Beneath the Southern Cross (67 page)

Pregnancy disrupted the pattern of her life, but not for long. Shortly after the birth of her daughter, the women's magazines boasted pictures of ‘the Kendall Rose'. Little Rose Kendall, born with her mother's raven hair and violet eyes, was pictured in Melanie's arms. Mother and daughter, dressed in beige satin and lace, gazed out at the reader. Both serene. Both beautiful.

Several months later, with an army of nannies to protect her from the more sordid and mundane aspects of motherhood, Melanie continued her fairytale existence.

So when did it start to go wrong? Melanie couldn't be sure. Around the time Rose was two, she supposed.

It wasn't the lack of sex, she'd become accustomed to that, even grateful. For quite a while now Wallace had demanded anal sex, which she detested, but to which she submitted. When he'd told her that, since childbirth, she'd become ‘looser' and less exciting, and that he enjoyed ‘a tighter fit', she'd supposed it was her duty to comply. Fortunately, he wasn't demanding.

But Wallace's whole demeanour had changed. He'd become tense and irritable, and she presumed it was something to do with business. The sharemarket crash in late '87? But it hadn't appeared to affect them too badly. She queried Jason about it.

‘No, no, we have Tricontinental on our side,' he assured her. ‘We can weather any storm, believe me.' He patted her hand reassuringly. ‘Don't you worry about Wallace, sweetheart, he's just got a few things on his mind.'

It wasn't that Melanie was stupid, far from it, but they had kept her well out of the picture. Her profile as devoted mother and wife, tireless charity worker and glamorous socialite served a far more valuable purpose than any corporate involvement might have done.

It was in fact Bruce Hamilton who was making Wallace tense. They'd weathered the storm of the share crash it was true, but Bruce had been keeping a close eye on Tricontinental.

‘They're going to go under, Wallace,' he insisted, ‘or they're going to have to call in repayments at a moment's notice. They have a commitment to just twenty-six clients which exceeds thirty per cent of their entire capital base. It's unrealistic. If those borrowers go under, then Tricontinental goes with them.'

‘Rubbish! They're owned by the State bloody Bank of Victoria, how can they go broke?' But Wallace worried nevertheless. Christ knew where Bruce got his information, but he was good at his job. The Kendall Corporation was built like a house of cards—if one came down, the others would tumble. Wallace needed Tricontinental's endless credit.

Bruce was right. By March '89 the amount lent to Tricontinental's thirteen biggest clients, of which the Kendall Corporation was one, had risen to an incredible $1.7 billion, and their parent, the State Bank of Victoria, was in crisis. Wallace and Jason had to move quickly.

Melanie was given just one week to organise the packing of the family's clothes and personal possessions. These were to be shipped on ahead, together with whatever valuables and furnishings Wallace could discreetly remove. He'd already transferred money overseas. They were leaving in ten days, he told her, a night flight, with hand luggage only. And she was to tell no-one.

A month after the Kendalls' departure, Bruce Hamilton was arrested. Wallace and Jason hadn't told him of their plans, he'd been deliberately left behind as a smokescreen. Bruce realised as much, but made no attempt to escape, staying instead to answer the charges.

Jason Bruford had travelled on a false passport and could not be traced, the newspapers said. Not at the moment anyway, but it was only a matter of time. Wallace Kendall was safely ensconced with his family in Brazil, living a life of luxury while his companies crumbled. But again, the newspapers reassuringly reported, it was only a matter of time before he would be extradited, the government had given its assurance of that.

By the time Bruce Hamilton was finally sentenced, the thousands
of small stockholders who had put their trust in the Kendall Corporation, and whose life savings had been wiped out, had to be satisfied with hissix-year gaol term. Jason Bruford had not been found, and Wallace Kendall had not been extradited. Justice had not been served, the stockholders protested. But there was little they could do about it.

