The Tower Mill (4 page)

TOM

O
n a modest
hill above Brisbane’s
cbd
stands the oldest surviving structure in the city, an unremarkable windmill built of stone blocks in a style known the world over as a ‘tower mill’. Rendered in white cement these days to stop it crumbling, it’s a relic of the city’s convict past, otherwise obliterated, and few miss what was little more than a footnote in the convict legend that took shape more memorably in Sydney and Hobart.

I have been to the Tower Mill many times since learning its significance in my own family legend, but I knew none of that on the day Susan asked to meet me there. I assumed it was simply a convenient landmark, since she would be in a courtroom in George Street all day and I was coming from school.

It wasn’t the only assumption I got wrong that day. To begin with, we had different places in mind. To me, the Tower Mill meant the old convict thing, so I dumped my bag in its shadow and kept watch down Wickham Terrace, since that was the way she would surely come.

‘Tom,’ a voice called from behind me. When I turned, Susan was thirty metres away, looking surprised. I swung my heavy school bag over one shoulder and headed off to join her.

‘You’re crying,’ I said, when I saw the panda smears around her eyes.

She offered an apologetic shrug, more a wince, really, and said, ‘It’s this spot, outside the Tower Mill.’

She was staring across the street now at a circular building, and I began to twig to some kind of mix-up. I didn’t ask because we’d found each other anyway and, besides, her tears hadn’t entirely ceased and I was quickly growing uneasy. I’d cried tears of my own after our last meeting, at the university, and this one was kicking off with hers.

I tried to break through the awkwardness. ‘Where do you want to go?’

‘I want to stay here a bit. That’s why I said meet me at the Tower Mill. Do you know what happened here in ’71?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Mike has never said anything?’

I shook my head, trying to make sense of where this was going. Whatever she was talking about, Dad must have been here, too. I asked her to confirm it.

‘Both your fathers were here, Tom, placards and all.
end apartheid now, racists out
. This was the hotel where they lobbed up.’

‘Apartheid! I don’t understand. Who lobbed up here?’

‘The Springboks,’ she said, spitting out the word. ‘Don’t you know any of this, how Bjelke-Petersen called a State of Emergency, all because we wanted to protest? Queensland was the laughing stock of the whole bloody country.’

Here was something, at least. Of course I knew who Bjelke-Petersen was. Old Joh had been premier for most of my life and the Springboks were the Rugby team from South Africa, except nobody would play against them any more. We’d studied apartheid at school.

‘Okay, Joh and the Springboks. What have they got to do with this place?’

She blew a frustrated gust from deep in her throat, as though I’d forgotten the date of Australia Day. It wasn’t fair! How was I supposed to know this stuff? I kicked at my bag and turned away so I didn’t have to look at her face. ‘What’s Rugby got to do with it? You hate the game anyway. You said so, and the Springboks aren’t allowed to play here any more.’
That was it. If she was going to make me feel like a fool, then I wasn’t saying another thing.

‘They might be banned now, Tom, but they weren’t in ’71. We came here to demonstrate against apartheid, to show they couldn’t go on like it was business as usual. Students like Terry and me, lecturers, union people. I even saw a teacher from Avila. There were hundreds of us.’

Years later, once the Tower Mill had come to taunt me as much as it taunted my mother, I found out all I could about that night, from old newspapers and the rest. What stunned me more than anything was the number of police. Extras had been ordered in from the country and the ring-ins weren’t happy, either.

The warning signs were obvious if those wondrously naive protestors had wanted to read them. In their home towns, those country police dealt with boongs every day, and here in the city they were confronted by a bunch of hippy types and commos having a go at the South Africans for keeping their own blackfellas in line.

Those poor kids had no idea how much they were hated. There weren’t enough thirty-six-inch batons to go around, apparently: that much was documented.

SUSAN

22 July, 1971

W
ith the garage
doors tilted open, cool winter light brought out the colours we were busily splashing onto cardboard – and the Rileys’ unprotected concrete. The cans were all crusted around the rim and none had more than an inch or two of paint in the bottom, but that was all we needed. Six of us were hard at work, although, apart from Mike Riley, only Donna Redlich was a friend and I’d only come along because she kept me to a rash promise I’d made days before.

