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  Virginia is not averse to abstract sculpture but this gigantic piece must be realistic enough to tell its story. Hours, days, months now at work on the log reveal figures, possible weapons, a line of oars, instruments, the curve of a hull, the fold of cloth. Sometimes but a second before she gouges she sees what is coming, perhaps a piece of sail, a boom. She does not know. She must retain so much faith, so much discipline, she is in constant control of her wild ego, her impatience.

  This Friday she works close to the base with some of the root and some above-ground tree where it is harder to determine what will emerge. The breasts seem to be pendulous but the character is not standing. Nor is the weight of a woman upon them though they hang as if she is lying on her belly. Nor are there arms to take the load. The breasts are not pendulous, they are tight, young, conical. It is a riddle. It is a monster. No neck. The head of a beast. She carves out five curling tresses. She moves away to attack it from another direction, behind, and finds crouching back legs; a dog, a large, muscular dog. Then she realises it is too chunky for the canine and the tail is all wrong. She is distracted and informed by the etheric, the esoteric, she must trust her body, her hands, the hemisphere of her brain that has no words. It is difficult. She goes off for lunch. Up before dawn and not necessarily early to bed, Virginia rests in the middle of the day. The light is better for books then, also. She reads through her siesta.

  In the afternoon the waxing moon rides a clear blue sky. She strides back up the hill.

  Instead of addressing the whole as she usually does, she dives straight into the detail she had worked in the morning. She knows now the whole is a boat with a female crew, most life-sized. She ignores appreciation of what has happened for her already because she is curious. The corner of the hindquarter settles her as she shapes it and the snake-like tail. When she is returning from a dip in the creek, climbing up the fallen tree, she spies what she has carved, the sphinx. She is finding a sphinx. She barks a laugh at the obvious and the ironic. The riddle all the time was the riddle itself. Chiselling the tassel of the tail takes the rest of the day.

  At night, in candlelight, she looks up her books. Barbara Walker informs her: 'This glyph was…"the Lions of Yesterday and Today". Traditionally a monster, Mary Daly suggests, the sphinx 'invites us to Realise expanding Integrity, Harmony, Splendor of form/forms across Time and Space'. Virginia is gratified but not ecstatic at the possibility that someone else may understand what she does in another place at another time. She muses, all very well, but it doesn't dispel the lonely weight of obligation. Her friends consider her work a ridiculous pursuit, a hobby.

  Although it is the most important piece she has ever attempted, she expects few ever to see it. The power of the process of uncovering, not making, is simply hers. The creative act a daily need for revelation. The inner and outer exercise makes her feel in control, feel capable of taking on all comers, an isolated happiness in the security of a hermit soul.

  But Virginia White is in love with a woman in town.

  The masked owl screeches and barking owls scream like humans. Ghosts are there for the feeling in the crying of the night. The bush is full of noises. Murderous sounds for the noctiphobic, Frogmouth ooms and nightjar grates, widow-makers fall like cannon-fire and crowns detach like pistol shots. Amid the galloping horses of butchering bushrangers, settler-women sing lullabies from Scotland. The past is alive in the present, Indigenous children play in the streams. Many gurls hear and see beyond the material plane for the first time in their lives when they stay on Lesbianlands. Whether with wonder or terror, either way, their knowledge of themselves as sentient beings is enriched. While money grows on trees and threatened species thrive, utopia it is not.

  Hope Strange watches a spacecraft hover and land.

  * * *

  Gig is lazy and easy-going. She lives near the road on the lower part of Lesbianlands. Gregarious and hospitable, she loves women because they are not men, and generally accepts them all. Hope materialises out of the bush. It is the first time Gig has seen her. So she looks her up and down: slim, tanned, bald, about twenty-one; bare feet, ankle strap, bandanna round her forehead.

  'None of it makes sense, no sense at all,' Hope says, crazily. Instead of sitting on the ground, Hope stands on the silver-grey log fencing the upper area around Gig's caravan, which has a roof and rudimentary verandah. Long grass in clumps hides the wheels. Her campfire is out in the open. Wood-chocks mark her kitchen.

  'Everything is so unfair. How dare they dynamite our sacred site?' Hope goes on.

  'That was a widow-maker falling,' Gig says. 'Happens all the time. They say this land made lots of widows. Which is cool with me.' Gig is not exactly blissed to have this mad visitor in her camp. But she rolls a smoke and pokes the fire under the billy. She has been away. Hope has come in the meantime, and she might as well listen for a while. 'I'm Gig, by the way.'

  Hope is distracted by listening to the words in her own head as she speaks. 'The practising fascist contacted me again. That is to say, while he continues to be a fascist, he is no longer a practising father. But he'll bomb the shitter out of enemy craft from outer space. He'd love that.'