Rob Farinelli was taking his parents to lunch. They'd met him at Wodin and Wodin, Solicitors, in the Australia Square Building so that he could show them his new offices, complete with reception room and personal secretary. Rob had worked for the massive law firm for ten years, but it had taken him all this time to get a plush office like the other senior lawyers. He knew exactly why, but he didn't care.

‘Pretty impressive, eh?'

‘About time too,' Kitty said, ‘you've certainly earned it.'

They said goodbye to Samantha, blonde, twenty-three and very pretty, and as they stepped into the lift Artie said, ‘Joanna cannot be too happy about a secretary like that.'

‘She wasn't at first. “Swap her for an old one”, that's what she told me.' Rob laughed. His wife was certainly feisty, she reminded him a little of his mother, that's why he'd married her. Well, they said men married their mothers, didn't they?

‘But she and Sam get on really well now,' he added. ‘Sometimes they even gang up on me.'

Kitty and Artie had presumed they'd be dining somewhere in the central business district, but instead they took a water taxi from Circular Quay to Watsons Bay on the southern harbour headland. Rob had booked a table at Doyle's Restaurant, by the beach, where they could sit and enjoy the panoramic view of Sydney.

‘Your farewell lunch,' he said. ‘Had to make it special. I've taken the afternoon off work.'

‘But we are having a farewell dinner tomorrow with you and the family,' Artie said.

‘Yes, I know, and you'll spend all your time playing Grandma and Grandpa. This way we get to talk.'

Kitty nodded her approval. They didn't have their son all to themselves very often. Arturo always enjoyed playing with his two grandchildren, but Kitty found the combined energies of a four-and five-year-old a little wearing. And she and her daughter-in-law were very competitive.

It was a hot January afternoon, and Kitty and Artie were flying to Europe in two days' time. The occasion was not a particularly happy one, being the funeral of one of Artie's older brothers, but his death had not been unexpected, he'd been ill for some time. They'd decided to stay in Europe for six months, to visit family and to holiday in Tuscany throughout the spring and into the summer. They hadn't been overseas since Artie's diagnosis.

Rob took his father's wrist to steady him as they stepped together from the water taxi onto the jetty at Watsons Bay. It disturbed him to see his father's once handsome face so gaunt and sunken, and to feel the bones of his wrist so very brittle and thin. Artie had been given a clean bill of health, his cancer having been inremission for the requisite five years, but no-one seemed able to explain his inability to gainweight. He was as appallingly haggard and thin as he had been when the cancer was ravaging his body. He always said he felt fine, but he obviously didn't; he was weak, and sometimes inpain, Kitty suspected, although the doctors could find nothing wrong.

They ordered a seafood platter, as the waiter opened a bottle of white wine, then Rob proposed the first toast. ‘I congratulated you on the phone, Dad, but we haven't made it official yet. Here's to
Son of a Migrant
,' he saidraising his glass, ‘may it be a bestseller.'

They toasted Artie's novel, the third he had written and the first to finally be published.

It had been Kitty's encouragement which had given Artie the strength to persevere through his despondency; indeed, it had been Kitty's idea which had formed the very basis of the book.

‘Write about the next generation, Arturo,' she'd said. ‘Write about your son and his life and the work that he does, there's a story in that.' She'd been right.

During his illness, Artie had left his job and worked from home, devoting himself to his books, which, although works of fiction, had been loosely autobiographical. Of his first two, the publishers had said that, well written as they were, there was nothing new in them. European immigrants' stories were old hat. The story of Arturo's son, however, was a different matter. And Rob didn't mind being the fictional hero in his father's book. He was flattered. Nevertheless, he meticulously proofread the manuscript to ensure that his character and those of the other protagonists were suitably disguised.

Rob Farinelli, fresh out of university, had been an up and coming member of the Labor Party in the mid-seventies. Devoted as he was to the left's policies, particularly the formal abolition of the White Australia Policy, and to the Prime Minister's personal beliefs in Aboriginal rights and multiculturalism, Rob had been shocked and disillusioned by the dismissal of the Whitlam Government in 1975. So disillusioned in fact that he quit all thoughts of a political career and accepted a position with a successful law firm instead.

