It
had rained for three days solid, in some places the creek had already
burst its banks; she’d waited for nightfall, a night with no
moon. No-one
can say
how spectacularly unsuccessful the launching was, no-one was there on
that dark night to bear witness. Though the remnants of the canoe were
found the following day wrapped crazily around an overhanging branch
almost a kilometre downstream, there is little point speculating on how
much of the journey was made on the surface as hoped and how much of it
tumbling in the putrid waters beneath. The body itself outdistanced the
canoe by a kilometre and a half and was recovered two days later wedged
between the root of a tree and the grey mud of the bank. It wore,
ridiculously, the uniform prescribed; the rabbit skin hat still held in
place by a chin-strap, the jacket still neatly buttoned.
I was asked into town to sign some papers and I drove there dazed and
shaken. Patterson himself seemed genuinely upset. It was, we both knew,
a strange and futile end to a strange and futile saga. Little was said,
little could be said; I saw the body, identified her as Jodie and drove
back home with the image of her blood-drained face and quiet
closed-forever eyes before me.
The rain wouldn’t stop, it came down in endless thin silver
ropes,
pelting the roof and bursting out of the gutters; it was washing
everything, washing everything clean, the whole sad sorry story, across
the paddocks and ruins, from trickles to rivulets to the creek into the
far-off sea. That night, as I sat down at my table and prepared to
break the news to Michael, I knew, at last, that my days here were done.
Michael! Mad, bad, cockeyed Michael! That it should all come to this!
All the twisted lines of our journey, the scratches, the cuts, the
bruises, were marked on her face. But serene, so serene, ghost-white
and pure. Michael! Oh Michael! That it should all come to this!
I
loaded the car up with beer from the pub in town and pulled the table
up that night to within arm’s reach of the fridge. Empty cans
littered
the table, the rain drummed hard on the roof. Hours passed, they could
have been years. I couldn’t write to Michael, there were no
words to
fix the image, wrap it in sympathy and carry it safely to him: six
screwed up pieces of paper lay strewn across the floor. I raised myself
unsteadily from the table, stood at the back door and looked out at the
rain. It had already washed the gravel from the path leading down the
back to the creek and the paddocks beyond lay shrouded in darkness and
damp. She’d have passed by here, just down there at the end
of the
path, beyond the murky shaft of light, where I could hear the sound of
the boiling, rushing water even now. Was she standing, head held high
as instructed, or already tumbling, groping, lost? I’d have
been
sleeping, the rain on the roof. And she passed by softly: I
couldn’t
have heard.
I put on my coat, took up the lamp, and walked out into the rain. I
made my way down North Court and trudged to the top of the mountain of
rubble that overlooked the Square. It was a lake now, a low lake of
muddy water in which a few persistent gorse bushes still stood. Nothing
to suggest the summer evenings of suffused orange light, the clinking
of glasses and the hubbub of talk; those long magical evenings now a
lifetime away. Grey sky, grey mud, grey water, drenched by an unending
rain. I walked down the eastern side of the hill towards the few houses
that still stood, miraculously, north-east of the Square. My boots were
caked with mud, my steps were leaden. Thick weeds, gorse and thistle
had long ago claimed the streets; they slapped at my thighs, tore at my
flesh and wet my trousers through.
I walked into the lounge room of an empty house; it reeked of dogs,
bird droppings and damp. A bird flew out the window, leaving the echo
of its flapping in the room. I remembered Michael, and our meeting in
the abandoned house on West Court all those years ago. Flies buzzed in
zigzag patterns around the broken light fitting and the dogs stretched
and yawned on the burnt-brown lawn. That summer was the worst, the
paddocks around us were dead grass and dust; the streets melted, the
gardens withered, a heat shimmer wobbled and distorted everything in
the middle distance and beyond. Days on end spent waiting for night,
nights on end spent dreading the days, we cowed beneath an open sky,
hugging the walls and shadows, listening with one ear cocked to the
distant rumblings whose source we could still not name. He was her
father, I was in love with her, all my words were servant to these
truths.
