If Blood Should Stain the Wattle

By Jackie French

It’s 1972, and across Australia the catchcry is ‘It’s time’.

Time for old folk, time for young folk, time for a new, idealistic Labor government.

In Gibber's Creek, it's time for Jed Kelly to choose between past love, Nicholas, the local Labor member, and Sam from the Halfway to Eternity commune. And for Scarlett O'Hara, it's time to dream that one day she becomes a doctor - despite being in a wheelchair.

It's also time for matriarch Matilda Thompson to reflect on the life that took her from the slums of Grinder's Alley to the events that began a nation at a billabong in 1894.

The 1970s was a time of extraordinary ideals of a better world, but as the ideals drifted from disaster to the Dismissal there were deep conflicts about what that better world might be.

Jackie French, author of the bestselling To Love a Sunburnt Country, has woven her own experience of that period into an unforgettable story of a small rural community and a nation swept into the social and political tumult of the early 1970s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Dec 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781460705933

Jackie French

Jackie French AM is an award-winning writer, wombat negotiator, the 2014–2015 Australian Children's Laureate and the 2015 Senior Australian of the Year. In 2016 Jackie became a Member of the Order of Australia for her contribution to children's literature and her advocacy for youth literacy. She is regarded as one of Australia's most popular children's authors and writes across all genres — from picture books, history, fantasy, ecology and sci-fi to her much loved historical fiction for a variety of age groups. ‘A book can change a child's life. A book can change the world' was the primary philosophy behind Jackie's two-year term as Laureate. jackiefrench.com facebook.com/authorjackiefrench

Book preview

Chapter 1

Gibber’s Creek Gazette, March 1972

Local MP Praises Knitting Triumph

The Honourable Kevin Briggs, Country Party, presented the prize for the Gibber’s Creek CWA Annual Junior Knitting Competition yesterday.

This year’s winner, Bronwyn Sampson, 12, created a beautiful baby’s jumper in swirls of tangy orange and royal purple. Mr Briggs was most impressed with Bronwyn’s ‘mod’ colours and womanly skills.

A splendid afternoon tea was served by all the ladies.

HALFWAY TO ETERNITY COMMUNE VIA GIBBER’S CREEK, AUSTRALIA

LEAFSONG

Leafsong sat by the fireplace outside the faded circus tent on one of the stumps of wood that served as the commune’s chairs, tables and occasional execution blocks for chooks, and assessed her empire.

The world was going to end the next day, at eleven-thirty pm exactly. You didn’t often get to celebrate the end of the world. The end of the world deserved a feast, the best she could create for the commune and its friends, for people who didn’t slide their eyes away from her lumpy body, her uneven ears and mismatched eyes.

When her body was made, she thought, the halves of two different people had been glued together. Sometimes Leafsong wondered if another girl crept the earth, the mirror image of her. She hoped her mirror twin had been as lucky as she had been, with her sister and her friends.

Leafsong gazed at the gum trees reaching dappled arms towards the sky and at the silken river quiet between its banks of sand. Yes, Halfway to Eternity would be the best place to be when the world ended. Above her stretched a blue-painted sky, and hills that sang of leaves and cicadas and of silence.

Silence had a melody too. It was sad, thought Leafsong, that few could hear it, especially if tomorrow night the northern hemisphere was going to explode like the newspapers said Nostradamus had predicted.

Carol said newspapers were part of the bourgeois capitalist conspiracy. Leafsong wasn’t sure what ‘bourgeois capitalism’ was, exactly — it was hard to ask questions when you couldn’t speak and didn’t know how to spell ‘bourgeois’ or ‘capitalism’. She suspected bourgeois capitalism had something to do with buying new lounge suites by having boring but well-paid jobs like the one Carol had given up in Sydney, when Mum and Dad moved to the USA and Carol brought her down to Gibber’s Creek.

It was just possible, of course, that Gibber’s Creek, the commune and the southern hemisphere might survive when the north half of the planet vanished. Leafsong knew very little about physics — she had stopped going to school four years earlier, when she was twelve, and no one, least of all her parents or her schoolteachers, had been particularly interested in sending her back again. But even she suspected that an exploding northern hemisphere would rip away the oceans, the atmosphere and possibly everyone on the planet too.

Leafsong didn’t think it would really happen. Or rather, she had suspended disbelief, like you had to with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Their visits required feasts too. In any case a horde of friends were arriving in the morning to finish Sam’s house and they needed to be fed whether or not the world ended. It was an unwritten rule of the alternative society that when you came to help build, you were fed.

Leafsong grinned. Perfect timing! An End of the World Feast and a We’ve Finished Sam’s House Party!

The feast would need to be cooked there on the fireplace and in the makeshift oven Sam had rigged up from an old truck brake drum, of course. But where should it be eaten?

The obvious place was the big geodesic dome the commune had built when they first bought the land two years back to be ready for JohnandAnnie’s baby. JohnandAnnie lazed on the dome’s deck now, Annie feeding Sunshine. John saw Leafsong look over and waved a two-fingered ‘peace’ sign at her. But although they had all helped build the dome, it had become JohnandAnnie’s private property, even though Clifford said all private property was theft.

The mud-walled cottage she lived in with Carol was too small for a feast, and Sam’s place was still only eight solid wood posts with chicken wire stretched between them, though its roof was already half covered with solar panels. Leafsong suspected Sam’s concept of ‘house’ was primarily ‘a place to perch solar panels’.

