Bruny Read online

  There was almost an audible groan.

  ‘I guess you’ve heard all this before,’ I said, offering a wry smile. A few people nodded, a few glared. A few simply stared out the window, as if they had far better things to do.

  ‘Let me assure you that any information you wish to share with me will be treated as confidential.’

  Was that a snicker moving around the table? Had I amused them or insulted them? Okay, here was the bit that was always going to get tricky.

  ‘So, let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room,’ I said. ‘My brother is the premier and my sister is Maxine Coleman, leader of the Opposition. The fact I have equally amiable relations with them both perhaps gives you an insight into my ability to be discreet. And possibly why I left here at eighteen and went to live on the other side of the world, where I have stayed ever since.’

  That caused a chuckle. They looked at me with new interest. I had them now. I should have started the meeting with that, remembered that Tasmanians need the personal touch. They need to know you’re connected to them somehow.

  ‘So what I am going to need from all of you is an understanding of the issues you see at work, out in the community, around your dinner table, or even in your own head. I need to know what you’re experiencing here, and out there, when you leave this site.’

  I watched them reflect on the things that were said to them at the dinner table, at the pub, what their kids brought home from school and the playground. The way the music from the protesters, and the chanting, got in their heads.

  ‘I’m not going to take up any more of your time now, other than to say that seeing the bridge for the first time in person, it is truly remarkable. I know it’s probably been a very long four years for some of you. To see what’s happened to it must be hard. But I do reassure you that the premier is totally committed to seeing the project through and keeping you all safe in the process.’

  ‘And his Chinese workers,’ said Brankovic.

  ‘Yes, you will have the assistance of skilled Chinese labour,’ I said. ‘The project stands to benefit from that.’ I wasn’t here to sell them anything, but it needed to be said.

  ‘Your union can make all the fuss in the world, but it won’t change anything, Alec,’ Frank interjected. ‘If you take action, we can sack you all and bring in more of them. That’s the law.’

  ‘You and your laws,’ said Brankovic, and the room got quiet.

  ‘The more laws you make, the less rights people have. Have you noticed that? This government, it has crippled the unions. And when you do that, you cripple families. Everyday working people who have no comeback with their pay and conditions are losing out big time. I come from a country where I’ve seen this before. A government running over its people’s basic rights to privacy and protest. You should be very careful working for a government like that. It’s a greasy slope. Not just slippery, greasy. Because someone is always making you pay.’

  After the last election, JC’s majority government had passed protest laws that meant anyone in Tasmania communicating an opinion harmful to the government or government activities received a five-thousand-dollar fine. Those billboards on the hill were very risky. Any activist getting in the way of the normal activities of a business, or was found protesting on a business premises, copped the same fine and, if they reoffended, got a jail sentence of up to five years. The bill had been opposed by environmentalists but they’d lost in court.

  ‘You ought to read your history, Frank,’ Brankovic said. ‘But you are far too young to think you might learn something from that.’

  I could feel the support he got for that in the room.

  ‘Soon enough, Tasmanian workers, Australian workers, will be forced to accept Chinese rates of pay,’ he added.

  ‘Alec, that will never happen,’ said Frank. There was a flush at his neck. ‘The Chinese workers will be paid three times their usual pay. This is a win-win.’

  ‘What’s that, twenty cents an hour?’ said Brankovic.

  ‘The foreign workers’ pay is commercial-in-confidence, and you know that,’ said Frank. ‘These men will go home a lot richer than they arrived. I would have thought you’d be supporting that, Alec.’

  ‘I hope,’ another man said, also in fluoro, bald, fleshy. He was the head of manufacturing at the plant across the bay at Electrona, ‘there’s a lot of translators coming with them.’

  ‘They’re bringing translators,’ said Frank.

  ‘It’s going to be a huge problem,’ said Brankovic.

  Nods went around the table. There was an air of I can’t believe I’ve lived to see this day.

