Old Wayne wakes as the sun comes up, dresses in protective gear ready to fight the remains of a bushfire—eats toast, drinks tea, waters plants, then checks the empty house next door. His little job for a couple of weeks, while the owners are away. Scooping wheat from a big tin in a rickety shed, he puts it into an ice-cream container, then potters through the garden to feeds fat chooks. He knows them all, calls them by name. Talks to them, “Lots of eggs today, girls.”
A bone for the dog, its water topped up, he bids them all farewell and exits the front gate, looking forward to his day.
He walks along the quiet street in the small historical town at the centre of the island where, down south, it once housed convicts in a notorious prison designed to accommodate those who’d committed serious and petty crimes in a distant land where the prisons overflowed. The only way to sort the overflow and fix all those criminals was to pack them off in big sailing ships to cross oceans and serve their time clearing the land, building houses, cities and rich people’s farms. Van Diemen’s Land—Tasmania.
It’s summer and Wayne is heading for the bakery, the designated spot for firefighters to pick him up at six o’clock. He’s early. He sits on a wooden seat at the base of a tall leafy oak and waits. “The buggers are late,” he says out loud. “Hope they haven’t forgotten me.” A few cars pass but none stop. He stands, moves to the curb—looks first one way and then the other, wondering if there’s a chance they didn’t see him.
His short-legged thick cotton trousers hang low at the crutch—uneven worn soles on his big leather boots. His too-big yellow top with the wide silver stripe shows everyone that he’s ready for work. He waits. Smokes one cigarette after the other. A woman arrives. Veronica. She’s there to get hot bread for breakfast, sits on the wooden bench and watches him as he shifts from one foot to the other, agitated. She wonders what kind of work he does, knows it has something to do with hard work, maybe on the roads, maybe a building site—somewhere they need safe clothes. She looks at his boots and thinks that perhaps his employer doesn’t supply them on a regular basis. He turns, saunters towards her and sits alongside.
“Glad the wind’s dropped,” he says. “No good on hot days. Risky.”
Veronica didn’t bother to ask about the risk. She was on holiday and holiday meant not thinking about risks. She’d been imagining her grandmother living here years ago. Glancing up, she replied, “Looks like rain. What’s your name?”
“Wayne. Yours?”
“Veronica.”
“Hope to God it buckets down,” he says.
“Bit dry out there. Yeah. Green it up a bit.”
They stare into what seems nothingness and then Wayne begins to tell her about why he’s there, and the day before. Helicopters loaded with thousands of gallons of water sprayed all over the flaming landscape as he and his thirty mates fought back the raging fire a few kilometres from here. His eyes sparkle in the telling and his mind wanders as he conjures up pictures—tinderbox bush and tall summer grass going up in smoke—fallen and broken trees bulldozed into piles in paddocks throwing off searing heat, and sparks the wind can pick up and carry and drop all over the joint. He tells Veronica all about it.
“Gotta watch them piles,” he says, quietly. “Dangerous buggers.”
Veronica’s hooked. She wants to know more and he tells her about himself.
He’s proud he’s connected to convicts—proud he can still help at times like this as well as look after his neighbour’s house and chooks and dog until they come back home. He’s a Ross man, born here. He’s lived here forever and he tells her that over the years, things run a bit smoother on the new highway that links the cities to the north and south of this place. He’s no longer called to assist with mangled wreckage from high-speed out-of-control cars and trucks when drivers get carried away on the main road.
He’s glad about the quietness the highway now brings. It bypasses the town—no more rushing people and spewing exhausts messing up the small main street. Tourists, the only ones likely to check out the place, pull off the highway, drive slowly across the convict bridge and stay a while to glory in the old buildings and spend a few bucks at the small shops where locals sell their crafts or old furniture.
“No need to lock doors in this town,” he says. “Everyone knows and helps one another.” He talks about giving where he can, and people sharing excess chook eggs and veggies and fruit grown in their backyards. He’s on a pension, not much to do.
Still no one comes to take him to the fire. It’s seven o’clock. He thinks maybe, the fire’s now under total control. He’s been waiting over an hour.
