A ledger book was a ledger book whether for groceries or the spendings of state.
A railway line had buffers both ends, rounded plates. Along a downslope rumbled tons of flatbed rolling stock and Pearl ran in front of them.
A man stood his ground and talked and joked and won votes over to him.
A cockatoo circled the sky. ‘Maaarcus!’
That bird ought to be on the national flag
, thought Marcus. The white with the sulphur crest, the grey with the muted pink, the black with the yellow tail, the black with the red of fire, the black with the speckled throat.
The business of state and commonwealth, he decided, was not so different from hospital board and shire council wrangles and making the roads passable for motor cars through the wielded pickaxes of the unemployed. National politics was not so different, either, although not as bloody as union battles where brother fought brother.
A cockatoo shrieked its ugly, complicated cry: ‘Maaarcus!’
‘I’ve taken note of a flaming cockatoo,’ he told Luana and Tim one day. ‘I’m putting up for parliament.’
T
IM WAS EDITOR OF
T
HE
W
HISTLE
and Luana his office help. Tim wrote the paper and printed it himself. Luana touch-typed and used Pitman’s shorthand. People passed
The Whistle
over the fence to their neighbours. Tim coaxed it along but the more it was read the fewer it sold. The crest was an engine emerging from a tunnel half-covered in smoke and forming a motto,
Fair Play
. Tim wrote leaders refining the art of partisan politics as the voice of quiet reason and demonstrable factual statement.
Luana’s Bub, a man of glowering maturity, lived his life in unemployed men’s camps on riverbanks and roadworks gravel pits, urging a red rag revolution.
In Bub’s eyes, Luana could never escape who she was – widow de facto of the hanged man, Maguire, whose anger lived in Bub by virtue of ideals Bub flung at anyone who bothered to listen. If Bub ever found the man who’d hanged his father, he swore, he would beat him to death. When he heard of anyone who’d been for those deaths he went after them, pouring out lava.
Everyone else had buried the cause, rolled a stone over the top, except now and again someone said to him, ‘On the day them boys were hung, Bub, Marcus Friendly sat in the offices of that piss-farting rag,
The Whistle
, and all they could talk about, him and his dog Atkinson, was if they went on fucking strike would they have enough wages to get married.’
Bub, pushing through Luana’s back door at Christmas, full of dialectical invective, disrupted the festive table and asked Luana why, why be a slave to Marcus Friendly’s petty ambition?
‘Atkinson,’ he threw at Tim, a man still with the strength in his upper torso to make Bub wary of taking him on.
A place was set ready for Bub. There was a chair for him. A folded napkin. A crepe paper party hat, cut with pinking shears, glued with flour paste.
Tim said, ‘Mate?’ in welcome.
Bub turned his back, though not before hooking a crystallised cherry from the cake and pocketing a slice. His shadow shrank through the doorframe; they heard the cottage gate slam. It would be some time before Luana had any word of Bub, living or dead. Her tongue turned to stone on the matter. You would not know she had a son, an attachment to fire.
W
ITH
M
ARCUS IN PARLIAMENT
, T
IM
closed down
The Whistle
. His leaders, amounting to thousands of words, were put in a file where they stayed until pulled out for a memorial volume after Marcus’s death.
The three took the rutted roads of the electorate down past Oberon and Taralga, where stars shone through the she-oaks and wide river crossings were stony and shallow. Tim, who loved driving, used his one almost all right foot to pump the brakes and his withered leg to pile-drive the clutch while Marcus snored in the back seat. Fiver clung to the metal bars of a cage in the dicky-seat, a sack thrown over the top with a slit to peer through. Coming down S-bends, Marcus jolted awake, and when they were too bleary to go on they slept at the side of the road.
The sun came up, with misty beams of light propped through the trees. Boiling the breakfast billy, Marcus and Luana sat on camp stools and gazed at the spitting twigs of the fire, smelling leaf smoke and drinking tea from chipped enamel mugs. It was worth a photograph and Tim took one.
Hold on to that snap gone spotty and cracked, to the campfire smoke caught in the tops of trees.
T
HE NATIONAL CAPITAL IN THOSE
last years of economic depression leading up to the Second World War was a building site and an encampment, a wonder of the dusty world. Tim took a salary and worked as a public service pen-pusher for an information section housed in a shed. Tim was the man who invented political PR outside what an MP could do for himself. The term used then was ‘press relations’ – Tim a tireless urger on behalf of Marcus while still on government pay, and Luana, with her Remington Noiseless typewriter, keeping the correspondence up.
