The Body in the Bridge

The Body in the Bridge

Published by Hilliard Hudson helenmenzies.com.au

First published 2020

© 2020 Helen Menzies

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright restricted above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

ISBN 978-0-9953568-5-6 (eBook)

Designed and typeset by Helen Christie, Blue Wren Books 

Front cover illustration by RomanYa, shutterstock.com 

Printed and bound in Australia by DB Bookbinders

The Body in the Bridge is a work of fiction which incorporates many elements of fact. The reference works consulted to gather those facts are listed at the end of the book. If I have missed or misinterpreted anything, the fault of course is entirely mine.

Special thanks to the amazing Kate McClymont, Member of the Order of Australia, Member of the Australian Media Hall of Fame, who kindly agreed to play a role in this story. Multi award-winning investigative journalist, author of best selling books, and now a character in a novel …

Chapter 1

Where’s the robot? I ask Free Radical.

What robot? Free Radical says.

Chapter 2

Amanda stands behind the schoolyard gate, hands on child-bearing hips, clumps of kids clinging to the metal pickets of the boundary fence like refugees at a detention centre, except they’re happy.

She pops up the child-proof safety latch. The school building looms over the footpath, two storey, massive but cramped, forbidding like a Dickensian poorhouse, mean-sized liver-coloured bricks, tall skinny windows, barred along the ground floor.

My mother would have walked through the ancestor of that school gate; at least until she was 14 and had to leave school to earn enough money to keep the family alive—or most of it—during the Great Depression.

Birchgrove. The whole suburb slathered in bitumen, and under that, sandstone, then water, and deep under that the coal mine tunnels. Buildings high on cliff faces that are covered with nasturtiums in cascades of red and orange, the peppery smell joining the tang of seaweed and salted jute ropes from the waterfront far below.

Kids swirl around.

I say to Amanda: Did you see the news last week?

Joking right? All day I teach grade 5 boys then I go home to two teenagers. Why would I choose to add the world’s woes to that lot?

I laugh.

Oh, alright then, she says, I can see you’re busting to tell me. What news? Wait a moment. Jaysen, find your hat, no hat, no go, you know the rule. OK. What news?

On the bridge. A robot. They’re using a robot to look for rust.

Get away. A robot. That’s what I need. Plenty of rust in my gutters. A robot could have a field day up there. Line up please, two rows, playground side of the school gate.

I shove the newspaper clipping into Amanda’s shoulder bag.

Three Cheers for the Inchworm

Nature and technology have combined in Sydney to solve an 85 year old problem. Inspired by the humble inchworm, an intelligent robot is busy at work on the Harbour Bridge.

The robot imitates the way an inchworm moves by alternately humping and stretching its body, causing it to have a characteristic looping gait. Like an inchworm, the robot can climb walls, avoid obstacles, navigate down drop-offs, and pivot through small spaces. This means it can go where humans cannot reach, or where the danger would be too great. For example, along the 7.2 kilometres of hollow girders on the arch of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

The robot, known as CROC (Climbing Robot Caterpillar) is an award-winning design developed by Roads and Maritime Services and the University of Technology Sydney.

CROC is fully autonomous. It plans its own path inside the narrow tunnels in the arches of the Bridge, using maps generated from its own 3D sensor. It has a high definition camera which sends back images to engineers as it climbs up and across walls, down 1.5 metre drops, and through small passages.

In the future CROC will be developed to vaporise rust using laser beams, and re-paint the section at the same time. The paintwork in many of the girders dates back to 1932. It has been too difficult and too dangerous to send workers through 30cm hatched access holes that are set every six metres along the span of the Bridge.

The risk of asphyxiation from toxic air is high in the confined space, and a trapped worker would be very difficult to rescue—the 30cm openings are too small to make it possible to send in a stretcher.

Miss-miss, miss-miss-miss …

Yes Paul.

I’m Peter, he says.

Where’s Paul? Full alert. The Newson twins. Amanda and I both swing round, eyes narrowed. Even I, volunteer for the day, have already heard of the Newson twins.