He quickly became disillusioned there too. He was expected to make unpalatable compromises and to constantly take the easy way out. ‘But we can win this case,' he'd argue. ‘Let's go in and fight.'

‘Accept the out-of-court settlement and shut up, Rob,' he would be told by the senior partners.

Things finally came to a head when he was handling a negligence claim for a wharfie. The defence brought up Rob's friendship with the militant trade unionist, Max Brown, and a picture of the two of them appeared in the newspapers. The intimation that there was some nefarious aspect to their friendship meant little in court, but the newspaper innuendoes had done their damage, as had been intended, and Rob's credibility had been undermined.

Refusing to obey his superiors' instructions, Rob neither denied the friendship nor maintained his silence. He issued a furious statement to the press instead. ‘Max Brown and I went to Bondi Beach Public School together,' he was quoted as saying. ‘We were childhood friends, we were friends throughout our youth, we are friends today, and we will remain friends, God willing, through our old age until our respective deaths, and anyone who wishes to make something of that can go to hell!'

He and the law firm parted company. He was unrealistic, they told him. He was willing neither to make concessions nor to turn a blind eye, nor, as was evident from his statement to the press, to practise diplomacy when necessary. In fact, it appeared he lacked all the skills of compromise required by a proficient lawyer.

Rob started to wonder whether perhaps law, like politics, had been an incorrect career choice on his part. He'd honestly wished to do some good.

‘I don't expect to change the world, Dad,' he'd said to Artie at the time, ‘but I'd like to serve a useful purpose.' He could only suppose now that that made him naive.

The problem with Rob Farinelli was his parents. There was too much of Artie and Kitty in him. The lethal mixture of his father's idealism and his mother's attack and tenacity was confronting to most people.

He was just the idealist Wodin and Wodin had been looking for. ‘It won't be big money,' he was warned, ‘you'll be handling minority cases.'

‘Minority cases', he soon discovered, were ‘underdog' cases, which at that time appeared to refer in the main to the Vietnamese boat people. The legal quandary raised by the boatloads of tragic and desperate refugees who were landing in droves on the north and north-western shores of the continent was receiving a lot of attention in the press. Such cases were worth little money to Wodin and Wodin, but as a public relations exercise they were invaluable.

The government had accepted the firm's caring offer of assistance, but the partners were having trouble finding someone who was willing to go. They discovered just the man in Rob Farinelli.

Rob was sent to Darwin where he was on his own. ‘Do what you can to assist the government's legal aid,' he was instructed, ‘but make sure the company's name appears regularly in the press.'

At the refugee camp Rob befriended a young Vietnamese-born Chinese girl. She was a student, just turned twenty, and she'd been at the camp for a month, having arrived on a boat with thirty-seven others, including three babies, seven children under ten, and four men and women over sixty.

‘There was a four' baby,' she told Rob, ‘but she die, we bury her at sea.'

Mai Wang Lee was a godsend, she spoke excellent English.

‘It is my English that save me,' she said. ‘They don' kill me because of my English.'

At one point in the voyage, she said, when their engine had broken down and they had drifted for over three weeks, having run out of food and being short of water, the people had become very frightened. She heard them talking about eating the first one of them who died. Then, at the end of the fourth week, she heard them discussing who they might kill. A woman it should be, the men were needed to do the hard work.

Mai was the only person aboard who was travelling without any family and, with no-one to defend her, she knew she would be the first choice. Then she heard them say they could not kill Mai Wang Lee because she was useful, she spoke English.

‘But they kill no-one,' she said, ‘because the nex' day the winds come. They make a big sail from women's clo's. My blouse,' she hugged her arms around her thin chest, ‘is terrible, I am so shy.' She shrugged off her shame and got on with her story. ‘The nex' day the rains come, and we catch the water in a raincoat. And then, two days, we find land. You see?' she smiled. Mai Wang Lee had the most charming smile. ‘The gods are kind.'

