Vanishing Point

To the late Martin Heemskirk whose inspiration and imagination persuaded me to put my ideas into writing. I also thank my wife, Rosemary, for her great patience and Amy, my editor, for her many suggestions to improve the story.

Barry Raymond von Wildemann took another swig of his beer. He perched on the edge of the bar stool at Fitzroy Crossing Hotel staring at the counter on which lay a small piece of newsprint. He looked at the fragment, torn from a page of the Courier Mail he’d picked up before hitching a lift with a friendly truckie at Tennant Creek. He smiled to himself as he pondered whether or not to keep it. Probably not. There was a small chance that it could fall into the wrong hands. Better that it disappear like Barry himself. He wanted new associates to know him only as Karl, Karl Brudos. It was a name stolen from a driller he had met once and he had used previously. It was clean, so it would do very nicely, especially since the real Karl was dead. He looked again at the headline, ‘Court bungle as evil rapist escapes’. He smiled to himself. Thank goodness for bungles and the stupidity of the court system. It was not the first time he had been involved with the Queensland legal system. After forcing his way into a woman’s home and viciously assaulting her, he had been caught and found guilty of aggravated rape.

Thinking back he scowled. It was a joke, a sick joke and that bloody bitch had lied. Yes, he had assaulted her but there certainly was no rape. Not that he hadn’t tried. Just that the excitement of having her at his mercy was too much and he came in his pants. In embarrassment he took it out on her. She lied, the bitch lied and said he’d raped her and his shame prevented him admitting his failures in open court. That meant two years in gaol. Two tough years. Now, as 1962 drew to a close, he had no desire to return to Boggo Road. Mind you, it could have been worse. Much of the charge had been thrown out because his clever lawyer had argued entry through an open window did not constitute ‘break and enter.’ Clever bastard he was, some law back in eighteen hundred and something. The court decided a crowbar was not an ‘offensive weapon’ so in the end it was just assault. And rape. Only it wasn’t that. Never should’ve gone anywhere near the prison but for the rape charge.

Within three months of his release he breached the conditions of his parole and, armed with a knife, he bound and gagged a young married woman who was at home with two babies. And raped her. No mistakes this time. Served the time, may as well do the crime. According to the newspaper article, the sentencing judge said, ‘… you have exuded a sense of latent and only barely concealed violence that does not bode well for your future, nor that of the community when released.’

In spite of his offences, the judge’s comments and his refusal to attend a sex offenders program while in prison the court saw fit to release him pending an appeal. Released under an extended supervision order Barry fled the city and the state. Despite widespread newspaper and radio notices he managed to travel west to Roma and traversed the Queensland outback without being recognised. Hitched rides with truckies through the Northern Territory brought him unnoticed to and across the border into Western Australia.

Reluctantly he scrunched up the newspaper cutting and threw it into the nearby bin overflowing with cigarette butts, bottles and trash. ‘Time to start over and find a place to disappear. Where I can be anyone I like. From now on I’ll be Karl and Karl will be me.’

* * *

Barry grew up in country Queensland, the youngest of ten children. His home of five rooms made of corrugated iron had a floor of crushed termite mounds. Well acquainted with poverty he saw how his mother led her hard life, cooking on an old wood stove and washing for the family in a large copper out of doors with the help only of his older sisters. Water supply depended on the rain and, while his mother had been a caring woman, the tough life and many children took their toll. She died before he was six. His father, rarely home, was a bullying alcoholic who both beat and abused his children, especially when money was tight and that was much of the time. At twelve Barry ran away and started earning a living by sewing jute bags and filling them with charcoal. It was used during the war in gas-driven vehicles when petrol was rationed.

Later he worked as a fencer on cattle properties near Cloncurry in far north Queensland. A large number of dingoes and wild dogs, offspring of feral domestic farm dogs and dingoes, plagued one of the properties where he was involved in fencing. The owner asked if he could set traps and shoot the dogs killing his cattle. It was the start of his existence as a dogger. Now, in his mid thirties, it seemed it was the only life he had ever known. It was a lonely life, far from the social activities of town and city, but at the time he was happy enough with his own company; he found relating to people in general very difficult and with women he remained particularly awkward.

