a front for the Greens. Their membership was far more diverse than that. I’m not paid to have a political perspective. If Frank was trying to determine whether I was aligned with my brother, my sister, or even the Greens, he wasn’t going to get any joy from me. In my work, it’s not about alignments. It’s about perspectives.

  Frank then pointed out the various staff facilities—kitchen and cafeteria and the various offices for the director, HR, engineering and media. Signage, pathways, efficiency.

  ‘Normally there’s about four hundred men on site,’ he said. ‘Two shifts, seven days a week.’

  Down by the waterfront, there was still a children’s playground, a red slide, rubber-tyre swings and an old roundabout that I thought I remembered.

  ‘Anyone make use of it?’ I asked, eyeing the swing.

  Frank merely shook his head. ‘It was the local park before we took over,’ he said. He was a serious young man.

  When we entered the executive building, the admin staff stared. A late-thirty-something woman got up from her desk. She introduced herself as Karen, assistant to Mick Feltham, the bridge director, and showed us into a large meeting room with a table big enough to seat twenty, although there were only half that many present. Mick Feltham was there, plus the chief engineer, the head of procurement, the head of manufacture, OH&S, PR, union and HR.

  On the walls were framed artist’s impressions of the project complete with traffic, sailing boats and road systems. The windows looked out on the bridge and all the way to the narrow beach and rocky flats where we had played—me, Max and JC—as children on family picnics.

  Karen offered me tea or coffee. I asked for a long black, one sugar. The men had already helped themselves to a pile of sandwiches on a central platter. I eyed the sandwiches but, despite being hungry, avoided the food. A man could pull that off, eating while talking, eating while commanding a meeting, but not a woman.

  I’ve spent more than three decades learning to read people. It’s like sniffing the air for rain. This room had complexity. There was wariness and resentment. There was also relief and straight antagonism amidst the usual blend of curiosity and hostility that came with my job, and with my being a woman in a room full of men.

  I circled the table and shook everyone’s hand and then I said to those still standing, ‘Please take a seat.’

  I remained on my feet. Frank tried to catch my eye as if he expected to make the opening remarks. I continued.

  ‘So, hello,’ I said. ‘As you all know, I’m Astrid Coleman, and I’m a conflict resolution specialist. I usually work in war zones for the UN, but I’ve taken leave to come help out here. I understand Mick has already briefed you on this morning’s meeting with the premier?’

  Mick nodded. So did a couple of the other men.

  ‘I know it’s been a very difficult week,’ I continued. ‘I’m here to ensure that things settle down.’

  ‘Yeah, but with foreign labour.’ A man in a high-vis vest with a Baltic accent had spoken. Alec Brankovic, rep for the CFMEU, the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union—one of the most powerful unions in the country. I had a file with all their photographs. I had their names and faces memorised.

  ‘Yes, Alec, it is going to take foreign labour. That’s a federal decision.’

  ‘It’s a fucking outrage.’

  ‘Alec, right now, I’m just giving you a heads-up.’

  He stared, and then looked away.

  I scanned their faces. I scanned myself too, noticing I was nervous. I paused to breathe, lower my energy. I suddenly felt out of my comfort zone. But this work was my comfort zone. Were my nerves showing? Maybe not to the people around the table, but it was unsettling me. Tasmania. It was Tasmania. The people around that table looked like people I’d once known. My teachers, the fathers of my friends. They had the outdoor faces of Tasmanians—a bit similar to Americans who worked the land. Like they knew distances, sunshine, weather and hard work. And right now these people were rattled.

  Tasmanians have a history of being extremely good at protests. When they band together, they have created protests on an internati
onal scale. They have stopped their rivers being dammed for hydro schemes, and pulp mills being built. They’ve stopped forests being destroyed, hotels and landing strips being built in national parks, and salmon farms taking over waterways. I knew that in the time I had, I could only make a show of fixing this resistance to the bridge. On top of that there was the additional irritant of foreign workers.

  I’m a fraud, I thought. That’s why I’m nervous. They can tell I’m a fraud.

  I am not a fraud, I told that voice. I’m good at this. Shut the fuck up.

  I breathed again and wriggled my toes in the steel-capped Blundstones I had dragged out of the back of my wardrobe when I was packing for this trip. Nothing like steel caps when you’re the only woman in the room, and often the only one unarmed. And nothing like a Blundstone boot for making Tasmanians think you’re okay too. Once Tasmania had been home to Blundstone like Oregon was home to Nike. But the boots haven’t been made in Tasmania for years. Now they’re made in China and they don’t last. Mine are more than twenty years old, from the good ol’ days.

  ‘So the aim is to get this bridge opened on March fourth next year,’ I continued. ‘That’s going to come round fast. I think you’ll all agree it’s going to take something big. I want to know from each of you what that something is. Don’t tell me now. I want you to think about it over the weekend. What will March the fourth next year look like? How will the community be feeling when there are cars going over this bridge, boats going under it? How will you be feeling about the job you’ve done?’

  I paused again. The bomb had clearly spooked them. If one could go off at dawn, why not any time of the day? Why not on their shift?

  ‘You all know the new security measures. No-one gets on or off this site without clearance. This bridge now has additional surveillance day and night. The federal police are determined to solve this.’

  I wasn’t telling them anything they didn’t know, but it seemed to soothe them a little.

  ‘I have one-on-one interviews with each of you on Monday and Tuesday. I look forward to those conversations. I’ll also be conducting interviews with community leaders, supporters, protestors and people further afield who have expressed an interest in this project. And beyond that, there’ll be meetings to keep all of you—the people employed and the community, everyone—informed of progress over the remaining months.’