I was more interested in the granny flat that took up the rest of the ground floor. Mike had told me about it while we were down the coast at Christmas but I hadn’t listened. Now that I’d seen it first hand, I was jealous. The lucky bastard had this whole space under the house as his private domain, yet he still got dinner every night and the use of his mother’s car. What Terry and I couldn’t do with that set-up.

I stepped back from my masterpiece.
smash apartheid
, it declared. I’d wanted
rugby racists
but Mike had talked me out of it: ‘It’s not the game that’s racist. You’ll only alienate people who like footy for its own sake.’

I was quietly pleased that the first word retained the violence that seemed so much a part of the stupid game. What was it about boys, that they enjoyed smashing into one another like bulls in a paddock? Couldn’t they just compare the size of their dicks? It was all the same thing, if you asked me.

‘Time to get moving,’ Mike called to the others.

With the signs done, he would drive us to the airport in his mother’s car, which we all thought of as his, anyway.

‘Do you mind if I don’t come along?’ I said, and immediately his face fell.

Oh shit, I thought. He wasn’t still hot for me, was he? It had been obvious when I first started going out with Terry, but that was ages ago and it wasn’t as if we’d had anything much going, just those weeks down the coast.

Mike was a nice guy, the organiser, the driver, but Terry was the one, and that morning I couldn’t concentrate on anything until I’d talked to him. We had a problem.

Mike dropped me at uni and I walked up to the union building. The police had arrested some demonstrators outside Parliament House the day before and Terry wanted the details of how they were knocked about. The meeting was just finishing up when I found the room.

He was seething. ‘The pigs confiscated all the film from the
Courier-Mail
’s photographers. Can you believe it? What ever happened to free speech?’

I didn’t know if he was furious or just incredulous.

We bought burgers from the refec, but this conversation needed privacy and I led him down among the lily ponds above the river, to a bench beneath a poinciana.

‘My period’s never late, Terry. I can’t go to the doctor, because he’s a friend of Mum’s and he’ll be on the phone before I’m even out of the surgery.
This could be serious . . .’ I managed to get it out before the tears rained out of me.

If he’d started in with frantic questions – how could I be sure, why wasn’t I on the Pill – if he’d shown any weakness at all, I might have hated him as quickly as I’d fallen in love with him.

Instead, he tossed his burger to the ducks and enveloped me in the comfort of his arms, his hand gently pressing my head against his chest.

‘Cry all you need to,’ he said. ‘We’ll sort this out. It’s going to be all right.’

My tears were of relief then, almost joy.

‘Whatever you want,’ said Terry. ‘We’ll handle this whatever way you say.’

Yes, but even while he cooed such reassurance I needed more from him than ‘whatever you want’. ‘This is too big for me to decide on my own,’ I said, standing back. ‘I want to know what you think. Tell me honestly. If I
am
pregnant, what do
you
want to do?’

Terry’s brows lowered, a sign that presaged his deepest thoughts and even without another word, he told me he would carry his half of whatever came our way. I could have kissed him for that alone.

‘A baby’s certainly not in my plans at the moment, Sue.’

‘Mum and Dad would want us to get married, for God’s sake, just so they can hold their heads high at church on Sunday.’

‘Married,’ said Terry, as though the word was new to him.

I didn’t want to hear the word right then, either. Marriage was for the future – Terry and me, sure, that was my dream, but not yet.

‘We’ve got so much we want to do,’ I thought, and only afterwards realised that I’d said the words aloud. ‘You know that tour of Paris? I want to do it for real one day, Terry, with you, but if there’s a baby and the rest, it won’t happen, will it?’

He shook his head. ‘Suze, since you’re asking me straight out, then I’ll tell you. I think the best thing’s an abortion.’

There it was, for only the ducks to hear, and the pair of us, too. ‘It’s such a big word,’ I said, glad that it had come from his lips and not mine. It had been in my head for days, whenever I checked for signs that I would never have to say it.

