Spirit of Progress (2 page)

His father was beside him as he entered the station, beside him all the time as Michael translated the foreign signs and the glossy advertisements for his benefit (the child navigating the father through new and puzzling places, as the father had once guided the child), until he stood before the engine cabin and realised that his father didn’t need a translator to be at home there, for he spoke the universal language of engine driving.

And just as his father was with Michael as he stepped out from the Metro and into the station where the grand lines are, the whole suburb in which he grew up is with him too wherever he goes. Always there, never gone. The place that made him. And which will always claim him: the ticket collector’s gate through which his family and all
their neighbours walked long ago, through all seasons, the sandy path that led down to the Old Wheat Road, the milk bar with the fancy French name of Rendezvous that sat on the corner, the dirt roads, the dusty cricket grounds, the wooden box houses that looked like the winds would blow them away but which they weathered all the same. And long before that the story of a white-haired old woman who lived in a tent and who asked for nothing more than to be left alone. The thing that makes you, it never goes. This is his travelling world. And as Michael steps from the platform into his carriage he brings this world with him: … a whole world inside his head … complete and vast, going about its daily life, constantly moving as if alive and still evolving.

And as he places his suitcase on the rack above his seat and takes his place, the Michael that was sits down with the Michael that is (and the travelling world he brings with him), and they take the journey together.

Soon, quietly and surreptitiously, this sleek, shiny modern train will leave the platform, carrying Michael through the rail yards, the inner city and the outer suburbs of Paris, into the green countryside with its bare trees, its villages and towns that are worlds away from his. He will look out upon one world and inward upon another. Two landscapes, travelling side by side.

A
long black train pulls into the station, exhaling clouds of steam and cinders over the platform that quickly rise and evaporate into the night sky. These are the engines of Michael’s youth, although Michael is still two months away from being born. His eyes are yet to focus, however blurry at first, on the face of the driver of the train that has just arrived, a little past eight in the evening, after an all-day journey from the state border. But when his eyes do open upon the world and focus on the face of this particular driver, he will become familiar with it, for this is his father. Although the word will come much later, he will come to know this face, currently looking back from the cabin window up the platform, in the same way that he will come to know the face of the woman he will call his mother. He will come to know and instantly recognise her face because she will always be there, just as the man looking back up the platform on this starry winter’s night will be there when he is not
driving engines. And Michael will also learn the names by which they are known to the world, even if he will never call them Vic or Rita. Just as he will eventually learn that his name is Michael, and that, together with Vic and Rita, they will become an unhappy family. None of this has happened and he has not yet opened his eyes upon the world. But it is, nonetheless, the story that awaits him when he does.

Vic is looking back up the platform from the driver’s seat, while his fireman, young and eager to leave, is packing his bag. Vic lingers, eyeing that platform as the train doors open and the passengers step into the smoky, crowded station. It is a dirty station, grimy and gritty because the sequence of sad and violent years that everyone simply calls the war, but which is more correctly known as the Second World War, has recently finished. And although six years may not seem a long time, everybody looks tired for it has been a long six years and a long war. And, in many ways, this war will not end for years yet. For, just as Michael’s eyes will soon open upon the tight, unhappy family he, his mother and father will become, they will also open upon a world that will become known as the post-war world. Years that will become the post-war years, and a whole generation, of which he will be part, that will become the post-war generation. The war has finished but the war will go on. The damage will not be confined to those six sad and violent years that constituted the war, for the damage too will be passed on and the effects of this war will be felt long into the future.

And as Vic looks up the length of the platform, he sees the damage stepping off the train. For this is a troop train (and Vic is more than familiar with the sight of troop trains because he drove them all through the war). These are the last of the returning soldiers, and the people on the platform are the families who haven’t seen them for years, and the children who have
never
seen them, these gaunt figures who are their fathers. And their arms go out, those who have waited and who now receive not only their sons, husbands and fathers back into their lives but receive their damage as well. For these men cannot help but bring their damage back with them.

