The Tower Mill (22 page)

That was why, at the end of 1991, Susan and I sat side by side in a courtroom as the verdict was announced in his perjury trial. We weren’t the only observers hoping for vindication that day – not because the former premier might have lied in his evidence to the Fitzgerald Inquiry, but for crimes that would never come to court.

In the most personal sense, we were seeking revenge for a baton charge on a cold night in 1971, when I was no more than a few cells inside my mother, a night when my father came face to face with an angry copper. It could have been any one of them, of course. They’d all had their hatred of rabble-rousing long-hairs primed for an act of brutality, and the man responsible now stood in the dock, not for inciting violence but to answer for something, at least. What my mother and I were seeking was that essential moment when he was forced to admit he’d done wrong.

But when the moment came – it was snatched away. Oh, Christ, what a night that was, outside the court in George Street after the verdict, with my mother howling in rage and my own limbs so robbed of life I could barely keep her upright.

A hung jury. The accused had walked free, spluttering self-righteous claims of innocence through a smugness that couldn’t hide how stunned he was to get away with it.

How utterly denied we felt, how unfinished. Within days of the non-verdict the papers carried news of a dodgy juror from the Friends of Joh campaign, who’d held out against the rest. What a knife in the heart that was. The entire state had been given a chance to redeem itself in one cathartic act, and they’d squibbed it.

Susan was inconsolable for days. She’d thought she’d witness another fall, like Barry Dolan’s.

‘You asked me why I get so angry with everything up here,’ she said, once she’d calmed down enough to speak. ‘Do you see, now? There are still faithful souls who’d follow him all the way to hell. Anything but admit they were wrong.’

I thought she meant the knee-jerk conservatism that bubbled through into how people voted, but when I said so, she snapped at me.

‘God no. I don’t give a damn what party they vote for. National, Labor, that’s all tribal. It’s not even the childish pretence that up here they’re better than the poofters and posers down south. There’s as much envy in that as there is suspicion.’

‘What is it, then?’ I demanded. I wasn’t a teenager any more and I wanted to peel away my mother’s evasions.

In response, she skewered me with a long silence that might have ended with her storming away in typical Susan fashion and more days of silence between us until I came crawling back, a son needing his mother on her terms alone.

Well, bugger that. I was ready to be done with her if she fobbed me off again.

‘Tell me, then. There had to be more than that letter to drive you away.’

When she began to answer, with barely a moment’s hesitation, I knew the earlier silence hadn’t been maternal discipline. She’d been marshalling her response.

‘Because when it mattered,’ she said, speaking slowly, as though I wasn’t to miss a word. ‘When it mattered, too many could only sneer at their own right to dissent – that’s what I’m talking about, Tom. They decided they didn’t need it. They trusted one man, instead, a man as ignorant of history as they were.’

‘You’re talking about Joh.’

‘Or anyone cagey enough to sweep up all the local prejudices and serve them back as some kind of victory for the common man. It takes a stubborn kind of naivety to choose that, Tom. There were two mobs in Queensland back then, one you could see at demos and the other mob that bayed for their blood and cheered old Joh on when he gave it to them. They had no idea what battles had been fought to free them from men like him.

‘Can you imagine how I felt watching it happen around me?’ she demanded. ‘By the time I left, Joh
was
Queensland. Criticise him and you were a traitor to the entire state, and even if there was no law that said it was a crime, there was the court of public opinion. Thank God for the lawyers who brought it all crashing down.’

I saw, then, that in the tension of that courtroom, more than a single defendant had stood accused. In my mother’s eyes, millions of others had stood in the dock with Joh, and if a guilty verdict had been returned, all those faces would have been made to look at what they’d flirted with – not Joh, who’d become a parody of himself by then, but the slow dismantling of their own political heritage.

When the verdict or, more precisely, the non-verdict was delivered in the Bjelke-Petersen trial, I was in the middle of uni exams. Later, when the results were posted, I’d managed only modest scores in comparison to earlier semesters and it would be easy to join the dots of cause and effect.

But such straight lines would have been an illusion. Through much of that year I’d fought a growing disgruntlement, and for the first time in my life became slapdash with assignments. The truth slipped out one night, unbidden. ‘I’m bored,’ I told the girl I was seeing at the time.