All going well, Sam’s mud walls, windows, doors and floor would be finished in one giant working bee tomorrow, hours before the end of the world, but the floor would need to dry out and then be sealed with oil and beeswax before anyone could walk on it.

No, the party would need to be where she was sitting, around the fireplace where they all ate each night, and in Sam’s mum’s giant old circus tent the commune used to store tea chests of brown rice and lentils. Clifford slept there too, and Sam for now, their sleeping bags shoved into old chests each morning to stop the chooks or bush rats using them as nests.

There was masses of room for a party in the tent, even if it rained. But what should she cook? Sam’s parents had promised a sheep to roast on the spit to feed the helpers tomorrow, but a feast needed more than meat.

There was corn, of course, an acre of it along the river flats, each stem as strong as if it owned the earth, as if to say, ‘I am here forever.’ Everyone in Gibber’s Creek seemed to have corn and tomatoes ripening. The commune had been eating corn on the cob, corn fritters, and corn and tomato casserole for two months. Corn was not nearly special enough for a feast.

There were eggs too, from the chooks scratching around the tent, and cheese and milk from the two goats, much healthier than what came from cows. And fat purple eggplants, giant-leafed basil, silverbeet, beans, carrots, potatoes and possibly 7,862 tomatoes, the whole garden filling the air with the smell of fermenting fruit . . . and the contents of Sunshine’s nappies, because JohnandAnnie believed that anything that came out of either end of a baby was naturally pure and therefore safe to use as fertiliser . . .

. . . and at least a three-hour picking’s worth of strawberries. If Leafsong didn’t harvest them, no one else would, because JohnandAnnie never worked, due to too much of what darling old Mrs Weaver down the road called ‘Whacky Baccy’, and Sam and Carol and Clifford were busy building, and planning the future of the commune and the world. Leafsong could hear their laughter as they puddled clay and dried tussocks together for the working bee.

No one asked Leafsong to help build anything, though even at sixteen her big crooked body was almost as strong as Sam’s. Somehow any wall Leafsong worked on or trench she dug turned out crooked too, though every cake she baked was perfect.

Nor did Leafsong join in the long discussions around the spark spires of the evening fire, the scent of red gum coals mixing with patchouli oil and JohnandAnnie’s joints. Should the commune become a learning centre for peace studies and alternative technology? How many long-drop dunnies did they need? When exactly would the world run out of oil and other resources, causing global catastrophe and the withering away or violent self-destruction of established societies?

It was difficult to discuss things when you could not speak, but not impossible, not when the others in the commune had learned to look at her, despite the slight distortion of her face, and had learned to interpret her gestures too. But since the day, when she was seven years old, she had discarded speech, Leafsong preferred to leave discussions to others.

Leafsong stood and lifted up her shoulder bag. No, a proper feast needed more than stuff they grew and ate every day, including brown rice. You could do one hundred and one things with brown rice and Leafsong had tried them all. Only stuffed rice balls and leek and mushroom rice were even vaguely feast-like.

There was no alternative, decided Leafsong happily. She needed white flour, even if Clifford said that white flour and white sugar were poisons with all the goodness taken away. Once the white flour was in a pumpkin fruitcake, Clifford would never know it had once been white. She had to have sugar too, because the commune had not yet provided itself with beehives or maple trees.

And butter. Goat’s milk was no good for butter, and shop-bought butter had to be used fast before it melted because no one had a fridge yet.

Leafsong grinned. She had five dollars and forty cents in her shoulder bag, made by selling her tomato jam and green tomato chutney on the commune’s stall by the gate. The money should go into the jar in the tent where the commune pooled whatever money they earned or received from relations. But today buying sugar and flour was more important.

It wasn’t as if you had an end of the world every week, or even once a year. This might be the only chance she ever had to celebrate one.

Leafsong trudged down the dusty track to the road to town, her slightly too-big sandals flapping under the hem of her blue cheesecloth dress. The sandals were Clifford’s, or had been, because all property was theft, and what belonged to one belonged to everyone, even if they didn’t fit everyone, quite.

Excitement fizzed through Leafsong’s crooked body. A feast to cook! A party for the end of the world.

No one stared at her in Gibber’s Creek, even though she wore cheesecloth and faded papery daisies in her waist-long hair, instead of a mini skirt or moleskins or jeans. No one even looked at her, beyond a first uncomfortable glance. People rarely did.

Leafsong was used to people avoiding looking at her. It meant, for one thing, she was free to briefly examine everyone she passed: a young man in jeans, who looked away a second too late, and was blushing; a woman with blue-rinsed hair, clad in pearls and a crisp shirtdress and carrying a small dog. The dog had the lost look that said, ‘I am only an accessory even if I am fed and groomed.’ The dog gazed at Leafsong, its tail wagging. The woman did not.

Gibber’s Creek was a town of dogs. Dogs sitting in the backs of utes. Dogs peering from the windows of tradesmen’s vans. Dogs waiting patiently outside the grocer’s shop, lifting their legs against electricity poles, or with wagging hopeful tails outside the butcher’s.

And a man. A man in a white suit, there in Gibber’s Creek! Leafsong had never seen a man in a white suit, except on TV back in Sydney, when she and Carol still lived in their parents’ house. The man was forty, perhaps, with a tan so even it might have been painted on, and eyes a strange light blue.

The man did look at her. Really looked: he was . . . evaluating. He gave the beginning of a smile, his teeth shining as white as his suit.

