Fishing for Stars (69 page)

‘Exercises,’ she gasped. ‘Oh God, that’s so good!’

‘Exercise? What, bushwalking?’ I said, laughing.

‘No,’ she gasped. ‘Exercises with an “s”. Harder, Nick, oh yes, yes, that’s lovely.’

‘What, pussy exercises?’ I laughed again. Marg was obviously enjoying herself, thrusting and gripping me tightly, using her pelvic muscles skilfully. Thankfully I felt I still had a fair safety margin before I exploded. The great advantage of the subtle non-penetrative loving I’d been receiving for so long was that control for long periods was what heightened the ultimate experience and I had been expertly tutored.

‘Oh, a dildo!’ she gasped. ‘Oh! Oh! I’m going to come. Now! Now! Hard! Nick, Nick! Bastard! Hard!’ she screamed.

‘Dildo, eh!’ I roared. ‘Here, take this then, bitch!’ I shouted in mock arrogance, then joyfully got my back stuck into pleasing her.

After this we made love several times, easily and happily exploring, getting to know each other, her wonderful breasts, the sudden delicious curve of her hips, her thrust and grip, the tenderness of her mouth and lips, the soft folds of her labia, her arms and legs folded about my body, the laughter and joy of the way of a man with a maid, of a girl and a boy (good love always seems young). Making love with Marg was, as it had previously been, a sharing between two people with a single purpose, each to please the other, but at the same time with the self-serving reward of maximum personal pleasure. This time, though, I’m happy to say, I needed a great deal less specific instruction.

Afterwards as we lay back in each other’s arms, a soft kiss of air from the ceiling fan cooling our naked bodies, moonlight streaming through the French windows, a whiff of frangipani blossom carried on the hot tropical night, I couldn’t resist the question contained in the word. ‘Dildo?’ I said.

Marg disentangled herself and, leaning on her elbow, kissed me on the nose. ‘A girl has to do what a girl has to do.’ I was silent, not quite knowing how to react to so open and honest a response. ‘Why? You don’t approve?’ she asked.

‘No, no,’ I hastily assured her. ‘I most certainly do! The results of the exercises with an “s” are truly remarkable and I’m a very grateful recipient.’

‘Oh, it wasn’t all pleasuring,’ Marg said.

‘There is a downside to a dildo?’ I asked. ‘Isn’t the standard joke that using one a woman meets a better class of lover?’

Marg smiled, the joke obviously not new, and then replied equally flippantly, ‘Nick, the only downside to a dildo is that it doesn’t put out the garbage.’

The old forthright Marg Hamilton was, I decided, much better than Mrs Rich, the admiral’s wife. ‘I can’t say that does a whole lot for my ego,’ I laughed.

‘It’s all about the transition from sausage-roll queen back to Marg Hamilton. Rob and I had an indifferent sex life after the kids came, you know, the obligatory birthday and Christmas bonk, the full ho-hum. He had his career, I had his career, and also the kids, school, sport, a man who needed constant reassurance and direction. Bed was a debate, not a delight. In short, ours was what so many marriages seem inevitably to become.’

‘Marg, whenever we met, you always seemed so upbeat, a successful woman and wife, with lovely children, well in control of your destiny, the future . . . it was almost scary.’

‘Now that I think back on it, it was scary, though in part I was to blame.’

‘Oh?’ I said, surprised. ‘I wouldn’t have thought so.’

‘Nick, child-bearing makes a mess of the parts that count with a man. We go from tight to sloppy, breasts sag after breastfeeding, tummies don’t tuck back quite as tightly and we tell ourselves – that is, if we think about it at all – well, that’s life, having kids, the physiology of marriage, the body beautiful sacrificed for a higher cause. I did, and so Rob, who wasn’t the rampant stallion type to begin with, gradually lost interest in me.’

‘And so you found another way?’ If this wasn’t exactly a romantic post-coital conversation, it was pleasant to be reacquainted with the original ‘tell it how it is’ Marg.

‘Of course not!’ Marg protested. ‘I simply felt unwanted, unloved, taken for granted, resentful, the admiral’s factotum, the whole sad-sack story.’ She paused. ‘But then Rob had the accident and the kids were flying the coop and I was suddenly on my own, in a sense my own responsibility.’

‘Yeah, the sausage-roll queen,’ I said sympathetically.

