Dedication
To Lisa, Cristina, Kate and Kate, and Angela —
partners in the creation of a series that tells the history
of our nation from the viewpoint of those historians
too long ignored.
And to all whose stories were hidden.
May they now be heard.
The Last Dingo
I had a dingo uncle when I was young.
He wore black fur. I had bare feet.
We lived on an island of sand dunes and scrub.
Each morning he waited, watched, protected,
Lying panting in the shade of thin-clothed casuarinas
As we swam and built castles vast enough to pierce the sky.
His hackles rose if strangers came too near
And once he patrolled the lacy edges of the waves,
Refusing to let us paddle.
That was when we saw the shark.
He was not our pet,
Nor were we his.
As a girl I heard the dingo’s song
So often that I failed to listen to it.
They baited ‘wild dogs’ up in the mountains,
Dropped poisoned meat from helicopters.
Was it months or years before I missed their cry?
That was fifty years ago
And yet last night, midnight, driving home,
A shadow tore at road kill on the gravel.
Long legged, skinny and gold eyes.
He did not even glance at me, and then was gone.
Maybe somewhere in the mountains dingoes hide
But do not let a human hear their song.
They’ve learnt that we aren’t worthy to be uncled.
One day earth’s last rose will bloom,
The final gum tree wither.
We’ll turn on a screen to escape the magnitude of loss
And assume there’ll always be another season of the green.
Meanwhile the hills are silent.
But tonight, as the moon bounces above the ridge
And the valley grows its silver shadows,
I will hear the dingo howl again
And imagine it’s not just echo
Of memory and of love.
Contents
Dedication
The Last Dingo
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
Also by Jackie French
About the Author
Copyright
Prologue
Gibber’s Creek Gazette, June 1978
Dogs of Gibber’s Creek Art Exxhibition
The great day is on us again. It’s doggy time! Come on, all you dodgggy artists. Which dag will win this year?
Entry forms at the Gazette office, above the Blue Belle Gafé.
THE KILLER
This was where the dead had rested.
The killer stood among the thistles that had grown since the Drinkwater church burned. For over seventy years worshippers had stood here after the service was over. Old Matilda Thompson had donated the land for this church and paid for it to be built. Now it was gone.
The bones found by the bulldozer driver a month ago had vanished too. Each skeleton had been draped in a body bag and taken to the morgue. Four had been clean with age. Only one still had the burned flesh about his body. The forensic team had taken samples among the crumbled rafters and charred floorboards.
The killer’s glance moved to the graves in the churchyard. Their wooden grave markers were charcoaled and illegible, the memorial stones smoke-dark too.
There were no gravestones for the bodies from the wreckage. Perhaps there never would be.
The winter air cut like a knife, smelling of new gum leaves and the lingering scent of bushfire. Above, the drought-blue sky seemed to snicker. I can see you, it seemed to say. You can’t escape from me.
Soon there would be no sign a church had been here at all. But every week the killer stood in the ash and dust.
Remembering.
Chapter 1
Gibber’s Creek Gazette, September 1978
Nixon Travels to Australia
Mr Richard Nixxon, former US President, has announced an imponding visit to Australia. The only problem? He’s not invited!
Despite Prime Minister Mr Malcolm Fraser’s refusal to see Mr Nixon, the President’s former Chief of Staff, Colonel Jack Brennan, says, ‘He’s getting mail from dozens of citizens saying, “Come and stay at my home,” or, “Have lunch.”’ ‘Tricky Dicky’s’ favourite meal is meatleaf and ice-cream sundays, if residents of Gibber’s Creek want to invite the former leader of the Free World to dinner.
SAM
Sam McAlpine gazed out his kitchen window, joy fizzing even through the deep tiredness of every parent with a seven-month-old baby who requires food, nappy changing, an hour’s burping and possibly an entire vaudeville performance at two am. The winter showers, more mist than rain, had turned Dribble’s fire-blackened grass into a green carpet. Plum blossom frothed in a haze of white. Bees hummed, their buzzing just at the edge of hearing, like the song of the river that knew it flowed forever.
‘Are you going to eat that toast or just sit grinning?’ Jed appeared in his old shirt — she wore them to bed now: easy to open for those two am feeds. Maxi padded behind her, carrying a small, once-fluffy hippopotamus that the Doberperson had decided was hers.
Sam’s grin grew wider. Darling Jed. Her legs were even better than plum blossom. As for the rest of her . . .
‘Did you hear the dingo howl last night?’ he asked.
Jed yawned. ‘Don’t think I’ve ever heard a dingo. I thought there weren’t any around here.’ She popped two slices of bread into the toaster.
‘Haven’t heard any for about ten years. The wild-dog baits got them all back in the 60s. Maybe the bushfire has driven some in from the national park.’
‘What’s it sound like? Spooky?’