It was the wrong kind of smile, as if a snake had grinned at her. Snakes had no malice, exactly, and nor did she think this man was malicious. But something was wrong with him, and with his smile too.

And then the smile stopped. He looked away as if he’d never seen her.

Leafsong smiled back politely anyway, then turned quickly into Lee’s Grocery Store. The grocery store wasn’t as good as supermarkets back in Sydney. Its only vegetables were dusty cabbages, even dustier potatoes, some shiny brown-skinned onions, sad-looking carrots and large wedges of bright orange pumpkin, with shrivelled apples and orange net bags of oranges. But the shop did sell sugar and butter and flour, as well as the array of canned vegetables and fruit lining the shelves behind the counter, and ice creams in the freezer cabinet by the door.

Leafsong waited her turn in line, then handed a list over the counter to Bronnie Lee. The grocery girls were used to her not talking now.

She listened to the women’s chatter behind her as the two big paper bags on the counter grew fatter with her purchases. Everyone in this shop knew each other and her, but of course no one talked to the mute commune girl.

‘Six millimetres of rain last night, but they got more across the river . . .’

‘Did you see Bellbird last night?’

‘. . . and another crop circle down in Harrison’s top paddock,’ said Mrs Weaver excitedly, her work-knotted hands petting the young kangaroo in a hessian bag suspended from her shoulder.

Mrs Weaver had found Joey with its leg caught in a barbed-wire fence. She had rescued it, cleaned the wound and put the leg in a splint. And now she took Joey everywhere while its leg, hopefully, healed.

Mrs Weaver had been the first local person to visit the commune, apart from Sam’s parents. She’d brought a tray of hot buttered scones, two jars of raspberry jam, six potted fruit trees she’d grown from seed, and the orphaned joey she had cared for before this one. Mrs Weaver always had an animal or two in care.

‘I asked the alien about the crop circle,’ she continued excitedly. ‘And he said, yes, it sounded like an alien one all right.’ Mrs Weaver had been seeing aliens for the last six years, ever since her car jumped the fence when the alien spacecraft levitated it. Or, according to gossip, when Mrs Weaver took the corner by the billabong too fast after a night at bingo at the Town Hall. ‘But aliens come in peace, you know. That’s what the alien says. He says they come in peace . . .’ Her voice died away.

Silence could have direction, just like sound. Leafsong stared at the shop door with the others.

The man in white had entered the grocery store. Two young women walked behind him, wearing white cheesecloth kurtas and loose white trousers. The man’s smile was snaky again: he was evaluating each person in the shop. The women’s smiles were vague and happy — their bodies were loose.

How did they keep their clothes so white in Gibber’s Creek’s autumn dust? wondered Leafsong. Carol had been forced to colour her once-white shirts and dresses with dyes home-made from onion skins and gum leaves. It should have worked, according to the self-sufficiency magazines, but left the clothes as mottled as the trees the dyes had come from.

These people wore garments so white they glowed.

‘Good afternoon.’ The man’s voice conquered the shop. Leafsong instinctively moved aside for him to take her place at the counter.

The man in white shook his head. ‘We’ll wait our turn. There is a season for all things.’ His smile turned into a grin. ‘This is the time of waiting. Even if this particular time lasts only five minutes.’

The women in white laughed, a little too much in unison. Around the shop the other customers smiled, in an ancient belief, perhaps, that strangers who came with jokes did not also bring swords.

Don’t laugh, thought Leafsong. Didn’t they see the snake behind the smile? She had seen a black snake swallow a frog a week ago.

Couldn’t they see this man was hunting too?

The pale blue eyes turned to Leafsong. ‘My name is Ra Zacharia. You’re from the commune next to Drinkwater.’

It wasn’t a question. ‘Ra Zacharia knows everything,’ said one of the white-clad women proudly.

It didn’t take omnipotence to work out I came from the commune, thought Leafsong. Not when she wore blue cheesecloth and daisies. But she nodded politely.

‘What’s your name?’ The voice was gentle as the blue eyes gazed into hers.

Ah, so Ra Zacharia did not know everything.

‘Her name’s Leafsong. She can’t talk,’ said Bronnie Lee from behind the counter, with more sympathy than Leafsong had expected from a stranger.

‘But she’s a lovely girl,’ added Mrs Weaver hurriedly. ‘They’re such sweet young people up at the commune. All hard workers.’ It was perhaps the greatest compliment anyone in Gibber’s Creek could give, even if it wasn’t quite true — not of JohnandAnnie anyway.

The man’s smile grew warm. Snakes could get warm, if they basked in the sun long enough. ‘Are the others on the commune like her?’

He doesn’t mean are they good cake-makers. He means are the others deformed too, thought Leafsong.

Bronnie Lee pushed Leafsong’s grocery bags towards her. ‘They’re nice people,’ she said sharply. ‘Here you are, love. All done. That’ll be four dollars exactly.’

Leafsong handed the money over, smiling her gratitude, and picked up the two big brown paper bags.

‘There’s a box of empty jars waiting for you on my veranda,’ Mrs Weaver said to Leafsong.

Leafsong smiled her thanks again. Mrs Weaver’s empty Vegemite and honey jars would soon be filled with more autumn jams and chutneys. She walked to the door, then halted as the man in white put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Why can’t you talk, my dear?’

Leafsong said nothing. Even if she’d had a notebook to write in, she had no wish to explain that when she was seven years old she’d had her tonsils out. And how, after the operation, she had discovered the power of silence.