  I observed Mick Feltham. He had the look of someone who was going to retire after the bridge was done. He’d take his wife on a cruise and then maybe move to the shack. He’d kick the football with his grandchildren, and when they asked him did he really build the bridge to Bruny, he’d say, ‘I sure did.’

  The world is a machine that feeds on people. There’s always a cost. There are always broken marriages and messed-up children. Happiness—simple happiness—maybe it doesn’t really exist anymore. Not in the world I saw, anyway. When it did happen, it was fleeting at best. Somewhere in the great rushing wind of conflict, refugees, climate change and capitalism, it had dissipated. It would be easy to blame capitalism but it wasn’t just capitalism. It was this idea that everyone had a God-given right to live as they pleased. Now, in the US, there was a righteous, well-armed underbelly wearing their brown shirts and creeping deeper into America’s psyche while the Democrats might as well have been talking underwater.

  When the GFC happened back in 2008, the money to bail people out in America went to Wall Street and Silicon Valley. East Coast and West Coast. But it was the places in between—the ‘flyover zone’—where the real pain was felt; where the homes were lost and the suicides happened and the kids went without decent food and schools. Lots of those people had bought the messages of the far right. Men and women, young and old, with their Christian creed and their right to bear arms, had elected themselves a leader who was going to save them. But he hadn’t and America was paying the price. Australia had been teetering on the brink of right-wing extremism for years. Across the world there was a deepening sense of powerlessness. In Europe, a lot of people were overwhelmed by the tide of refugees and the influx of Islam. Now there was also the fear of speaking out. Of being seen as racist and xenophobic, anti-multiculturalism, anti-progress. The chaos of Brexit was really the desperate bid of the English to salvage whatever values they’d surrendered back in the 1950s. The growing movement to dismantle the EU was the same. What were our shared values? Nobody seemed to know, other than to look to the past. But you can’t wind back time. There was trouble coming. We could all feel it.

  Back in the meeting room at Tinderbox, I said, ‘We’re all delighted that it looks like the bridge can be repaired, Mick. That the damage wasn’t worse. I can only imagine how personal it feels to all of you to look out there and see it.’

  They turned their heads in unison and took in the mutilation.

  I flicked open my notes for the first time and scanned my itinerary. ‘So, in your emails, you’ll discover a schedule of one-on-ones. Frank, would you hand out the hard copies?’

  Frank stood and said, ‘We need everyone to make themselves available. No excuses.’ He handed a bunch of papers to the man next to him who took the top sheet and handed the rest on.

  Frank looked as if he was about to say more, but I spoke again.

  ‘Let me add that I know I sound American these days—it’s a hard thing to avoid after thirty-plus years away—but I am a Tasmanian. I grew up here, and I have a shack over there on North Bruny. On the hill. What happens here, with the bridge, this is personal to me too.’

  There was a silence. This was personal for all of us. I could work with that.

  ‘Now, any questions before we finish up?’ I asked.

  There was silence, and then the head of manufacturing said, ‘What if it c
an’t be done? By March? It makes no sense to rush it now. Except if you wanted to be re-elected.’

  The ripple of smirks went around the table.

  ‘Look, from my perspective, getting the community aligned, it takes the time it takes. You can’t hurry these things. That aside, there is a schedule, but that’s Mick’s area of expertise, not mine. I recall, Mick, you’ve worked miracles on deadlines before. The new Launceston power scheme for one?’

  Mick looked as if someone had stroked his feathers. As I said, I do my homework.

  ‘If that’s it, then let’s bring this to a close,’ I said. ‘Thank you all for your time. I look forward to speaking with each of you next week. Enjoy your weekend.’

  With that, I walked out of the room and back out into the reception area. Karen stood up again and, with a smile, handed me a paper bag.

  ‘You must be hungry,’ she said. ‘I put this aside for you.’

  I thanked her. I am a fan of the thoughtfulness of women. Then I crossed the foyer and headed towards the waiting government car.