Sam hunted for a way to describe it. ‘Beautiful. Lonely. I hadn’t realised how much I missed their call. I suppose you hard
ly ever get a chance to think, “That’s the last time I will ever hear that.”’
Jed spread butter thickly, and strawberry jam (Mrs Sampson’s, from the CWA stall) even more thickly. ‘Why lonely?’
‘Because no other dingo answered.’
A sleepy mutter erupted down the hallway.
‘Speaking of answering the call of the wild,’ murmured Jed, her mouth full of toast.
Maxi thrust her wet nose at Jed when she failed to dash immediately to her daughter’s cot, then placed a large paw on Sam’s foot. ‘Your puppy is awake,’ the Doberperson was clearly saying. ‘Attend to her!’
Sam passed Jed the latest edition of the Gibber’s Creek Gazette, still enjoyed mostly for its typos. ‘Eat. I’ll get her, darling.’ Maxi curled herself under the kitchen table, temporarily relieved from duty.
Sam opened the door to Mattie’s room. His daughter sat in her cot, chewing Koala’s ears and drooling. She held up her arms to him. She’ll be standing soon, he thought proudly.
‘Daaaagaa!’ announced Mattie.
Which clearly meant ‘Daddy, please pick me up and take me to Mummy for a feed’.
Mattie was a genius, born miraculously in the middle of a bushfire. Even a genius baby couldn’t have a conversation when she lacked teeth to articulate with, but Sam was sure Mattie had understood the science of photovoltaic panels when he’d explained it to her at two am as he’d carried her back and forth along the corridors to burp her after her feed, especially the conversion ratios of sunlight to electricity, one of the main problems he and the others were working on now.
‘Don’t forget to change her!’ yelled Jed.
‘I never do!’ Sam unpinned the nappy, wiped the small pink bottom with lanolin, pinned on a crisp cloth nappy and calico overpants, then straightened the pintucked nightdress, lovingly stitched by his mother long before Jed’s pregnancy, ‘Just in case.’ Pity he’d miss bathtime this morning, but a shipment of inverters was arriving, a new model with a much larger capacity . . .
He carried the baby down the corridor into the sunlight of the kitchen, where Jed was quickly spooning up muesli. ‘I’ll jiggle her for a while,’ he said as Mattie leaned towards the source of her breakfast.
‘I can eat with one hand and feed her in the other. Pass her over.’ Jed settled Mattie into the crook of her left arm and opened her buttons. She looked at her daughter with deep contentment. ‘You’d never think she fed four hours ago.’
‘You’re not too tired?’
‘Always.’ They exchanged the grins of chronically sleep-deprived parents. ‘I’ll have a nap when she goes down this afternoon,’ said Jed. ‘You need sleep more than me.’ Mattie had kept Sam up for two hours last night.
‘I’m fine.’ For life was perfect. Even with too little sleep.
He gazed around the Dribble kitchen, newly painted sunshine yellow, at his wife, his daughter. Outside, chooks clucked and the solar pump chugged. He would spend today at the business he had longed for all his life without knowing it. The Whole Australia Factory bought or engineered everything needed for an alternative Australia — from solar panels to chook-shed doors that shut themselves when it grew dark. ‘Playing with big boys’ toys’, Jed called it, with love and an indulgent smile . . .
‘I’d better go.’ He bent and kissed her on the cheek, then on the lips; kissed Mattie’s fragrant baby head, then kissed Jed again, just because each time he kissed her the solar panel of happiness had an efficiency ratio of three hundred per cent.
‘I’ll be back about four. Hope you get that nap. Don’t worry about dinner. I’ll pick up something from the Blue Belle. Cheese and spinach triangles okay?’
Which would give him time to play with Mattie before dinner and read her The ABC of Monsters as well as an article from The Ecologist. It was important for a baby to hear a wide vocabulary as soon as possible.
The ute hummed down the road, slowing as it weaved its way through a mob of sheep heading from Drinkwater to the sale yards. Nancy believed they were in for a drought, a bad one, despite the winter rains. She and Michael were gradually reducing Drinkwater’s and Overflow’s stock while the price was still high. Nancy had learned tens of thousands of years’ understanding of the land from her dark-skinned grandmother. You didn’t argue with Nancy about the weather.
Sam raised a two-finger salute to Michael, on his motorbike. Funny how fast you got used to motorbikes driving the sheep, instead of horses. Sam yawned. Yep, he was tired.
He turned in at the gate of the factory. The delivery van was already in the courtyard, with Bruce and Greg edging a heavy pallet of inverters onto the forklift.
Sam parked, yawned again and wandered over to them, just as the pallet slipped. Instinctively he ran to grab it, knew the second that he should not have, should not, should not, should not, if only that moment could be undone. Felt the corner of the pallet touch him, push him . . .
Blackness. Cold. He was on the ground. Someone yelling. Cold.
He vomited, was able to move his head just enough to see the colour. Blood.
