13. Unslung hero
Quint looked out through his window, a curious mixture of satisfaction and despair. Sorry beyond words that his pleasant prospect of grass and trees had vanished, but glad that he was able to get a feel for what was happening.
Dawn was a good chance to establish a baseline record. He moved the camera on the tripod head, making a panoramic image of the entire ASIO site. Day by day, he would be able to track changes. Maybe there was some way he could make the composite images into a time-lapse sequence. He’d have to investigate.
An early-morning walker moved across the view. Quint paused, in case she appeared in two or more photographs. That would be confusing.
On his windowsill were two objects. The fireblackened stone from Quint’s now-vanished thinking grove. The metal disc from under the stone.
He picked up the disc, feeling the texture. It was about the size of a twenty-cent piece, but thinner and darker. There were figures on it, but it was blackened, corroded and encrusted.
Kitchen sink. Hot water, detergent and the old toothbrush kept for scrubbing at the shower times. He worked away at it, gently loosening the dirt, careful not to damage the surface.
It was a coin. A 1927 penny.
The currency had changed in 1966, when Quint was still very young, but he had seen examples. King George V’s head on one side, and a bounding kangaroo on the reverse.
The reverse of the reverse was called the obverse. This was one of those words that could be brought out to show people that the world was not as plain as it could be.
There was a significance to the date of the coin. Old Parliament House had been opened in 1927 by King George V’s son, Prince Albert, the Duke of York, who eventually became King George VI, father of the present Queen. Canberra had been a sheep station then, with a parliament house, a couple of hotels, a tiny village and a church in the paddocks, just up from the slow-moving Molonglo River. And dozens of foundation stones for the city to come.
The Depression had delayed construction, and in fact it had not been until the Sixties and Seventies that many of the grander buildings had been constructed. Architecturally, a poor choice of time period, but that was the way it had happened.
Quint kept some metal polish in the laundry cupboard, brought out on Sundays to keep the doorbell and other things gleaming, and with a soft cloth he worked on the coin until it was glowing copper bright. It was scratched and worn down where the green corrosion had bitten in, but it was a beauty in its own right. The kangaroo bounding across the golden reverse said “Australia” in a way nothing else ever could.
He left the patina of smoke and burning on the stone. Unless geology had changed, there was nothing under the black but rock.
Quint had a moka pot for coffee. Two days worth of fire-blackening on the rounded base. It made espresso coffee without the gadgetry and expense – just fill it up with water and coffee, sit it on the gas ring and when the spluttering stopped, turn off the gas and pour.
The time it took to make the coffee fitted precisely the time needed to open the front door, retrieve the morning paper, spread it out on the table and warm the coffee mug. He was running late today, but it was a special day, after sleeping late on Monday and taking a good set of photographs today, not to mention uncovering the secret of the coin.
The Canberra Times was an aberration. A daily broadsheet in a city of 350 000, it also had high standards of journalism, quite up with those set by the bigger cities of Melbourne and Sydney with populations in the millions, and well ahead of similarly sized cities such as Newcastle or Wollongong. Canberrans liked to think that the quality of the paper reflected the quality of the readership.
Today was special in another way. Normally Quint skipped over the Editorial page, with its cartoon and letters, because he found the diverse and contradictory views expressed there unsettling. But for the past few days he had been compiling a file of cuttings from the paper related to the ASIO building.
Very few correspondents had a good word for the thing. Quint found this entirely understandable. It was a monster, and it was destroying his life.
Know your opponent. That was one of the basic rules of war, of law, of life. There was a lot to find out about this building, and the information was beginning to flood in. Much of it was opinion, or misleading, or just plain wrong. But, like trial research and cross-examination, the inconsistencies could be identified, the truth exposed and the matter tidied away with a good verdict.
The jury of popular opinion, as expressed in Letters to the Editor, was on Quint’s side. But these people were powerless. Their verdict had no effect.
Quint wasn’t sure if there was any way to change the verdict already delivered in the dimmer recesses of government and bureaucracy. But maybe the monster had bent the rules somewhere in some office of planning and procedure. Just how had it escaped the normal stages of consultation and comment? Maybe there was an Achilles heel to be found and exploited.
It wasn’t as if it could not be done. There was history. Local history. Ewart Smith, a retired public servant, had been woken in the Campbell dawn by carolling magpies, and, unable to return to slumber, had bent his mind to a draconian identity card system on the verge of being introduced by the federal government. He had discovered a loophole in the legislation, and despite the bill having been the subject of a double dissolution election specifically held to ensure the its passage, a few words referring to regulations had been enough to kill it dead.
Maybe there was something. Maybe the monster could be slain by a quiet man with a well-aimed arrow.
Copyright © 2009 Peter Mackay