Brisneyland by Night – Part Two
by Angela Slatter
‘Why didn’t we come here first?’
Our last stop: a house in Ascot that I didn’t remember seeing before.
He shrugged. ‘Always the last place you look. It’s glamoured.’
He was right – I had to concentrate to see it properly. It got easier, but still the building seemed, well, slippery.
The house was set far back from the road, in the middle of an overgrown garden. Trees led up the driveway, grown so tall and close they formed a canopy overhead. Flying foxes squeaked, dark patches against the lightening sky.
I got out of the cab. ‘You’re not going anywhere, right?’
‘You paid me yet?’
‘Nope.’
‘I ain’t going nowhere.’
I wanted to go to bed. I’d spent the whole night picking through deserted houses. In West End, I’d nearly been spitted on the umbrella of an especially grumpy old lady whose wings unfurled in shock when she found me in her squat. That was fun.
West End’s filled with Weyrd. Everyone thinks it’s just students, drunks, artists, writers, a few yuppies waiting for an upgrade, junkies and the Saturday markets for cheap fruit and vegies. There’s also a metric butt-load of Weyrd, who do their best to blend in. In suburbs with a pretty strange human population, they generally succeed. The smart ones use glamours to hide what they are.
But this was Ascot; so upmarket that house prices could give you a nosebleed
I pushed hard on the doorbell. If anyone answered I’d ask if they were interested in a pyramid-selling scheme. People invariably backed away then, like you had an eye in your forehead.
No one came.
Through the front windows I couldn’t see too much: dark tidy rooms, some expensive pieces of furniture, a chandelier catching strays streaks of dawn light.
Out the back, steps lead down to a sunken garden. From the vantage of the veranda I could see it was set out as a maze, about five feet high; you might lose track of your path if you were short or a young kid.
Empty house. Why the glamour? I might have given up but that was the kicker. Something was amiss. Where do you hide a whole bunch of kids? Twenty-five kids in four weeks; all from unhappy homes so it looks like they’ve run away.
How do you make them disappear without a trace? A glamour.
When the River Died
by Jason Fischer
When the river died, its bones ran through a wasteland of our making. House-boats rested on crusts of salt, torched where they lay or stripped to the framework. Weather-beaten jetties jutted over dead ground, stretching for the water that they could never touch again.
And out in the middle of the cracked salty jags, a thin ribbon of red. Still water, tainted with algal blooms and two centuries of superphosphate. All that was left of the mighty Murray River, an artery that once carried steamboats by the hundred, a Nile that flooded and receded as it wished, coating the plains with thick, healthy loam.
When the river died, the pelicans left, and they never came back. If they found fish somewhere else, no-one knows about it.
All that was left of Australia’s fruit bowl, mile on mile of orange groves and vineyards, now dead sticks in dust and waving in the hot winds. Irrigation pipes led down to the salty muck, thick-throated and ultimately thirsty.
When the river died, it killed a hundred towns. Grand old hotels, rotting hulks that were witness to the empty, dusty streets. Cars without the fuel to run them left junked, burnt out. Rows of quaint country shops stood silent, the windows smashed and the doors broken or gone.
The only man left in each town was the statue of the lone Anzac, features nearly worn blank from the acid rain. Most of these stone soldiers faced the river, the old lifeblood, and perhaps it was a kindness that their eyes were worn smooth. “Lest we Forget” each slouch-hatted figure exhorted us, but they’ve been long abandoned. Nothing left but these ghost-soldiers to defend the dead places.
When the river died the arcologies were born, great spires of steel and glass, hiding the children and grandchildren of the evacuees from the murderous sun. A million of these pasty folk, living in a fluorescent hell with each other’s stink, praying that the desal plants will work for one more day.
But if you were to leave that crowded place, and knew the signs, the ways to strain the briny water through ash and stone, you could survive. If you figured on a method to trap the tough little creatures that come out at night, and knew which of the bitter succulants were safe to eat, a whole continent could be yours.
When the river died, a soft nation was finished, but a tough new land was born.