‘Then change what you’re doing,’ she replied, as though it was the easiest thing in the world.

Rather to my surprise, it was. I filled in the forms, salvaged what credit I could from my journalism courses and started 1992 as a law student.

Why Law? A straight line would lead to Dad, who’d always said I had the right kind of mind for a lawyer – and it wasn’t necessarily a compliment. He certainly pushed the suggestion once I’d confessed my disillusion, but, again, his advice wasn’t the deciding factor. Susan was the one. Something she’d said played over and over in my mind: thank God for the lawyers who brought it all crashing down.

Did she realise what she was admitting? Ask Dad, or anyone who lived through the Fitzgerald days, and he’ll tell you it was a band of crusading journos who brought down Joh and Lewis and the rest of his cronies. The truth isn’t quite so romantic. My mother’s profession might have wrestled the beast to the ground, but it was the law that drove a sword through its heart.

I’d been absenting myself from the Riley household more and more through those early years at
uq
. My many trips to Sydney began to feel like a journey between two countries, despite Queensland being welcomed back into the fold through the early ’90s after the Joh decades of wilful separateness. For me, the differentiation lingered, and always in favour of the south. It was personal, and far from reasonable in any objective sense, but each time I crossed the border I felt a change in the current.

I willingly confess how silly this was, when the shake-up that flowed from the Fitzgerald Inquiry meant Queensland’s political processes were downright pristine compared to New South Wales’. That wasn’t the point, though. Political personalities came and went, they were honest or otherwise; what filled me with quiet disdain were the stories my mother told, over and over, of the tacit consent given by an entire state to a regime that was steadily, deliberately chipping away at the rights of its own people.

‘It’s still there, Tom,’ she’d insist. ‘It might be lying dormant for the time being, but the seed is still in the soil.’

Oh, how my mother loved the dramatic. She’d interviewed John Sinclair, the man who saved Fraser Island from sand mining. A public servant in his day job, Sinclair had been hounded out of the state, and Susan saw herself in the same light, following the grand tradition of writers and artists who found Queensland too stultifying to remain.

Not that I was content to sit at her feet drinking in every word. How many times did Robert leave us bickering on the balcony, resigned to his own exclusion, and with a wink at me that said I’d found the way to my mother’s heart – argue politics.

Lurking in the shadows behind us both was Terry Stoddard. The three of us were a family in a way I could never feel within the loving quartet that welcomed me back to Brisbane whenever I returned. The verdict in Joh’s trial had robbed my father’s ghost of closure, so Susan and I were perpetual wanderers as well, and if she continued to rail against her bête noire, out of all proportion to his crimes, this was why. I knew it was over the top, but let myself be swept up in it all the same, for no other reason than it bound us together as mother and son. At least I thought it did.

During the inquiries I’d made about changing courses, I’d looked at universities interstate. In the end,
uq
took me in without demur, but the idea lingered. Why wait until holidays, if there was a way to see Susan every day?

When I told her about it, she was chuffed and before I knew it she was sussing out flats near the University of New South Wales. ‘I’ll pay the rent until you find some flatmates,’ she assured me.

Her response was both natural and generous, yet as soon as she started on about a flat in Paddington my interest waned. I lied and said Dad wouldn’t let me move, only to be found out when Susan rang him, demanding he change his mind. How could I come right out and say it, that I wanted to live with her in Rose Bay, for a month or two, anyway, until I found my feet? There was a spare bedroom, after all.

But she hadn’t even considered the idea.

TWELVE

TOM

‘Come and look at this, Tom,’ said one of the paralegals one morning, when I’d been working at Coghills for more than a year.

By the time I looked up, she was already gone from my doorway and I had to follow her to a conference room where the television screen was filled by a talking head.

‘That woman from Ipswich, it’s her maiden speech,’ came the explanation.

‘The fish shop lady?’ I said, only to be shushed by one of the partners standing with arms folded and a scowl I hadn’t seen since I’d stuffed up some research in my first year.

From the speaker came a nasal, faintly indignant voice: ‘Present governments are encouraging separatism in Australia by providing opportunities, land, moneys and facilities available only to Aboriginals. Along with millions of Australians, I am fed up to the back teeth with the inequalities that are being promoted by the government . . .’

Was this woman actually peddling such twaddle in Federal Parliament? I listened, caught between dismay and laughter.

