By Warrigal Mirriyuula

After school young George Cassimatty dragged his sorry self around to Mrs Bell’s house. The rain had stopped and the sky was clearing. It had been a big day in young George’s mind and he was thinking that he’d better get this apology in before his father found out that it was him that made Tinker sick. And he would find out, George was sure of that. Mrs. Bell always dropped in to the Pantheon Café for a cup of tea and a sticky bun when she did her shopping. She’d tell George’s father for sure.

George hesitated outside Mrs. Bell’s gate. He knew he was in for it, but he felt he had an obligation and so he opened the gate and marched down the path, up the few steps to the verandah and knocked on the door.

As Mrs. Bell opened the door Tinker ran out and began rubbing himself on Georges legs, purring loudly. The salami sandwiches may not have done Tinker any good but the fat moggy obviously remembered George as a source of snacks.

George just blurted out his apology right there on the doorstep. He admitted the sandwiches were his and how sorry he was, because he liked Tinker, but the policeman had said it was wrong and Tinker might die, and he really was very sorry, and he didn’t want to get into trouble with the police, and was there anything he could do for Mrs. Bell that would make it up. He hung his head in contrition, waiting for what he imagined would be a severe rebuke. Maybe Mrs. Bell would chase him off with a broom the way she had before.

Mrs Bell however had been unable to follow George’s rushing, incoherent apology. She’d been snoozing in a chair before he arrived and was woken by the knocking. Frankly she wasn’t quite awake enough to work out what young George was saying. He seemed awfully agitated; something about his lunch and the Police, and Tinker being sick. Mrs. Bell looked at her cat. He had been sick a few weeks ago but he seemed fit and hearty now. Mrs Bell shook her head a little as if hoping to clear her mind.

It was perplexing, and while the rain had stopped and the sun had come out, it was also getting a little cooler and Mrs. Bell thought it best if they continue their conversation inside. She’d get George to light the lounge room fire for her and she’d make some tea and George could have one of her Butterfly cupcakes with her famous lime icing. Children always liked her lime iced butterfly cakes.

“Young George,” she said pulling her old cardigan tighter around her ample breast, “I haven’t understood a single word you’ve said but it must be important so why don’t you come in. You can liven up the firebox in the stove for me and we’ll have some afternoon tea and you can explain it all again to me slowly.

“Yes Mrs. Bell.” Said George with a little trepidation as he stepped over the threshold, Tinker still making a great fuss over him.

Down at the Telegraph Beryl and Alice had spent the afternoon dealing with the “Doc” problem. Alice had explained that her tears earlier had not been over her awkward feelings for Doc, but rather for her dear late father. They’d talked about Alice’s dread that she might turn out the same kind of wife as her mother, which she now considered no kind of wife at all. Beryl had dismissed this as highly unlikely given Alice’s passion for caring for people. Indeed Beryl had said that the very fact that Alice was so disconcerted by her feelings for Doc was proof of an emotional honesty not common in matters of the heart.

Clarry had come in right in the middle of this particularly intense moment hoping for a cuppa with his missus. He took one look at Beryl and Alice deep in collogue and backed out of the room on tip toes hoping he hadn’t disturbed them. When women got together like this, talking feelings and romance, Clarry felt like a cork in a storm. He went back down to the bar and had a squash instead. As he sipped the sour refreshment and chewed absently on the pulp he considered the days goings on.

The game was certainly afoot here at The Telegraph. Alice and Beryl had been holed up all afternoon in the small kitchen of Clarry and Beryl’s flat at the back of the hotel. They’d drunk enough tea to float a battleship. Meanwhile, having started out in the dining room, Doc and Gruber had now finished their lunch and decided a few frames of billiards might be therapeutic. They’d moved into the billiard parlour where Doc had quickly lit the fire and then joined Gruber in several Pilseners as the wet afternoon wore on.

As professional men will, their conversation had turned to politics and they’d worn down the afternoon discussing whether or not Menzies and this new fangled Liberal Party were any good.