Once or twice when he’d been in town he’d tried to be friendly towards a couple of the women in the hotel lounge. He’d stood at the adjoining bar, from which women were banned, and watched through the glass doors as other men approached them. To him they were pretty, although most knew them as the local prostitutes. With heavy make-up, scarlet lips and enough baubles to make a Christmas tree jealous they laughed coarsely with the men before linking arms and walking out together. Summoning up as much courage as he could Barry cautiously approached the women on different occasions and, on each, had been so briskly and embarrassingly rebuffe

d that he developed a real angry antagonism towards all women. He never forgot the laughter of the men at the bar when the story was circulated within his earshot.

After that he took to drinking alone in a park, resenting both his loneliness and his lack of success with women. Whisky eased the pain. He started smoking marijuana, readily available even though illegal. It was after an evening of whisky and drug induced self-loathing that he had passed the house with crates near the garage. A crowbar together with the open window seemed to be an opportunity. Inside a woman was on her own, unpacking paper-wrapped crockery. She’d started it all and once more he found himself in serious trouble with the law.

* * *

Barry von Wildemann had walked into the Fitzroy Crossing Hotel bar and now Karl Brudos walked out. He picked up his bag containing his few possessions and headed off to the truck stop, certain he would soon be travelling south where he could resume his career as fencer, dogger, jackaroo or whatever was needed of him. He just had to remain anonymous.

Alec and Katherine’s second-hand VW Kombi bounced along the dog fence track heading west. Its current indeterminate colour hid the tan brown colour and reflected an uneven coating of fine dust from the reddish sands that spread along the track and out to the horizon. As the sun sank lower into the sky, Alec found it increasingly difficult to squint through the dirty windshield. The corrugated track, two uneven paths made by the wheels of traffic and separated by a small sand ridge, did not make driving any easier.

The swirling plume of fine, reddish dust, thick behind their old Kombi extruded as a dense, billowing cloud behind the moving vehicle. It rapidly thinned and spread out across the landscape changing the vivid blue sky into a dusty haze. Dust hung in the still air like a fine mist then gently wafted far over the scattered scrub before finally settling, blanketing the harsh landscape. Bushes with ochre stems and leaves near the track were densely coated with desert dust. The Kombi bumped its way along the track that ran parallel to the dog fence. The fence, designed to keep wild dogs and dingoes to the north and away from the sheep that lived on most of Eyre Peninsula to the south, stretched through hundreds of kilometres of the Australian outback. The small, central ridge helping define the track occasionally scraped the bottom of the vehicle. Resistant shrubs and grasses, and even a few small grevillea bushes, brushed against this mechanical intrusion into their world.

Inside the vehicle, partly cocooned from the dust of the road and oblivious of the way in which the vehicle noisily disrupted nature’s harmony, baby Carolyn slept soundly. Under a soft pink rabbit blanket she was no longer ‘new’ at four months. A carefully planned safety harness held her bassinette securely in place. Alec designed it himself so that it held firm in spite of the bumpy road. No father could be more proud of both wife and child.

Alec’s appearance would not make him stand out in a crowd. He well suited the statistician’s view of the average Australian male standing five seven in stockinged feet, with broad shoulders and a well-proportioned body. His sandy brown hair lived its own life in spite of a morning training session with a brush and comb, a slight natural curl made it always look as if blown about in a gale. His unexceptional looks did not make an immediate impact on those he met, but striking deep blue eyes caused comment from everyone who met him for the first time. When emotionally aroused they flashed with a fire of their own.

Alec and Katherine were involved in one of their interminable arguments, or discussions, as he preferred to call them.

It all started because Alec had failed to get a better-paid position at the university. Alec’s parents had little money since his father was a parish priest more interested in matters moral than pecuniary. However, Alec’s strong motivation had driven him through university, largely by way of part-time jobs ranging from a salesman at John Martin’s department store to driving an excavator for the Department of Main Roads. At Adelaide University he achieved an average grade Honours degree but it was enough to allow him to enrol to do research towards his doctorate. Alec always maintained brilliance was not necessary to be successful at university; it was more important to want to achieve.

