Bruny Read online

  ‘Come together, ladies,’ said the photographer, and snapped them as they cuddled and laughed. Being November, it occurred to me that this was probably a Melbourne Cup party. Australia’s favourite horse race inspired social events across the country. Even in Hobart.

  I noticed that men were emerging from the cars around the women. As if they could smell the scent of fresh oestrogen, these older men in blue singlets or polo shorts, with their beer guts and jowls, sauntered about taking off their caps and rubbing their balding heads, puffing out their chests, nodding to one another and covertly staring at the women, like roosters assessing the hens. Are you serious? I wanted to say to them. Don’t you know how old you are? They are never going to look at you!

  Along the railing, three Chinese women had dressed for this ferry crossing in blue striped t-shirts, white pants and sneakers. They photographed one another, but when they saw the male attention the floral women were getting, they moved further down the railing. They looked a little lost.

  A passing yacht heeled to starboard, heading up the channel. The Chinese woman returned to their car. The floral women resumed their seats on the minibus. I looked north and took in the dramatic expanse of bridge, huge even from this distance.

  Driving off the ferry, we followed the traffic up over the hill. At the North Bruny turn-off, only one other car took the road to Dennes Point. The rest of the traffic headed south.

  The road had been upgraded, widened and sealed in anticipation of the bridge. Gone were the tight gravel corners and corrugated surface. Now it was a four-lane tarmac carved through farmlands. Only as we reached Dennes Point did the roadworks end, and we diverted to the old road. We could see the last section that, when complete, would sweep over the hill, down past the 1800s red-brick farmhouse, to the bridge.

  We passed my house on the left. I didn’t mention this to Frank. Perhaps he already knew. I was relieved it was on this old section of road away from the bridge traffic. So was the new cafe and local art gallery that had opened a few years back. And there was the bridge up close, winged, injured, a giant beast fallen on one knee.

  We pulled in by the jetty. It had been upgraded too—lengthened and widened for equipment and supplies. We got out and walked a short distance along the shore to the headquarters of the BFG.

  ‘Very well funded, as you will see. They pretend they’re not a political group, so donations are tax deductible,’ Frank sneered.

  ‘Like churches,’ I said.

  Frank did not reply.

  BFG number two camp was very different to the one across at Tinderbox. Over there it was hippie music festival. Here it was neat rows of temporary cabins, portable toilets and shower facilities clearly marked. Rental recreational vehicles were parked in neat lines. People were seated at outdoor tables, engaged in conversations. There was an attention to order. And no music. People paused and observed us as we walked in. Frank’s suit and tie was decidedly out of place and I was grateful for the outdoor pants and polar fleece jacket I was wearing. I blended in. The blackboard outside the kitchen tent announced today’s lunch as vegetarian lasagne with garlic bread and salad at fifteen dollars a serve. There were water tanks and duckboard to protect the shoreline and almost a military air. Somewhere in this camp, I thought, were people who knew how to lay explosives. But why now? Why after almost four years? Why not wait until the day it opened, with all the politicians present to watch it blow? When the international media were going to be here in force for the whole event. Why now?

  Maybe they got desperate. It was a long time to maintain a protest. Every day and every night. No, I decided. These people had sticking power. Four years, through one election cycle and into the next. Why, I wondered, not for the first time, were Tasmanians so good at protesting?

  I recognised Gilbert Farris immediately. If you were casting Farris in a movie, you’d want a character actor. Michael Shannon would do just fine. The same sociopathic tendencies, easy smile and hard eyes.

  Farris bought the property at the end of the beach a year before the bridge project was announced. He’d thought he was retiring from the world to work on his next great tome on the human species. But then people began crawling over his little bit of paradise. Bridge designers were imagining caissons and cables, engineers were considering wind and tide, torsion and tension. Soon enough, boatloads of workers were being ferried back and forth from the pier by his house and Farris’s haven was suddenly the scene of one of Australia’s most significant infrastructure projects in years.