‘We’ve been given a house,’ said Tim after an interval of temporary accommodation and having their names on a waiting list.
‘A house, now there’s a step up for a nobody in from the bush, driving a jalopy,’ said Marcus.
‘Luana shall have her vegetable patch,’ said Tim rather stiffly, hiding his pleasure in the status of a solid brick bungalow in Arthur Circle.
Luana bought hens, good layers and watched them fluffing their feathers, scratching the dirt. She grew herbs in buckets in case they ever had to move again. But they never did.
‘What about you?’ said Tim.
‘A house?’ said Marcus. ‘Can you see me in one? I’ve got one – Representatives, House of. A roof over my head, couches to sit on, benches to lean on, corridors to walk down.’
Living in the government hostel, Marcus had a suitcase under the bed, a cardboard box of papers, a reading lamp burning into the night. He wrote headings for debate sitting on his iron-framed bed and drafted letters for Luana to type, directed to factional leaders of a beleaguered party of which he was, through patient necessity and a shortage of elected members, a national leader himself almost before he knew it.
He started going to mass.
‘But why?’ Tim said.
‘It’s a good place to look over the sheilas,’ said Luana.
‘It’s what you need to know about what you don’t,’ said Marcus, ‘up against what’s being thrown at you by those who think they know but don’t. The old Dutchies knew that. There’s no other world but this one, but in this one there’s a way of stepping across over into – I don’t know what to call it – consolation. That’s why I take an hour off on Sunday mornings and let Father Pat rip.’
‘Oh, there’s never any comfort for him since Pearl died,’ said Luana.
‘Can I tell you something about them?’ said Marcus.
‘The Dutchies? You have,’ said Tim.
‘I wouldn’t be here but for them.’
It was what Tim never put in his articles when he wrote about Marcus. He did write, though, that Marcus had artesian reserves to call on. Read this as Tim on the power of what could be spoken about around Shakespeare, Coleridge and Keats, but was denied to honest journalism. The power of the hidden.
‘I wonder,’ said Tim, when Marcus said everyone had a streak of it in them – something that must not come out, but drove them.
‘Even you, Timmo,’ said Marcus.
In talks with newspaper editors around the states, Tim started calling Marcus ‘the bloke’, as he had for years between the two of them. It kept Marcus in overalls, smudged him with admirable grime. It kept his origins in plain sight.
What Tim had, that he kept to himself, he was only half shameful about – a material life aspired to and cleverly achieved, a double-walled brick house, money in the bank and a car, always a better sort of car and not ‘Australia’s Own Car’, either, the Holden Marcus backed after the war and Tim wrote about so encouragingly but felt cramped driving.
No. In those latter years, post-war, it would be, for Tim, the dark-green Jaguar XJ6 with steering wheel, gearstick and dashboard veneered in walnut, the eight cylinders of British manufacture purring under the bonnet and Luana, the white-haired love of his life at his side as they ranged the countryside visiting her relations. In the end, when he couldn’t drive anymore, he would give it away.
With Luana it was an almost rapier-like refinement of resentment she kept hidden. There was too much she never wanted found out. There was the Wobbly compact to which she had given herself. There was Bub. There was the loss of Pearl. There was pride mixed with shame going back to the Englishwoman, her mother, who married a man of race and gave Luana her skin colour, coffee-cream.
Luana listened out for slurs, sitting at her desk, so brilliantly capable.
She
never heard anything bad. What Tim heard he never repeated but smashed his crutch down on a bar to silence whatever it was.
Without hesitation Luana helped herself when sides of meat came down from Harden in a van, in through the back door of the government hostel and served up to boarders. Luana put it on her table weekly, prime cuts, by going around there, where the cooks had a parcel wrapped up in newspaper ready.
‘Two four six eight, bog in, don’t wait,’ said Tim over a baked dinner when Marcus came over.
Tim the former Baptist was an atheist, Luana likewise. No grace for them; they were anti-religious. But Luana thought how Marcus had brought her to Tim, how Tim was her provider. Then she liked them to join hands around the table. A member of parliament had a priestly role, a power of converting will into words, words into law, law into physical structures, emotions into material benefits.