‘Feeling all right, love?’ the nurse had asked her. For a moment Leafsong had been too groggy to reply. And the nurse had looked at her. Really looked at her, instead of instinctively avoiding a not-quite-right face. For the first time in her life Leafsong felt connected to the world. Only Carol had ever really looked at her before then. But as soon as she stopped speaking, Mum, Dad, even the kids at school had had to look at her, to see what she was thinking or might do.

Could she talk now? Leafsong didn’t know. It had been nine years since she had spoken. She did know that if she ever spoke a single word, the spell would break.

‘Dear child,’ the white-clad man’s voice was as full of sympathy as a nasturtium flower’s tail was of nectar, ‘one day you will talk, I promise you.’ He added quietly, ‘All you need is to want to.’

Ah, thought Leafsong. Perhaps this Ra Zacharia had really looked. But he was still speaking, his voice louder now. ‘One day all who are crippled will walk, all who are dumb will speak, all who are in pain will dance in joy. Nor will the world end tomorrow night, no matter what the papers say.’

The customers shared grins around the shop. Everyone knew this End of the World stuff was a game, printed in the newspapers for fun, not as a warning. The world couldn’t end. The world could never end! Most people, thought Leafsong, never really accepted that while tomorrow was almost always like today, one day it wouldn’t be.

She smiled at the other customers, and stepped out of the shop, carrying the two big brown paper bags of groceries.

She had End of the World cakes to bake.

Chapter 2

Gibber’s Creek Gazette, March 1972

Correction: Last Thursday’s ‘Sale of erotic shrubs at the Rectory in aid of Overseas Missions’ should have read ‘Sale of exotic shrubs’. The Gazette apologises to all concerned and congratulates the Ladies’ Guild on their success.

SCARLETT

Scarlett guided her wheelchair along the footpath towards River View. She was NOT crying.

A passer-by might think she was, but her face was twisted anyway. A waif’s face, a cramped cripple’s face, marked by fourteen years of fighting to sit up without cushions or a harness to help, to make her arms and hands move of her own volition, instead of being guided by a therapist, to be free to go to school on a motorised wheelchair built by the technicians at River View, where she had lived since she was a few months old, because why would parents want to keep a child who looked like a mutated elf?

But looking like a mutated elf wasn’t why she was the only girl in the class not to be invited to Barbie’s fourteenth birthday party. A girl in a wheelchair COULD go to a party, even if she couldn’t dance. She even had a purple mini skirt, which Jed had bought her in Canberra, and long purple boots with pink flowers that made her skinny legs look normal.

If being in a wheelchair had been the reason Barbie hadn’t invited her, Scarlett wouldn’t be crying. Not that she WAS crying.

Scarlett brushed the tears away, then pressed her wheelchair’s controls to go faster down the footpath. Old Matilda Thompson had bullied the council into concreting the path between town and River View the year before so the River View kids who were mobile enough could get to school by themselves.

Those kids had found friends, kids who liked the novelty of having a mate in a wheelchair, or could look beyond it to the person. But not her. And that was why she WASN’T crying. The dumb girls at high school didn’t like her because she was too intelligent, talked too much about things they didn’t KNOW about, like plate tectonics. Didn’t they even CARE that Australia was drifting north? That the mountains beyond these gold-grassed plains were slowly rising?

Barbie and her ‘barbarians’ didn’t like her because Scarlett saw too much, and said too much too. Like how Deirdre had her period twice as often as everyone else. But had Deirdre been GRATEFUL when Scarlett had told her to ask Dr McAlpine about it? NO!

Scarlett suddenly pressed the stop button of her wheelchair.

The footpath in front of her was blocked by a burst bag of flour, a bag of icing sugar and a half-empty bottle of cream. A strangely bulky girl kneeled next to the mess, trying to wrap what was left into the remains of the sodden grocery bag, which was mathematically IMPOSSIBLE when you calculated the mass of the shopping and what was left of the bag . . .

‘Do you want to borrow my basket?’

The girl looked up. A crooked face. Odd. But odd was interesting. Scarlett reached behind — still a triumph to have arms and hands that could reach, she’d be WHEELING HERSELF soon — and lifted her schoolbag out of the basket on the back of her wheelchair, then held out the basket.

The girl smiled. Her smile was crooked too, her big teeth erratically uneven. But it was still a good smile, and her hair was lovely, long, parted in the middle and blonde and decked with dried everlastings. She stood, took the basket, and began to pile the shopping into it.

‘I’m Scarlett O’Hara,’ offered Scarlett. She’d chosen the name years back, when she had assumed a new glamorous name each week. Scarlett waited for the girl to give her own name.

The girl picked up the bag of icing sugar, scooped up as much of the flour as she could, and the half-empty bottle of cream. She still didn’t speak. ‘What’s YOUR name?’ Scarlett demanded at last.

The girl reached into her shoulder bag and brought out a card. Scarlett read the single word on it: Leafsong. ‘Is that your name?’

The girl nodded.

Interesting. Had the girl chosen the name, as she had chosen Scarlett? Or had her parents been idiots? Because some parents WERE idiots. Like hers, Jed said, because they didn’t know the treasure they had lost when they signed a crippled daughter over to River View. And if Jed thought Scarlett was a treasure, then she WAS, because Jed always told the truth . . .

Scarlett inspected the girl. The almost flat face was odd. Not Down syndrome, but as if her face had once been slightly twisted by some giant hand. ‘Can’t you talk?’ Her voice was sharper than she meant it to be, the snubs of the afternoon still wriggling inside her like vicious worms.