Veronica wasn’t waiting for anything other than bread. She was up with the sparrows and sun to walk from one end of town to the other, trying to imagine her grandma adjusting to this place when she arrived from London, newly wed to her grandfather, a WW1 veteran. Horses and carts and dirt roads and box-like trucks with wooden wheels and trays greeted them. Her grandfather was born near to here, had family, so it wouldn’t have been too hard for him. But it must have been terribly difficult for her grandma. Back then it was an even smaller town, so isolated.
She tells Wayne this. He reckons he might know some of her ancestors. He names some, living out of town on farms. “If you want to know more,” he says, “go to the museum at the end of the street. They might be able to help. Lots of photos and stuff there.”
They talked like a sister and brother who were sharing lives that neither had known about. In a place like this, there’s every chance they could be related. Veronica wondered.
The door to the bakery opens and a woman in her thirties or thereabouts, gets ready for her day. She has no time to set up tables and chairs and umbrellas under the shelter of the oak because a local man is on her doorstep already, wanting milk and fresh bread. Wayne sets everything in place for her. The deep wrinkles in his tanned face and the slow way he moves spell years of working outdoors, unprotected from the sun.
Labouring for well-to-do landowners on surrounding farms with cattle and sheep, is about all such men can do to earn a living in these parts and when the strength runs out and the muscles wither like Wayne’s, it’s pensions of one type or another, and volunteering.
When he’s not doing something for someone else, he helps with the bakery as much as he can, loves doing it. After the woman serves the local man and the bakery’s shelves are full and ready, she joins them, loaded with stories and happy to hear of Veronica’s grandma who once, as the story goes, threw her fishing line from the veranda of her home into the Macquarie River to catch trout and eels—about two hundred metres from where they talk.
“What’s y name?” she asks as she lights a smoke. Veronica tells her as Wayne stands listening.
“What’s yours?”
“Wendy. And believe me, if your grandma was here right now, there’s no way she’d be able to eat anything from that river.”
Not another one, Veronica thinks, as Wayne nods his head.
“It’s full of blue-green algae. Can’t touch it.”
“Why not?” Veronica asks.
“Toxic. If you drink that water you get real sick. Rashes and stuff. Can’t swim in it. Causes lung problems.”
“So that’s what the signs in the motel are about. Boil All Water.”
“That’s right. Third World country here,” she laughs. “Been going on for years and we have to bloody well pay for it. Oh yeah. They pumped in new water from Lake Leake and that was toxic too. Same thing. One hundred and thirty-plus bucks a quarter for poison water. Can you believe!”
“I wouldn’t be paying for bloody poisoned water!” Veronica says.
“Nothing we can do. The Cockies are onto it. You know. Farmers. Thank God for ‘em!”
“How did it get poisoned in the first place?”
“Dunno.”
“Jesus! This place of all places! There’s stuff like this happening everywhere. Swansea’s got signs up on the beach saying there are times you can’t swim in the ocean there. Pollution signs.”
“That’s right.”
“I didn’t find out why. Do you know?”
“Nuh.”
“My God. The Huon River’s in trouble too. I’ve heard something about farms and trout and hormones. A friend of mine can’t drink the scheme water down there because she got sick. Her neighbor took a sample to Canberra for testing. She tells me it was loaded with all sorts of terrible stuff. Dunno what, but she’s not touching it.”
“Yep. They’re working on new water for us, from up north somewhere. Gonna pump it here. God knows how long that will take.”
“Does the water affect the cows and sheep?”
“Don’t think so. Just us.”
“I used to cup my hands and drink from creeks in the Huon. Can’t do that any more. It’s a laugh.”
“Laugh all right.”
“Did you know that the island is promoted as Australia’s future food bowel?”
“Don’t bloody tell me,” Wendy said. “Can’t eat river fish here and veggies and stuff have to go up north somewhere to get checked. Then we get it back.”
“A woman at a supermarket in the Huon told me that too. Quality control she called it.”
“Quality control? Now, that’s a laugh.”
Veronica was astounded by the magnitude of this terrible news, and as she walked back to the motel with warm bread, she wondered about the rash on her back. One week on the island and a couple of glasses of tap water could not have done that.
Surely?
