Fishing for Stars (64 page)

‘When? When will all this take place?’ I asked, enjoying her enthusiasm.

‘When? Well, just as soon as I get back to Sydney. The house has been put up for sale, it goes to auction the week after next. I told you I think I’ve found a house in Hobart and when mine is sold I’ll go over and have a look at it. If it’s not suitable, I’ll find something else. After that it’s come home, pack up, get back to Hobart, settle in and enrol as a mature-age student at the beginning of next year.’

‘And that’s a very good reason why you can’t come here once a month in future?’ I said, stating the bleeding obvious.

She smiled. ‘Yes, but I can for some part of the university vacations. If you’ll have me?’

‘Of course, you’ll always be welcome at Beautiful Bay.’ I grew serious. ‘We’ll always be mates, come what may,’ I said, a tad sentimentally.

I accepted her proffered glass and started to prepare Marg’s third gin and tonic – two was usually her limit. She was silent while I sliced a fresh lime, added ice, gin, tonic, and handed it to her. Frankly, I didn’t really know what to think, what to say other than to encourage her. I must admit surprise though; I’d always thought of both Marg and Anna as liberated women, but she’d made me see that there clearly was a huge flaw in my male perception. However, one thing was certain. Nick Duncan’s future sex life had reached a sudden hiatus. Can’t say halt – Anna was still a remarkably skilled practitioner of the art of ‘anything but’.

‘Nick, you wanted to say something. I apologise, but I really wanted to get everything off my chest. Thank you for listening so patiently. Now, what was it, darling?’ Marg asked.

I grinned in an attempt to appear casual, unconcerned. ‘No . . . nothing, it wasn’t important. Honestly.’

It was the word ‘honestly’ that did it. Marg went for the jugular. ‘What happened in Japan?’ It was more than a question and just short of a command.

‘I told you, we bought two freighters.’

‘Don’t be a smart arse, Nick. The Japanese general and Anna?’

‘It was a furphy. They ended up good friends, business associates.’ While I didn’t think the world had anything against tuna fishing, my instinct told me not to elaborate.

‘And the vaginismus?’

‘Ah, still there,’ I shrugged. ‘Anna now thinks that he wasn’t the cause.’

‘Oh, Nick, how sad! For her . . . for you! Does she have any insight into what it may be?’

‘None whatsoever, not the foggiest,’ I replied, using the silly expression to lighten the implications.

Marg wasn’t fooled. ‘So, what now?’

I shrugged again. ‘Life goes on.’

‘But it doesn’t. It changes things . . . dramatically.’

‘How?’ I asked.

‘Well, you had hopes that things would change. You gave up your previous arrangements . . .’

‘Yeah, just as well . . . Time I grew up.’

Marg was silent, staring into her glass. The stars were out. It was a bright night, despite the half moon. Lights twinkled across the bay. Then she said, ‘Nick, you and I . . .’

‘No, Marg, I understand.’

‘Darling, I’m starting a new life. Intimacy with you, a relationship other than friendship, isn’t possible now. It would be going backwards. Back to where I was. You do understand, don’t you?’

‘Yes, of course,’ I said, not sure I believed myself. At least I didn’t have to tell her I had Anna’s permission.

‘Nick, I love you. I always have, always will. But I don’t want to be taken for granted ever again, to be a convenient arrangement. A handbag. Pillow partner. Perhaps later, when I’ve got my new life underway, when I know who I am, what I want. Then perhaps something meaningful?’ Marg came over and sat on the arm of my chair and leaned over and put her arms around me and kissed me. ‘Nick, Nick, Nick,’ she whispered softly. I could feel her beautiful breasts pressed against me. Nothing had changed. Marg was still doing things on her own terms. It was only that they were bigger, more important terms than sharing her bed.

Shit!