The feeling went back to when Marcus was a boy chasing cockatoos up and down a railway line – to when, like an apprentice Roman emperor with something good in mind, he was taken aside by state assassins and shown, in a knot running along a string, the needs of power.
I
N
1939
THREE MEN
– an industrialist, a banker and a professor of economics – went out in a flat-bottomed boat on a coastal lake. Having heard of Marcus as the coming man, the coming bloke – gifted, hard-working in the House and willing to learn – they invited him along.
Over a few days of fishing, Marcus said, he learned something about licking a country into shape at the level of policy decisions and corrected a few ideas blue bloods had about industrial work. It gave Tim the School of Arts feeling all over again, listening to Marcus talk about ideas as tools in a job comparable to tightening a nut on a thread.
As the war came on, his party came in, and Marcus entered national life. The arms factory making rifles, machine guns, hand grenades and pistols was in his electorate. He was made the Minister of Munitions – tanks, planes and ships, not just guns, to be stamped out of metal and paid for from national funds.
By the time the Jap was in, Marcus was Treasurer and saw how to pay for destruction by building.
M
ARCUS HAD NEVER WANTED ANYTHING
for himself, just for himself. Now he declared he wanted a house.
Marcus, a
house
?
The builder, Don Devlin, spoke to the six men needed: two carpenters, two builder’s labourers, a cabinet-maker, a stonemason. It was all done on the mention of Marcus Friendly’s name. The tradesmen put their other jobs to the side and started with Don on the first of the month. There was never any doubt they would. For the bloke.
Friendly had an architect, Warner Tarbett II, who wore a spotted bow tie and mustard-coloured brothel creepers.
Don Devlin spat the words out: ‘Architects are the greatest damned fool-wasters of a man’s time. You’ll have to put up with me being cranky a lot. Warner Tarbett’s drawn the house plans down to the last nail. He’ll be on the site most days looking over my shoulder. I’ll try to keep him away from you. Tarbett put the idea into the bloke’s head during the war, a house at the end of the road. Tarbett was in the air force. They gave the bloke an Avro Anson, called them the Flying Brick. Tarbett was the pilot. He was like a son to the bloke.
‘Tarbett flew the Anson with Friendly aboard all over the shop, from Tassie to Darwin and up to New Guinea. It was Friendly’s Flying Brick that was bodgied in Moresby in ’44. The plane’s airspeed device was blocked by chewing gum and water was found in the gasoline. They say it was a grudge job, a louse who hated the bloke and took a step. But Tarbett saved Friendly’s life by being fussy. Always checking everything, double-checking all the time. It’s what architects are like. They never stop poking their noses in.’
The builders knew that a house was a pretty small-ticket item to the bloke, who’d worked through the war years finding money to fight the Japs without bleeding the country dry. He was the one who’d stood up to Churchill, berated MacArthur, roused the fury of his own party, argued them round, all in the deadset voice of a dogged Australian bloke, and he’d tested his brains against the best thinkers thrown at him in the arguments of the old School of Arts – and won.
Brilliant as he was, though, the builders thought he was being led by the nose by Tarbett.
It was not the sort of house that any of them would build by choice, rough-hewn, they called it. When people left the bush behind as Friendly had as a boy, it was surely for something better than a ramshackle proposition. As tradesmen they were beyond the pioneering habit of leaving timber looking as if it was dragged from the wilds – slabs of ironbark, pillars of yellow box with scabs of bark on them, knotholes exposed, insect scribbles in the wood.
Tarbett’s grandfather, an honest drover, had lived in such places in the sticks. Tarbett never shut up about it. He called for an earth-built architectural revolution: ‘Think of the structure as two sheds overlapping with a screened arcade joining them. You’ve seen the idea.’
They had. And primitive it was. Though it kept out the flies.
In those first weeks they made clay bricks in wooden moulds. Heavy, irregular window frames were hammered from second-hand iron. On the plans it looked like a fruit-packing shed or a shearing shed. A house of the sort to match the bloke’s deserves should at least have verandahs, where the heat and glare would not penetrate and the bloke would be able to hang a waterbag, go around in a singlet and shorts, stretch out in a deckchair, read up on philosophy and such. Or say his prayers. If Tarbett had called for gold leaf, they would have slapped it on. But this?