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"Where?" Sally asked, puzzled. She couldn't see anything.
"That's good!" Phil grinned. "If you can't see it when it's pointed out to you, no-one else is going to find it by looking for it!"
Zara threw the rope she was carrying over the lowest branch of the tree and used it to climb up into it. Then Sally and Anton could see the transmitter. It was a small green and brown box perched on a higher-up branch and nestling against the trunk. Zara took a cassette out of it and put the new one in place before she climbed back down again.
"We managed to nick a solar panel and that's perched right up in the top of the tree there, see it?" Phil pointed.
They both looked up again and they could just see the straight edges of the panel among the leaves.
"That and a moter bike battery power the thing. Simple, isn't it? All we ever have to do is put a new cassette in every hour and clean the heads on the cassette deck." He pulled out a small transistor radio out of his pocket and turned it on. A song by the Crass was just ending, followed by Alien's voice saying "This is Radio Freedom, your local community pirate radio station..."
"What happens if the cops come?" Sally asked.
"We'd know they were coming long before they got anywhere this tree!" Zara laughed. "So all we have to do is run up here and turn the transmitter of and they've lost us. They could spend a year searching the bush around this spot and never find it. Finding a transmitter up a tree in the rainforest is a bit like finding a needle in a haystack!"
"We've got a friend working on a remote control at the moment." Phil joined in. "So we can have a little box at home that will switch the transmitter on and off with radio signals. We were thinking about having a link transmitter at home to save us coming up here to change the tape all the time, but it's a bit of a giveaway if they search the house and it doesn't really take much effort to do it anyway."
"We'll go back a different way eh?" Zara said, as they began to move off. "We don't like using the same route all the time, you end up with obvious tracks real quick."
*-*-*
Sally and Anton had been living in Mainline for nearly a week now. They were almost beginning to get used to the steep hill that led up to their new home.
Life had certainly changed for the two of them in those few days. It was surprising what a difference getting out of the town and into the bush could make. They hadn't fought once in that time, although Anton had had a couple of tastes of smack - no more. And they both felt much happer and were starting to feel like they really were in australia out there, among the trees. Sally still hadn't told Anton about her dead boyfriend and he still hadn't told her about his drug use history, but they both still meant to - soon. Everything was going too well to risk spoiling it will possible controversy. It was silly really, as the best time to talk about these things is when you're getting on well, but when has sense ever come between a couple and their excuse for a fight?
They'd stayed in the house for the first couple of nights they spent in Mianline. But then they bought a $45 polytarp and put that over the platform which was up the hill as Phil had said. The tarp had been a bit of a struggle at first, as none of them had ever slung one up before. But eventually they sorted out the mess of ropes and tarpaulin and managed to create quite a habitable little structure, shaped like a house and about the size of a small bedroom. They only used it for sleeping in, living in the house in the daytime.
At first it felt really strange walking up the muddy hillside in the pouring rain to go to bed at night. And then lying under the tarpaulin, with the loud splashing of the rain on top of it lulling them to sleep. But they were beginning to get used to it already. That and the feeling of being out on their own in the strange forest at night - although they were hardly any distance from the others sleeping in the house.
There were other weird an unexplainable sensations that came and went in those first few days - and corried on for several weeks after. One of them was the sickness that Anton had felt on his first drive into the Mainline valley. They both felt it this time, although they didn't talk about it until someone else brought up the subject several weeks later. Then they discovered that it affected just about everyone who was new to the place. It only lasted a few hours really, although in a milder form it was with them for a few days.
Another strange thing they both noticed was how much more strongly drugs seemed to affect them there than anywhere else. It hardly took more than a few drops of alcohol to get quite pissed. And a couple of drags on a joint and they were out of their heads. Again, neither of them related it to where they were until someone else talked about similar things later on.
Theri dreams were suddenly stronger too. They were more vivd and intense, and both Sally and Anton often woke in the morning feeling they'd discovered something really significant in their dreams last night - although they could never quite remember what it was.
All in all, it was a strange place, Mainline. A place like they'd never been to before. There was something about it that seemed totally impossible to define in terms of their previous experiences of life. And therefore totally impossible to define in ay way at all. Their minds didn't yet hold the concepts that would allow them to explain it. Their language didn't have the words to express these concepts so they could talk about them an gain some understanding that way. And they were so swamped by the newness of the whole situation that they couldn't have separated one aspect of it from another - even if they'd known they had somehow arrived in two different realities at the same time and not just one.
Later on when these elusive concepts had filtered through from their unconscious minds to their conscious, and they'd learnt to use some of the words in the english language in completely new ways, so they had a means of talking about it, they looked back on this period with a mixture of amusement and confusion. It all eventually made sense, although they wouldn't both arrive together at the mental milestones on the road to understanding.
They would both look back on this time in the future, realizing it was here they learnt to understand the real australia - not the ridiculous hallucination that the europeans have obscured it with, but the australia that's hardly ever seen by anyone else except its original inhabitants, but that's all around us all the time. It even lies there still, buried under the hideous concrete nightmares of the cities and its power is as strong as it ever was. Which is why people who live in australian cities are so confused.