  I’ve known a lot of men like Farris. Because of the privileges afforded them, they are eminently employable. I’m menopausal. I know I can sound tough about men, but I’ve had fifty-six years for things to simmer beneath the surface and now they’re bubbling up. My daughter Tavvy—Octavia—calls them cis-gendered white males, but to me the ones like Farris are just husbands. They tend to have wives who for years worked full-time while their men built careers. Women who raised children, did the ferrying of provisions and sports bags, ran the social calendar, oversaw the homework and housework, the soccer fixtures and the swimming lessons, loved these men and ensured with all their care and nurture and support that these men of words, ideas and inventions fulfilled their greatness. And this greatness was made evident by the world bestowing that word—genius—upon them. And having had it bestowed, they carried this word as they might carry a great shield bearing their names and icons.

  Maxine and I had both gone to a Catholic girls’ school. Our mother had not exactly behaved to type, but we had been trained to be good. Compliant. Well-behaved. Charming. Never laugh too loud. Never interrupt. Never tease a boy. Be of service. Do the housework. Make the beds. Cook the meals. Honour thy father and thy mother and thy brother. Pretend sex never happens.

  Everywhere I’ve travelled, regardless of skin colour, religion, economic or political circumstances, it’s men who’ve created the violence and viciousness of the world. It’s the way it is. There’ve been a few exceptions, of course. Maggie Thatcher. Ruined the lives of millions in her own country and a few in the Falklands too. And Aung Sun Suu Kyi. I don’t excuse the savagery that’s happened under her leadership, but she never had the real power or authority. It was all show. The Myanmar military were always in control after she was elected. She spent twenty years under house arrest, under that same military regime. Lost her sons, her husband, and God knows what else.

  One woman I knew, also in Asia, was under house arrest for three years. Every night, the militia sent in a different soldier to rape her. Every night. After three years, there was an election. Government was restored. She was freed. That’s what democracy can do.

  But people get immune to violence when it’s all they know, and all I know is that men enact it everywhere. And usually they enact it in the name of some kind of God, even the God of Economics. I try not to go down this road, getting cynical, but it comes with the territory. Like the bad dreams, and the sweats that follow loud bangs or when I hear a child scream. I don’t sleep well. I get jumpy in four-wheel drives. It would be easy to think of it as PTSD, but who isn’t a little bit fucked up by the modern world?

  CHAPTER SIX

  Gilbert Farris was the bestselling author of seven tomes, including the controversial bestseller Homogenocene. He had been insisting loudly on every news outlet that the BFG had had no part in the bombing. They’d never advocated violence. But the BFG, he had clarified, applauded any effort to delay the completion of the bridge. I’d sat through hours of footage JC’s people had prepared for me, giving me the media history over the past four years and more.

  ‘This bridge has no good part to play for Tasmanians,’ Farris had said on an ABC special on the bridge back when the federal government, heading to the polls six years ago, made it a key election promise for Tasmania.

  ‘Imagine what two billion dollars transforming the Midlands into arable land for growing crops would do,’ he had said.

  He came up well on camera, if a little oafish. His
nose was getting fleshy, his jawline too. But he had the same pale blue eyes that had made him look penetrating in his YouTube lectures and on the jackets of his books.

  ‘What would two billion dollars on wind farms do? Imagine even ten per cent of that spent on Tasmanian schools!’

  Farris reprised this once we were seated outside a large portable office. The Bruny Bridge swept forty or fifty metres above us. The government had compulsorily acquired a narrow stretch of Farris’s land for the flyover, and it was said that he had used the money to fund the BFG.

  There were two women flanking him.

  ‘Maggie Lennox,’ said the first, a striking older woman in a bright orange jacket and a strand of pearls that whispered Paspaley. ‘That money poured into Tasmanian schools would change an entire generation.’

  Maggie Lennox had a South African accent. ‘And this is Jenny Singh,’ she said.

  ‘Public relations,’ said Jenny Singh. She was my age, all generous curves, red lips, liquid black eyes, a floral headscarf and sunglasses dangling from around her neck. She’d previously been head of PR for a multinational in Zurich before sea-changing to Bruny. Farris might be their star mouthpiece, but it was Jenny Singh who had landed so much of the press that had advanced the BFG’s agenda.

