The Marmalade Files
Read The Marmalade Files Online
Authors: Steve Lewis & Chris Uhlmann
It was a brutal morning, the mercury close to zero, the sun still in a foetal position. Canberra was snap-frozen in a harsh winter embrace, cold enough to tease an ache from your throat every time you drew breath. The freeze lay like frosted glass across the national capital, yet to wake from its public service slumber.
The time was nudging 6.30 a.m. this June 16, a Thursday if you really want to know.
Harry Dunkley, a press gallery veteran with an instinct for trouble, nursed a thermos of coffee and a grade-three hangover as he coaxed his '97 LandCruiser along the sweeping lake road. He chased the volume from the news and drove in silence, save for the steady beat of his pulse hammering inside his head.
Despite a layer of thermal clothing and a heater cranked to high, the cold bit hard as he turned right towards the muddy waters of Lake Burley Griffin.
âFuck global warming,' he muttered, with the soft croak of the ill.
Harry's face, still handsome despite an encroaching fifty-third birthday, wore the signs of a morning-after-the-night-before. And some night it had been. The Press Gallery Midwinter Ball, the one night of the year when politicians and journalists could enjoy that rarest of commodities in the capital â camaraderie.
Dunkley had unquestionably enjoyed himself, drinking too much of a good red â a 2006 Barossa shiraz, from memory. He'd chatted up the odd MP â one Minister getting in his ear about a particularly embarrassing moment in Cabinet â before stumbling onto the dance floor for a late-night embrace with a Liberal staffer that threatened to get out of control.
But while the night had been spirited, Dunkley's mind had been focused on something more tantalising than a night in bed with a political starlet â the scent of a cracking yarn.
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The phone call had come a few days earlier, in the middle of a particularly rowdy Question Time, as a hunted Prime Minister tried to fend off some well-aimed darts from a baying Opposition. Dunkley was only half-interested in the staged pantomime when his phone rang, its face illuminating with a distinctive Canberra number: 6261-1111. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade â DFAT â full of diplomats and policy wonks, many with multiple foreign languages under their university-educated belts.
Fuck, what does DFAT want? Dunkley wondered. He turned the volume down on his flat-screen TV, anticipating a routine blast from one of DFAT's media nazis.
âHarry Dunkley? You don't know me, and you don't need to
know my name â yet â but I have something for you, if you're interested.' The voice was cultured, with an accent polished, Dunkley suspected, by a life serving successive Australian governments in various exotic locations and shitholes around the globe. There was enough in those few words to prick Dunkley's interest.
And so now, as most of Canberra's population snuggled under their doonas, Dunkley idled his LandCruiser down a narrow dirt track off Lady Denman Drive. His destination: Yarramundi Reach, a lonely clip of land tucked away at the north-western end of Lake Burley Griffin.
He had barely ever ventured to this part of the lake, which, like much of the capital, had been designed by bureaucrats paid to suck the marrow from the city's soul.
Yarramundi Reach had been chosen by Paul Keating as the original site for the National Museum in 1993, back when the Labor Party was filled with men and women of substance and steel; not the current mob of shallow careerists whose sole ambition was chasing power at any cost â before pissing off to a nice offshore sinecure.
In recent times, Yarramundi Reach had become a well-known gay beat for those who liked it rough and discreet. Word around Parliament was that a small cabal of MPs, including at least one Shadow Minister, the flamboyant Eddy Sully, had been spotted picking up late-night trade, but Dunkley, like most in the press gallery, really didn't give a toss. âEach to their own, mate,' he'd told a member of the ALP dirt unit, when he'd come knocking with salacious details of Sully's fetishes.
Now, in the early shadows of the day, nothing much stirred. Through a thin mist, a four-man rowing crew was slicing through the lake, their oars in rhythmic harmony. Further across the water, somewhere near the imperious High Court, several hot-air balloons climbed effortlessly, languid in their skyward arc, carried away on the whim of an early morning current.
Dunkley slowed the LandCruiser to a crawl and wondered, what next? The instructions had been specific: drive past the timber toilet block to a small clearing near the lake's fringe; be there at 6.45 a.m. But who was he meeting?
Unusually for Dunkley, he was on time; in fact, he was a few minutes early. I've beaten the deadline, he chuckled, but it was too cold for grinning. He stepped out of the car's warmth, his feet stamping a mark on the frosted ground.
The sun still barely mattered, its tepid rays too weak to pierce the gloom. He was in the dark, in more ways than one. Suddenly he heard the thud of a car door, maybe fifty metres away on the other side of a small grove of eucalypts near the shoreline. Dunkley curled his fists into a ball, close to his mouth and blew some warmth on them. âOkay, time for action, let's meet this joker.'
He walked in the direction of the sound; steady, not too fast. Through the trees he caught sight of a late-model dark-coloured European sedan â a Mercedes, he guessed. It started reversing and then accelerated down a dirt track in the direction of Lady Denman. âWhat the â¦' Dunkley said and scrambled towards the departing vehicle, wondering whether he'd been tricked. He managed to glimpse its rear numberplate: blue with a distinctive DC stamp. A member of the diplomatic corps.
Close to the point the vehicle had driven off from, propped up on a small picnic table so he could not miss it, was an A3-sized manila envelope. It bore a single marking â âEmbassy of Taiwan'.
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From a safe distance, they appeared like a fast-moving caterpillar, strung out for fifty metres or so, all blinking lights and lycra. Canberra's notorious early-morning cyclists were well versed in the art of riding two abreast and getting right up the noses of motorists. Dunkley eased off the throttle, uncertain about overtaking even though the road was near to empty. âC'mon, boys, get a move on â¦'
Despite having the best off-road cycle paths in the country, the capital's cyclists seemed determined to hog the tarmac and slow the traffic to a crawl. It was no surprise that the odd scuffle had broken out as impatient drivers grew fed up with kamikaze riders, one hoon landing an Olympic hopeful in hospital for a week. âSpoke-Rage', the
Canberra Times
had called it.