At the bubblers miss, helping Jaysen with his hat.

We both think, yeah right. Paul and Jaysen scamper to the back of the crocodile. Jaysen’s hat is dripping. Amanda lasers Paul with The Look. The Look. Learnt by all of us in first year Teachers’ College.

In my day, I say to Amanda, I’d have thrown a blackboard duster and caught him, dead-eye, right on the forehead. In my day the blackboard duster was considered a teachers’ aide.

Yeah, the good old days, Amanda laughs. Try it now and you’d end up on the front page of the paper, alongside the story about that robot.

The grade 5C crocodile, kids two-abreast in a raggedy line, passes the Colgate Palmolive building, divided now into million dollar chi-chi apartments. My mother worked there when it was a soap factory. By the time she was 21 she was managing a team of 12. Then she got married. End of career.

Left into Cove Street. Pocked bluestone kerbstones. Creamy frangipani blossoms, sharp and cool, nodding on trees and gracing the bitumen of the footpath.

Ahead of us, the Harbour, and Cockatoo Island, where my father, Australia’s youngest Merchant Navy Captain, brought his ship to drydock during the War after it was pierced through one side of the hull by a Japanese torpedo, which didn’t explode.

Right into Louisa Road.

The crocodile wends its way around the BMWs, Mercs and Porsches that are edged wheels-up on the footpath. In my day, OK, the not-so-good old days, Birchgrove was a rental suburb for workers at the shipyards, the gasworks, the chemical works or the coal mine. My Uncle Tom had all four fingers of one hand chopped off in a machine at the chemical works. End of career. In those days there were no cars in Louisa Road. A car was a dream, out of reach.

At the end of Louisa Road, Long Nose Point and the wharf for the ferry to Circular Quay. Yurulbin Park I read on a sign.

Yurulbin Park? What happened to Long Nose Point? I ask Amanda.

Been called Yurulbin for yonks now.

It’s a point of land and it’s shaped like a long nose. What’s the problem? What’s Yurulbin mean anyway?

Amanda laughs. Probably means a place to sit down by clear water. We used to say that’s what all those Aboriginal place names mean.

I say to her: Remember when Spike Milligan visited his Mum in Woy Woy and he found out that Woy Woy meant Clear Water? He wondered which Woy meant Clear and which Woy meant Water?

We snigger, naughty as the Newsons.

But I give an exasperated sigh. Uncle Jack and I used to fish from the Long Nose Point jetty. Flathead and leatherjackets, using handlines with pippis as bait. Pippis collected from nearby Snails Bay, where my cousin Janice could levitate the swings until she went right over the top and down the other side, the full 360 degrees. The swings are long gone, the grass is manicured, and even the rocks look buffed.

A green and yellow ferry, named the Dawn Fraser, bumps the wooden Yurulbin landing stage. The grade 5 Sydney Harbour Bridge excursion troupe files along the wooden jetty, down the steps, through the gingerbread waiting shed, and onto the ferry, named to honour the three-times Olympic champion, World Athlete of the Year, sometime publican of the nearby Riverview Hotel, sometime Member of the NSW Parliament. Birchgrove’s most famous daughter. Everyone’s favourite larrikin.

Amanda and I stand guard at the ferry’s open door. I watch her do a roll call in her head, then relax. No-one left behind, no-one overboard. Amanda is slightly rotund and young-looking, in the way of slightly rotund women. Still find it hard to believe she has teenage kids, though what would I know.

The deckhand flicks the rope off the wharf bollard and does a reverse figure of eight onto the deck cleat. Amanda’s flyaway hair tangles in the sudden breeze as we skip away from the wharf. Drat, she says. Her eyes spark behind rimless glasses. Despite what the Newson twins think, she’s about as tough as a crème brulee.

I remember the staff meeting where Amanda and I first caught each other’s expression. The Men’s Deputy Head, a sandy man with lips so dry that a stick of chalk would glue there like a