The land was talking to them. Telling them about itself and its laws, about its people and its spirits. That was the cause of the strange feelings and experiences that seemed to come from all sides in Mainline. It would take them a long time to understand it fully, but when they did they would realize the incredible power of those hills. The power they held could cut through their european conditioning, their european view of reality - or maybe i should say their view of reality as it is in europe, which is something different. It could teach them not only about itself , but about australia as a whole. Maybe if the first fleet had landed near there, the colonization of australia would have happened in a different way. Would not have happened at all perhaps. It might have become migration and integration, rather than colonization and destruction. But then who knows? It didn't stop what destruction has happened in the area in the last two hundred years.
Gdzakl sat outside her humpy, in the sparse shade of the old gum tree. She looked out over the dry patch of ground in the clearing immediately in front of her and nodded slowly to herself. It wasn't always easy being alive, but she was happy.
The little vegetable patch over there that survived the harsh climate only with her help didn't take much work to grow. But it was all they needed, her and the kid, to survive quite comfortably. Some years there was less food than others, but they managed.
The river never ran completely dry, and if it was used carefully, the water would last the two of them and the vegetables until the rains came. It was a drag, sometimes, carrying all that water from the river to the garden in the old wooden bucket. But when it was done she felt satisfied.
Then Gdzakl looked towards the other part of the garden, where the white petals of the poppies shone fiercely in the powerful sunlight. Those plants were important too, she thought. Without them, life would be pretty meaningless. It would just revolve around growing and eating food and fixing up the thatch of her humpy.
Of course there were friends and neighbours in the village to talk to, but eventually they got boring. Only for a while mind, now and then. She always found a new interest in them after a bit of a break from their company. But she needed more. Something outside the village, outside this material existence that she surveyed now. And the poppies provided that.
They put her in touch with other worlds. Other existences. Other possibilities for reality. None of which she really wanted to stay in for ever, but all of them were fascinating and beautiful. Like her own world really, only familiarity always tends to breed some form of contempt.
They also relieved the pain of hunger in the lean periods - when they seemed to grow biggest and strongest. And they soothed her weary body after a day's work that had been harder than usual.
She had no reason to imagine life wihout them, so she didn't. Until one day.
"You can't grow those you know!" A harsh voice cut through the afternoon sun.
Gdzakl looked up at the red faced person in a strange looking suit who stood in front of her pointing at the poppies.
She couldn't work out what this person meant. She could grow them quite well in fact - her poppies were the biggest and strongest in the village. Or maybe this red faced person meant that you couldn't grow them because they grew themselves, which was quite true. But what did he want anyway? And why was he out and about at this time of day, when everyone always rested and kept out of the sun?
"I've told all the other villagers that if they pull them up now, we'll take no further action." the harsh voice continued. "But if you don't, we'll have no option but to put you in prison!"
Gdzakl had never heard of prison, but the official person was very keen to put that right. He explained that it was a big building made of stone where you had to live in a small cell and never saw the sun. And it didn't sound very much fun at all.
Eventually Gdzakl, along with everyone else in the village was persuaded to stop growing their poppies, which they'd been growing for dozens of generations and never found any reason to stop growing before. They just didn't seem important enough to be put in prison for.
But that was then. And it didn't take very long before they realised how important they'd been to them. Life wasn't the same. It turned into one long drudge. A real proverbial daily grind. There really was bugger all to make it better than what they'd always imagined death to be like. Then one day when they were just about at the end of their collective tether and seriously contemplating mass ritual suicide, another stranger came to the village.
"Psst..." said the new red faced person, who was also out in the heat of the afternoon sun while everyone else was sitting in the shade thinking about the good old days. "Remember those white poppies you used to grow?"
Gdzakl nodded. That was exactly what she had been remembering. She looked up at the stranger, who looked curiously like the last one, only without the suit, and wondered what this was all about.
"Well, i've got some white powder here that does exactly the same thing." He held out a little silver foil packet, which Gdzakl went to take.
"Uh-uh! Wait a minute." the stranger said, withdrawing his hand a little. "It costs me money to bring this here to you. I can't just let you have it for nothing you know! Tell you what i'll do though," he smiled and Gdzakl noticed just how much like the other stranger this one looked. In fact she could have sworn it was the same person if it hadn't been for the different clothes.
"If you just double the ammount of food you grow and give me what you don't need, i'll supply you with this stuff when you need it."
Gdzakl frowned. It seemed like a strange idea, but she supposed it wasn't very much more effort than growing the poppies in the first place. So she accepted the stranger's offer and once again she was happy. The afternoons, when work was finished, regained that charmed and pleasantly relaxed quality. Of course they weren't quite so long, as it did take an extra hour to water all those other vegies the stranger demanded, but after the months without poppies it still seemed worth it.
Of course it didn't stop there.
"Due to fluctuations in the market and a poor harvest this year," the stranger said, "the cost of this white powder has risen prohibitively. Of course, i wouldn't want to deprive you of your pleasure and relaxation, so i'll tell you what i'll do..."
Gdzakl ended up growing four times the ammount of vegies she needed to live on and then she really did need the white powder that the other three quarters went to pay for. But somehow by then, it was too late. She didn't have the time to sit down and think about her life. The shadow cast by the old gum tree never had anyone to shelter any more. So she could barely muster up the energy to hit up the white powder in order to get a good night's sleep before the daily grind began again, let alone wonder why she was working four times as hard as she had been before.
The stranger who sold the white powder laughed as he sat in the shade of an air conditioned bar and drank a beer with his cousin who wore the suit.
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