A smile, a shake of the head. And the anger worms vanished. Scarlett smiled back, considering the many reasons this girl might not talk. Facial deformity, tumour of the larynx . . . she could just imagine Barbie’s face if she’d even MENTIONED tumours of the larynx. Impulsively Scarlett asked, ‘Did you have a tumour of the larynx?’

Leafsong grinned and shook her head.

Interesting. This girl knew what a tumour of the larynx was.

‘Problem with your palate? Tongue? Birth defect?’ Scarlett added hesitantly, ‘Brain injury?’

A headshake to all of them. And the grin. A grin that looked at her, not away. Scarlett said impulsively, ‘Do you want to come back to River View with me for a swim? We’ve got a swimming pool.’ Friends could use it too, after therapy sessions finished at four-thirty.

Leafsong pointed to her groceries and shook her head. Then, slowly, she gestured to Scarlett, to herself, then made walking motions with her fingers, back to her own body.

‘You want me to come to your place?’

A nod. Leafsong pointed to the sun, then put up a single finger as if to say, ‘One.’

Scarlett LOVED puzzles. ‘You want me to come to your place tomorrow?’

Another nod. Leafsong held up four fingers to say, ‘Four o’clock.’

‘Where do you live?’

Leafsong pointed along the river, grinned and pantomimed playing a guitar.

‘The commune!’ It was a few kilometres out of town on the road that led to Dribble, where Jed lived and where Scarlett stayed whenever Jed was home from uni. The name ‘Dribble’ had been a joke — what else could you call a house between Drinkwater and Overflow?

Leafsong lifted her arms, twisted her body in a dance that clearly said, ‘Party,’ then pointed to the ground, then north. Impressive. None of the barbarians even KNEW where north was. Leafsong waved her hands in a wild explosion.

Scarlett laughed. Laughed at the ridiculousness, at the wonder of communicating by only expression and gesture, of having someone who might just want to be her friend.

‘You’re having an End of the World party? Groovy!’ That was one in the eye for Barbie, Scarlett thought gleefully. A proper grown-up party, not just schoolgirls and a record player.

And even groovier to be going to the party from Dribble, because Jed would be home tonight. Jed would let her borrow her eyeshadow and lipstick, which Matron Clancy never let her use even though EVERY girl in class used lipstick now.

But it would be mean to ask Jed to drive her to the party and not stay. NO ONE should be left out of a party.

‘Can I bring my sister?’

Leafsong nodded again.

Far out! Though one day soon Scarlett wanted Leafsong to see where she really lived most of the time. Not in a house with a mum and dad and three point five brothers and sisters, but in an institution, no matter how many butterflies it was decorated with.

But she had Jed, and Nancy and Michael as her adopted aunt and uncle, and the twins who let you cuddle them for ten seconds before they squirmed away, and Matilda, who was a cross between a grandma and the empress of Gibber’s Creek. Which might be BETTER than a normal family, though it was impossible to extrapolate any valid conclusion about that without a LOT more data . . .

A commune and River View had a lot in common, Scarlett thought, watching Leafsong pack the last of the groceries neatly in the basket. The kids had to share nearly everything at River View. Only their clothes and wheelchairs belonged to them alone, and a few things like books or the dream catcher Jed had given her to hang from her window in the dorm she shared with three much younger girls. Everyone at River View these days was younger than her, and . . .

. . . just like her. Cripples, in their chairs.

A car slowed down next to them, then stopped. A white car, dust free. Even the hubcaps were shining white. A man in a white suit looked out, smiling at Scarlett, ignoring Leafsong. A white-clad young woman sat next to him, smiling vaguely. Another in the back seat, asleep. ‘Do you need a hand?’ the man asked gently. His voice was warm and deep.

Leafsong put her hand on Scarlett’s shoulder and shook her head urgently. Why? thought Scarlett. The man was only trying to be kind.

‘We’re okay,’ said Scarlett. ‘Thanks anyway.’

‘Would you like a lift back to River View?’

Scarlett froze. She had never seen the man before. You got to know everyone at least by sight in Gibber’s Creek. How did he know she lived at River View? ‘No. Thank you,’ she said.

‘Are you sure? It would be no trouble. Your wheelchair would fit in the boot.’

‘I’m fine.’ She turned the wheelchair, so her back faced the car. ‘Can Jed and I bring anything to the party?’ she asked, making conversation till the car left. And then it did, its engine purring along the street, but not in the direction of River View.

Not an axe murderer trying to lure two girls into his car, and anyway, he already had two girls and neither of them had looked worried. Just one of those strangers who thought a crippled girl ALWAYS needed help, thought Scarlett, dismissing him from her thoughts.

‘See you tomorrow,’ she said to Leafsong.

Leafsong nodded, glanced at the basket and touched her heart and lips briefly in a way that somehow said, ‘Thanks,’ even more clearly than if she’d spoken the word. She walked a little way, then turned and waved at her.

Odd. Weird. But then Scarlett was weird too. And not a single one of her adopted almost-family was normal. Normal, decided Scarlett, with a rush of happiness and of pity for all the Barbies in the universe, was BORING.

And Jed would be there that afternoon. Impossibly wonderful Jed, who wasn’t quite a sister, aunt or mother, but was bits of all of them and better. Jed was NEVER boring.

