The Tesla Legacy
The author would like to thank the following people for their invaluable help in the writing and research of this book:
The staff at Newcastle Public Library.
The staff at Muswellbrook Library.
The staff at Scone Library.
Rihana and Layla Fibbins at the Belmore Hotel, Scone.
Mrs Robyn Millar at the Just Read It Bookshop, Terrigal.
Artist and navigator Di Human.
Fellow Tesla buff Peter Lemmin.
The author would also like to thank the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service for the information on Burning Mountain. And the Wonnarua people of the Hunter Valley for a beautiful legend from the Dreamtime.
This book is dedicated to Captain Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd.
A message from the author, photos and information regarding the writing and research of this book can be found on the author’s website at www.robertgbarrett.com.au
T
he Indian myna bird never knew what hit it.
One minute it was strutting along the wooden railing towards the two peewees picking at their food in the plastic dish. The next second, a lead sinker smashed into its chest, killing it instantly. Its startled mate watched it tumble onto the wooden sundeck. But instead of flying away, it fluttered up onto the branch of a tree above the railing, not sure what was going on. It had barely landed when from out of nowhere another lead sinker smashed into its throat and broke its neck. The myna bird’s eyes lidded over and it fell out of the tree, landing dead in the thick grass below the sundeck. The man standing in the dining room, wearing a white T-shirt and blue cargoes, lowered the slingshot, and stepped through the open flyscreen door out into the sunlight. He looked at the first dead myna bird for a moment, then contemptuously kicked it off the sundeck with the toe of his right foot. When it landed next to its mate in the grass below, the man
smiled down in triumph at the two dead myna birds.
‘Gotcha, you bastards,’ he said. ‘Both of you.’
The two peewees took almost no notice of the violence that had just happened. They did stop picking at the pieces of bread for a moment to look up at the man standing nearby, then after giving him a nod of friendly recognition, continued eating.
It had taken Newcastle electrician Mick Vincent six frustrating weeks to kill the two myna birds on the sundeck of his Bar Beach home. A month and a half of watching them bully and steal the food he’d laid out for the two little peewees he affectionately called Ike and Tina, only to see the myna birds fly off as soon as he eased the flyscreen door open to get a shot at them. Eventually Mick realised the best way to get the myna birds would be to leave the flyscreen open, wait in the half-light at the table next to the kitchen with his slingshot, whack the first one and maybe get the other one if it ever came back. When the second myna bird hung around, Mick couldn’t believe his luck. But Mick was quick with a slingshot; quick and deadly accurate. Two years living in a Queensland caravan park while his parents ran a hamburger shop saw to that.
Every other ten-year-old kid Mick met in Maryborough had a slingshot, or ging, made from a small tree fork, two strips of pushbike tube and the tongue out of a shoe, for shooting cane toads. And with a natural eye, it wasn’t long before Mick was far and away the best shot amongst the team of young larrikins he hung around with in the caravan park. Young Mick could barrel a cane toad on the hop at twenty metres before the other kids had even loaded up. Even today, Mick had lost none of his skill with a slingshot and still liked to plunk cans and bottles or whatever. However, Mick’s grown-up version of a ging, using spear-gun rubber on a metal frame, was infinitely more powerful than the ones he had as a kid, and ball bearings or lead sinkers were infinitely more accurate and deadly than rocks or pebbles. Mick could put a ball bearing through a crow or a rat at fifty metres, or a lead sinker between the eyes of any feral cats that came out of the gulley below his house hunting birds at twenty-five, quick as anyone could blink. The young electrician came inside, closed the flyscreen door and winked at his reflection in the sliding glass door.
‘Hello, killer,’ he said, dropping his slingshot on the dining room table. ‘You’ve done it again.’
However, the reflection smiling back didn’t look like that of a killer. Average height, medium build with light green eyes and neat dark hair combed over a cheerful face. The reflection was more of an easygoing young man that kept reasonably fit and liked the sun than that of a killer. And even though Mick Vincent’s thirty-one-year-old life hadn’t been one long bed of roses, the likeable electrician had plenty of reasons to be cheerful.