Dunkley cast a sideways glance at the A3 envelope, anxious to prise open its secrets. He was five minutes from a cheerful joint in Yarralumla that served a decent latte and Spanish omelette. Most importantly, at this time of day, Beess & Co Cafe would be near-deserted, perhaps hosting just a few hardy souls who'd ventured out to pick up the papers or get an early gym fix.
Pulling into the car park, Dunkley could see Julie, his favourite waitress, setting up outside tables. Surely you jest, he thought, given the freezing temperature.
In the corner near the window, at a table for one, Dunkley poured a glass of water and scanned a menu absently, even
though he knew what he wanted and was impatient to order so he could turn to the business at hand, without interruption.
âMorning, Harry, the usual?' Julie knew better than to interrogate her best customers and, even though the hour was early, she sensed the urgency in his manner.
Dunkley unwrapped one of the morning papers he'd brought with him, glancing at its headlines and waiting until he was sure it was safe. Eventually, his fingers stopped drumming the table and opened the envelope.
Three faces stared at him in glossy black-and-white. Two were Asian â Chinese, he guessed, given the Mao caps â and the other belonged to a Caucasian man in his early twenties with long sideburns and thick wavy hair. From the generous lapels on the man's open-necked shirt, Dunkley reckoned the photo dated back to the late 1970s, when Malcolm Fraser was in the Lodge; those years before the former Liberal PM began courting the urban elites, pretending that he had a conscience.
Despite the time that had passed there was no mistaking that face with its trademark toothy smirk. âBruce fucking Paxton.' Dunkley took a swig of his double-shot latte and turned the photo over, seeking confirmation. There was none.
But he was sure the young face gazing up at him belonged to the man who had improbably risen through the Labor ranks to be crowned Minister for Defence.
Bruce Leonard Paxton. A former poster boy for one of Australia's biggest blue-collar unions â the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union â Paxton was in his mid-fifties and had been the Member for Brand, a Labor seat on
Perth's southern flank, for the past fifteen years. It wasn't listed on his CV, but he was also the least educated man ever to have been sworn in by the Governor-General as the Minister for Australia's proud defence services.
The appointment had brought jeers from the Opposition, and with some justification. Paxton was the epitome of the Labor career man, a former union heavy who had been a fearsome figure in the Wild West, cutting his teeth as a paid thug with the notorious Building Workers Industrial Union. He had left school at fifteen, the moment he was legal, and through a family contact landed a job almost immediately in the building sites around Perth, shovelling sand and shit, and learning to talk fast.
After a few years labouring and doing odd jobs for men who worked hard and drank wildly, he'd joined up with the local ALP â or, more correctly, the BWIU had paid his dues and directed him to the Rockingham branch.
His career had really taken off though when he'd switched allegiances and risen to become State Secretary of the United Mineworkers Federation, then in the process of wielding its muscle across the State, particularly in the Pilbara, where the first riches of the mining boom were being exploited by hungry entrepreneurs. In the early 1990s the UMF merged with the BWIU to become a more potent force â the CFMEU.
Paxton and another union thug, Doug Turner, had forged a tag team that ran amok, taking on bosses and union rivals alike. (They once planted several kilos of explosives in the ceiling of a union rat's home before calling in the cops.)
It was during one of these escapades that Paxton mysteriously lost his left hand, claiming to be the victim of an industrial accident. âFucking drop saw took it clean off,' he would say over an ale, seeking to impress whoever cared to listen.
Instead of getting the prosthesis recommended by a team of specialists, he had a hook fitted in place of his missing hand. He famously paraded it on the front page of the
West Australian
, grinning maniacally beneath the cheeky headline âHook or Crook?'. He was dubbed âCaptain' by adoring building unionists and the unique look only served to build on the already menacing Paxton mystique.
After a decade and a half of union power, Paxton was persuaded to move into Federal Parliament. A safe seat was found, the Labor incumbent bought off with a promise of a diplomatic posting to the Holy See. Paxton came to Canberra masquerading as a workers' hero â âHawkie without the charisma', was the view of more than a few Labor colleagues â and set about using the skills he'd honed during his union career to build support within the parliamentary caucus.
He was forced to cool his heels during the long years in opposition, finding the travel between the West and Canberra a burden on his family life, an argument he used to justify the occasional dalliance with one of his female staffers. âWell, we do support fucking affirmative action,' he joked, when quizzed by his colleagues on his unusually high female-to-male staff ratio.
In Canberra he toned down his wild man image by replacing the hook with a black-gloved prosthesis. But he kept the hook
in his office and was rumoured to put it on behind closed doors whenever he faced a particularly tough meeting.
Now Harry Dunkley stared at the youthful facsimile of the Minister. A single photo, with no obvious inscription to identify it. Someone was trying to damage Paxton, of that he was sure. But who? And about what?
âAnother coffee, Harry?'
âYes thanks, Julie. Single shot, though, otherwise I'll be walking on the ceiling.'
Just then he noticed a small marking along the top right-hand edge of the photo, faded slightly, hard to see except in a certain light. âAcacia.' The name meant nothing to Dunkley but he was sure it carried some significance. He shuffled a few papers, put the photo back into its envelope and then into a leather shoulder bag, a gift from his daughter, Gaby. His hangover had receded, the caffeine jazz had taken hold.
Dunkley was ready to look the world in the eye, to take on the latest political travesty. As for the photo of Bruce Paxton, he had no idea what it meant â but he knew who to ask to find out.