And now, perhaps, thought Scarlett, shifting the speed button on her chair to maximum as she ALMOST whizzed down the footpath, feeling the hot wind upon her face, smelling of sunstruck lawns and wilting geraniums, I also have a friend.

Chapter 3

Gibber’s Creek Gazette, March 1972

No Hot Pants or Boob Tubes at the Club Please!

Mr Bruce Briggs, President of the Gibber’s Creek RSL Club, reminds readers of the Gazette that patrons must be dressed decently and respectfully, due to complaints by members. Ladies: proper skirts, please.

‘We must uphold family values,’ said Mr Briggs. ‘Any visitor wearing a skirt more than an inch above the knee may be asked to leave.’

RA ZACHARIA

He had been a fool. Ra Zacharia was rarely a fool. But today he had let his eagerness show.

He would not make that mistake again.

He had hunted for perfect Sacrifices for two years, until he had heard of River View at Gibber’s Creek. What better place to find the Sacrifices the Elders demanded than a rehabilitation centre for crippled children in a country town?

It wasn’t until his community buildings were almost complete that he discovered that River View was designed for children who needed only a year or two of therapy, and then went home to almost normal lives. Ra Zacharia had no need of ‘almost normal’. He already had enough of those.

He should have trusted in the harmony of the universe! For there she was, perfect, on his first visit to town. That small defiant girl, her shrunken legs dangling over the chair in a way that made it clear she had never walked. Never could walk, without a miracle.

Ra Zacharia smiled as he turned the car onto the road that led to his community. Once he controlled that girl, he would create a miracle indeed.

But he must move slowly. Must, somehow, convince her to be his, absolutely. The perfect willing Sacrifice to offer to the Elders.

Forever.

Chapter 4

Gibber’s Creek Gazette, March 1972

The Lions Club wood raffle was won by Mrs Andrew Green, with $67.82 raised for the Gibber’s Creek Hospital. Lions Club President, Mr Martin Sampson, thanks all volunteers. Baked goods are still needed for Friday’s street stall.

JED

Jed waved cheerily to Miss Elsinkop, her tutor, as she raced out the doors of Ursula College, then shoved her bag into the back of her blue sports car.

Miss Elsinkop would know perfectly well that:

a. Jed was heading off to Gibber’s Creek mid-week — why else would she carry her suitcase? And that:

b. Jed had no permission to do so.

But Miss Elsinkop would say nothing. No one would. Because after two and a bit years at ANU and Ursula College, Jed’s tutors, lecturers and even the dean knew that Jed Kelly would get high distinctions even if she cut every lecture; and that if they threatened to fail her for non-attendance, she’d just grin and say, ‘Okay.’

The wealthy, generous and . . . to be honest, not modest, thought Jed . . . beautiful Miss Kelly could also get away with wearing clothes that were slightly too gorgeous to bring to university. Rumour said that Jed Kelly’s clothes came from Paris designers in the 1920s and ’30s, via her great-grandmother’s wardrobe, altered to fit Jed’s generous curves.

Rumour was right.

Today’s dress was low-waisted green silk with dappled autumn leaves, leaving her arms bare; they were brown from helping to dag sheep in the summer holidays. Her long dark hair was topped with a floppy hat and a scarf that exactly matched the dress. Only her sandals were modern: the wedges worn by half the girls at college.

Jed’s tutors and lecturers also knew that even if this girl missed the occasional lecture, she cared deeply about their subjects. Jed Kelly was not at university to learn her way to a profession, nor, as many girls still freely admitted, to find a husband studying for a suitably lucrative profession. Jed might also turn up at her tutor’s office at lunchtime, almost dancing with excitement about a research paper she’d discovered. Her essays were insightful and sometimes disconcertingly original.

Besides, Ursula College, and even the entire Faculty of Arts at ANU, listened when Matilda Thompson summoned her great-granddaughter to Drinkwater. Mrs Thompson had become a generous donor, now that her great-granddaughter was a student at ANU. Mrs Thompson was equally generous in making it quite clear that if she wanted a small favour in return, it would be granted.

No, thought Jed happily, no one would object to her taking a few days off. The days of people ordering her about were gone.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’

A vision in a purple-fringed micro mini skimming the tops of legs made even longer by sheer purple stockings and silver stiletto sandals stared at her with Cleopatra eyes outlined in glittery purple eyeshadow.

Jed grinned. ‘Home.’ It was such a lovely word. At last she had a home.

Julieanne put her hands on her hips, sending the bells on her bracelets ringing. ‘You mean Deadsville?’

Julieanne had visited Gibber’s Creek with Jed just once, after the girl in a silver 1920s fringed sheath and headband had sat next to the girl in green velvet hot pants and matching long boots, giving the finger to the wolf-whistling boys in the back of the lecture theatre.

It had been love at first fight, when Jed and Julieanne argued over Descartes’s theory of knowledge and what if a brain kept alive in a bottle only thought it was alive, making ‘I think therefore I am’ totally unreliable, while the blokes looked on, uncomprehending.

Julieanne had as little respect for ‘normal’ as Jed. She was an embassy brat, born when her father had been third undersecretary in Ghana. He was now first secretary in New York. Two days in Gibber’s Creek, with no discos or boutiques, and where discussions centred on cattle prices and ‘How much rain did you get last week?’, had been enough.

Instead she had brought Jed into her world: demonstrations against the visiting South African Springbok rugby team; marching in moratoriums against young conscripted Australians being sent to the Vietnam War; arguing about Germaine Greer and should women lead separate lives from men to free them from inevitable tyranny; drinking coffee and eating raisin toast at Gus’s till midnight.