  Inside the muted interior, behind the tinted glass, I wondered why that had been tougher than I’d imagined. Not tough the way militias were tough, or religious fanatics, or women returned from captivity. But the feeling of injury. They were bruised. As if the bomb had damaged them. Or maybe it went deeper than that. The daily dissent wherever they went. Working on this bridge was costing them.

  The government chauffeur said nothing and I blessed him for it. Frank was moving towards the car. The person walking with him was Mick Feltham.

  ‘It’s what it is,’ I heard Frank saying. ‘Premier’s relying on you.’ ‘At least she doesn’t waste time,’ Mick said. ‘See ya, Frank.’ And he turned back towards the buildings and Frank got into the car.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Well, I think that went well. They do good pies near the ferry terminal, if you’re hungry.’

  I held up my lunch bag. Frank frowned. ‘Okay,’ he said.

  The car exited the worksite, and took the road that would connect us with the highway to Kettering.

  Frank said, ‘JC told me about your house there at Dennes Point.’

  Frank making small talk. Good, I thought. A small power shift.

  ‘Haven’t seen it in a long time,’ I said.

  I wondered what would have changed over there in ten years. Apart from the bridge, maybe very little. This was what I relied on: that while the world went to hell in a handbasket, Tasmania stayed pretty much the same, decade after decade.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  We could have taken a boat across from the construction site, but I’d requested otherwise. I’d also offered to go on from Tinderbox alone, but JC had insisted Frank accompany me today. I think he wanted to show Frank that his objection to me being here was unwarranted.

  It had been a long time since I’d been on the Bruny ferry. And despite what everyone said, I was sure it wouldn’t be operational in a year or two. The bridge would do it in. There weren’t enough ferry devotees to make it worthwhile. It was the market reality. And I wanted to understand the communities that would lose all the passing trade.

  We drove through the tiny suburbs of Howden, Margate, Snug, past Coningham and Oyster Cove, along the winding rural road until we descended into Kettering. From there the road continued on to Woodbridge and eventually wound back to Cygnet, if you didn’t veer down Ferry Road. All these places named in honour of our British overlords. The new King of England is still Australia’s figurehead. If the crowd at the airport, and the people I’d observed in the streets and shops were anything to go by, Tasmania was still almost entirely an Anglo-Saxon population of people schooled in British manners, habits, food and government. It was possible Tasmania had changed, beneath the surface, but I doubted it. Other than people who looked like tourists, I had hardly seen a non-Caucasian person.

  The channel used to be a place of orchards—cherries, apricots, apples. The apples had mostly gone in the seventies when Britain joined the European market. Tasmania had grown an abundance of potato varieties back then too, but they had gone when one of the multinationals insisted on farmers growing a single potato variety suitable for making fries. A few years later, with all that diversity lost, the multinational moved on to another country with cheaper labour, better subsidies. Looking at the countryside with its weatherboard farmhouses, paddocks, fences and tidy gardens, I wondered if the latest venture was alpacas or health spas. Sheep’s cheese or sloe gin.

  The Bruny ferry crossing is twelve minutes or so. The wait was much longer. There were vehicles lined up across the bitumen car park in neat lines. I went into the cafe with Frank and got coffee. I took it back to the car and ate my sandwich. It was a Reuben and I wondered if someone thought of that especially for me, coming from New York. If so, I appreciated it. The silverside was good. The sauerkraut was excellent and the cheese just right. Not toasted but delicious. I was suddenly homesick for New York. The trees had been bare when I’d raced home to pack for this trip. The wind rushing through Union Square had grown icy in the weeks I’d been gone to the Middle East. Suddenly everyone was in black puffer coats and beanies.