  We all sat in deckchairs with the bridge ahead and above us. Frank’s suit, and his youth, looked out of place. Farris was observing me, waiting for me to respond to his opening address. I turned to Singh. ‘Do you live here at Dennes Point?’ As I said, I never let people know I’ve backgrounded them.

  ‘We’re at Adventure Bay,’ she said. Adventure Bay was on South Bruny, about an hour’s drive. ‘Where all the tourists end up. We’ve had years of resisting hotels and high-rises down there. And we’re losing. We’re all losing. We didn’t move here to find Bruny becoming Miami or the Gold Coast. Bruny Island is a small community. A really active community. We moved here because we don’t like crowds. We don’t want our roads congested, our wildlife killed. There’s no planning on water reserves or even toilet blocks. No planning on sewerage. This government has no idea …’

  ‘You have an accommodation business, yes?’ I asked Lennox.

  ‘Maggie owns Solitude,’ said Singh. Solitude. The high end of the high end of Tasmanian tourism. Word was that Oprah and Reese Witherspoon had stayed there recently with Witherspoon’s kids. It was price on application, tailored services. Starting price apparently some twenty thousand US dollars per week.

  ‘And the cafe and gallery here at Dennes Point too,’ Singh added. ‘It provides all the food for the camp.’

  ‘This isn’t just about economics,’ said Farris. ‘It’s about a loss of place.’ He had an abrasive quality. ‘Tasmanians are like small, furry animals with no predators. Well, they have a predator now, and it’s a monster.’

  ‘People are distraught,’ agreed Singh.

  I had taken in the CCTV surveillance at the camp on approach. The BFG had eyes on every part of the project, and they had eyes on themselves. Smart. And they had a high-powered telescope trained on the worksite back over at Tinderbox. Farris was happy to point that out.

  ‘We don’t miss anything,’ he said.

  ‘So you got film of the bridge being blown up?’

  ‘We handed it all over,’ he said. ‘As soon as we began this protest, we knew they’d want to disable us. And they’ve tried.’

  ‘I suggested the cameras be installed right from the start,’ Jenny Singh added. ‘I was sure things would get nasty. Two billion dollars, after all. The government was always going to try to wipe us out.’

  ‘That’s the way you people work, we know that,’ said Farris.

  You people … I didn’t bite. ‘What does your footage show of that morning?’

  ‘That it was dark,’ said Farris. ‘Security saw nothing until the boat was halfway down the channel. Godawful explosion. Woke everyone in Dennes Point and at Tinderbox. I was in the kitchen making coffee and felt the tremor. Thought it was a bloody earthquake. Then that far pylon just collapsed. The whole thing shook like a guitar string, then it started twisting. I thought the whole bridge was going to go.’

  The Bruny Friends Group had formed within twenty-four hours of the bridge being announced, and they’d been going ever since, gaining momentum with members and funding. They were highly engaged, well informed, well resourced, articulate and well connected. Because Farris was involved, many high-profile visitors had been drawn to Tasmania to see the bridge and support their cause. In short, they were the worst sort of protesters for a government or a corporation.

  ‘You’ve been at this a long time, and you’ve built incredible awareness,’ I said. ‘You’ve got about forty per cent of Tasmanians supporting you. Why haven’t you succeeded in stopping it?’

  Lennox sighed. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘You know. You see it, even looking like it does now. People come here and they see the architecture, this feat of engineering, and they love it.’

  ‘They don’t see the island trampled with tourists,’ said Singh. ‘They don’t see the damage to birdlife or wildlife, the threat to the fairy penguins and shearwater rookeries. It’s more than a loss of place, though Gilbert is right, it is that too. It’s the death of a way of life. You put a bridge in and it stops being an island.’