I trudged back home, my boots and the shoulders of my coat soaked
through, and lit a fire in the grate. Steam rose from the boots on the
hearth and the coat flung over the chair: it hung below the ceiling
like a cloud threatening rain. Rain, rain, everywhere the rain. It
battered the roof and dripped with an insistent rhythm into the
saucepans. I sat at the table and gazed again at the objects assembled
there: a piece of glass from a broken beer bottle, a chipped house
brick, a charred rabbit bone. I arranged and rearranged them on the
table before me, imploring them to tell a story, to reconstitute
themselves into a whole. But they remained stubbornly themselves;
inert, mute, adrift. So are these few reliquiae all that I have
salvaged from the ruins of those years? Small things, absurd,
earth-encrusted things. Had I not come back to dig them out they would
still be sleeping peacefully where they should be, in the all-forgiving
earth.
Later
that night I awoke in the chair; the fire was cold, a heavy pounding
echoed in my head. I’d woken with her image before me again,
the cold
white face, the matted hair, her stomach so flat that it almost looked
shrunken; the great fertile hump she’d been carrying, gone. I
caught
Patterson’s eye; he half-shrugged. The baby hadn’t
been found.
With that image before me I couldn’t sleep, and I spent the
next hour
or more outside gathering up old bricks and rubble, anything I could
find, to make a low dyke across the back yard which I hoped would save
me at least until morning. The creek down there was spreading now, bits
of rubbish floated past and the stench was unbearable. Across the
paddocks the puddles had swollen into lakes, the labyrinth of rabbit
warrens flooded; the rain lashed the dead grasses furiously. I lit the
fire again and pulled the blanket tight around me, so many things
clawing at my head. The tangled barbed-wire and splintered wood wrapped
around a tree; Jodie, growing ever-flatter in my mind, a cigarette
paper laid out on a slab, white and so insubstantial that a mere puff
of breath might blow her away; the tiny blue-grey bundle of flesh
tumbling in the filthy waters, God knows, still tumbling now past
Konagaderra, Wildwood, Bulla to the Bay and on into the soundless sea.
Yes,
I came back, only fools do that, to live among these ruins in a
slapped-up shack of leftovers. And for my foolishness I’ve
become the
only witness to the final act, last spectator in an empty theatre, last
left squinting when the lights come on, the only one to take the final
image out into the street. You’re the only one of the old
group we
could find, said Patterson, as if for that I should be pitied. And
probably I should.
The earth can only take so much rain and as the night wore on I felt it
gulping ever-closer to its limit. The bridge was gone, my car was
drowned; I was on an island surrounded by a sea of dirty water. I
arranged the objects on my table again. I emptied the saucepans and
mopped the floor. I couldn’t sleep. I opened a can, lit the
lamp,
pulled the table up by the fire and write.
Two
It was a mistake from the first. In the early days a much talked about
and heralded mistake but a mistake nonetheless. I was a victim of the
publicity, I can’t pretend otherwise. I was if anything its
greatest
victim, harbouring to the very end my belief that it would, despite the
setbacks, soon or at least one day all work out as planned.
The country was changing, the population exploding, we were no longer a
few fly specks on a huge uncluttered map. Our cities were becoming
enormous, unsightly and ever-expanding blotches; my own, my birthplace,
south of here, Melbourne, the most unsightly and expanding of all. So
it didn’t take much for some new upstart town planners, the
ink hardly
dry on their diplomas, to convince the civic authorities that a new
approach to urban planning was needed. It was all very well to be
encouraging new housing development in the outer suburbs to lessen the
pressure on the city’s resources but, they argued, there was
really no
point in simply tacking one new development onto the back fence as it
were of the one just completed; far from encouraging moves away from
the city this was simply grafting the new population onto it. We must,
they said, look ‘further out.’
This reasoning was all very well, and there was a good deal of sense in
it. But, with the benefit of hindsight, they made two fundamental
mistakes. First, in their great enthusiasm, they looked
too far out; and
second, they
looked too far out
in
the wrong
direction.
