Downstream - Page 3
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 12: Hot Air
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Matthew Condon
THE INSTANT THEY BLEW THE BAILEY BRIDGE AT OLD JINDABYNE, Wilfred, astride his horse, felt the shock wave pass through him and knew, before the shower of river water returned to earth, that the river was dead.
They had come in throngs to watch the army bring down the bridge. There were gasps and cheers when the explosives were detonated. Cars parked in rows shone in the winter light like beetles, their headlights trained to the cleared valley and the old town. Soon it would all be under water.
Wilfred wore his old tweed jacket and his only tie. He could have taken the Humber but wanted to go by horseback. He tracked the Snowy River from Dalgety as best he could, almost to the base of the new dam wall, and was surprised by the carnival-like crowds.
He could have tied up the horse and joined the locals – Straw Weston from the old pub and Polly McGregor from the store – but he needed to see this alone. He had no desire to talk to anyone.
Sitting on the grass hillock, he tried to imagine the old town submerged in the new man-made lake. Old Ted's Snowy River Café. The hotel with its worn bench on the veranda. The church.
He thought of people's living rooms and kitchens and bedrooms deep down in the murky water. The backyards, the lanes where children played, and the trees they stole fruit off, and the gates of the old cemetery, the empty shelves and counter of the general store, still there but cold and silent under the water.
There would be no fish straight away, he thought. But they'll introduce them, and when they do they'll be swimming in the spire of the church and around Straw's bar and in and out of houses where people had eaten together at a table on winter nights and rooms where they'd made love and women had given birth and children had grown up and fought and hugged and slept. It would all belong to the fishes.
He had no inclination to see the new town up on the shore of what would be the lake, with its fresh bitumen roads and gutters and electric lighting and shiny roofs and fledgling gardens. On his last trip up to the summer leases in the high country, he'd caught a glimpse of it, laid out in grids, worked over by smoke-belching bulldozers, the outline of a town in white pegs and rows of fresh soil. It looked fleshy through the trees, like a wound on an animal's hide.
And he'd seen for himself the damming up at Island's Bend.
YET DOWNSTREAM NOTHING SEEMED TO BE AFFECTED. Wilfred went about his daily business and checked the river like you would tend to a small child for any changes, any distress or difference in behaviour. There were none he could detect.
He still fished and caught some decent trout. It was this, the unaltered rhythm of the fishing, that made him wonder if he'd been worrying about nothing all along.
One afternoon, wading in up to his knees at one of his favourite spots at Iron Mungie, he saw something he'd never before witnessed in all the years he'd fished the river. He'd only caught a single brown in two hours when a small cloud of red dragonflies appeared above the surface of the water. Out of nowhere dozens of rainbow leapt up into the blur of insects, the water boiling with their attack, the sky alive with trout. And just as quickly the dragonflies were gone and the river surface smoothed.
It was this moment that quelled his concerns. Men had burrowed into the mountains, poured untold tons of concrete, scratched out roads where there had never been roads and diverted streams and creeks and rivers that had remained undisturbed for thousands of years, maybe millions – he had seen much of it with his own eyes – and still the river could produce something that surprised him. An intense flash of life.
When they finally blew the bridge, though, and the invisible wave of air from the explosion passed over and around him and the horse, and they were left in that horrible vacuum of silence and nothingness in its wake, he knew in his soul that the river would never be the same again.
In his head he'd found it hard to reconcile the contradictions. With so much water around, how could the river be killed? That day, he watched it rise an inch an hour after the explosion. It was like the spring thaw happening in fast motion, even though it was only July. They were filling the valley with water.
The closer the hydro-electric scheme got to completion the more confused he'd become. They were told the summer grazing leases would not be affected. Nothing would change. Australia was thinking big at last. This would be one of the greatest engineering feats the world had ever seen.
They had debated it in the front bar of the Buckley's. The closer the scheme got to completion, the less the talk.
Old Alf Brindlemere's son, Jack, with the same velvety rattle in his chest as his father, couldn't see the fuss.
"We done without it all these years and we did all right," he said. It became his mantra.
"It's progress, mate."
"The way I see it," Jack said, and his companions groaned, "they just wanted to keep the war goin', with all the dynamite and stuff. Couldn't let the war go."
"How you think they gonna' dig them tunnels for the pipes and shit, with toothpicks?"
"Country thick with bloody Yanks and Eyeties, like we haven't got the blokes here to do the job. Building a bloody nation, my arse. We got hands to do it."
"I seen your new water tank, you silly old bastard. You couldn't build a billycart for your kids. Three wheels and facin' backwards, that's you."
"I built plenty of billycarts in me time."
"You're a stone's throw from the biggest source of 'lectricity in the bloody country and you still scratchin' around with candles and kerosene out at your joint."
"That'll do me."
They cheered in the bar. They'd been waiting for it. "That'll do me."
AS THE YEARS WENT BY AND THE SNOWY KEPT UP its temperamental seasonal flow and Wilfred went about mending fences and shooting rabbits, as he had done forever, he felt, whenever he did think about it, a little stab of pride that the river and the mountains would be sending electricity to the east coast of Australia, lighting buildings and railway stations and houses he would never see. It made the river seem bigger to him than ever before. Invincible.
And still he found himself, on some nights, getting out of bed in the dark in the early hours of the morning, padding out onto the front veranda, and cocking his ear towards the distant Snowy and its comforting roar. Just as he had placed his ear to his dead mother's open mouth the day he found her collapsed in front of the fireplace.
Sitting on the stationary horse that day, he watched the crowds mill about the old town like it was an open-air museum. Folks having one last look at their homes. Sightseers and strangers strolling through it, hands clasped behind their backs, like it was already the ruins of Pompeii.
The water was rising. So much water.
He made his way around the back of parked cars and the straggly crowd and headed for home. He heard a single car approaching from behind, and moved to the gravel verge of the road.
The car stopped about twenty metres in front of him and a woman in a straw sunhat with a scarf around her neck and wearing large black sunglasses emerged from the passenger's seat and held up her hand, motioning Wilfred to stop.
He jerked on the reins of the horse.
"Excuse me, but would you mind?"
He looked down at her as she foraged in a shoulder bag. She pulled out a large black and silver camera. "Just one photograph?" ♦