And these are the lucky ones. Vic is motionless as he surveys the platform. The station is eerily quiet. It is not silent: there are carriage doors still being opened and slammed shut, occasional whistles and announcements. This and the sounds of young children. But not much of it, for most of the children, who until now may not have known what damage is or looks like and who may be seeing it for the first time, are simply staring. There is little grown-up speech. Not that Vic can hear. No one seems to be talking much. Those gathered to meet the returning troops and those stick-figure troops themselves (for even though their return has been delayed because they were too thin to travel, and even though they have been carefully fed, substance comes back slowly to their stick frames and it is even possible that some will never lose that bony look) have somehow, without speaking, all agreed that words can wait. That
whatever words may be spoken at this moment will be the wrong words — the words they all might have used
before
, the words of a time, of a way of living, that once existed but doesn’t any more. And that for this new age new ways of speaking will have to be found. Or ways of using the old words that don’t exist yet. And although Vic would never say it like that, the eerie quiet on the platform tells him that everybody has decided to scrub the words for the moment because they wouldn’t be up to the job demanded of them. And whatever things they all imagined they might have said they leave inside their heads and now greet one another in silence or muted welcome. Occasionally, Vic notes, someone’s lips move, indicating that more extended speech has taken place. A young woman suddenly sobs, then stops herself — an act of will that is more moving than the tears. And there is the odd smile, even a laugh — the sort of prepared happiness you see in newspapers. But this is a night arrival and only those who have to be here are, and no one smiles or laughs for the cameras because there aren’t any. Not that Vic can see.

They may, Vic is thinking while his fireman leaves the cabin, they may even be his old mob. And Vic is as much looking back through the years as back up the platform to the time he spent in the army before being called back to drive engines. To the life he might have lived had he stayed a sapper. Could they be his old mob? He discovered, when the war was over, where they were sent. Singapore, just in time for the fall and just in time to be taken prisoner, more or less, without firing a shot.
All of them. That was what became of his mob, and that would have been his fate too. Taken, more or less, without firing a shot and sent off to the prison camps where one in three died. A one-in-three chance that the child who is about to open his eyes upon the world would never have been conceived.

Slowly, the crowd begins to thin. Soldiers who still have that stick-figure look are led like children through the platform gate. And, as they walk back into the world they left behind in another age altogether, the children take their damaged hands. And so it begins, the process of passing the damage on. For out there are the quiet suburbs to which they will return, where fathers will sob uncontrollably in their bedrooms, fly into sad violence without warning or sit listening to jaunty songs about love discovered or sombre songs about love lost, or, when the time comes, be found lounging in front of television screens gazing upon quiz programs or American westerns about wagon trains and cavalry, all of which will be the face of this other, this post-war, world to which they returned but which they know, in that part of the mind that ticks over without thought, will never be their world because they don’t really have one any more. And there will be a creeping feeling that this world, this age of Progress, didn’t, in the end, need them to exist any more; a creeping feeling that History found them useful for a time and that those six sad and violent years were part of a larger process that was always moving forward to just such a moment. And once the longed-for moment is reached, History continues,
on and on, leaving those who were useful for a while to gaze upon these bright, shiny new worlds with faintly puzzled eyes.

This will all unfold out there in the world to which they have returned: the sobbing, the violence without warning, the silence and the puzzled curiosity. And all to the accompaniment of jaunty little songs about catching falling stars, coming from plastic radios in kitchens and lounge rooms and bedrooms, or wherever the damage takes itself to be alone in those quiet and unquiet suburbs.

Vic waits in the cabin, and can’t help but wait, for he is increasingly drawn to the possibility that this was his old mob, or part of it, and their fate, somehow, still his fate. So he waits until the platform clears, apart from the station staff and the guards gathered together in a small group, talking quietly.

And only when they have finished talking and the group has broken up does Vic rise, pack his leather bag, leave the cabin and step onto the platform. In the immediate distance, over the vacant platforms, he sees the
Spirit of Progress
. It is, for all the world, moving, even as it is standing still. Pointing like a blue and yellow arrow into the distance of the future.

In this drab part of the city, on the corner of Spencer and Bourke Streets, stick-figure soldiers are climbing on to trams under silvery street lights at the stop opposite the station. The occasional car, for there aren’t many and they are old ones at that, some still carrying charcoal burners, passes by. The trams leave, the cars go and Vic is
left standing on the corner, staring at the intersecting streets of the city he has lived in all his life, streets that should look familiar but which, at this moment, have the shadowy deserted look of streets in dreams.