Doc had said that he was with Labor and Evett and had voted John Breen for Calare at the election last May. He was unhappy that the Liberal Howse had got in. Doc considered Howse a lightweight who’d only been preselected on the back of his father’s reputation. Howse senior, Major General Sir Neville Reginald Howse VC, KCB, KCMG, KStJ, had been a real hero and held the seat from 1922 until 1929 Howse junior had always relied on his father’s reputation to get him over the line.

Gruber didn’t think much of Howse either. In fact he had little time for politics or politicians in general. He’d voted for Madge Roberts, the independent. He admitted to Doc that it was her “independence” that had convinced him. Gruber knew nothing else about Madge and she’d got less than 500 votes in the end.

Gruber was building up a run of nursery cannons, deftly shepherding the balls down the baize stopping now and then for a sip on his beer. When his skill ran out he racked up his score and slumped in one of the club chairs by the fire.

“Democracy is all things to all people, Berty. Look at this last election here. The current government won neither the popular vote or the two party preferred. Hardly sounds like a democratic mandate does it? Gruber asked rhetorically.

“Menzies is a mendacious, manipulative ersatz patrician, as the French so beautifully put it, an “arriviste”.” pronounced Gruber in perfect Parisienne.

Becoming terrifically animated and sitting on the edge of his chair, his hands, fingers spread before him as if to encompass the entirety of his argument, he dived in.

“You know Jimmy, Jimmy Hang Seng?”

Doc nodded but was somewhat surprised that Gruber knew Jimmy, and he was entirely uncertain as to what Jimmy had to do with the new Menzies government.

“You probably don’t know that Jimmy’s family have been here in Australia since the 1840’s.”

“Is that right? I didn’t know that.”

“That makes him more “Australian” than most Australians!” Gruber added with some gravity.

“His ancestor arrived on a whaler from San Francisco and somehow ended up working with explosives at the Copper Hill mine. When the Hill End rush was on he went there and made a modest pile from the gold, but more importantly, he ran a kitchen for the miners. When Hill End ran out he came back to Molong. He could have gone back to China a relatively rich man but he came back here. Why did he do that?”

Doc, having taken his shot and assuming this question was also rhetorical, sat down opposite Gruber and prepared for one of his friend’s enormously entertaining and occasionally bizarre analyses.

Doc entered into the spirit of the question as he topped up their beers, “I have no idea Karl. Why did Jimmy’s ancestor choose to stay?”

Doc sat back into the smooth brown leather of the club chair and took a sip of his own beer, waiting on the answer.

Gruber, his cue abandoned against the mantel, took a long pull on the amber fluid then putting his glass down on the chair-side table, he sat once again on the edge of his chair; leaning forward, his elbows on his thighs while his hands engaged in a kind of sorcery, somehow drawing the narrative of Jimmy’s family from the thin air between his knees. It was as if Gruber could actually see the story there, filled with characters and action, in front of him.

Doc loved this aspect of Karl; his enthusiasm for people and their stories.

“When Jimmy’s great, great grandfather landed in Sydney Town his accent must have confused the customs officer’s ear. Having landed with a crew of Americans, the single Chinese member of that cohort went completely unnoticed; a small Chinaman lost amongst the hulking blue pea coats of the American crewmembers. When finally confronted with authority in the form of a huge ticket of leave man who asked his name, he had been careful to pronounce it properly, but to no avail. Chinese phonemics was beyond the customs officer’s ear and he wrote the name down as Jimmy Hanson.

From that day forward he was known as Chinese Jimmy, presumably so that no one he met could be in any doubt that the man with the oriental face and English sounding name was actually Chinese.

His real name, his Chinese name, was Jie Meng and in honour of that industrious ancestor the name has been given to the first born male of Jimmy’s family ever since. It’s Jimmy’s true name, the name he thinks of himself as. It means “one who rises above the rest, energetically.” Gruber said nodding, as if to confirm Jimmy’s successful rise.

“And I think that’s why he stayed Berty; why I’m here, and you too in your way. This is a place for rising above the rest, for energy and innovation.”

