And...the end of Part 1. (Part 2 is the downfall, of course.) I can finally get around to slowing the pace of updates, as we build up to uni exams. But this should be enough to keep you satiated for a while.
Day 432...
They descended into Cooktown early; a distance that had taken hours to cover before took a matter of minutes. They were, by now, very far from home. The town (barely even a village, or a hamlet) was surrounded by jungle; the heat, even in August, was stifling. The man at the rent-a-car desk looked to the skies, doubtfully.
‘Looks like there’s gonna be a storm,’ he said. ‘Where you fellas driving?’
‘We want to see where the settlements were,’ Alanson said. ‘Is that gonna be a problem?’
The man snorted. ‘Mate, you can go wherever you want. But there ain’t much left to see.’
‘Precisely.’
They drove a heavy four-wheel-drive onto rugged paths and down mountain slopes. The forest was thick on either side; birds chattered and sang in shrieking voices, and Mark thought he could see possums, leaping from branch to branch.
‘This is Kokowarra country,’ said Alanson. ‘My father’s lands. There’s a tiny little village, Laura, a few miles ahead. Or at least, there used to be.’
Laura was nothing. A few houses, a crossroads between the highway and a dirt track. Every house was abandoned. They climbed out of the car; Alanson checked the sign on the only shop’s window. ‘Town Vacated By Order of the Minister for Lands.’
Rubbish blew through abandoned streets. Gardens were overgrowing. Garbage bins, never collected, had been spilled over by winds and rain; fruit rotted in compost heaps. Birds had taken to nesting in abandoned houses.
‘This was a centre for Aboriginal art,’ said Alanson, oddly hushed. ‘A lot of it, I’ll admit, was rubbish; just taking advantage of white guilt to sell sub-par plagiarised patterns. But some of it was beautiful...’
Mark, with bureaucratic eyes, saw the broken windows, the pitted roads, the collapsing infrastructure. Even before the evacuation, Laura had been poor. Now, it felt like some glimpse into a time after mankind.
They returned to the road. Every hour or so, they would enter another of the abandoned settlements. They were tiny places, once home to fifty people or less, too small to destroy, too small, really, to survive without human maintenance for long. The rainforest had already begun to encroach. In the afternoon, they found a town that they could not even identify. Strangler figs had gotten into the pub; they crawled over every surface, ripping up the bar, shattering the windows, and slowly – it could take years – pulling the entire structure back to Earth. They watched the broken building in silence. They had still not seen anyone in the entire trip. Some communities with significant white populations, like Weipa, had been preserved; but in the deep interior of Cape York, no town had been spared.
‘It’s...affecting,’ said Mark, of the pub. ‘I wish I’d seen this earlier.’
‘Damn right,’ said Alanson, sounding reassured. ‘Come on. We’ve got a hell of a long way to go on a road that’s barely there. I want to reach Aurukun by nightfall.’
They turned off the main road near Archer River (a silent community; although not evacuated, the removal of the surrounding population had gutted its economy, and led to its abandonment), and sank into wilderness. Sunlight was blocked by the canopy of trees; broken and rusted cars lay by the side of the road, evidence of past travellers trapped here. Even their cursory and repetitive conversations, which had sustained them on the long road to Townsville, fell silent. Soon, even the birds fell quiet.
The first raindrops hit the windscreen at three pm. Alanson swore violently and repeatedly.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Mark. ‘This car can handle a bit of rain, can’t it?’
‘This isn’t Brisbane, Mark,’ Alanson snapped. ‘It starts to rain here, we could get washed off the road. We’re barely even on a road, here. If this gets worse, we’ll have to stop for the night.’
But the rain eased, somewhat, turning instead to a fine drizzle that merely intensified the humidity. Sweat poured down Mark’s face, and pooled in his armpits. Every surface in the car seemed to glisten. They grew short-tempered, snapping at each other if the car bumped or swerved. They had reached, it seemed, the end of their tether.
It was sunset by the time they reached Aurukun. With heavy clouds on the horizon, the sunset was magnificent; the whole world seemed to glow red in the light of it. Puddles, raindrops, and glass surfaces reflected the sunset, giving the sense of pooling fires.
Aurukun had been ‘the worst town in Queensland’. Mark had visited before, when working for Goss, and had been appalled: by the low education standards, by abominable health care, by the poverty and desperation of the local population. It was his frustration that Labor didn’t seem to notice rampant poverty that had driven him out of the party, and into One Nation. He felt that he alone could see the effects of economic rationalism, and that every existing party was tainted by it. Aurukun was, to him, evidence of the total failure of government compassion, charity, and their role to guide and protect the community.
Aurukun was silent.
Aurukun was gone.
The government men had arrived in May, with planners and bulldozers and government authority. They had ordered startled families out of their homes. They had paid for evacuation, even for accommodation of removed families for a few weeks, but their compassion extended no further.
They had set dynamite around the bases of buildings and brought them down in great explosions. They had ripped up the roads and let mud seep into the cracks. They had smashed the houses and sorted the rubble, creating great pyramids on every block. They had placed signs of ‘Extreme Danger’ around the town, forbidding access. They had fought legal battles with those who attempted to stay, that even now showed no sign of abating, but a cowed judiciary (kept in check by the People’s Tribunals, overturning any verdict unfavourable to the government) had been unable to stem the tide.
Aurukun, as they entered, resembled the aftermath of a war zone. Every house was a crater. There had been no attempt to remove the rubble from the remains, or to impose some order on the ruins. Instead, a town that had once been home to a thousand people was left simply to moulder. It was enough that it was uninhabitable.
