Holden's Performance (28 page)

There was—there always will be—a quota of Sid Hoadleys in all populated parts of the world. His characteristics were even more universal than the idealised proportions of beauty queens. His gifts were the original tribal ones: an ability to simplify and give clearly defined shape to himself. Such forceful personalities who come to believe in their own shape emerge from the smallest village gatherings, as well as the most complex and congested populations. Hoadley stood out from those who served him and stood apart from other politicians. It was said that he hardly ever took no for an answer. In a narrow range of men and in many—many, many—women he produced feelings of loyalty.

The interior was open to any definition. Hoadley took it to be everything in from the edges. He expropriated the idea of the interior.

And what a bruised, uneven surface it was! To travel its contours, to acquire first-hand knowledge of its forests and valleys, and to be constantly, even eagerly, surprised by variety; above all, to go below the surface. The interior breathed and emptied itself. It followed its own seasons. Parts of it were barren—always a shock—but around the next corner or in the next town you could count on rivers and the sought-after complexities. And each version represented the whole and was part of an unfolding endlessness.

‘Basically,' Hoadley glanced at his gold watch, ‘I enjoy people, I can't leave them alone. My opponents would say that's a weakness. Personally I don't think so. It all gets back to looking after the needs of your constituents.'

‘It's worth working that into a speech,' Shadbolt nodded solemnly.

Harriet always said he said yes to everything. He looked out the window.

Switching on his public smile Hoadley said, ‘Keep talking like that and you and I will get along fine.'

The driver showed his feelings by shoving his Commonwealth cap over his eyes and slouching down in the seat. Almost immediately they approached the town and he sat up.

‘We're late,' Hoadley frowned. But he smiled and vibrated his hand like Her Majesty at a group of uncomprehending cockies squatting outside the hotel.

On the other side of town a stretch of dirt road met the new strip of highway which simply went for a short while then stopped. It headed into nowhere. You'd think it had some use…A cluster of local dignitaries faced the town, the wind twisting their wide trousers, while their stout women pressed flapping hats to their heads in salute. Vaguely they reminded Shadbolt of the people at his father's funeral. Another thirty or forty spectators including school children stood nearby. They parted as the car pulled up, their eyes crinkled into rural welcome as Hoadley unfolded outwards from the open door, his politician's right hand already extended.

‘We drove through six thunderstorms,' Hoadley shouted. Slight exaggeration.

‘She's a bit on the blowy side,' conceded the shire president. ‘We anticipated that. We know something about the weather out here, Minister. We lifted the speakers from the race track, so as you could make yourself heard.'

Under the gum trees some local ladies stood behind a trestle table shooing flies from the lamb and the upturned cups and spoons.

‘Do us a favour,' Hoadley turned to Shadbolt. ‘I don't see the local press here. See if you can find them and make sure their camera gear's set up.' He beamed and winked at a grazier's wife. ‘I wouldn't want to come out all this way for nothing.'

Sure! Shadbolt gave a nod. That's what he was there for, to give a hand.

As Hoadley made his way to the beginning of the pointless road, Shadbolt reported out of the corner of his mouth, ‘The photographer's OK and the reporter's got his notebook and pencil. I noticed over by the trees there a couple of blokes with shotguns.'

‘Good man. What'd you say?'

But Hoadley was steered away and handed a pair of pliers.

Instead of the ceremonial white ribbon a single line of barbed wire crossed the road, waist high.

‘It's all we could find,' the shire president explained sheepishly. ‘Besides, it stops the hoons in town coming out here on their blasted motorbikes.'

By the time the president finished his introduction (‘the Honourable Minister of Commerce, Home Affairs and the Interior on my left—excuse me, on my right talking to my wife—needs no introduction…') a grey cloud in the shape of a brain moved into position directly above the intellectually indefensible road, trees swayed as skirts plaited around legs, the tablecloth rose and fell on the long refreshment table, and Hoadley the human loudspeaker, who smilingly had his hands on hips forming two transparent wings, couldn't hear his own voice, and switched on the race-caller's microphone.

The sudden loud words of praise angled at the audience, something about the interior being the ‘engine of the nation's commerce', and something else about the ‘headlights of prosperity', barely had time to be caught up by the wind and go over people's heads before they were obliterated by the earsplitting screech of the Hoadley & Son sound system.