  When you live in the East Village, you can walk two blocks and wonder what part of the world you’re in and if you’re safe. Near the East River, in Alphabet City where the avenues go by letters, even today the code is still A for adventure, B for beware, C for caution and D for dead. I live in a fifth floor walk-up on East 4th Street between Caution and Dead. It’s fine to go to the grocery one block over, but not to the one across the road. Sometimes it’s good to be a white person and feel unsafe. It reminds me what my children have to go through every day. What the people I work with go through every day. Of course, for most women, fear is a state of daily awareness. But at six feet tall and trained to defend myself, I’ve probably had less of that than many women. I love the East Village. I love its edginess that’s so unlike the West Village. I love the little library on Tompkins Square Park and the coffee at Third Rail and Momofuku’s shrimp buns and chicken noodle soup. It was hard to believe I was there just the other night with Tavvy and Paul having a last dinner before I left again. Though they’re both grown up, and I leave Manhattan often, something about being here, waiting for the Bruny ferry, made me feel very far away from them. I hadn’t given them this. In a way, I thought I’d been saving them from it. From the smallness of a life here in Tasmania. I’d escaped. I’d wanted them to have a different life. A bigger, more colourful, more international life. Well, they sure got that, but maybe I’d been wrong. That’s the downside with parenting. There’s no going back.

  The chauffeur started up the car and drove us onto the ferry. It was the same old beast as the last time I was here. Salt-sodden, rust-eaten, painted up and practical. A double-decker ferry carrying buses, a couple of trucks bearing the branding of building contractors, residents, and all those tourists in their rental cars, all keen to see Adventure Bay, Cloudy Bay, the lighthouse, the Neck. It was easy to spot them. They were the Asians and Indians with their cameras and slightly jaunty holiday wear at odds with the practical clothing worn by the locals. Clearly Manhattan wasn’t the only place where the black puffer jacket was the outdoor uniform. My briefing notes told me that South Bruny had an abundance of visitor accommodation, cruises, fishing trips, shops, cafes, wineries, history and diving. On the long pristine beaches, fairy penguins came ashore after dark, shearwaters nested in the sand dunes and there were dawn vistas from isolated lookouts. Two hundred and fifty thousand tourists a year were proof that whatever Bruny offered, people liked it. It made sense to build a bridge. So why was everyone so het up about it? Why had someone wanted to blow the thing up? Was it just that Tasmanians will protest anything that comes in the guise of progress?

  ‘Why do you think Tasmanians are so upset about the bridge, Frank?’ I asked, sipping coffee.

  ‘Because everyone here is inoculated against change. And the worst of them are the sea changers and tree changers wh
o have done more to change the place than anyone.’

  ‘But it makes sense, yes, to let tourists have better access to Bruny? I mean, they’re coming anyway,’ I said.

  ‘There’s plenty of room,’ said Frank. ‘The place is booming. People ought to be grateful.’

  ‘Yet people smell a rat. Is it the size of the bridge? The two billion dollars? I mean, the scale of the thing, it doesn’t quite add up, does it?’

  ‘What’s to add up? Tasmanians complain all the time about being the poor cousin and then, when the federal government finally gives them a golden goose, they turn up their noses at it.’

  ‘So there is no other agenda? Something everyone’s missing?’

  ‘You’ve been here twenty-four hours and you’re already talking conspiracy theories?’

  We were parked on the lower level of the ferry, so I got out of the car and took the stairs to the upper deck. There, leaning against the railing, I surveyed the channel. It was dark denim blue. A five- to ten-knot south-westerly was ruffling the water. I breathed in the salt air. Most places I’ve travelled, I’ve found beauty, but in Tasmania, each time I come back, I get hit with it all over again. The beauty here is of a different order. Something to do with the light and the air that is so crisp and unpolluted it almost hurts to take a deep breath at first.

  Further along the deck, a young woman emerged from a minibus in a floral dress with a garland around her head. Other women emerged from the bus, also in floral dresses and high heels. One had a camera, and she began to photograph the garlanded woman, who posed as models do, assured of her beauty, at ease with her body and her smile, slightly embarrassed at all the attention. The breeze was stiffening as we moved into the channel, and the wind blew her dress up, revealing black lace underwear. All the women laughed.