‘I know what you mean,’ he conceded. ‘Tell me how you feel about it.’

What did I know? I’d chanted slogans and marched for a woman’s right to control her own body, but all I knew for certain was that there would be no baby afterwards, no pregnancy, finito. I just wanted things the way they had been these last months and once it was fixed, we’d be more careful. Maybe it wasn’t so hard to go on the Pill after all. I’d find out.

‘It’s more than likely a false alarm,’ I told him, forcing a smile. ‘Every girl has them. But . . . but if it’s for real, then we’ve made a stupid mistake, haven’t we?’ I shifted away from him a little. ‘Shouldn’t have let it happen, wasn’t supposed to happen. Neither of us wanted it to happen, and it’ll change everything, especially for me. Shit, Joyce will go off like Krakatoa.’

Terry grinned. He’d never met Mum but I’d told him enough about her to see the explosion. There wasn’t going to be a volcano, though, was there, so we could afford to be flippant.

I looked at Terry, who seemed so steady, so sure. ‘I just want to be unpregnant.’

‘It’ll cost. And we have to find out who . . . You know. That part shouldn’t be too hard. As for the money, we’ll just have to find it.’

He was smiling still, sheepishly. There was nothing we couldn’t overcome, that smile was telling me. ‘Guess you have to pay for your mistakes,’ he said.

‘I wish you’d paid for more condoms!’

I hadn’t meant it as a joke, but we were happy to make it one. I’d thought it would take longer to decide, but there amid the shady chaos of the poinciana and with a view of the languid river offering a sort of peace, it seemed we’d already made up our minds.

That day turned into a farcical game of cat and mouse. When the unions refused to let the Springboks travel to Brisbane on commercial flights, a fleet of small planes was rounded up, and, instead of landing at Brisbane airport, they sneaked in through an airfield in the suburbs. Mike Riley and the rest missed them altogether. Only late in the afternoon did we find out they had gone to ground at a place on Wickham Terrace called the Tower Mill Hotel.

I hadn’t counted on a vigil, not after dark and on a hilltop with a westerly wind raising goosebumps on my bare legs. Idiot. I should have worn jeans like the rest, but when I’d left home for Mike’s place to help with the placards, the sun was shining and I’d simply thrown on a skirt and long-sleeved top. After an hour in the open, I was shivering.

‘Like a plucked penguin,’ I told Mike, who’d found me in the crowd. ‘Wish I had Grandad’s greatcoat.’

Mike had come better prepared. Typical.

‘Here, put this on,’ he said, and, before I could stop him, he’d stripped off his heavy woollen jumper and held it out to me.

‘No, then you’ll be cold,’ I said, but it ended up around me somehow, still warm with his body heat.

I searched for Terry’s shaggy head and found him at the edge of the footpath, conferring with three others as though they were generals laying siege to Rome.

Mike nudged my arm and nodded towards a broad-shouldered figure in front of us, noticeably older than the rest of the mob and dressed differently, too. He was inching towards the gutter, towards Terry.

‘Hey mate,’ Mike called, ‘if you Special Branch shits want to know where the Molotov cocktails are, why don’t you come straight out and ask?’

The bastard turned a blank shrug our way – who, me? But nothing much was happening, most of us were bored as well as cold, and this was all we needed to renew the chant in his face: ‘Apartheid Out! Springboks Out!’ Left in a circle on his own, the spy slipped to the edge of the crowd and disappeared altogether.

Watching him go, I saw that some of the protesters were drifting away, too. The South Africans had come onto their hotel balconies earlier to watch the ruckus, but when this only incited louder jeers, they withdrew. Maybe they’d been ordered to. For all we knew, the Boers were now feasting on some slaughtered bullock on the far side of the hotel, oblivious to our placards and the show of Queensland force assembled to protect them.

I couldn’t really blame the deserters for heading out of the cold. I’d have gone with them, if not for Terry. It was all an anticlimax, really. We wanted to send the brutal pride of apartheid back home with its racist arse kicked but all we had to shout at were the ranks of our own police, who were no more than patsies sent out by our own geriatric regime. We were here for the Afrikaners who herded blacks into Bantustans and policed the Pass laws.