Gruber paused again, then added, as if further confirmation of the success of the Hang Seng family were required, “Jimmy’s brother’s a surgeon in Adelaide. His sister’s a librarian in Orange. There are Hang Seng restaurants all over the Central West and you know why? Well I’ll tell you why. It’s because that original Jimmy understood a thing or two about the potential of this place, a place that might be big enough for a young man’s dreams.”

In his minds eye Doc saw a caricature Jimmy, coolie’s hat, queue and all, setting charges at Copper Hill; before the town, before the highway, before the railway; blasting away at the native rock to get at the first payable copper in the colony. As a figmentary explosion filled Doc’s daydream with dust, Gruber waded back into his exposition.

“When he came back to Molong he wrote to his family in China. He needed a wife. They sent one, a hardworking young woman from his home village. Her name was Mingmei which means intelligent and beautiful. Too apt to be true apparently but there you have it.  In time they grew into a deep love and depended entirely on one another. He had a big family, ancestor Jimmy, and while his wife never managed English all that well, their children all learned it and, what was considerably more difficult, they all learned to read and write Chinese. As the family grew they worked a market garden they ran on the flats along Molong Creek. As each son reached his majority he was staked in a small restaurant or grocery business. Those restaurants and grocers were guaranteed supply from the home gardens. Over the years some of the younger generations married local girls and boys but the first born son has always married a Chinese girl.”

Ancestor Jimmy’s English was good, he was amiable and hardworking. He and his family prospered, but more importantly he made a part of this country at a time when being Chinese wasn’t all that easy. In fact you might say that it was his early arrival that assured his place. Later, after all the anti Chinese rioting and murders that took place on virtually every goldfield, he wouldn’t have been allowed off the boat. And do you know why the Anglo-Celts didn’t like the Chinese?”

Doc just shook his head. This was no time to interrupt the flow. Karl was rolling now and he couldn’t stop until he came to the end. Gruber’s face took on that serious look that Doc always associated with Gruber having found something in human nature that assaulted his rationality and which Gruber recognised served only to brutalise those that had given in to its baser drives.

“The Chinese miners were what we’d now call “socialists” and tended to work in large organised groups. They exploited the entire resource; the gravel in the creek beds and the veins in the rock. If there was any gold there, the Chinese miners usually found it. They lived communally and frugally, and could get by on a much lower return than the other miners.

The agrarian background of most of the Chinese diggers suited them well to the hard physical life of being goldminers: they were used to long hours of heavy outdoor work. They saw themselves as parts of a greater whole, individually satisfied with a much smaller share of gold than the Europeans who tended, when they weren’t too drunk, to work alone or in small groups, always looking for a mother lode that would make them rich. Often times moving on when there was still gold for the taking, always staking their future on the next big rumour.

It was a cultural difference to be sure, and one the Anglo Celtic miners should have learned from. Instead they demonised the Chinese miners for their success, blaming them for a host of ills, none of which could have been proven, and set in train a kind of murderously ugly culturally ingrained racism that’s still with us today. You’ll recall Caldwell’s deathless line about “two Wongs not making a white.” Gruber’s mouth made an ugly grimace as he quoted the line. “So you see it’s not just the conservatives whipping this dog, we have bipartisan hateful stupidity”

“Fear of  “the other”, pure and simple.” Gruber face went motionless as he considered the ugly face of racism. Presently it turned to a more speculative aspect.

“It’s just possible that the reason ancestor Jimmy came back to Molong is because he read the writing on the wall at Hill End. Even though there were relatively few Chinese at the diggings on the Turon, anti Chinese sentiment arrived with the miners from previous fields. As the riches of the Hill End field declined, ancestor Jimmy decided to move on. Shortly after his return to Molong he purchased the deep rich loamy creek flats and started in the family vegetable business. He fed the locals, he added value to the town. He was a genuine pioneer and he did it all by the sweat of his own brow and his commitment to his family and his new country.” Gruber paused to let that sink in. “We’re all immigrant stock here except the aborigines.”