E
arlier in the day, the morning, in fact, when Vic is just beginning his journey south from the New South Wales border, a deep-blue American sedan (one of the last of the pre-war productions) makes its way out of the large newspaper offices in Flinders Street and points its rounded, chrome-plated nose towards the north of the city. The driving is easy because there is little traffic on the roads as petrol is still rationed, and besides, nobody can afford a car. Nobody, that is, except for those who have managed to make a tidy sum out of the war, and newspaper companies such as the one this car belongs to.

This newspaper is the largest in the city. When the people of the city talk about ‘the paper’, they are usually talking about the afternoon or evening editions of this one. The front page boasts sales of 350,000 and that is why the paper has cars such as this pre-war American sedan.

The two men sitting in the car (one a journalist, the other a photographer) work for the paper. They are driving north, beyond the established suburbs, to where they are told an old pensioner lives in a tent on the edge of the city. Somebody passed this information on to the news desk and the young journalist was given the job. The photographer drives — they always do (at least this is what the young journalist in his short time at the paper has observed) — and the journalist stares out the window as the drab streets of the city glide by, not, he notes, in ‘pink majesty’ like the Place de la Concorde (for this young journalist is drenched in the writings of Mr F. Scott Fitzgerald) but in a grey haze. Part of him would rather be in a city that can sustain an image such as ‘pink majesty’, hence the bored look on his face. All the same, the idea of an old pensioner living by herself in a tent on the frontier of the city (neither city nor country, but on the edge) is vaguely intriguing. Even quaint. Their job is to photograph and interview her. Simple.

The journalist does not simply think of himself as a journalist. At certain times he thinks of his job as the thing he is doing until he can leave the country and enter that world, over the seas, where city squares are shrouded in the kind of poetry that they could never be shrouded in here. At other times, to his surprise, he loses himself in the tasks at hand. He has, he often fancifully imagines, learnt his trade sitting at the feet of Mr Hemingway, who was a journalist, and still is when he chooses to be, and who does not look down his nose or sneer at journalism. No, Mr Hemingway talks kindly and fondly of his days at
the
Kansas City Star
, where he learnt much of the difficult, complex business of putting simple sentences together. So this journalist sees himself as a writer whose journalism is a part of his writing. As soon as he can, though, he will leave this country, the city and the newspaper. But he knows that cannot happen until the following year when all the soldiers are finally home and the boats that brought them home are finally free. When that happens he will go where every writer and artist in the country goes — away. Like his literary heroes he believes that the only way to write about the place from which you come is to leave it. To put distance between it and yourself. To see it through the distant eyes of those who look back and see the whole picture, as apart from those who remain and see only bits of it. He will, in short, become an expatriate. Even though he doesn’t think of it in such terms. He can’t at the moment, anyway, because he can’t leave the country. Few can.

So he bides his time working for a newspaper and now, as he looks out the window, he notices for the first time that they have entered the inner suburbs. Which particular suburb he doesn’t know, because it’s not his side of the city. He’s from what the city calls ‘the other side of the river’. But they are passing through a workers’ suburb, he can tell that. Squat, dark little cottages, row after grubby row. The photographer is talking, and he’s been talking the whole time they’ve been driving, but the journalist is only dimly aware of what he is saying. He nods and comments every so often and this is sufficient for the photographer to call it a conversation. It leaves
the journalist’s mind free to wander. Free to dream about foreign places and the vital distance that will allow him to see the whole of the picture as apart from bits of it. At the same time, although his face may look bored, he is, in fact, contemplating the job at hand. For there is something about an old woman living in a tent on the edge of the city, in what he calls the bush, that compels his imagination.

Soon the suburbs open out and they are travelling on a patchy tarred road that runs along an ancient river valley. The photographer stops talking and they follow the road to the distant limits of the city. The houses are larger, the yards wider. Then there are fewer and fewer houses and the city begins to give way to open thistle country, long grass and paddocks that might still be farms. This patchy bitumen road, which is one of the main roads out of the city, is now running parallel to the railway line, and they slowly ascend a long incline into another world — a lost one. Or, rather, one that will very soon become a lost domain when the city finally catches up with it.

