Edges

The story came in the first instance from the radio room. There had been a shooting in the main street of Wollongong. None of us knew the main street of Wollongong even though it was the industrial city a hundred kilometes to the south. There was no reason to go there unless you had to. It sounded like there had been a massacre, someone gone crazy, half a dozen dead. Tragedy strikes our noble, working heart, that sort of thing, as innocent people go about their shopping. The quickest way was by helicopter. Sitting near the chief of staff can mean you get caught with every idea that crosses their bewildered minds, or suddenly you can get caught up in things that take your own life in sharp jags across time and space, enveloped in other people's tragedies.

I found myself disengaging from a cab at the airport, the massively expensive helicopter already waiting. Boys and their toys, it was a wonderful world. The tarmac, the plane in the background. Being guided by young men in uniform. Taking off. Last time I had been in a helicopter it had been with the Premier Bob Carr, heading west across the city at enormous speed to a property in the Blue Mountains; power, luxury, intrigue and importance, they were heady combinations for a man predisposed to arrogance. This time there was just the helicopter pilot for company, as we flew down hugging the coast line. I organised the taxi to pick us up; to get us to the scene of tragedy in the quickest possible time. I looked into the secret coves, the sharp cliffs, the massive spreads of vegetation arking down into the sea.

And when we got there. The mall was returning to normality. Only one man had been shot; it wasn't a massacre. The reporters that had also travelled down by road were completely excess to requirement. If it had happened in the western suburbs we wouldn't have paid any attention at all. But because the paper had thrown so many resources at it, the splashing headlines the next day of death in main street covered the front page. We stayed in hotels nearby. We followed every possible angle. There just wasn't that much to it. Someone went beserk, an argument, money and drugs, it was almost always that; and he thought of other times, when he had done the working girls at Port Kembla, with the steel works and Wollongong in the background; a completely forlorn place with the old girls as outraged for fear of the competition as the general public was over the media whipped story of the Labor MP who owned a brothel and had employed an under-age girl.

To here in Shellharbour, still further down the coast, where the money kept coming all the time; new restaurants, new developments, some with inbuilt by the sea side charm. He wished he had the money to invest. We gathered to mark the passing of another day, holy times.