And that’s pretty well how all the trouble began. As a first-year mature-age student Marg gravitated to the more serious-minded and radical students and faculty members, many bitterly opposed to the pro-development Tasmanian establishment and the new Liberal government headed up by Angus Bethune. It came as no surprise when he continued the Reece Labor government’s support for the Hydro-Electric Commission and the massive damage they were causing to the wilderness areas, to be epitomised by the drowning of the exquisite Lake Pedder. Let me remind you about the early seventies, when
‘the times they
were
a-changing’, a
s
Bob Dylan said. Vietnam had radicalised many Australians, just as it had many Americans. The war didn’t make sense even to quite conservative families. The idea that your son, still too young to vote
,
could be sent to fight and possibly die according to the tumble of a lottery ball angered a lot of people who might normally have counted themselves as patriots rather than protesters. Furthermore, since 1968, European and American campuses had been convulsed by protests, often violent, from student activists seemingly protesting against everything. The rage of the world’s young against the reactionary forces that ruled the world was finally being expressed, and, almost too late, it had reached Tasmania, where it met head-on one of the most reactionary and conservative organisations of them all: the Hydro-Electric Commission. The acrimonious, doomed and often bitter campaign to save Lake Pedder would divide families, friends and whole communities in Tasmania.

Almost at once, Marg joined the Save Lake Pedder National Park Committee. One of her first political acts was to take the train with fellow students to Launceston, where they joined others to visit all the public toilets in town to write ‘No Dam!’ on every single sheet of toilet paper, then roll them up again. They were to learn that not all publicity is good publicity. The forces ranged against them had a field day. Some examples from the local wags:
A real bummer. I wipe my arse on the protesters. A shithouse idea. A heap of student crap.
And so on
.
The students tried to respond with:
Damming Pedder stinks. Pedder
 – 
another shitty idea from the state government. The Hydro is talking crap as usual.
But the general consensus was that conservative forces had won the day, especially when the Hobart
Mercury
came out with the headline,
A protest not worth the paper it’s written on
. It was all pretty childish stuff but it seemed to do more to entrench opposition attitudes than change them.

Long before she graduated with honours Marg had found her true vocation: environmentalist–troublemaker. The war for the forests, rivers and lakes had begun and the first of the battlelines were drawn along the scalloped white beach of Lake Pedder. It was here that she enthusiastically began her career as a tree hugger; river rescuer; guardian of lakes; opposer of dams, bulldozers and chainsaws; and mortal enemy of the all-powerful Tasmanian Hydro-Electric Commission.

I had gone down to Tasmania in 1971 to see Marg after she’d badgered me to attend a protest meeting to be held in Hobart. I agreed only because it was a good excuse to see her. Anna had never again brought up the subject of my sleeping with Marg. Strangely, it was never the prospect of sharing a partner that created the antipathy between the two women, but rather how they saw each other’s lives and values: the fierce and fanatical environmentalist and the rapacious plunderer of the planet – Green Bitch versus Princess Plunder.

I never returned to my scattered surrogates and while I can’t say it was perfect or that I didn’t retain a strong desire for Marg, life, even with its sexual compromises, was tolerable. In the moral sense I was the guilty party. I never gave up hoping Marg would change her mind. But if I had any carnal thoughts during my first visit to Tasmania, Marg definitely had other things in mind. She was entirely preoccupied with the protest over the damming of Lake Pedder and was anxious to have me meet her new friends.

While there were too many of them to recall all their names, some I met on that first visit became stalwarts of the conservation movement. There was feisty Helen Gee, who had the distinction of having been called a communist ratbag in parliament; Olegas Truchanas, one of the finest nature photographers in the world, who was later tragically drowned canoeing on the Gordon; Peter Sims, a fifth-generation Taswegian who had, along with the redoubtable Jessie Luckman, been involved in the conservation movement for at least a decade. I also met Brenda Hean and Max Price, who died soon afterwards when the Tiger Moth in which they were flying to Canberra to skywrite ‘Save Lake Pedder’ above the Federal Parliament crashed. While I am not one for conspiracy theories, they had, as a matter of record, received several threatening phone calls and Price’s Tiger Moth had, on a previous occasion, been tampered with while in the hangar.