More cold.
It was so lonely here in the cold. As lonely as the dingo’s call.
Then nothing.
JED
The phone call came just as she’d got Mattie to sleep and was heading down the corridor to bed. Wonderful soft warm bed . . .
Jed grabbed the receiver. ‘What do you want?’
A laugh on the other end. ‘Is that any way to greet your best friend and editor?’
‘What?’ She rubbed her eyes. ‘Julieanne? Sorry, I’ve just got Mattie to sleep. She’s teething.’
‘That’s good, isn’t it? Getting teeth?’
‘You wait till you’re a parent.’
‘I’ll wait for my gorgeous Scot to follow me back to Australia and propose. Didn’t you hear that last bit?’
‘What last bit? My brain’s turned into a soggy nappy.’
‘I am your new editor.’
‘What? You mean . . . ?’
Another laugh. ‘Yep. The acquisitions team adore your book. I told you so! And I get to edit it, the first major edit of my career. This is a formal offer for publication of Matilda’s Waltz, with a two-hundred-dollar advance. And yes, my darling genius, two hundred dollars is peanuts, but it’s not as if you need the money.’
Jed let herself fall onto the hall chair. A decade ago she had been starving, penniless, desperate. Two hundred dollars would have been a fortune. Then there’d been Tommy’s legacy and her directorship of Thompson’s Industries, which would have made her rich if most of the money didn’t go to maintaining Scarlett’s wheelchairs, the Sydney flat and all the other paraphernalia needed to keep a girl with multiple musculature problems at medical school, as well as setting up the Whole Australia Factory. But, no, the advance was not critical . . .
She rubbed Maxi’s ears. The Doberperson liked to share whatever joy was going. ‘They really liked it?’
‘Yep. That last draft was miles better than the first. And now you and I are going to make that book the best Jed Kelly is capable of.’
‘I think I’m dreaming.’ I really am a writer, she thought. No longer a person who writes and hopes. When I go into the bookshop, my book will be on the ‘new releases’ shelf.
Another laugh from Julieanne. Damn it, that woman even laughed elegantly. Jed bet she didn’t have drool stains on her shoulder either. ‘Go and have that nap. The contract will be in the mail. Okay if I come down for the weekend and we’ll talk about restructuring?’
‘Restructuring?’ Jed’s tired brain attempted a guess at what this might mean, then gave up. They liked it! ‘Yes. Sure. If you don’t mind being woken at two am.’
‘I can sleep through police sirens. I’ll sleep through a crying baby.’
You don’t know babies, thought Jed. Or the instinct to wake up and tend them. Her mind lurched back to the topic in hand. ‘Restructuring? You said they liked it.’
‘They adored it. It’s just the beg
inning needs a bit more tension. The ending is unresolved too, and it does sag in the middle.’
‘But if they liked it . . .’
‘Everyone agrees it’s absolutely brilliant. Maybe it shouldn’t be in the first person though. But we can talk about all of that when I see you. They’re thinking of publication for Christmas 1979 . . .’
‘But that’s more than a year away!’
‘So we have plenty of time for rewrites. Easy-peasy,’ said Julieanne airily. ‘See you Friday night.’
‘We’ll have the billy boiling. Might even throw an extra rat in the stew.’
Another laugh. The phone line clicked off. Jed sat staring at the receiver. That heap of badly typed paper would actually become a book. After a few ‘rewrites’, of course.
And everyone who read it might understand more about the beginning of their nation and the roles played by those the history books mostly failed to mention: the women, the Indigenous Australians, the Chinese — and how a drought had led to colonies uniting to form a nation.
Would old Matilda have approved of her life being turned into a story? Jed smiled. Even after death, she was pretty sure Matilda could find a way to make her displeasure understood.
But Jed had also known Matilda well in their few years together. Jed’s book put women back into the history that had ignored them. No matter what errors Jed had made fictionalising her life, the old woman would have agreed with the aim.
Jed looked at the receiver still in her hand. Should she phone Sam now to tell him, or wait till tonight?
Tonight, she decided. She might even ask Blue to babysit so she and Sam could take a bottle of champagne down to the river and watch for platypuses in the moonlight. They hadn’t done that since Mattie’s birth. Blue would keep her granddaughter awake long enough so that she might just possibly sleep till three am before demanding milk and entertainment . . .
The phone rang again, just as she clicked the receiver down to dial Blue. The voice on the other end spoke before she had a chance to say hello.
‘Jed? Come to the factory. Hurry.’
It was Mack, the only woman among the factory’s Beards.
‘But what —?’ Jed began.
‘No time.’ Mack sounded like she was crying. Mack never cried. ‘We’ve called the ambulance, but you can get here faster. Now!’
Ambulance?
Fear slashed like a scalpel. In thirty seconds she’d grabbed Mattie, strapped her into the bassinet in the sensible Honda that had replaced her sports car.