The only place Jed refused to accompany her was the union bar, with a fake ID to prove she was over twenty-one. Alcohol for Jed would always be associated with drunkenness, violence and fear. And Julieanne, being Julieanne, had listened with sympathy and understanding to the parts of Jed’s life she wished to share.

‘Back to Deadsville,’ agreed Jed companionably. ‘Want to come?’

Julieanne gave an elaborate shudder. ‘Let me guess. Mrs Matilda Thompson has instructed you to be with her for the end of the world. But Gibber’s Creek is the end of the world already.’

Jed laughed. ‘I can’t see Matilda believing a plague doctor’s ancient prophecy.’

‘Ha,’ said Julieanne. ‘It’s all a beat-up. Nostradamus’s prophecies are so vague they might mean anything. Just promise you won’t come back engaged to a sheep farmer.’

‘I promise. Cross my heart. I’m not getting engaged to anyone. Ever.’ Jed pushed back a flicker of memory: Nicholas’s lips on hers. If she had never mentioned marriage, would Nicholas have pushed her away? Her father’s two disastrous marriages should have taught her that for her ‘wedded bliss’ was poison.

‘What is there for someone like you in Gibber’s Creek, except sheep and marriage?’ demanded Julieanne, who planned to head to swinging London as soon as she graduated — Carnaby Street, Mick Jagger concerts, and a network that would with determination, brilliance and a few buckets of mascara help her become a lead reporter or possibly a columnist for a magazine like Rolling Stone, and not ever ever ever a writer for the women’s pages.

‘Gibber’s Creek has everything,’ said Jed, grinning, because there were some things that even Julieanne could never understand. Or at least not until she had got the magic of ‘going overseas’ out of her system. ‘Anyway, I like sheep.’

‘Me too. With mint sauce and gravy.’

Jed took the corner out of the car park a little too fast, just for the fun of it, waving as Julieanne waved back, smiling, exasperated, the sunlight shining on her bracelets and fifteen rings, one of them a Catherine de Medici poison ring from which she would sometimes slip a little white powder into her coffee, to shock the others at the table. Only sugar, of course. Shocking people was fun, whether it was with fake arsenic or a sports car.

But Boadicea is a lovely car anyway, thought Jed, turning the radio up so that Leonard Cohen sang at full pelt along the road past the CSIRO. Extravagant, especially with the customisation to cope with Scarlett’s wheelchair and the bar that helped the crippled girl hoist herself in and out of the low seats. Impractical too, because the Canberra weather either fried you or spat at you with ice, and by the time you had her roof up Boadicea was half filled with hail and the leather seats still felt damp a week later.

A Simon and Garfunkel song now — ‘I Am a Rock’, her favourite. She turned it to full volume as Boadicea sped over the bridge across Lake Burley Griffin, filled at last with water, what old Campbell had called ‘a bloody waste of a good paddock’; past Parliament House, long and gleaming white, and the shabby tent and bark structure and tiny smoking fire of the new Aboriginal Tent Embassy, protesting for the rights of the Indigenous people to the ancient continent they had inhabited for so long.

The parliamentary rose gardens bloomed on either side, a ludicrously uninhibited clash of colour and green grass. Boadicea followed the road along the artificial lake and the tree-lined avenues of Kingston.

Three years earlier, before she had inherited the money that gave her freedom as well as riches, Jed had assumed she’d go to Sydney University on a scholarship. But that had been when she and Nicholas had planned to live together.

Nicholas would finish his sci-fi book, transmuting the horrors of the Vietnam battle where he had lost his legs into a made-up future warfare. She’d shop, cook, clean and help him write, in between going to lectures. And he would care for her, this girl with no money, no family, no past she wanted to admit to, even to herself.

Nicholas had once known her better than anyone in the world, even if he did not know she saw ghosts or, rather, glimpses of the past and future in places where time was thin. She had even seen a glimpse of a future Nicholas the first time she had met him, a shock of a love for a man she had only just met. She would love an older Nicholas, and so she loved the younger one.

But Nicholas had deserted her when he felt her inheritance meant she no longer needed him. Gone to the mountains, to stay with a friend’s grandmother, Flinty McAlpine, who, of course, was also a darling of Matilda’s, because down in this quarter of New South Wales it seemed all good people knew and loved her great-grandmother. Gone to fall in love with Flinty’s granddaughter, Felicity, to become engaged to her. To be, Jed hoped, happy. She had tried to put that glimpse of future love behind her. She hadn’t seen him since.

There was no reason to go to Sydney University after that, except her newfound Great-Uncle Jim’s offer to live with him and his family, an option both of them were too tactful to admit they regarded with horror. Jed briefly considered the University of Queensland, where some of the girls from her high school would be only one year ahead of her. But there had been no friendships there strong enough for anyone to believe the horrors of her home life, much less support her after her rape by her stepmother’s boyfriend or through its tragic aftermath.

Jed did know Canberra, or rather Queanbeyan. She had squatted there in those months of wonder when she washed dishes at Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station and had been an insignificant part of the greatest technical triumph of humankind, as Neil Armstrong stepped down onto the moon. She almost decided to try to buy the derelict house she’d lived in then, but a house needed tending, especially a house that was half fallen down, and she had a house, the one Matilda and Tommy had bought for her between Matilda’s Drinkwater property and Nancy’s Overflow, a house Scarlett had cheekily nicknamed ‘Dribble’.