  At this they all nodded. Island. Tasmanians are island people. Bruny Islanders even more so. It’s a very different identity to that of someone from the American Midwest, the mountains of Europe, the veldts of Africa. There is always the awareness that we are somehow water-bound and water-dependant. The water is friend and foe. Every child is taught to swim and every year there are drownings—fishermen, surfers, jet ski riders, swimmers. We are water people. If this bridge was being built to join Tasmania to mainland Australia, Tasmania would, I imagined, be absorbed into mainland Australian culture within a decade or two. I was sure Tasmanians would resist that with everything they had, despite the economic advantages. Because to live on an island isn’t just a location. It’s a sense of belonging. It’s history and sacrifice. It’s a choice to be remote. It’s a kind of metaphor.

  Manhattan is an island. It’s easy for people to forget that, but I never do. I am sure that’s why I felt so at home there when I first arrived for university. I was between water. Surrounded by water. There was the smell of salt in the afternoon breeze that blew through Midtown. I could watch the sun set over New Jersey across the Hudson. There was the possibility that, if we had to, we could close the bridges and the tunnels. Of course, no-one had seen an attack coming by air. But the premise remained. An island was both a stronghold and a bolthole. It was also a choice to live on land that might be prey to the sea level rising, to tsunamis, hurricanes and king tides. These new arrivals to Bruny—the Farrises and the Singhs and the Lennoxes—these sea changers with their ideas of an old age far from the madding crowd, and the residents who felt that sense of island deep in their bones, it was probably the same for all of them. The longer they’d been here, the deeper it went. And right here on Dennes Point was the micro reality of being an islander in the face of a very macro bridge.

  ‘Why was it blown up now?’ I asked them.

  I thought Maggie Lennox was going to answer, but Farris interjected.

  ‘It’s always about who has the most to gain,’ he said.

  ‘This is fabulous publicity,’ said Singh. ‘It makes all the protesters look like terrorists. Public sympathy is now on your brother’s side, just as he’s going into an election.’

  ‘Gilbert is right,’ said Lennox. ‘Someone is benefiting from this.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Singh. ‘The Chinese.’

  ‘The Chinese?’ I asked.

  ‘The Chinese!’ said Frank who had, until now, maintained a polite silence. ‘The Chinese are Tasmania’s biggest investor.’

  ‘They don’t let us go there and buy land and businesses willy nilly,’ said Singh, ‘in case you haven’t noticed. The same in Switzerland. Smart places don’t. They p
rotect their assets. And land is our asset.’

  ‘So is beauty,’ said Maggie Lennox.

  Frank scoffed.

  I gave him a look. He leaned back in his chair and stared up at the sky. ‘A one-hundred-million-dollar golf course and health resort on the east coast. A three-hundred-million-dollar investment in the dairy industry. Do you people have any idea of the employment that creates?’

  ‘Precious little, actually, Frank,’ said Gilbert Farris, ‘if you bothered to do your own analysis and didn’t simply believe the press releases of the Chinese government.’

  ‘Frank,’ I said. ‘Can we have a moment?’

  I got up and indicated for him to walk with me. Quietly, once we were out of earshot, I said to him, ‘I really appreciate the time you’ve given this today. And I’m sure you’ve heard all this before.’ He was shorter than me, which is often helpful. ‘How about I meet you up at the cafe when we’re finished here? Or if you want to head back to Hobart—I know you’ve got better things to do.’

  He looked at me and acquiesced. ‘Don’t hatch any new theories without letting me know,’ he said, without smiling. ‘You’re sorted for tomorrow, yeah? I heard the foreman’s taking you back over. He’ll pick you up at the jetty.’

  I nodded. He turned and gave Farris, Singh and Lennox a short wave and walked away.

  ‘Too young for the job,’ said Singh when I returned. And no-one disagreed.

  ‘So the Chinese …’ I said.

  ‘It’s chequebook colonialism,’ said Farris. ‘They’re buying our island one property at a time, and everyone refuses to see it as a problem. They have their so-called Buddhists here filming everyone. They’re building their global database of faces, even here in Tasmania. They’re going to make a killing selling that to ASIO one day. Or the CIA.’