“Yes but what’s that got to do with Menzies?” Doc was openly puzzled but genuinely excited to hear his friend’s thesis come to its somewhat convoluted end.

“Well Menzies family were crofters, little better than ill educated agricultural serfs. They came here from Scotland at about the same time, maybe a little later. They’d been forced off their land by enclosure and had decided to join the exodus to the new world. Australia was a cheaper destination. They were in much the same straightened circumstances as Jimmy’s family and they too came for the riches the gold promised.”

“I won’t bore you with Menzies’ family history. It’s little better than the usual scrabble for prosperity and social position. They worked hard, put a little by, so that when our Menzies arrives his parents have a small shop in the Wimmera and for the rest of his life he is imbued with the small concerns and constrained view of a rural shopkeeper. Christ, have you read “The Forgotten People”, Berty?”

Gruber looked like his beer had suddenly gone sour.

“Turgid, tiny minded piece of nonsense masquerading as political homily. Boiled down it essentially says we should all be small shopkeepers and that the family so focussed, far from being a hotbed of neurotic psychopathology, an oven in which sociopaths are baked, is actually the basis of our society. I suppose from a terminally middle class shopkeeper’s viewpoint that may look like the truth. So why does he support the White Australia Policy? Possibly the single most antifamily policy ever devised in a country of immigrants! If you’re not quite white that is.”

Gruber paused and sipped his beer before ploughing in again. “Menzies, ever the great classicist, at least in his mind, sees himself as some kind of antipodean Greek hero. The Liberal Party is little more than his chorus, tasked to constantly sing his praises and provide the unquestioning support the “leader” requires. It’d be laughable except that the mistrust between the warring factions of the Labor party looks like crippling any meaningful opposition for some years to come. Looks to me like this so-called “coalition” may be Menzies answer to the possibility of a series of ineffective hung parliaments. The DLP obviously now has more in common with the Liberals that Labor. Whether we love him or would like to lacerate him, we’ve got Menzies pro tem. I only hope Evatt can hang on. Labor under Caldwell would involve a frying pan and a fire.”

Doc could see Karl mentally testing the cables of his argument, trying to pick up the strong line again.

“Where was I? Oh, yes. So here is where Jimmy and Menzies tie up. Jimmy and Menzies are more alike than they are dissimilar. Both families were immigrants from harsh circumstances, both used to struggling and both families find a future here. And yet, in a “Yellow Peril” climate of fear and loathing Jimmy’s family have worked hard, prospered, paid their taxes and contributed to the town and the country. In essence the family’s life has been entirely about family and the business that supports them. Perfect Liberal fit! You see Jimmy is Menzies constituency.”

Gruber shrugged as if to reinforce the obvious fit.

“Only problem is Jimmy’s Chinese ancestry. For purely ideological reasons Menzies continues to shamelessly manipulate the electorate’s long established historical fear of Asian immigration for his own base political advantage. In effect saying that the entirety of Jimmy’s family’s time here in Australia, a spectacular example of the triumph of hard work, dedication and commitment, are as nothing. Other “Chinese Jimmy’s” from the mainland of China cannot come simply because they are Chinese. Oh, and communist of course. Let’s not forget Menzies’ other great political theme, strident anticommunism, which has him shamelessly manipulating the electorate’s fear of a bogeyman totalitarian oppression. You must have followed the Petrov business. Low farce dressed up to look like international intrigue. I mean, really, can you see an Australian communist state Berty, regardless of what Santamaria says?” Gruber chuckled. “It’s ludicrous. The man’s a political cur barking as loud as he can for fear that anyone recognise he has nothing worthwhile to protect. Frankly Menzies is no better.”

Once again Doc had to admit to himself that his friend was truly a one of a kind. Only in the country a few years and yet he could hold forth not only on the individual life story of one of the locals but his understanding of local politics and the Byzantine intrigues of the parties was simply remarkable.

“You really are a one of a kind Karl…..” Doc began to say, and then stopped.

Off in the distance a siren could be heard. The Doctors both looked at one another and then after the sound. Maybe there’d been a smash on the highway.