Using perhaps no more than a slide rule and the logic of their fanciful
theories, they fixed on a point over fifty kilometres north of the city
to establish the first ‘New Estate.’ It mattered
little to them in what
kind of landscape this Estate stood: those who ended up living there
were always convinced that the whole thing had been planned and
approved on the basis of a red pin stuck on a wall map in some obscure
city office. But the north it was: past the tired pot-holed suburbs on
the city fringe and the brick veneer additions of recent years, past
the For Lease factories with bare asphalt car-parks marked out in
white, the used car lots, the wrecking yards, past the miserable market
garden plots full of cabbage gone to seed and on through the flat and
never-changing expanse of paddocks, dead trees, broken barbed-wire
fences, bored cows, hang-gutted horses, and here and there the rusted
shell of an abandoned car. Forty hectares of overworked and abandoned
farmland, half encircled by a small creek with steep-sided banks,
pockmarked with rabbit holes and decorated by gorse and Scotch thistle;
this was the spot to which the surveyors were sent armed with their
mysterious three-legged instruments, weaving in and out of the gorse
bushes with tape measures in their hands and hammering in their orange
marker pegs in a strange and almost incomprehensible array of patterns.
The Estate was built in record time and the official opening was
attended by many dignitaries, the most important of whom, the Premier
no less, unveiled the small bronze plaque that up until the destruction
still stood on the grass plantation in the centre of the Square. It was
all a cause for great civic pride at the time and those of us who were
there, the first residents, guinea pigs if you like, felt that we were
taking part in an event of great national importance. Speeches were
made, a large marquee covered the Square and beer, wine and savouries
were served. I hope, said the Premier, one hand on the podium to
prevent his speech being carried off by the wind, that this will become
the model of things to come.
And yes, despite its questionable location and the hurry to completion,
despite everything that has happened since, the Estate was a model of
the new planning ideas at the time and was, in its way, absolutely
unique. It was designed as a kind of self-contained village; a main
Square in the centre surrounded by shops, a bank, a post office and so
on, with four streets radiating out from this Square to each point of
the compass. Each of these four streets then crossed a ring road some
forty metres out from the Square with all except one terminating on the
other side in three bubble-shaped cul-de-sacs or courts. The fourth or
eastbound street crossed the ring road and continued on for a little
over a kilometre until it met up with the main highway to the city -
the only access, by road, to the Estate. Four further cul-de-sacs or
courts branched off from the ring road, making seven in all.
So that the whole thing resembled, if seen from the air and with a
touch of imagination, the great wheel of an old sailing ship bound for
exotic new lands. The four streets and seven courts were named
according to their corresponding positions on the compass; North
Street, East Street, North Court, North-East Court etc.... And they
all, including the ring road, were lined with houses - two hundred and
twenty in all and all identical in design: three bedroom solid brick
with front yard, back yard, driveway and garage. On the basis of four
and a half persons per household, the designers had calculated on a
population of nine hundred and ninety people.
It was, to anyone’s way of seeing things, an extraordinary
achievement.
Out of the bare inhospitable paddocks a new village had arisen; neat,
clean and impeccably ordered, far from the unkempt sprawl of the city.
There was one small town a long way to the south-east and a slightly
larger one a little closer to the north, but aside from that we seemed
as far away from civilisation as is these days humanly possible. As to
the question of how the architects of this bold new adventure intended
resettling nine hundred and ninety people in the flat wasteland over
fifty kilometres (or almost an hour’s drive) north of the
city centre,
the answer, on the surface at least, was simple. From the moment the
project was proposed there was, hand in hand with it, the further
proposal of constructing an enormous six-lane freeway from the city
fringe to just over the fifty kilometre mark. Obviously, without this
hand in hand proposal, well advertised as a
fait accompli,
no-one would ever
have moved to the Estate in the first place: aside from those who,
counting on a population sufficient to sustain them, intended setting
up businesses there, it was obvious that the remaining majority would
have to commute to the city for work. The freeway proposal promised to
reduce a commuting time of almost an hour to a little under half that;
a very significant reduction. Two further carrots were dangled, and not
unimportant ones either. All those who lived on the Estate were to be
issued with ‘residency cards,’ proving that they
lived there and
allowing them on production of their card to buy petrol at the petrol
station that was to be built on the eastern access road at
half the usual price.