They pause at a T-intersection. There are a few scattered shops and three or four houses on one side, and on the other a dirt road that leads down into what looks like the centre of the hamlet, or whatever it is. It is flat land, dominated by the tall silos of the flour mill opposite the station, which loom like a medieval fortress over the paddocks. A landmark from which to take their bearings, and which they were told to look for. They are not happy to leave the road they are on because although it is patchy, it is, at least, solid. And that dirt road, softened by the
winter rain, looks like just the sort of track to get bogged in. But as untrustworthy as these roads look, they actually have names, and the old woman they have come all this way to interview has pitched her tent at the end of the road in front of them. And so, warily, the photographer turns the steering wheel and they cautiously enter what their street directory tells them is the Old Wheat Road.

The rain has not been so bad and the road holds. They pause beside three double-storey shops. Brick, signs of the first attempt, years before, to create a suburb here. The footpaths either side are as empty as the shops (baker, butcher and grocer) seem to be. A war memorial and the occasional farmhouse are visible across the flat, open country. Some of them, the journalist notes, are large and substantial. The nearest, on the other side of a wooden church in the middle distance (the journalist is familiar with such terms because he is also the art critic for the newspaper), is wide enough and high enough to be called a mansion. Slowly, cautiously, they leave the main road, make a series of turns (always on the lookout for potholes and mud) and eventually come to a stop at the end of a street with no name. At least, no sign denoting a name.

There is one house in the whole street; the rest is open country, paddocks and farm land, with a farmhouse and milking sheds just behind them on the other side of this dirt track that calls itself a street. And there, to the right of their parked car, is the pitched tent and, presumably inside, the old woman they have come all this way to interview.

The journalist takes his pad and pencil from his pocket and the photographer picks up his camera. The sound of the car doors slamming echoes across the still, open country, and, already aware of creating a disturbance, they walk towards the lot of land on which the tent is pitched, looking for signs of the old woman.

At first they cannot decide what to do. Should they advance into the property and thereby trespass or should they just stand there hoping to catch a glimpse of her? This indecision lasts only a minute, and, concluding that they are surrounded by open country anyway, they simply stroll on to the property, avoiding the mud, and call out as they go.

There is no response. Perhaps she is out. Perhaps the tent is empty. Cows from the neighbouring farm, grazing where they have always grazed and oblivious of the existence of dirt roads, gape indifferently at the two intruders. The journalist and the photographer walk on, calling out again, convinced now that there is nobody in residence, when a small, white-haired woman suddenly lifts the flap of the old tent and peers at them through the opening.

The journalist and the photographer stop. The eyes, they both realise instantly, tell you that this is not a woman to be disturbed. Not a woman who takes kindly to intruders, and they, at this moment, have intruded. She then steps from the tent and starts striding across the sodden ground towards them, waving her arm as she walks.

‘Get off my property.’

She does not need to say it a second time, for the photographer and the journalist immediately retreat and quickly make their way back to the road. But the woman, dressed in black, in loose-hanging clothes, follows them right up to the road, still standing inside her land.

‘Get right off.’

They step further back. She looks them up and down with, the journalist imagines, her pioneer eyes, eyes that have seen and known a way of living that these comfortable suburban types can only guess at. She is tough, and she is not frightened. They can see this clearly. She has been in scraps, this woman. She has known real danger. She has known all sorts of what she would call ‘types’. ‘Types’ that make the journalist and the photographer look like nothing more than troublesome children.

‘Who are you?’

It is a question, but asked in the manner of an interrogation. And, in the manner of an interrogation, the journalist replies rather more quickly than he would in an everyday conversation.

‘We’re from a newspaper. We’d like to ask some questions.’

‘Why?’

Again, the same tone of interrogation. And it occurs to the journalist, who might even be amused if he wasn’t being jabbed with questions, that they came prepared with questions for their article and, as yet, have done nothing but respond to her orders and her questions.

‘Why?’