‘Yes, well, you know all that and the denouement, the return to Marg Hamilton. Part of the way back was to resume control of my body.’ Marg paused, leaned forward and kissed me on the forehead. ‘I couldn’t bear to think that it was all over for me, that I’d had all there was and the rest was simply growing plump and what women laughingly refer to as “comfortable”, when carrying any extra weight is patently anything but. So I started to lose weight and to tone the pubococcygeus muscle, or the PC muscle, with vaginal-tightening exercises.’

‘I don’t suppose I should ask, but is that done with a . . . you-know-what?’

‘You probably don’t want to know, Nick, but seeing you’ve asked, it’s done by tightening and pulling on the band of muscle that stretches from the coccyx to the pubic bone, as if you are trying to resist the urge to pee or fart.’

We both started to giggle. ‘Useful if you’re caught short in the middle of a good movie?’ I managed.

‘Don’t joke. One of the benefits is that it reduces the risk of urinary incontinence, not uncommon in women my age,’ Marg replied.

‘It suddenly occurs to me that this conversation isn’t all that romantic,’ I said, ‘but it’s stuff men don’t know anything about and it’s bloody interesting. But if I may be persistent, we still haven’t come to the . . . er . . . offending item.’

‘Ah, the dildo,’ Marg proclaimed. ‘Well, I have a very sensible gynaecologist, who fortunately for me is a woman of my age and a very practical one. One of the PC-tightening exercises she recommended involves a Kegelmaster – not dissimilar to a dumbbell – you use it by tightening against it as it tries to . . . well, fall out. My gyno simply said, “Marg, a dildo is just as effective and a lot more fun; I personally recommend it.”’ Marg giggled wickedly. ‘One should always take one’s doctor’s advice, don’t you think, darling?’

‘Nice,’ I said, genuinely pleased that she’d confided in me.

Marg jumped on top of me and said, ‘Darling, shall we benefit just once more from the results of the modified Kegelmaster?’

‘Oh, okay, if you insist,’ I laughed, ‘but you have to promise to be gentle.’

I guess, as they say in the vernacular, I was double dipping. (Oops! Under the circumstances quite the wrong expression.) Anyway, having a bet each way. But the two glorious women in my life approached the act of making love so entirely differently that it was as if I was taking pleasure in two essentially different experiences: the exquisite subtlety and knowledge of the male erogenous zones that Anna possessed, and the joyous exuberance of Marg’s approach to lovemaking. In return, I think I learned to satisfy the desire of each in a completely different manner.

Marg won her seat in the May 1982 state election on a count back, ten votes separating her from her Liberal rival, while Bob Brown in the neighbouring seat of Denison missed out almost as closely. This was almost certainly due to the perfidious campaign Robin Gray’s Liberals ran against him where they letterboxed every house in Denison with a copy of an article that had appeared in the
Launceston Examiner
many years previously with the headline
‘Doctor admits he’s gay!’
, making sure that everyone in the electorate knew Bob Brown was homosexual.

It is not unusual for the Libs and Labor to give a new member from either side some time to settle in, but the first member of the new Greens party enjoyed no such luxury; both traditional opponents lined up to be the first to chew her up and spit her out.

The very idea that sufficient Tasmanians existed to elect a member of a new political party that stood for trees and rivers was totally abhorrent to the old guard, particularly in the year when the infrastructure was just about in place to build the first dams to flood a large part of the state.

These dams would effectively submerge over a third of Tasmania’s south-west wilderness. On any map in any nation it was a sizeable area to change forever, to simply swallow in one great greedy gulp. Planning had been furiously underway since October 1979 when the multi-million-dollar scheme to build a 296-megawatt hydroelectricity project was announced.

However, in this period the Wilderness Society hadn’t been idle either. Active membership had grown from the sixteen original members to two thousand nationally and the movement to save the Franklin and Gordon rivers was now on a much firmer base.
If it had not yet attained a powerful head of steam, it had at least given off several good puffs, noticeable on an expanding national horizon.

At the Federal Labor Conference in July, the New South Wales premier Neville Wran, a powerful figure in the Australian Labor Party, together with his wife Jill, came out strongly against the building of the dams and, mainly due to their efforts, Federal Labor adopted as policy the no-dams case.

This certainly counted as a significant win for the movement, but as Labor was still in opposition, as far as Robin Gray, now Liberal premier, was concerned, it was a toothless tiger and he simply thumbed his nose at Federal Labor.