(The
residency cards were in fact issued, the phantom petrol station is
another story.) In other words, you could drive from the Estate to the
city and back every day and still come out with a weekly petrol bill no
worse and in some cases even better than before. The final carrot, and
the most important for many, was a case of economics in its crudest
form. The Estate was Government-subsidised and all the houses available
there cost on average one third less than a house of similar size and
design as the many to be found on the suburban fringe. For those with a
dream of owning their own home but without the means to do so, this was
an enormous incentive to make the long journey north.
A hundred and twenty six official residents attended the opening gala
that day (though we still didn’t have our residency cards, on
that day
we nevertheless felt official), and though a hundred and twenty six is
a long way from nine hundred and ninety it did nothing to dampen the
enthusiasm. They were an odd assortment of people; young married
couples, new immigrant families, older folk who had come to escape the
city and slowly count out the days to their retirement, and, as to be
expected, a small number of more established families from the towns
further north (farmers mostly) who, with an eye to the discount petrol,
had in addition made no small profit on the sale of their own houses
against the much cheaper purchase of an Estate one. There was no-one
there that day who couldn’t fail to feel a sense of
importance, of
being part of a great experiment the success of which, to most
people’s
minds, was already assured. But hardly had the marquee and bunting been
taken down than the first grumblings began.
There were problems with the sewage; the first real indication of the
haste with which, especially in the final stages, the Estate had been
built and what effect this had on the workers’ attention to
detail. The
sewage pipes were connected to each house to be sure, and these pipes
linked to the main line which was to carry the effluent away. But
further to that no plans were made and as was later found the main line
simply stopped about twenty metres beyond North-East Court and
discharged its contents there. At this point, on the northern fringe of
the Estate, a small creek passes in an east-west direction before
turning south towards the sea - usually drying to a trickle
in
summer but often flooded in winter - and it’s into this creek
that the
sewage found its way. (It is an even greater cause for disbelief to
remember that, at the time, there was a plan to dam this creek at a
point a little west of the Estate, excavate a large area east of this
dam and so create a lake which was to become the central feature of a
five hectare recreational park.) The creek began to stink, so much so
that those who had bought houses on the northern edge (and they were
not a few, having heard and believed the story of the park) soon
applied to swap them for houses on the other side of the Estate. The
northern sector became deserted. The petrol station, despite the
endless promises, was and remained no more than a large concrete slab
that had been hastily poured one afternoon a week or so after the
opening. Four square metal plates with four rusting bolts in each were
the only evidence left that they ever had any intention of returning to
erect the structure. Finally, as if to rub salt into our wounds, we
soon found that not a single telephone on the Estate worked: every
phone was dead.
With the odour of sewage wafting through our doors and windows whenever
the breeze was from the north and with the realisation that the offer
of discount petrol had been no more than an empty promise, many people
quickly made plans to get out. ‘For Sale’ signs
went up in the front
yards of a number of houses but the grass grew thick around them.
Rumours of the Estate’s problems had already reached back to
the city
and no-one wanted to buy. A few households took down the signs and
decided, with a certain fatalism that marked the period to follow, to
stay; others, desperate to get out at any cost, eventually sold their
houses back to the Government at a fraction of the price
they’d paid
for them. In this way we lost (I’m speaking of the first
twelve months
here) eight families in all: those that remained had quickly
established themselves in the southern part of the Estate, as far away
as possible from the creek. The northern part quickly fell into
neglect; wild grass, gorse and thistle took over and grew to
chest-height in the yards and gardens. Weeds forced their way up
through and widened the cracks in the footpaths and streets. With the
combined weight of sometimes ten or twenty birds’ nests the
eaves on
the houses began to sag and collapse. And, in the case of those houses
on the very northern edge, the combined forces of the first
winter’s
rains, a swollen creek and a small moving sea of effluent soon served
to undermine the foundations. The houses themselves began to sag and
crack - in one case a whole front wall falling over onto the lawn,
exposing an empty lounge room with the paint already flaking from the
walls and the half-rotted body of an old stray dog inside.