  Gig hears her jabber, and recognises the particular madness: annihilation as a result of sexual abuse as a child. Many clever women come here with this experience. It results in a very personal hatred of men. 'Is he in the army?'

  Hope nods, 'Chaplain.'

  Gig sighs, 'My grandfather did it, dead in his grave now. I'd happily dance on it, if I knew where it was.'

  'So gravely the dead are gone. Our father which art in heaven shall not be appeased. No pleasing him,' Hope comments, as she crouches, less like a highly strung deer but just as ready to spring into flight.

  'Last time I saw him, he was so old and weak. The picture of innocence. He had dribbles on his chin that Granny wiped away with her hankie.' Gig repeats a story many times told.

  And Hope continues raving, so both are speaking at the same time. Overlapping voices, concurrent silences. 'It is not good for me, this is not good for me. She took my passport from my head. I left it in my dresser. Snappy dresser, wasn't he? They love their polished boots and knife-blade pleats, the fascists do.'

  Gig begins tidying things. 'Calm down,' she says. 'It was only a tree falling. It wasn't your father attacking the aliens last night.'

  'Gig, Gig, listen to me,' Hope pleads. Then quotes: '"And to the woman were given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness, into her place, where she is nourished for a time, and times, and half a time, from the face of a serpent."' Hope grins, 'Had to learn the Bible after he did it. Off by heart. My fault. I must be cleansed by the word of the Lord.'

  'Let me guess.' Gig pauses in her slow housework. 'Your dad was a preaching hypocrite.' Gig fists her hands to her hips, akimbo, ready to discuss abusing men. 'Projecting his guilt onto you. Wasn't your fault, girl.'

  Hope goes off on a tangent. 'She is hiding things. I'm telling you the truth. Someone took my passport so that I cannot escape. I haven't forgotten I know. What is it I haven't forgotten?'

  Gig answers, 'You've forgotten to eat for days.' She studies Hope sharply, 'So it is you who has been stealing from other women's camps?'

  'No, not me,' says Hope. And quotes again, '"I saw it was a sea of glass mingled with fire…"'

  'Come on, own up? That's okay. We just like to know.' Gig explains, 'Like, if it's a matter of need, cool.'

  'No no no.'

  'Greed's another thing, see?' Gig cares about this distinction.

  'Fire is the element of the devil. I saw two women on horseback and a dog with four legs on three legs. They smiled at one another. At the blast. You don't believe me.' Hope sounds hopeless as she starts to go. She has on a vest which her tanned thin shoulders swim inside. She arrived from nowhere, was the report, with a one-person tent and several packets of dried food. Plump, enthusiastic, young and too keen.

  'You have to get it together and find your way ho
me,' Gig decides, shaking her head. The fawn-like gurl backs away from her, the rag around her waist Gig recognises as someone else's scarf.

  Hope steps forward menacingly. 'I have nowhere to go, but here. I have burnt my bridges. I came to a women's community, Amazons together in the wilderness, but what are you? A bunch of derelicts, with no spirituality at all. None.'

  Gig gets tough. 'You are not the first woman who has come here expecting us to solve all your problems. You come to Lesbianlands wanting love, wanting women—because we are not men—to be perfect, to be your priest, to be your psychiatrist, to be your mother. But here, actually, you have to hold your own, give and take. Sure, we're all mad, but we're not all psychotic. Apart from giving you a lift to town, I can't help you.'

  'You are rejecting me. "And them that had gotten the victory over the beast, and over his mark, and over his image, and over the number of his name, stand on the sea of glass."'

  Gig watches as she goes to her woodpile and picks up her double-headed axe to put it under cover. Hope disappears up the track. Although Gig does nothing but think about it, the exchange affects her. She studies the she-oak in front of her. It is intriguingly rough. She imagines she sees faces drawn in the shadows of its grainy ridges. With the clouds overhead moving fast, she stares for a long while at changing expressions in the bark. Out on the plain, cooees and dogs' barking indicate the proximity of her friends. Self-obsession is a sickness, a transmissible disease in these parts, she opines. She walks to the creek with two empty buckets.

  A white, late-model, long-wheelbase Toyota LandCruiser, white with toplights and primary red and blue decoration to broadcast the might of the law, cruised into my yard at seven-thirty a.m. As the copper parked, I kept stretching, taking my mind through the stiff areas as if it were a healing laser beam, warming my joints with inner heat. Focused, I stayed a moment in stillness at each sore spot while attention worked its cure. My body is my meal ticket. I would have to be a busy private eye, or a corrupt one, to make as much money at it as I do as a sponsored athlete. The few sportsmen who make a grotesque amount of money could fund a thousand dedicated scientists, I read recently. Quickly I touched my toes then responded to the knock on my front door.

  'My my, keen dees,' I joked. Plain clothes, CID. He was alone.