It is only then that the journalist realises that he has
not yet answered the question. And it is a good one. For the real answer is that somebody back at the newspaper told them to drive here and speak to her because she could be news. Why? The journalist toys with a playful answer: because you are what we call ‘human interest’. Odd phrase, but there you are. You’re it and that’s why we’re here. But of course he can’t say that. Especially not to this woman. This woman who is a survivor. Who has stepped out of the pages of pioneer history, and who now sizes them up with all the menace of someone who has known a lifetime of intruders and seen them all off. She’s small, she’s old, but the journalist feels himself face to face with History. With a certain historical type.

There must have been a long pause because she is talking to them, answering her own question.

‘It’s the tent, isn’t it?’

‘Partly,’ says the journalist, the photographer watching on.

‘Who lives in a tent, eh?’ She looks back at her canvas home. ‘And what’s an old woman doing living in a tent? Is that it?’

‘Some of it.’

‘I’ve lived in tents all my life. I like them. You can take them anywhere.’

And she looks them both up and down, with the eyes of someone who has been everywhere and anywhere.

‘Isn’t it cold?’

‘Don’t get cold. Too busy.’

Neither of them asks what this means, what she does to be busy enough not to notice the cold, for out here, on the
very edge of the city, they feel the ice on the inland wind. And, just as the journalist is about to pursue this matter of cold and comfort, he is distracted. He is not so much wary of her now as concerned for her, because beneath the toughness she presents to the world is the brittleness of age that he sees in her small, bony hands as she rubs them together. He is, in fact, beginning to feel sympathy, possibly even affection, for her. The ground is flat and muddy. The only shops are the ones they passed back there on the dirt track that seems to be the main street, and, apart from the landmark of the mill and the odd farmhouse, there are few other buildings, and he is wondering what she does for food and company and warmth. The tough exterior, he is now convinced, is the act she presents to the world because the world expects it: a picture of the strong pioneer woman that she plays up to and for which he just fell, before noting the brittle vulnerability in her hands.

As the journalist dwells on all of this, his sense of social justice is roused. It is inconceivable that the old stock, whose image the country trades off through tea and biscuit-tin labels and whatnot, should be left to shiver her last years away in an old patched-up tent in a sodden paddock on the edge of nowhere. More than inconceivable, his sense of social justice tells him that it is not right. And he determines there and then to save her. Through the story he will write, which will be printed in the paper this evening, he will deliver her from all of this. She will be given the comfort and respect she deserves and his outraged sense of social justice will be satisfied. Yes, he now knows what he will write and now knows what questions to ask.
But just as he is about to speak, the photographer lifts his camera and any chance of gaining her confidence is suddenly lost.

‘Shoo!’ the old woman is saying. ‘Shoo!’ Her left arm is raised and she is shaking her bony, white hand at them both. Her right hand is on her hip. The photographer takes a second shot before she turns and leaves them, trudging back to her tent, inside which she will be safe from the prying eyes of a world that isn’t hers any more and finds her odd enough to send newspaper types out to talk to her. Before she leaves, the journalist calls out that he can help her, and she stops for a second and spins around, telling him that she practically owns the land and if she’s not complaining why should anybody else? And, what’s more, she doesn’t need anybody’s help. She’s done without help all her life and she doesn’t need it now, thank you very much. Then she is gone and the photographer and the journalist are left standing on the dirt road, after having taken two photographs and asked one question for their troubles. They didn’t even get her name. And no matter how much they call out, the journalist knows she will not re-emerge from her tent. The journalist glares at the photographer, who is completely oblivious of the fact that he has ruined his colleague’s plans, and who wouldn’t care anyway. This photographer has been at the paper for many years and for him it’s a job: get the shot and go. And concluding that there is nothing to say, that the damage has been done, the journalist looks around him in search of someone to talk to about the old woman. They cannot
return without even knowing her name. So he scans the neighbourhood and it is only then that he notices a golf course at the end of this dirt track. He knows it’s a golf course because behind the fence and the line of trees that continues for a mile or more he can see the trim lawns of a fairway, a tee and part of a painted weatherboard clubhouse. A golf course. Out here? Then he tells the photographer that they can’t leave yet. That they don’t know who she is. He will, he says, stroll across to the farmhouse and ask the questions he was not able to ask the old woman, if anybody is in. The photographer shrugs and returns to the car, where he lights a cigarette and watches the young journalist trudging over the muddy paddocks to the farmhouse.