By the end of the second year (Inauguration Day was marked by a small
protest in the Square) many more people had left but a relative
handful, some fifty in all, had decided to stay. Though no-one believed
in the petrol station any more, the freeway was still a hard dream to
give up. As the greater part of the Estate began to fall apart around
us, the remaining population - concentrated around and to the south of
the Square - were bound together all the more tightly. We believed,
despite the unfinished works and unfulfilled promises, that the freeway
would come: it was hard for us to believe how it could not, given that
the whole rationale of the Estate’s existence was based on
the very
fact of its coming. It was only a matter of waiting, we told ourselves,
and of making the best of it in the meantime.
But such faith was misguided: by the end of the third year, still
without a freeway and with the population now reduced to a mere
twenty-seven adults, five children and an uncountable number of dogs
and cats, the real situation became clear. The original planners had
made a mistake; they’d built an Estate over fifty kilometres
north of
the city but the fact was that in the intervening years it had become
clear to everyone that the north was not the place to be. Under the
influence of various private property developers who, soon after the
declared Government backing of a northward expansion had wisely bought
up vast tracts of land on the much more lush and hospitable eastern
belt, the suburbs had begun to march unstoppably in that direction.
Housing was cheap, one estate was quickly grafted onto the next to form
whole new suburbs, families moved there by the thousands, new business
and employment opportunities flourished and before long the expansion
had moved so far out that the idea of building a freeway north at the
expense of the much more obvious needs of those in the east became, for
those originally responsible for our Estate, unsustainable. The
northern freeway was ‘temporarily delayed’ (as if
it had not been
delayed already) and all the money, equipment and manpower was
immediately transferred into the construction of a new eastern freeway,
to be completed with all possible haste.
The north was suddenly and quite brutally forgotten. All those
previously responsible for the Estate’s planning and
construction
quickly wiped their hands of it and turned their eyes to the East. The
Estate fell back in on itself, more isolated than ever. House prices
fell dramatically again (they were now worth little more than the dry
earth on which they stood) and, however much they may have wanted to
get out, few people could afford to sell at such a loss. We protested,
of course, and the Government, no doubt driven by guilt, responded to
our protests with the payment of a small monthly subsidy to those hardy
residents who had decided to stay. Rest assured, they said, the freeway
will come - but the wait may be a long one and we should not be made to
suffer in the meantime. Finally, and a little ridiculously, as if to
expunge any remaining guilt, a telephone box for which no coins were
needed suddenly appeared overnight in the Square.
The original dream was shattered, all but the deluded had fled, and in
the end six three bedroom solid brick homes on South Street and one,
incongruously, on the edge of North Court, were occupied by one person
each.
~
So this was the Estate, the Outer Suburban Village Development Complex
as the sign on the access road called it, a now dead and forgotten
place, testament for any visitor who may chance upon it - and they,
believe me, were few - to some now very anonymous architect’s
grand but
misguided vision. We gathered in the Square of an evening to drink and
talk (it was summer when the last rat jumped ship and left us seven to
sink or swim) and at that hour, as the heat of the day began to subside
- and the heat out there in the height of summer was almost unbearable
- the Estate did for a time begin to resemble as closely as it ever
might the village the original planners had in mind. Ignore the empty
and tumbledown houses, the gardens of wild grass and gorse, pass over
the stench from the creek and the streets and footpaths riven with
cracks, and you might almost see the faint stirrings of a new community
being born.
Around us on the Square the shops remained empty and ghost-infested,
white masking tape crosses still stuck to their windows. Weeds crept up
through the cracks at our feet, starlings flew home to roost under the
supermarket awning. Far, far away you could hear the tortured bellowing
of a cow. On the grass plantation in the centre of the Square where the
bronze plaque still stood as a somewhat incongruous reminder of an old
dream long faded, a motley assortment of dogs and cats gathered to
sniff, gambol and doze. The evenings fell slowly, casting long shadows
across the Square, and, clear as we were of the city lights, night
revealed above us a magical cupola of stars.
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