On her flight back to Perth Veronica thought of the contempt her mother had for Greenies when they got into Tasmania’s parliament in the 1980’s. So much hate for them. On one of her few visits to Burnie, her mother had given her the choice of shutting her mouth about them, or getting no baked lunch—packing her bags to get out if she didn’t shut up. Her mother thought that Greenie’s were messing up the place—creating havoc. For her, jobs were more important and so was the Burnie Paper Pulp, which employed a lot of people. It turned the ocean orange and pumped non-stop smoke into the air for years.
Back then, Veronica did as her mother demanded, swallowed her joy in meeting a Greenie at church who told her of the Pulp dumping drums of toxic waste into Bass Strait. Veronica was delighted to find a woman who cared about Tasmania as much she did. She ate her mother’s lamb roast and shut the door to her room to weep.
So many people on the island still think like her mother did, still refuse to see the environmental damage that smacked Veronica in the face. Resistant to knowledge about the terrible changes and stuck in the past where pristine waters and fertile land once fed and clothed them, they cannot bear to look. Beautiful mountains, beautiful forests, rolling hills—fresh country air and full-flowing rivers and creeks still capture the tourists’ eye, still work to lure the locals into their lies. When Veronica’s brother worked at the Paper Pulp he got seriously injured—hit in the head when he spoke of how the forests were being gutted—how wide stretches of trees and bush remain by the sides of roads to give people the idea that all is well. He loved canoeing and went off main roads to get to rivers. That’s how he knew.
“They stripped the lot with big bulldozers and chains dragging everything down,” he said. “Huge patches of nothing.” One woman told Veronica that the Greenies were full of shit.
She thought about the openhearted people she’d met like Wayne and Wendy, all over the island. They’ve certainly woken up and perhaps it took the sickness caused by the polluted river for them to do that. Deeply concerned, generous and honest, they remain the beauty of the place.
It comes as no surprise that Veronica got defensive when she was back in Fremantle. At a coffee shop one morning, a Perth antique dealer, well dressed, in his sixties, proudly told her how he’d managed to buy a pile of antiques from an old woman in Ross for $2,000 and sold it for $40,000—not a thought for the hard times such people have.
What really got to her was how he spoke of that old woman. She’d invited him and his wife into her home, saving them heaps on accommodation as she housed and fed them home-grown vegetables and fruit—home-cooked meals. The woman, so grateful for the money they gave her for old furniture and things, is still in touch with this couple. The antique dealer spoke about her and other such people as if they were another species, ignorant and stupid and all too happy to know them.
His wife sat back as he spoke of this, just as proud. When Veronica thought of her grandma trying to make a go of it on the island way back—the pride she took in having a new potato bag, a new mat to place on the floor in front of the open fire, she told them what might sit beneath the generosity of such people—their possible histories and desperate need for extra cash. The townspeople know of the alluring gloss of an historical place like theirs, for tourists and people like them. Especially like them. Veronica knew only too well that so few of the oldies have had the advantage of an education that would make them aware of such unscrupulous businessmen, such predators.
“In Ross,” she told them, “the young ones have to catch buses to Launceston to go to school or work, and there’s little employment in the town. The people are poor.”
Listening to Veronica for a short time, the smile didn’t stay too long on this antique dealer’s face, or his wife’s. They got real uncomfortable, got up from their table, started to walk out, telling her they had to leave before they got a parking ticket.
Veronica could not hold back. She stood and spoke for the world to hear, as they skedaddled towards the door. “Not at seven o’clock in the morning sweethearts.
The parking inspectors are not on the move until nine!”
Dr Suzanne Covich, an author, public speaker, human rights activist and High School English teacher, has been widely published in Australian literary journals. An award-winning poet and short story writer, she is also the first Australian to win two National Excellence in Teaching Awards (NEITA). Her work has been published in a wide range of Australian literary journals and her childhood memoir When We Remember They Call Us Liars, was published by Fremantle Press, in 2012. She grew up in Tasmania and her writing addresses issues that have always concerned her—the violations of vulnerable people, especially women and children confronted with systemic and/or domestic violence. She is just as concerned about unscrupulous business exploits, and environmental violations that render the land and its waters, toxic. The devastating environmental damage she sees in Tasmania is as heartbreaking for her, as listening to the stories of vulnerable people who become sick as a result.