Until then the crows spaced out on the telegraph wires had looked on silently but now they began croaking out their coarse lament of complaint. Crouching in front of the mike making adjustments with the ceremonial pliers Shadbolt only heard what happened next. Two figures leaned forward from the shadows of the trees with guns to their shoulders, and in a coordinated clap of thunder brought down the birds like fluttering black books. They were members of the local Young Men's Bible Class objecting not so much to the dried-out pessimism in the cry of the crows—after all, it had become engrained in the national consciousness—but in the apparent choice of the crows' four-letter words. The vigilante group was well known in the district. The audience concentrated with their arms folded on the Minister's words.

Hoadley went on flashing his smile as if nothing had happened. Experience had taught him to expect all kinds of interruptions in the interior. And he'd be the last person to register impatience or alarm, and so out there in the middle of the sticks the small crowd accepted him. The Senator was all right.

Meanwhile, Shadbolt had set about tracing the irritating screech to a speaker hooked into the groin of a gum tree. Shinnying up the ironbark trunk—giant koala in maroon blazer—he managed to get at the wiring while the Bible-bashers below stared at the sky for the slightest utterance of the dreaded carnal word unsuitable to human ears. He managed to reduce the interference just as the Minister wound up with added timbre to his voice, ‘I declare this super highway open…' And snip went the barbed wire.

At that moment drops of rain splattered the leaves and Shad-bolt was the last to reach the shelter of the trees. The women behind the table were brisk, mutton dressed up as lamb, and the men looked down at their boots concentrating on erosion and yields. Shoulder to shoulder he and Hoadley drank a cup of tea from the urn, the Minister making extravagant promises with his mouth full of scone.

Shadbolt who hadn't said a word felt comfortable among the country people. But Hoadley out of the corner of his mouth said, ‘There's nothing doing here, let's go.' Nodding and waving they retreated to the car, Shadbolt bringing up the rear.

‘A good day's work,' Hoadley loosened his necktie and cuffs.

They left the windswept plain, the chrome mascot on the bonnet aiming for a pubic fold in the distant hills, the entrance to Sydney and the sea.

‘Straight home today, sir? No detours or anything?' Because of his height Shadbolt couldn't escape the driver grinning and winking at him in the mirror. Lowering his head he tried drying his hair with his handkerchief.

The Minister pointed his ringed finger, ‘You've ripped your strides.'

Shadbolt recognised a tone of gratitude.

‘Doesn't matter.'

From his wallet Hoadley peeled off some fivers.

‘Get yourself a new pair on me. I'm told you can handle a car,' he said in a louder voice. ‘And that you can be relied upon. Well, I know you can be relied upon. And God knows, that's what I need right now.'

Shadbolt wasn't sure what he was driving at. He kept rubbing his hair with his handkerchief. Then he noticed a sudden change of expression in the driver's shoulders.

‘I'll talk to Alex about you. I've decided. I think that's what you and I'll do.'

3

Days and nights of an autocrat—women and words— views through a windscreen—the last tram—an Egyptian harbour—Harriet, the attraction of curves—a power play— McBee conquers the capital—the Colonel points to Shadbolt—Vern requires further proof—the fall of Mister Hoadley
.

F
ew capital cities of consequence are located at the edges of a country. The instinct's to set them down towards the middle. Some nations have transferred their capitals holus-bolus after realising the mistake. A capital positioned at the edges of a country remains at the edges of the mind.

From the interior a capital can be seen by its citizens to be radiating power in all directions, a feeling reinforced by a psycho-geometric town plan of lawned circles and spokes, parliaments and palaces at the end of perfectly straight vistas. With so much symbolism invested a capital naturally is tenaciously defended. When the capital ‘falls' a nation is weakened; almost too painful to contemplate. Here again, locating them away from the sea and adjacent countries is obeying a deep instinct, Moscow's experiences to the north merely being the most graphic among many examples.

Newly erected capitals—Delhi, Brasilia, Yamoussoukro!—have had the good fortune of drawing upon the combined experience of the others. Naturally each one has been set down in the interior, and following the examples of Paris, Washington, Pretoria, they've been lavish with space, for it denotes confidence, and devices such as artificial lakes and the fluted column suggest, to the innocent eye, tranquillity and permanence.