There were of course many others as brave and true who fought and suffered greatly for their beliefs. Tasmania is a small island with a close-knit population. The fight against the Hydro-Electric Commission’s projects and the battle to save the Tasmanian wilderness and old-growth forests has left deep divisions. To this day families are divided and communities split. Many of those conservationists who took the side of nature have paid a heavy price in their social, working and family lives, but also, it must be said, those who sided with the Hydro and logging interests have not come through unscathed.

Making a stand for the environment wasn’t and isn’t for wimps; these were and still are the bravest and truest of our green warriors. When the saints finally come marching in, it won’t surprise me to see that Brenda Hean and Max Price are the official flag-bearers, with Olegas Truchanas the photographer for the
Resurrection Bugle
,
and Bob Brown will be giving the celestial newspaper his scathing opinion on the clipped box hedges of the Anglican suburbs of Heaven, while the other true greens will all be marching with chestfuls of campaign medals in the front line.

But, of course, all of this is with the benefit of hindsight. At the time I was at best ambivalent. I supported Marg more for her resolution to change her life than for her chosen cause, which meant that I wasn’t entirely apathetic or uninterested but rather what I considered at the time ‘sensible and fair-minded’, pretty much the same thing, if you consider it in any depth.

This doomed wilderness, euphoniously named the Middle Gordon Scheme, was first proposed by the Labor Premier Eric Reece, known as ‘Electric Eric’, who came to power in 1958 and described the area to be dammed as ‘worthless land that only contains a few badgers, kangaroos and wallabies and some wildflowers that can be seen elsewhere’. This just about sums up the prevailing attitude and appalling ignorance of the premier and his government about the state’s flora and fauna. Moreover, the Liberals who came to power in 1969 were no better informed, although it should be mentioned that one lone MP, Louis Shoobridge, a scion of one of the old landowning families, was the only member to protest against the damming of Lake Pedder.

I arrived in Tasmania three days before the November Lake Pedder protest meeting, after first stopping off in Melbourne to see Anna and the site – now cleared – for Nauru House, the building of which was due to begin the following year. The Melbourne
Herald
had discovered who the genius was who’d put the real-estate deal of the decade together and Anna was suddenly being taken very seriously by the big end of town.

Marg had urged me to bring my hiking boots, gear, rucksack and sleeping bag, and from her friends she’d borrowed two single tents (not a promising sign) and a rather beaten-up Toyota four-wheel drive. We spent the first part of the evening at a pub meeting Marg’s friends but she’d warned of an early start and a long day’s walk so we left around eight. Marg made a light supper – ham omelette, toast and tea – and I was in bed in her spare room by about half-past nine, only to be wakened just after four in the morning by the dead admiral’s resurrected wife dressed in hiking gear and assuring me that I had plenty of time to get ready but we would need to leave in fifteen minutes on the dot. ‘You don’t need to shave, Nick.’

‘What about going to the dunny?’

‘Well, yes, okay, but hurry,’ she laughed.

We drove north along the Midland Highway, turning off to Bridgewater then heading along the Strathgordon Road through Maydena along a well-graded gravel road built to service the Hydro-Electric Commission projects. We left the Toyota at a muddy clearing off the road and, humping our backpacks, set off into what looked like an impregnable tangle of dark vegetation filling every inch of the space in the temperate rainforest where the trees rose no higher than forty feet. The path was narrow, muddy, dark and slippery and the vegetation kept snatching at my rucksack as if determined to close up the puny path humans had scratched and hacked through it. I’d never witnessed bush as dense and the fact that even this narrow path existed at all seemed remarkable.

I was accustomed to hiking in tropical jungle where the canopy prevents sunlight penetrating to the floor so that, with the exception of vines and creepers, the surface is almost free of undergrowth and progress is relatively easy. The track Marg and I were following was going to make it a very long hard day, and despite the early-morning chill I was soon sweating profusely. ‘Christ, how long does this go on?’ I called to Marg.