The three-bedroom house he lived in at the top of Fenton Avenue had been left to him by his late Aunt Nina and, with its views across Newcastle Harbour and the coast beyond, was quite valuable. Mick had lived with Aunt Nina since his parents died in a flash flood when Mick was twenty-two, and when she unexpectedly died in her sleep three years previously Mick was elated to find Aunt Nina had willed the house entirely to him. He had a sister two years younger, Alicia, who’d left Newcastle when she was twenty-four and now lived in Balmain in Sydney with her coke-dealing, stockbroker boyfriend, Troy. Sadly, Mick didn’t get on with Alicia and he didn’t get on with her boyfriend, either. And when Alicia never came to Aunt Nina’s funeral, it suited Mick in a way. He’d always tried to show Alicia a
brother’s love and often rang to see how she was. But if he ever drove down to see her, the lines of coke always got rolled out, but never the welcome mat. He was always accused of being too square and too parochial and told he should leave Newcastle and broaden his horizons.
But Mick was a Newcastle boy born and bred. He went to West Gateshead Primary and Gateshead High. Did his apprenticeship up the road. And as for being parochial, what was there not to be parochial about? Besides having great beaches, clean water and good air, Miss Universe came from Newcastle. The best rugby league player, a world champion boxer and one of the best bands in the world came from Newcastle. And a world champion surfer grew up on Bar Beach. Their rugby league team had won a premiership. And although it was tough when the steelworks first closed down, Newcastle was now up and away and sailing along better than ever. Mick had done the mandatory trips to Bali and Hawaii, but ‘Newy’ would do Mick. Alicia and her boyfriend could have Sydney, or anywhere else they cared to jet off to for that matter.
For a man who lived close to a beach, Mick wasn’t at all interested in surfboards. Bouncing around on a rubber mat or a lid, body surfing and
snorkelling did Mick and the close circle of friends he hung around with. They followed the Knights. But they also went to the Jets games and liked to kick a soccer ball around Reid Park or bang a few balls about on the tennis courts. Mostly blue-collar boys, they liked a beer, but frequented hotels like the Kent or the Brewery mainly to take in the bands. A fair amount of their partying was done with their girlfriends back at Mick’s.
Downstairs in Mick’s house was a laundry and double garage and in between the two was a large storage room. Mick had cleaned it out then furnished it with bar stools, old lounge suites and a good stereo and called it Mick’s Bar Beach Bar. The boys would get in there and drink beer and bourbon and roar, while the girls would drink pina coladas and fluffy ducks and laugh at the boys. Mick’s girl was a wiry, brown-eyed brunette named Jesse Osbourne.
Jesse, or Ossie as Mick liked to call her, was the love of Mick’s life. She was no raving beauty and any looks she did have were slightly spoiled by a nose broken playing netball and again when she took up kick boxing. But Jesse knew how to kiss, and when they made love it was passionate and exciting and always left both of them feeling on top of the world.
Jesse lived above her bookshop in an old two-storey weatherboard house she owned in Mitchell Street, Stockton. She called her shop The Eye Full Tower, and it was on a corner near the Gladstone Hotel, where she had met Mick two years ago. Mick had just finished doing a job a few doors up and literally bumped into Jesse when he was coming back from the hotel kitchen with a fish basket and a schooner of lemon squash. They sat down near the juke box out the back, got into some good conversation and Jesse invited Mick over to see her shop. While he was there Mick fixed a loose power point and they’d become an item ever since. Jesse liked Mick’s honesty and sense of humour and, despite the little boy in him at times, he was a hard-working man of independent means. Mick was attracted by Jesse’s intelligence. She was into virtually everything: mysticism, conspiracy theories, New Age thinking, world affairs, UFOs etc. She could converse on almost any subject and made a good living buying and selling books at the shop or over the internet. But besides being an avid reader, Jesse could speed read. Mick had never seen anything like it. It took Mick half a day to read the Sunday papers. Jesse would knock them over along with the two magazines and the crossword
puzzle in fifteen minutes. After they fell in love, Jesse turned out to be a good friend as well.
Business had picked up. So Mick took on another electrician, a younger man who looked similar to him, named Mark Brooks. Mark was such a good worker that a year later Mick made him a junior partner and they called themselves M and M Electrical Services. Three weeks back they went to do a job at Speers Point that involved nothing more than changing a light bulb for an old-age pensioner. Mick was a bit hungover, so Mark volunteered to do it while Mick waited in the van and took it easy. Mark only bothered to turn the light off at the switch and was absently checking around the fitting with a screwdriver when just as absently the old dear remarked it was dark in the kitchen and turned the switch on so Mark could see better. The old house had high ceilings and, besides the effect of the shock, Mark broke his neck when he was thrown off the ladder.
The funeral service was awful. Mark came from a big family and they all blamed Mick for what happened. One of Mark’s brothers actually threatened him. And in Mick’s view they were right. Why wasn’t he in there helping Mark instead of sitting on his arse reading the paper?