‘Today, I am talking about the privileges that Aboriginals enjoy over other Australians . . .’

‘Like low life expectancy, no government services, harassment from the police,’ I began to enumerate, until the partner glared at me a second time.

I watched the face on screen, trying to decide whether it was the ignorance or the audacity that appalled me more. I should have gone back to my desk, but her distortion and bigotry held a macabre attraction. I simply couldn’t believe what I was hearing, and if the partner beside me could stay to hear it all, so would I.

At my desk afterwards, I felt sorry for the poor woman for the inevitable jibes about her red hair and her irritating voice, but mostly for the vilification she would suffer for stirring up prejudices that we’d outgrown. Reaction to the speech was sure to be savage.

SUSAN

1996

‘
Downward envy, they’re
calling it in the office,’ I said from in front of the
tv
, where the news prattled away with the sound turned low. I’d kicked off my shoes to recline with my feet on the coffee table, and the first glass of red in my hand.

Only Robert’s top half was visible above the island bench where he was cooking dinner. My culinary skills were on a par with my French – adequate, but lacking nuance. The kitchen was his own little Paris, he’d told me, and I let him ‘go home’ whenever the mood took him.

The news moved on, extinguishing the face of Pauline Hanson, who had prompted my remark.

‘We have the same with Le Pen,’ said Robert. ‘He has a surprising amount of support.’

‘This galoot of a woman will do the same, you watch. I had Tom on the phone the other day saying no one will take any notice of her. He lives in a bubble, that boy. Got to get him out of that lawyers’ sweatshop, shake him up. If he’s not careful, he’ll work twelve hours a day for thirty years and wonder where his life went.’

‘Only twelve? I slept on the floor behind my desk some nights,’ said Robert.

I threw a cushion at him, but without enough conviction for it to reach the bench.

‘He’d have been a lousy journalist. He can’t see what a story Hanson is. I’ve heard
Sixty Minutes
is sniffing around.’

‘Perhaps she’ll expose herself.’

Sudden nakedness filled my mind. Sometimes Robert’s way of phrasing things begged a belly laugh, but he corrected my French howlers only gently, and I’d learned to return the favour.

‘Make a fool of herself, you mean. The producer could make sure of that with a bit of judicious editing, but why kill the story? She’s a hundred per cent news fodder, this one. Talk-back loves her.’

Hanson would become a lightning rod for every nutter from Cape York to Perth, she’d legitimise anyone who felt threatened by ‘the other’. Despite my cynicism a familiar anger stirred in me. Look where the woman came from. Should anyone be surprised?

TOM

For a man with eight grandparents, the death of one shouldn’t have affected me the way it did, but, in ’97, when Len Kinnane drew cancer’s short straw, I found myself unaccountably overwhelmed. I went up to the hospital to see him after the surgery and listened to him talk of how he would fight this like he’d fought the Japanese.

‘Good on ya, Grandad,’ I muttered, with the rest.

Weeks later, when the chemo did little but make him frail and miserable, I was warned of the inevitable. Finally, the hospital sent him home with a drip in his arm so he could die in his own house, another vow he’d made and one he’d soon kept. He and Grandma Joyce had raised their kids there and, after her too-early death, he’d stayed on, even though every stick of furniture, the prints on the walls, even the doilies must have reminded him of her.

Aunty Diane moved into the bedroom she’d once shared with my mother and called in the rest of the family to make their farewells. I picked Susan up from the airport and together we drove straight to Holland Park to find Grandad propped up on pillows and still lucid, despite the morphine.

Why was I so affected? I barely knew the old guy, I told myself, and in that simple truth lay the answer to my question. Len was the last of my real grandparents, the ones whose blood ran in my veins. Soon, there would be only Susan and Terry left in that direct line and this left me lonely in a way I couldn’t explain.

Such sentiments didn’t stop me becoming annoyed with Len, though, when he took my hand and said, ‘I wish I’d known you better when you were a young nipper. There you were, just across the river all those years.’

He didn’t need to cross the river to see me – didn’t have to go anywhere – not when, every winter Saturday, he’d come to watch my cousin play football for the school. Gary’s B team were always the curtain-raiser for my As, so it would have been simple to stay behind, and he surely saw Mike Riley among the faces waiting for my game to start. Yes, he knew, but he never said a word to Dad, never stayed to tell me I’d played well. That would have been something, at least.