These last-to-arrive capitals have followed the eternal laws too literally, too eagerly, and with their concentration of two-hundred-foot wide avenues connected to circles like molecular structures, their deployment of obelisks, shadowless forecourts and memorials to the fallen, and their preference for buildings of the golden section, they display not so much obedience to the idea of a capital as an obsession for cleanliness and clarity, as though showing themselves and the world they have mastered the difficult local environment; cities then in the abstract, detergent capitals. Recalled in the mind's eye these new capitals have an aerial perspective. And because of the surrounding emptiness there is nothing to stop them spreading.

For the first few weeks Shadbolt drove with a map spread on his knees, and at the end of each day lay crucified in his curtained room.

The centrifugal forces of Canberra had entered his metabolism. For a good hour his body leaned this way and that, as if he was back on Frank McBee's motorbike. Closing his eyes he saw the slippery steering wheel bringing into view low white buildings and flagpoles, spinning away in vast semicircles of concrete. Even the word Canberra was circular in its loops and vowels.

The dream of the capital was still being realised. The two-hundred-foot wide avenues radiating from orbs set in concrete, which happened to be geometric renditions of the sunrise of optimism around the pursed lips of his Aunt Dais, and thousands of other Australian women, were mostly complete. Still on the drawing board in late 1958 was the ornamental lake with its patently false bottom and the fountain designed to spurt at a permanent tremendous height, a measure of the nation's virility. The War Memorial had long risen up from a bare paddock. Crammed full of dioramas, captured weapons and tobacco tins perforated with Jarman and Jap shrapnel, it sported its own copper-cladded orb roof, maternal in its declaration of reigning superiority; this centre for khaki worship was given precedence of thirty, forty years over the proposed library and the national gallery. Other government offices occupied horizontal buildings set back in lawns kept alive by sprinklers hissing like summer insects. Town-planners in their peculiar uniforms of browns and suede outnumbered the elected politicians, while earth-movers and trench-diggers in faded navy singlets toiled over the flat landscape, Egyptian slaves being paid a living wage, cracking open the old yellow-brown soil and rock under a white sun, for there was still much to do superimposing order over the naturalness. Thousands of flyscreens for the windows were still being stamped out all over the country and shipped in.

The pattern of orbs and semicircles was repeated on a smaller scale in suburbs. Wherever Shadbolt drove he discovered no relief from the crescents, doglegs, returning boomerangs, cul-de-sacs uncompleted—never had Shadbolt come across so many dead ends. At regular intervals he passed a concrete velodrome where concave aerodynamics sucked in butterflies, bus tickets and interdepartmental papers, where civil servants and their masters could be seen going flat out in circles practising their craft. The centrifugal forces of Canberra…The constant veering to the right and U-turning had sent successive governments ‘further to the right', produced endless steering committees, and cricked the necks and given stiff upper lips to the residents. It took a superhuman effort to follow another course. Older people found it especially difficult; they simply took the longer, roundabout way. It was a city where language itself became circular, self-centred.

Shadbolt had been supplied with a uniform, somewhere between a policeman's and lift-attendant's. Below his chin a necktie tapered like a narrow bitumen road, and he wore a cap bearing the nation's coat of arms which feature the kangaroo and emu, because they can't take a step backwards. Unlike the other drivers he wore the cap at all times—he even wore it when the Minister wasn't seated in the back—and he never had a Sydney tabloid open at the racing pages on the seat beside him. The coat and trousers were so tight he could hardly bend over, which is why, partly why, he often had a shoelace undone.

At the crack of dawn he reported in at the car pool. There he made sure the Minister's car was topped up with water, oil and juice from the Middle East. He checked the tyres. If he couldn't see his teeth in the duco he used his handkerchief and a bit of spit and polish. He enjoyed the early hour when it felt as if the whole world unfolded from the echoing garage. After signing in he solemnly negotiated his way past the fleet, past the other drivers lounging against the bonnets and walls, the supervisor there striding about with his clipboard, and cautiously nosed the Detroit-designed front end out into the rectangle of daylight.