The one small consolation was that Mark only left a sobbing girlfriend and not a wife and kids. Mick hadn’t worked since the accident and even though he still hadn’t the heart to take the name off the white Volkswagen Transporter, he still felt uncomfortable whenever he drove it. He went out of his way to avoid Mark’s family and the drinks back at the bar had been put on hold. But with Jesse’s help Mick was slowly coming out of the doldrums and learning to laugh again. Now it was ten in the morning on the last Wednesday in October. Jesse had told him on the weekend it was time to put it all behind him. Take another week off then start working again. Mick agreed and loved Jesse more than ever for her patience and understanding.
However, if Jesse was the main love in Mick’s life, there was another: a canary yellow 1936 Buick Roadmaster, with a Fischer body, matching leather upholstery and whitewall tyres. It had a valve-in-head straight-eight motor under an Aerobat carburettor, and with its torque tube drive and double stabilisation, the old Buick cruised like a dream on the open road.
Ironically, Mick came across the Buick through his sister Alicia. One of Troy’s coke-dealing mates got busted and was having a fire sale before he
jumped bail for parts unknown. Mick offered the bloke five thousand dollars cash for the car and the bloke jumped at it. That was three years ago and the Buick had now become Mick’s pride and joy. Mick liked nothing better than to get Jesse and another couple then take a run up to Port Stephens or out through the Hunter Valley with the stereo playing and the wind coming in the corner window. Mick even bought an old double breasted pinstripe suit from an op shop, which he sometimes wore with a painted tie and a hat when he took Jesse out to dinner. To keep Mick happy, Jesse got dressed up like Bonnie Parker on his birthday one night. But refused to ever do it again. Of course this all happened when the Buick was going. At the moment, unfortunately, it wasn’t.
Mick asked Jesse to take a day off from work and come for a spin up to Shoal Bay, go dolphin watching then have a meal at the Country Club while he tried to get his mind off things. Mick was barely half a kilometre from home when he double shuffled round a corner and cracked the pressure plate. That was two weeks ago. Now the Buick was still up on blocks at a workshop in Hamilton run by the Nise brothers: Neanderthal Neville and Jurassic Jimmy. The two big men with greasy black hair, thick necks, beady eyes
and domed foreheads were friends with Mick and had been his mechanics for years. But business was business and the boys were getting tired of Mick’s car taking up valuable space in their garage. Mick was starting to sweat. Finding a pressure plate for a 1936 Buick wasn’t easy, and if he didn’t find one soon, it meant getting the Buick towed back to his place then trying to get the part shipped in from a Buick specialist in Flint, Michigan in the USA. Which, if they could find the part, would take weeks. Probably months. Not to mention the cost. And Mick missed his old Buick. Every time he went round the workshop, it was like visiting an old friend in an intensive care ward. Then unexpectedly Jurassic Jimmy rang Mick on Tuesday to tell him he might have a solution to his problem.
The brothers had an Aunt Bronwyn who organised carers for old people living on their own. Somewhere over at New Lambton, there was an old woman getting ready to go into a nursing home, who had a car she wanted to sell. It had been in her garage for years and nobody knew what it was. But parts from old cars were often compatible and if it was a vintage car, the pressure plate might be compatible with Mick’s Buick. And if the old car was only fit for the
scrapheap and the woman didn’t want too much for it, it might be worth buying for spare parts. Being desperate to get his pride and joy out of the Nise brothers’ garage and back on the road, Mick jumped at the offer and took three thousand dollars out of the bank to wave in front of the old lady, hoping he might be able to work out some sort of a deal. Now Mick was in his kitchen, waiting anxiously for Jimmy to call him with the old lady’s name and address. Mick was about to make a cup of coffee when the phone rang. He put the coffee down and picked up the receiver.
‘Hello?’
‘Is that the Shlomo Klinghoffer Bar Mitzvah?’ came a gruff voice at the other end.
‘No. You got Yitzak Fishbinder’s deli on Fenton.’
‘You don’t got a Shlomo Klinghoffer there?’
‘No.’
‘Oh.’
‘Jimmy. Stop stuffing around, will you. I want to get my car going. Have you got this old sheila’s address or what?’
‘Yeah, yeah. Don’t shit your pants,’ replied Jimmy. ‘You got a Biro?’
‘Yeah.’ Mick nodded into the phone.
‘Okay. Her name’s Mrs Hedstrom.’
Jimmy gave Mick the woman’s address. Then again because the first Biro didn’t have any ink and Mick had to find another.
‘I think I know where that is,’ said Mick. ‘Near Regent Park. I did a job out there.’