A post-graduate research grant had been arranged through the efforts of Dr Jones, his supervisor, making this the first time that funding was not a major problem. Dr Jones had identified a kindred spirit in the hard-working young student who somehow got near, but always failed to achieve, the top marks. He recognised that such students commonly matured after the set examinations and blossomed into very capable research workers. Independent thought and dedication were as important as memorising facts. What’s more, he needed more work done on his own pet projects so that his list of publications could grow. A post-graduate student could do the hackwork, he could take most of the credit. By increasing his list of publications he would become more eligible for the ever-decreasing source of research funds for pure sciences, those with no direct link to immediate, perceived economic benefit or social change.

In Alec Thompson, Dr Jones recognised a hard worker, a motivated student and someone who, in time, could ‘go places’ in academia. After all, Alec was only twenty-four, much younger than most of the other doctoral students at the Mawson Laboratories. Named for the University’s most famous Professor of Geology, Sir Douglas Mawson, Antarctic explorer and survivor, the building was a three-storey brick oblong, more functional than attractive. It had been a second home to Alec ever since he started as an undergraduate student. Already two papers had emerged from his and Dr Jones’ work, and this in spite of the fact that Alec, soon after starting his research, had unexpectedly married the girl in the zoology department across the road. Who would have thought that he, of all people, would have had to get married and so jeopardise his possible career? In addition to marriage, fatherhood and research, young Alec accepted a position as Tutor in the department, to supplement his meagre research grant. He had applied for the more lucrative position of Senior Tutor, but it was awarded to the only female Tutor.

‘She didn’t even have any publications, compared with my two papers,’ Alec was telling Katherine, a grumble not heard for the first time.

‘Nearly everyone agreed she benefited from Prof’s own affirmative action policy.’ He was referring to Professor Morna Nash, the Head of Department, a rare appointment in senior academia, especially geology. What Katherine recognised and her husband seemed to fail to see was that Nash was prescient in understanding that it was only a matter of time before the introduction of legal or other requirements to fast-track women into more senior positions. Already President Johnson in the USA had introduced such legislation. Since it was a policy with which Alec disagreed, Katherine found herself as the protagonist in this particular discussion.

‘It’s a crazy policy,’ Alec intoned. ‘If it’s implemented then in the end it becomes self-defeating. After a while one has to ask if a person is appointed because they are the best person for the job, or if it’s just because they are female.’

Although not yet implemented elsewhere in the University, Prof. Nash’s proposal was that minority groups, women in particular, should be given priority in more senior appointments. Alec had long been opposed to the principle of affirmative action, an opposition making him unpopular with his peers in the University Staff Association. It was not wise to be vocally opposed to the new politically correct philosophies now starting to permeate some of the university departments. He felt that it was not just a case of sour grapes because he had missed out on the senior tutorship. This was the crux of their current argument.

Alec’s high cheek bones had a flush of pink about them, features that Katherine had long ago recognised as a characteristic of high emotion and passion, usually anger. The discussion was really a monologue as Alec expressed his views; he was not one to do much listening.

A brief pause suggested that Katherine make a response.

‘But if they don’t make a start on appointing some women into more senior positions then when is the cycle going to be broken??

?

Alec snorted but did not respond so Katherine continued. ‘I mean, look at Mary. She’s spent her entire life as a Senior Tutor way below her capabilities, at a lower salary than men and continually passed over for promotion. It really isn’t fair.’ She paused, expecting a response. Since Alec simply sniffed, she continued. ‘They used to say it was because a woman may get married, have children and leave the job. All that training for nothing. But Mary’s a confirmed spinster married to the job. It really wasn’t fair. She was exploited just because she was a woman —’

‘Fair? What’s fair?’ Alec’s interruption was almost vehement. ‘Life isn’t fair and never will be. Let’s face it, nothing is fair. The sooner we all accept that the happier we’ll all be.’

Katherine opened her mouth to respond. ‘But —’

Alec spoke over her as he continued his diatribe. ‘It can never be totally fair. Gender differences, intelligence variability, physical differences to start with. Everything depends on something else. Historically and socially lots wasn’t fair by today’s standards. Like discrimination against women. We can’t apply the same sort of unfairness now to another group, in this case blokes, just to even up the score. I mean, does anyone suggest we enslave the Arabs and Europeans to make up for the African slave trade?’

‘Oh, Alec! You’re going to extremes again. All they’re trying to do is a bit of catch up. If women don’t get into these more senior roles they won’t get the experience to be able to compete on an equal basis with men.’