You didn’t need another house when you had a home called Dribble. And living in college meant she didn’t have to cook — after years of washing up to earn money and eating leftovers meant for the garbage that had, just, kept her from starvation, Jed now had an aversion to anything that hinted of kitchen. College also meant someone else washed your sheets. And ANU was only a three-hour drive back home, now the highway had been upgraded.

Jed grinned as the car zoomed up the hill out of Queanbeyan. What was home? Her house by the river? Or the mansion that was Drinkwater homestead? Her great-grandfather, who had lived there with its owner Matilda, his second wife, was dead, but Matilda, though no kin of Jed’s except by love and even deeper bonds that neither spoke of, was family. And family was home, wasn’t it?

Home could just as easily include Overflow, where Matilda’s son Michael lived with his wife, Nancy, on the property made famous by Paterson’s poem about Nancy’s grandfather, Clancy, who had gone to Queensland droving when neither his family nor society would accept his dark-skinned wife.

Home was also Gibber’s Creek: the town as well as its outlying paddocks of lichened rocks that looked like dusty sheep, and dusty sheep that looked like lichened rocks; the leaf-strewn billabong sleeping by the river, where she had arrived, starving, almost too scared to keep on living, and met a man called Fred who’d claimed to be a ghost and who had at last become one, in a fight with a psychopath to save girls like her from rape and death.

Deadsville? For all her experience of the world, Julieanne had no idea.

Home was the smell of sheep droppings on hot soil, the taste of gum leaves in the air, the puff of air from the soft wings of a powerful owl on your skin at night. Home was knowing people loved you, accepted you, needed you as you needed them.

It didn’t matter exactly what home was. Just that now, at last, she had one.

River View looked just the same as it had during the uni holidays, the wooden cottages among the flowerbeds, the river snaking between its banks of white sand, abandoned by a thousand years of floods. The cottage where Nicholas had stayed was . . .

No. No thinking about Nicholas.

‘Jed!’ Scarlett’s wheelchair scooted towards her. ‘We’ve been invited to a PARTY!’

‘Matilda never mentioned it.’ Jed opened Boadicea’s door and swung the bar out for Scarlett to grab. She knew better than to help her.

Scarlett heaved, swung, settled, then reached over to press the release lever on her wheelchair. It had taken years for Thompson’s Engineering Works to design a motorised chair so light, so strong and portable. Jed regretted deeply that wheelchairs like this were still available only to the patients of River View. Each chair had to be individually made to suit the body of the one who’d use it: enormously expensive. Perhaps she should start a foundation to supply them to others . . .

‘Jed!’

‘Sorry. What were you saying?’ She started the car again.

‘The party’s at that commune, tomorrow night. You know, Halfway to Eternity.’

‘What?’ Jed glanced at her. Scarlett’s short hair flickered in the wind. A lovely wind, rich in sheep and river smells . . . ‘How did you get invited to a commune?’

She had heard of the commune, of course. Janice on the telephone exchange had told everyone at church and the CWA. The gossip spread across the entire district. Seven young people — none of them married to any of the others — had put down the deposit to secure the McAlpines’ lower paddock, instead of a neat farming family of husband, wife and three children.

Jed even knew exactly how much they had paid for it. Janice listened to every conversation and always passed on the juicy bits.

Jed had never bothered to ask more. She wasn’t interested in ‘alternative’ lifestyles. In her experience the only people who wanted any such thing already had extremely comfortable lives to leave. Jed wanted what those people had known and rejected: being part of a loving family, security, deep in an existing community. ‘What do you mean we are invited to a party?’

‘You and me, of course. And I met a girl. She’s my age, maybe a bit older. Her name’s Leafsong and she can’t speak.’ Scarlett considered, then added, ‘DOESN’T speak, anyhow. I need to discuss disorders of the larynx with Dr McAlpine. Anyway, the party is tomorrow at four o’clock, to celebrate the end of the world.’

‘How did this Leafsong girl invite you if she can’t speak?’

Scarlett looked at her with the gaze of one whose life has been shaped by pain and loneliness and unwavering determination. ‘You don’t always need words to communicate.’

‘True.’ Jed had promised herself to Matilda tomorrow as well as tonight, for whatever mysterious reason the old woman had insisted Jed come home now. But Matilda went to bed early. And if she and Scarlett arrived to find themselves among pot smokers and free love — Jed wasn’t having Scarlett exposed to any of that — they could leave again. ‘What else is new?’

‘I got an A in English.’

‘That’s not news.’

‘Huh. Wait till you hear this. I got a C for geography!’

‘What? Scarlett O’Hara with a C? Impossible!’

‘Mrs Newbry didn’t BELIEVE me when I said Venice was sinking.’

‘Did you give her the references?’

‘Of COURSE! She said, That’s the best joke I’ve heard all week,’ added Scarlett bitterly. ‘And when I insisted that it was true — I might just have raised my voice but only a LITTLE bit — she gave me a C and told me I was lucky she didn’t fail me for rudeness.’

Jed shrugged. ‘Just get yourself to university, brat. They’ll believe you there. As long as you have references.’

‘You don’t need geography to do

Reviews for If Blood Should Stain the Wattle

[siri51 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Continuing family saga set in 1972-5 - time of social change in Australia- excellent depiction of the hopes and disappointments of the the time. A millionaire heroine might be far fetched but makes a good story.