Rob and Mai became allies. Not only was she an invaluable interpreter, but he watched with admiration as she calmed, advised and counselled her fellow refugees. She was a strong, intelligent young woman. She would be an asset to this country, he maintained, using her as a prime example when presenting the emotional aspects of his argument.

With Mai's help, Rob achieved much success and Mai was the first amongst a number of the refugees granted residency in Australia. Although his own name featured minimally in the press, ‘legal representation by Wodin and Wodin' appeared so regularly that his superiors congratulated themselves upon their choice.

There were other ‘minority cases' to be addressed. Following the collapse of Pol Pot's regime in 1979, Cambodian refugees sought settlement in Australia and other Western countries, and who better qualified to represent them than Rob Farinelli of Wodin and Wodin?

But a case much closer to homeraised its head in the late eighties. It had started in 1982 when Eddie Mabo, a Torres Strait Islander, made legal claim to eight hectares of government land on
his native home of Mer Island off the northernmost tip of Queensland. It was the first challenge to the legal basis of white settlement, and the outcome, should Eddie Mabo prove successful, was bound to create a precedent for other such claims to follow.

Wodin and Wodin had found a prime PR issue with which to become associated. And now they had just the man to represent their caring commitment to the cause. Even his name was perfect. Farinelli. And he looked so Italian too. Son of a European immigrant fighting for the rights of the indigenous people. Couldn't be better. Finally they gave Rob Farinelli his own plush office and his own personal secretary.

Rob was fully aware he was being used, but he didn't give a damn. He believed wholeheartedly in Aboriginal land rights, so he took up the banner and used Wodin and Wodin right back.

Having thoroughly toasted
Son of a Migrant
, and having demolished the seafood platter, Rob ordered a second bottle and the conversation turned to Bruce Hamilton.

‘Caroline told me you visited him last week,' Kitty said. ‘I'm glad. He needs a friend.' Of course it was Caroline she was really worried about. With Emma in England and Jim an empty shell of a man, Bruce was the only family Caroline had, and his imprisonment had left her distraught. Although she had accepted the fact of his guilt, she would not hear a word against her son's character.

‘He made a mistake, certainly, but he stayed and faced the music like a man,' she said defiantly, daring anyone else to differ. ‘Not like those other two cowardly bastards.'

Kitty readily agreed, which was a comfort to Caroline who so valued her opinion. But now Kitty was worried—she was leaving, and who would visit Caroline and fill in the lonely void of her days?

‘You will visit Caroline regularly, won't you?' she said to Rob as the waiter opened the second bottle of wine.

‘Yes, I promised you I would.' He'd promised about ten times.

‘And you'll take her to see Bruce once a week?'

‘I promised you I'd do that too.'

‘I've arranged Meals on Wheels …'

‘Yes, so you told me.'

‘… more for the company than anything, at least she'll have someone popping in daily …'

‘Shall we order dessert?' Artie suggested, changing the subject. Kitty's worries about Caroline had become an obsession. When they'd discussed the possibility of extending their overseas trip, she'd carried on to such a degree that Artie had suggested it would be simpler if he went on his own. ‘My place is by my husband's side,' Kitty had insisted. Artie had raised an eyebrow, normally Kitty resisted such platitudes, but she'd continued oblivious, ‘… and you need a holiday. We're going to Italy for six months as we planned and I'll hear no more on the subject.' But it didn't stop her going on about Caroline.

Not that Artie minded really, he could forgive Kitty anything. She had saved his life. Quite literally, he often thought.

At the lowest depths of his illness, Artie had been prepared to give up. He'd accepted the fact that his cancer would kill him, but he'd been unable to accept the fact that his life had been meaningless. When his second book, two years in the writing, had been rejected by all the leading publishers, he'd become demoralised and, in his weakened physical condition, deeply depressed.

He had retreated further and further into himself, despondent, refusing to burden his wife with his unhappiness. But she hadn't given up, she'd nagged at him untilfinally he had told her the truth.