Gone, gone, those lovely people, and all that strange stuff. Gone.
G’bye. Goodluck to you and me.
The Interior
A tale o f outback rapture
©
DAMIEN BRODERICK
Oh, the dreams they have, the women.
All their dreams come true here, if they work at it.
Sally loves insurance. She’ll never make another meal (John only
used to pick at it, anyway). There are laws to learn, statutes and
actuarial tables. W here would we be without those hands waiting to
catch us?
Elaine’s going to drive the tram she conducts. Fares will shortly
be abolished. A flat tax, devised by Jane, makes that silly system
uneconomical.
Dianne goes to meetings and is snide and loving by turns. Who
understands her piercing intelligence? Who warms to her caring?
Perhaps she will open a house for marginal loonies, outside the
system.
All these things have come to pass here in the desert, in the hot
gusts and new oceanic rains of the city of Restitution.
One or two of the blacks get drunk. They like living out there in
their filthy humpies. There are always a few deadbeats, after all.
Paradise can hardly be summoned by legislation.
In the morning the red land is darkened halfway to noon, in the
west, by the shadows of the pyramids we put here.
Angela climbs the struts, putting on muscle mass now she’s given
up her nervy anorexia, climbs pantingly the four kilometres to the
bloody top and cocks her Leica, squinting cunningly at the
readouts. This is magic. It is her soul she captures, sucking it into
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the banging nanosecond aperture. How she sighs. Here and there
gawk people in family groups. She grabs a snap. How hard it is to
breathe at this height. Still. Bliss.
Yvonne looks after her fractious daughter and on the tea-table
edits books. In Restitution she has an official post but is permitted
to work at home, of course. There is no point in Yvonne’s friends
complaining that she is not director of the firm. H er gift is the
sensitive nuance of text.
Jackie is the firm’s top dog, and rightly so. She loves it, though it’s
exhausting. They never see one another; Yvonne spends a fair bit of
time keeping up with it all on the phone.
Lucy is a mogul of information. Jenny engineers the data flows.
Neither of them digs ditches or washes babies’ bums. There are
babies squalling and snorting and radiating cuteness all over the
hardy grass when it’s not too hot, but none of the babies belong to
Lucy or Jenny, or Russell or Damien or Bruce or John or plenty of
the others. It’s not totalitarian in the desert. Laurie’s m ountain is
not a pyramid, in fact, but a wedge, a hollow concrete-lined earthworks higher than the M atterhorn. It’s eighteen hundred kilometres long, splitting the continent at longitude 130 degrees,
from the Great Australian Bight to the Joseph Bonaparte Gulf up
north.
There’s a little, unpretentious shrine in Artarmon in the house
where Laurie Hogan used to eat his breakfast before he went off
each day to work for the Willoughby Council. That was in the big
depression, before we got the rains started here.
You can stand in the desert and see the snow up on the plateau.
No wonder Angela is shivering, protecting her delicate camera
lenses.
Not all the aborigines are shickered, naturally. Most of them
work inside the Hogan, where it’s kept cool. When you have those
big nukes churning out the juice, airconditioning’s no problem. O f
course, the sheer mass of dirt helps keep off the desert sun.
The canal is on the western side, where the precipitation’s forced by
the Hogan’s upward jut. Gillian sails there with her cousins. She
leaves the portapak at work and lies there in the afternoon sun,
adding melanin to her goldy skin.
Kim Phuc smiles across the lapping water at her from a dhow.
She’s got enough melanin already and keeps her face shaded, soft,
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Damien Broderick
fresh, lovely as a dream of courtesans. No jellied terrordrifts.
There’s romance and self-discovery in the sacred places of the H ogan. U nder its colossal fin the bones of fifty thousand years lie, tenderly held.
Rirette yawns delicately behind five exquisitely coral nails,
musing spitefully on one hundred and eighty thousand farms,
averaging two thousand hectares apiece. And hurls with vicious
force