Marg was a single flea on the hide of the Hydro monster and with both sides so closely aligned to the Electric Kremlin, as the Hydro-Electric Commission had been dubbed by some wag in the Wilderness Society, she simply became an object of derision, the daily joke in the House.

Marg would often call me at the end of a difficult day and burst into tears, but I don’t think she ever for one moment lost her resolve. The battle-hardened Wilderness Society was not easily thwarted and in a series of mass rallies they collected forty thousand signatures on a ‘Save the Rivers’ petition, presented it to state parliament and quite noticeably tweaked political noses.

This must have had some real effect, because Russell Ashton, the head of the Hydro-Electric Commission, showing the typical autocratic arrogance of the Electric Kremlin, declared, ‘If the parliament tries to work through popular decisions we are doomed in this state and doomed elsewhere.’ So much for democracy at work and, of course, the premier Robin Gray decided to heed this self-serving advice.

This time Marg couldn’t take it on the chin. Forty thousand Tasmanians simply couldn’t be dismissed or ignored as ratbags, she maintained in a speech to the House that was accompanied by the jeers of both Liberal and Labor. I recall how on one of her now daily phone calls she could barely contain her anger. ‘Nick, it’s not the derision of the politicians – I’m one of them now and I suppose I have to accept what’s coming to me – it’s the bloody-minded arrogance of the Hydro. They really think they’re omnipotent and can do as they wish.’

‘Well, my dear, it seems as though they can,’ I replied.

‘It isn’t even an issue that will be decided at an election,’ Marg fumed. ‘The opposition has the same point of view and that’s why they got rid of Doug Lowe. The Franklin–Gordon doesn’t even get debated! We spent the entire session today discussing the price of potatoes!’

But Marg wasn’t completely right. Doug Lowe, before he’d been deposed as the Labor premier, had proposed to Fraser’s federal government that the south-west wilderness area, incorporating the Gordon and Franklin rivers, be submitted for World Heritage listing. Fraser agreed. With an election looming, he was keen to neutralise conservation as an issue, now that Federal Labor had taken up the no-dams issue.

At the time the World Heritage gesture was seen as futile in the face of the absolute determination by both sides of state politics to proceed with the damming of the rivers, but it would later come to be regarded as the one critical action that saved the wilderness. It also showed that men of conscience and independent thought such as Doug Lowe can still occasionally be found in politics, even if their chances of success are minimal.

Marg, echoing the Wilderness Society, seemed to think the heritage listing wasn’t going to make a huge difference. ‘It’s just politics,’ she asserted. ‘Local Labor won’t take any notice but at least it put us on the international agenda and gave me a rare moment of satisfaction in parliament.’

‘So what does that tell you?’ I asked.

‘That we’ve got to go outside Tasmania? Even outside Australia? Yes, we know that. It’s not about the local pollies and the Hydro – they’re never going to change. All our efforts must be directed at Canberra and overseas. Australia must be made to look foolish and backward in the eyes of the outside world.’ She paused. ‘But our rejection of Doug Lowe’s original compromise to save some of the wilderness isn’t helping at the moment. The mainlanders don’t understand that it’s a complete ecosystem and can’t simply be halved. They, the media, think Lowe’s compromise was a reasonable suggestion and we should have accepted it while it was available. Now it no longer is. But we’re fighting back. Yehudi Menuhin helped by launching a booklet that set out the whole issue and it seems to have been a great success. He knows everyone who is anyone, not just in Australia, and we’re hoping that will have some effect.’

I didn’t comment that there was something very funny about one of the world’s greatest violinists in a sense fiddling while Rome burned. I simply couldn’t see a truck driver from Strahan, the town chosen as the launching point for the Franklin River project where unemployment was three times the national average, getting too excited by the violinist’s contribution or the booklet. These glossy brochures always seem to bolster the spirits of the converted and arouse the suspicions of the doubters. (Where did the money come from to print that?) It’s a curious paradox that in Australia protesters have to be seen to be battling without resources to be considered legitimate. Nearly two hundred years of battler versus squatter seem to have conditioned us so that a well-organised and properly financed protest is generally regarded with considerable suspicion. Printed placards don’t work; it’s always crayons on cardboard and silly chants against seemingly well-organised arrogance and indifference – rags versus riches.