They saw signs of humanity in the ruins. Furniture which could not be removed by evacuated residents was simply left in the buildings as they were detonated. Chair legs lay on streets and in gutters. Garbage was strewn everywhere; a foul stench perforated every surface as it rotted. Paper was blown about on the breeze. Newspapers, books, even photo albums: all had been disturbed into constant activity by the explosions and the rain.
They left their car near the centre of town. Trees had begun to converge. Birds had set up nests and colonies in the remains of structures. What had once been a town hall was now home to thousands of parrots, of every colour, shrieking and squabbling for position inside.
Mark staggered out. He slipped on the broken road and fell to his feet amongst the rubbish. Mud stained his jeans and his hands. He looked up, and saw a street of smashed and broken houses. His hands, scrabbling for position as he tried to pull himself to his feet, disturbed a newspaper, lying trodden in the dirt. It was the Courier-Mail, from March 21, 1999. A Hanson Landslide, said the headline.
He pulled himself back up. The hastily-erected signs warned him about the dangers of the town. Vast regions had been ‘quarantined’ from human habitation, all across the north; corresponding precisely to areas of Indigenous habitation, and areas where land rights had been established.
Mark and Alanson stood together as the sun set over the ‘town’.
‘Not even Joh did this,’ said Alanson. ‘Even the most despicable racists had never imagined a project such as this. Even the most heated opponent of land rights, the most demented newsletter-scribbler, had never planned the evacuation of the north. Do you know why she did this, Mark?’
Mark shook his head, numbly.
‘My people are tied to the land, in a manner completely alien to European sensibilities. It is our religion. It is our inheritance. It is the source of our identity. We gain our identity as Aborigines from our lands – from the continuity of that tradition. When I stand on my people’s land, I stand in the footsteps of my ancestors, back tens of thousands of years. I know who I am.’
‘Hanson cannot bear that we have a distinct identity. One Nation’s entire ideology is about oneness. All decent Australians are essentially the same. The existence of such an independent culture in her country is more than she can bear. She cannot stand that we flaunt our difference. That we are proud of our difference.’
‘So she tried to destroy the source of our identity. She severed us from our lands, as much as she was able. Now we are marked out from you only by skin. She has not gone so far as past assimilationists – she has not tried to ‘breed out the colour’, to sever children from families and to cut our next generation off from its history.’
‘But do you really think, Mark, that if she had the power – that she would not?’
All this washed over Mark. He took staggered steps in each direction. He felt rubble squelch and break beneath his feet. He looked down – some plastic toy, made unrecognisable by mud, was stuck to his foot.
‘Renounce her, Mark,’ said Alanson. ‘Admit you were wrong. Only if you admit it can you try and redeem the atrocities you’ve helped create.’
Silence. Even the birds seem to wait.
Mark spoke haltingly. Every word was forced. ‘It’s all a question of numbers.’
‘What?’
‘Two hundred thousand new jobs created. $274 million worth of Trust grants. Hundreds of millions more for schools. Hundreds of millions more for hospitals. Apprenticeship rates up 57%. Unemployment down to 4.5%. School retention rates up 20% from two years ago.’
‘Mark, please...’
‘$500 million for school infrastructure over three years,’ said Mark, with increasing confidence. ‘$10 billion on education next year. $10 billion on health. And then there’s your people.’
There was a new derisory tone in his voice.
‘125 000 in Queensland. 3% of the state population. The quarantined areas are less than 10% of the state. Immigrants: 700 000 in the state. Less than 15% of the population.’
Mark seemed to pause, briefly. He realised the significance of his thoughts: that his life seemed to hinge on this.
‘This isn’t important.’
Alanson was stunned. He stuttered, stammered for words, gestured. ‘But this—‘
‘Is a tragedy, yes. It’s horrible. It’s...awful, racist, sickening, all that. But my work is more important.’
‘More important,’ Alanson hissed. ‘This is genocide, Mark. Ethnic cleansing in Australia. In 1999, for f***’s sake!’
‘Funding for health and education up 40%,’ said Mark serenely. ‘Capital spending of $15 billion. The lowest unemployment rates in the nation. That’s more important – a fair and equitable society.’
‘You’re damned, Mark,’ Alanson said viciously. ‘You cannot accept this. This is not some compromise. You cannot excuse this!’
‘This is the price I pay,’ Mark said softly. ‘A bit of moral comfort for the future of Queensland. I’m willing to accept that.’
Alanson stared at him. His mouth moved, occasionally, as he tried to grasp this, but failed.
Mark spread his arms. ‘One Nation’s given me everything. I’ve been able to help people, in a way I’ve never managed before. I’ve got power, money, even a bit of fame – and I’m in love, Paul. I’ve never been in love before – never even had a friend before. All I have to do is overlook this. That’s a reasonable trade-off, isn’t it? To increase the prosperity and happiness of millions of Queenslanders, to be happy in a way I’ve never been before – and all I have to accept is this? All I have to ignore is this?’
Alanson closed his eyes.
‘You’re a monster, Mark,’ he said softly.
Mark tried to rebut this, then fell silent.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘But it’s worth it.’
Postscript: that scene really could have gone either way. If you want to see what happens if it does go the other way, read Advance Australia, linked to in my sig. But as I scaled up One Nation's schemes and policies, going from 'disagreeable' to 'unconscionable', I decided I wanted to drag Mark down with them.