I said as much to Susan when we retired to the lounge room to await the tea Diane had promised.

‘That was my mother’s doing,’ said Susan, and suddenly Grandma Joyce was so fully in the room there was barely air to breathe.

I was grateful for the convenient ‘out’ she’d offered, because I didn’t want to be so hard on Grandad, not with the end so close and a need in me that still had no name.

Susan seemed to take my football story as a cue for her own. ‘Ritchie and I gave Mum hell in this house, you know,’ she began, with a smile. ‘No wonder I remember her screeching at us so often. The things we got up to.’ Then, as I suspected it would, her smile took on some subtle adjustments. ‘He was worse than me, the little devil, but he had a cheeky way of sucking up to Mum when she lost patience. I never learned how to do it.’

Her smile became a wince and then a frown, just as her childhood mischief had become an urge to be gone that itched like sunburn and bled whenever she scratched it. We were sitting on the same sofa where Joyce, with Len beside her, had tried to lay out their daughter’s future, as though Susan had no say in it at all, except Susan hadn’t talked about her future on the many occasions she told me the story. How had she phrased it? ‘They planned my motherhood, down to the last nappy and who might deign to marry me.’

Her bitterness was justified, no doubt, but I’d listened to her stories many times and wanted something else from my mother at this moment – family, forgiveness, softer sentiments more suited to a house where a man lay dying. Susan said something, but I didn’t pick up what it was. I think she was trying to get the conversation going again because my edginess had rendered me silent.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

I responded with a shrug.

‘There’s nothing we can do for Grandad,’ she said quietly. ‘He’s resigned to it and the pain’s under control. We don’t need to stay if—’

‘I’m fine.’

‘No you’re not. I can tell from the way you’re sitting there, jumpy as a cat. Nothing to be ashamed of—’

‘It’s not about Grandad,’ I said, too sharply.

She tried another tack, which left me equally dumb, then, as she did so often, Susan filled the void with the issues of the day. ‘It’s this Hanson thing, isn’t it?’

We’d talked about it on the phone in recent weeks. The maiden speech had turned Hanson into a convenient
piñata
for the chattering classes, but the stuffing she spewed out was making her a hero, for Christ’s sake. My mother had seen it coming, but not me.

Since she’d put the matter out there, I took hold of it. ‘Some girls at Dad’s school have been having a go at the Aboriginal boarders, saying they get everything for free, stuff white people have to work for.’

Susan shook her head. ‘Half-truths are harder to argue against than outright lies, especially in politics. Those girls are only quoting Hanson from the television, of course.’

With spectacularly bad timing, Aunty Diane came in with the tea tray and her own opinion. ‘Some of the things she says aren’t so far from the truth, you know.’

Susan and I glanced at each other, but we loved Diane too much to embarrass her. What we hadn’t said came out later, while we drove to the nursing home through the lassitude of a Sunday afternoon in Brisbane.

‘Don’t be too hard on your aunt. She’s good at heart,’ Susan concluded, after we’d each let off a bit of steam. It seemed enough for her, yet left me more hollowed out than ever and my mood didn’t improve when we found Terry in bed with a drip in his arm.

‘Chest infection,’ said the nurse in charge of Terry’s wing. ‘The doctor doesn’t want it to turn into anything worse. His head injury makes him more prone,’ and she went on to explain why in terms that neither of us understood.

My poor father. He lay in bed as ghostly white as Len Kinnane, but with no idea of what was happening to him. That seemed to make his condition worse, despite the nurse’s assurances that he wasn’t in any danger. They had secured his right arm to the bed frame to stop him pulling out the drip from his left, and, defeated by this, he remained unnaturally still through our entire visit.

Grandad would be dead by week’s end, and, with Terry making an almost identical scene, it struck me again that my personal history was slipping away. It was too late to know Grandad, but with Terry there had never been a chance, not since the day I was born.

‘I wish I’d known him,’ I muttered.

On the other side of the bed, Susan stirred. My words might not have formed a question, but that’s what they were, yet another variation of ‘What was he like?’ It was as though I couldn’t get enough of the stories she told, willingly and sometimes through tears. I’d first heard them back in the Fitzgerald days, but I kept asking, because none of her answers quite satisfied.