The front line of cops was assembled along the white line in the centre of the road, each wearing a motorcycle helmet, which seemed a bit ridiculous when there wasn’t a bike for even one of them to ride.

‘There’s more than at parliament yesterday,’ I said to Mike. ‘What do they think we’re going to do? Set fire to the hotel? Jesus, we could do with something to warm us up.’

I wasn’t about to admit it to Mike, but the lines of police worried me, the way they marshalled like an army. That was just what those grandads in the government wanted it to look like, no doubt. First principle of the oppressive tyrant, I’d heard Terry explain at a rally earlier in the week, was intimidation through a show of force.

‘Bastards,’ I said out loud. ‘A State of Emergency just because a few of us want to demonstrate.’

‘Bjelke-Petersen’s cleverer than that,’ said Mike. ‘All this makes him look strong for the by-elections next week. We’re playing into his hands here.’

It sounded like a criticism of Terry. ‘So you think we should pack up and go home because it
looks
bad?’ I challenged him.

‘No, of course not – but it’s McMahon in Canberra we have to convince.’

Terry had said the same thing, in almost the same words. ‘Yeah, Joh’s a sideshow.’

The minutes ticked by coldly. Mike was shivering openly now and I felt a twinge of guilt; it wasn’t enough to give back the jumper, though. I was bloody freezing and the sight of all those police didn’t make it any easier. The fear fluttered again in my stomach when an officer walked behind the helmeted line only thirty yards away. Some kind of order was being shouted out, lost to my ears in the chanting and the gusty breeze.

‘Why the motorcycle helmets?’ I asked Mike.

‘Oh, we’re a vicious mob.’

He was closer to me now, although not intentionally. Despite the defections, the numbers were swelling again and the footpath was narrow. Even with bodies pressed unnaturally close, some spilled into the park behind us, where the ground dropped away, making it tricky underfoot in the darkness.

The restlessness had spread to the nearest row of coppers now. It brought a new edge to the night that I didn’t like. I looked for Terry, but couldn’t find him this time and the crush was too tight to go searching.

‘He’s over there –’ Mike’s voice was right in my ear – ‘talking to the Aboriginal guy.’

Mike was watching me, aware of me and what I was thinking. I should have resented it, and if we hadn’t been talking about Terry, I might have told him off.

‘Terry never stays still for long, does he?’ I said proudly. ‘One minute he’s revving up the crowd and the next he’s conspiring one on one.’
Was he really mine? There had to be a better word than boyfriend. Lover, maybe. There was an old-world daring about the term that appealed to me.

‘Terry took me to a party last week,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t believe who was there.’

‘Yeah, you told me.’

Did I? ‘Oh, sorry.’ I’d mentioned it to a few people out of sheer wonder, really, that such company would open up to me. I hadn’t sat in the corner like some decoration, either, while Terry worked the room. When he was drawn away from me, I plunged straight in and found myself talking seriously with people who’d only been exalted names around the campus until then.

Going home afterwards was like slipping through the gloomy gates of a prison, from freedom to the cage, from grown-up to child. That was when I saw what bound me to Terry: more than the sex and the laughter, he was my ladder over the wall.

That delicious thought was still in mind when the crowd’s mood shifted, and things began to fly over my head onto the road, whatever lay at hand, even a half-eaten hamburger spilling out of its paper bag. The mess was a sign of the frustration we shared, a petty demonstration of something far deeper.

‘Littering as public disobedience,’ I joked. That was going to change the world, wasn’t it? Yet the silly missiles somehow added to the anticipation and I was no longer shivering simply from the cold.

‘They look more pent up than we do,’ Mike said, and I knew what he meant: The police were arrayed with such precision along the white centre line.

Then the line began to move.

Everyone on the footpath that night must have seen it begin. What Mike picked out before the rest, though, was what it meant.

‘I don’t like this,’ he said, and before I quite knew what was happening, he’d grabbed me by the sleeve of his own jumper and backed across the footpath towards the park.