  The young detective did not look as ignorant as some. He shook my hand, said, 'Margot Gorman? Detective Constable Phillip Philippoussis.'

  'Coffee?' I offered.

  'Do you make Turkish?' he asked, wistfully.

  'As if I would!' I led the way to my kitchen table.

  My nose told me he and I were going to get along. Chemistry. I gave him a matey nickname. 'Do you play tennis, Pip?' I was trying to lighten up. 'Or do they call you Phil?' I showed him the fresh grounds and said, 'You make it how you like it.'

  'Squash. Soccer, of course.' He shrugged. 'Phil,' he yawned.

  He spooned heaps of coffee from the gold espresso packet I handed him into a mug from the sink and put a small amount of boiling water on it, resulting in a kind of mud that he thickened with sugar. We sat.

  'You look as if you've been up all night,' I said.

  'I have,' he affirmed. As I squeezed out my tea-bag and put it in the compost he talked. 'There was a fatality last night, on this road, as well as the death in the toilet block.'

  Nodding, I glanced north.

  Phil continued, 'I came over first ferry after logging in details throughout the small hours. I got a bit of shut-eye with my head on the desk.' He sipped at the sturdy rim of my Virgo mug as if it were a demi-tasse. 'Used to do it in the library all the time. Crowded house, my mother's terrace in Marrickville.'

  We might as well get to know each other, I thought. Let him take his time. 'Did you get into policing after a bit of tertiary study? Are you a serious guy, perhaps?' The DC smiled artlessly.

  Phil was polite and down to business after revealing some of his personal life. He must have checked on me while burning the midnight oil. He didn't say, but I could tell, there had to be a reason for the respect he showed me apart from the instant rapport. He noted my version of events in perfect shorthand. I was impressed. There may have been Greek letters in there, but no English except names. Pip was at ease in his body, at ease with me. I returned him the favour.

  'Did you interview the gurls?' I asked.

  He raised an eyebrow as if I were being politically incorrect, and queried, 'Women?'

  Detective Constable Philippoussis, new to the area, straight and bilingual, did not twig to the word, gurls, hinterland dykes, according to local mythology, bare-breasted, knife-toting sheilas, but it won't be long before it is in his vocabulary.

  'One of the new breed, are you, Phil? One would hope a stiff breeze is blowing through the NSW Police Force, rattling the windows and clearing out cobwebs, showing up corrupt coppers for what they really are. Maybe I am marked in the file as a potential whistle-blower?' Somehow he had put me on the back foot and I chatted nervously, still a bit shaken. Still premenstrual.

  'I don't mind,' he confided as he drank the rest of his coffee. Ate would be a better word.

  'Cleanskins might not be as universally disliked as in the old days.' This boy was a bright new penny, not guarded through fear of exposure; naturally arrogant.

  As thorough as I would have been, he asked a few things about my surroundings, what was it like to live here, anything strange, and so on. Although he was tired, although he was into his job, he had all the time in the world, displaying, to me, the inquisitive patience of the natural detective.

  'This broken-down cottage was quite expensive for what it is. So, plainly, the developers' plans to make a big bridge are seen by the market to be viable. For the moment, though, it is pretty wild. The dunes are saddened by bitou bush weed which native banksias try to struggle through.' I talked freely. 'There is a long stretch of National Park further north. Birds, frogs, even emu.'

  'The Pacific Ocean, with all those rips breaking at acute and changing angles to the beach, would be too dangerous for most swimmers,' he commented.

  Grinning, I said, 'I love it when the dolphins surf the waves.'

  We got up and I showed him round. My house has a skinny verandah at the front with a door in the middle and a punching bag down the end near a neat shelf for hand weights and ab-frame. The internal walls are the same as the outside ones, vertical timber: inch-thick tongue-and-groove mixed Australian hardwoods. To the left as you enter is the big lounge-room; on the right, my bedroom. The kitchen, bathroom and laundry are all doorless behind the big room, opposite which are two cubes of space. Cubbyholes, each has a tiny window facing north. I've cleaned out one. 'My temporary office,' I explained. The other is my storage room. 'The closed-in back verandah was crowded with bunks and junk. A pair of those long gum-boots with braces fishermen wear angling for tailor from the shoreline hung from a nail I couldn't reach for months and swung in the breeze from the louvre-windows like a suicide.' The bedroom has french doors opening onto the east. 'My friends helped me to put them in,' I boasted.

  We walked outside. Out the back is a large chook-house, silvered by age. 'Did the holiday-makers bring their chooks with them for the summer? Or did people live here full time in the Depression eating fish and eggs?' I asked his opinion.

  'Fresh eggs,' Philippoussis reckoned, as he inspected inside.

  'I am at present remodelling it,' I explained, following. The roosting area is like a hay-loft in a dairy in miniature with a higher pitched roof, like a squat tower.