On that day, the Hanson thing gave her an easy hook.

‘He’d have taken her on, head to head if he could. He’d have dismantled the scaremongering and jealousy with hard evidence instead of prejudice. He was learning so quickly, you know, Tom, back in ’71. He could see the street protests would take a cause only so far. Only real power could bring change. He might have been premier, one day.’

It wasn’t the first time she’d made that prediction. It was something to be proud of and I certainly felt proud when she spoke of what he might have been. It formed part of the familiar theme I picked up in all her stories – we had all been deprived of Terry’s political potential. Since she offered nothing more personal that day, as on every other, it was all I could latch on to. And, as always, I felt angry, without quite knowing what I was angry about or who I was angry with.

When Susan suggested we leave, I was on the move almost before the words were out of her mouth. At the car, when I couldn’t fit the key into the door the first time, I wanted to punch through the glass. It was a rage I recognised, half against the world, half against myself.

‘Tom?’ said my mother tentatively. She’d come round the car and was suddenly at my side.

‘I felt so ashamed sitting there beside him,’ I told her. ‘Terry’s in there because he stood up against the same rubbish Hanson is peddling all over again, twenty years later. I thought we’d all moved on. Now this. Nothing’s changed at all, especially not here.’

‘There are too many like your aunty Diane, I’m afraid. The mindset is rooted way down deep. There’s talk that she’ll form her own party. It’s all about the leader, you see, and we know where that leads,’ she said, nodding towards the nursing home.

‘I’ve had a enough of this place,’ I heard myself say. ‘Even the stuff I’m doing at work . . . I don’t know, it’s so trivial when you look around at . . .’ I couldn’t finish, because the thought simply wouldn’t form.

‘Then leave – go overseas. I still have contacts in London. Maybe one of them can swing something for you. Do you want me to make a few calls?’

‘Yes, today, right now,’ I begged.

Suddenly, she was laughing. ‘Tom, it’s four in the morning over there. Can you wait a few hours?’

It did seem funny, once she put it that way. ‘Yes, a few hours,’ I said, pulling her hard against me for comfort.

Did I really leave Queensland because of Pauline Hanson? My mother put it in those terms a couple of times, halfway between a private joke and something more serious. At the time I felt it was simply time to go. Many of my friends had already taken a working holiday in England. There was nothing special in what I was doing.

Susan’s contacts didn’t prove much use, as it turned out, but I had money enough to be patient and London held things for me that I hadn’t anticipated. While job hunting, I’d sometimes sit by the Thames and stare across at Westminster, feeling that I’d come home, at last. This was odd, because, when asked where home was by some nameless drinking companions in a nearby pub, I answered ‘Brisbane’ without hesitation. I even turned spruiker when they stared blankly at my reply.

‘A thousand kays north of Sydney, in sunny Queensland. Great place.’

Yet I didn’t carry around with me any strong images of the home state I’d been so quick to own. Let poets like Dad memorialise its landscape; my training was the law and that was how I experienced places. To me, Queensland was a political entity and since its laws and parliament had grown out of the buildings I could see across the river, yes, I found a homely contentment in London. It became stronger when I began at the Crown Prosecutor and found, in the work I was doing, a second homecoming.

How much did Hilary have to do with that happiness? I’d been working at the Crown Prosecutor for two years when, on a bus to London University for a postgrad course I was doing, I noticed the same girl three weeks in a row. On the third night I said hello and after we’d laughed at our matching accents, discovered a Brisbane connection, as well. If she’d been part of the Catholic mafia we might have met at school dances, and the fact that she wasn’t only made her more attractive to me.

And Hilary
was
very attractive. Hair like Susan’s, about the same height, and pale-skinned, which she put down to the English weather. By the Christmas of ’99 we were living together in a cosy flat in Kennington, ten minutes’ walk from The Oval, where the Australians occasionally came to play cricket.

They weren’t the only Australians to make a beeline for Kennington, either. My sisters, Gabby and Emma, camped on our floor for a week in 2001 as part of their grand tour, and a year later Susan turned up.

‘Thought I’d pop over to check out my old stamping ground, and to visit my son, of course,’ she said, but it was obvious she’d come to run the ruler over this young woman I talked so much about in my emails.