The Comfort of Figs Read online

  The Canadian steel engineer, Arnott Le Roy Lawrence, sits at his desk in the site office at Kangaroo Point, in the upper floor of the northern wing of what had been the Immigration Depot before it was appropriated by the engineers and their bridge. He has been at his desk since before dawn, since before the temperatures were taken out on the bridge above, and run in here to his office for him to consider, to weigh, and to make judgment.

  Light enters the room through the large dormer window which was added after they moved in, when the bridge had begun to grow and to dwarf the building and to starve them of sunlight. In front of him, on the desk, are cards. Everything cleared but these playing cards, suffused with soft light. Face up in front of him are jacks and queens and kings in their finery. As the engineer moves the cards they dance as at a royal pageant, pirouetting, spinning backwards, somersaulting, exchanging places. And there are the number cards, two to ten, doing the work they promise, no more, no less. Finally the ace, the changeling. She is both one, in all of her completeness, and then suddenly, as on a whim, eleven. There is something unknowable about the nature of the ace. Ragged musings enter, then leave Lawrence’s mind. He has barely slept.

  The temperatures taken, the engineer has begun to play cards. Playing for a solution, playing for certainty, playing for reassurance. He does this – turns cards in the hope a solution to whatever mathematical conundrum is occupying his mind will fall into place. He can play solitaire for hours. Sometimes the pattern of the game unfolds. On those occasions, rare, it is beauty itself that is revealed, and whatever calculus has been eluding him will fall out and the engineer will reach for a piece of paper and record the answer delivered by the game.

  Earlier, years ago now, at the start of his journey, the engineer had written, in what seems another man’s hand:

  Under suitable weather conditions the suspended span is swung into

  place, and the bridge is closed. During closure operations, allowances are

  made for the possible variations due to temperature and wind and also

  for the actual movements required to match the upper and lower chord

  connections and to swing the suspended span free of the wedges. These

  movements are functions of the elastic properties of the main trusses

  and their values are derived from the deflections of the points concerned

  before and after closure.

  As if it is all merely science, merely mathematics. As if there is no luck. As if there is no terror.

  The city was obsessed with taming the river, with building bridges. The bridge-lust was in her. It was rampant. Brisbane was not alone, but Lawrence could see she had it bad. He perceived this as soon as he arrived, puts it together, the pieces of the story he has entered, ignorant of so much.

  The briefing he’d got before he set sail was different, all facts, dry but for the promise of the new. And yet all the facts were there for the reading, in the history he was given:

  In 1925 the newly established Greater Brisbane Council appointed

  the Cross River Commission. It recommended a bridge at Kangaroo

  Point, but the proposal stalled. Other bridges satisfied the city’s need

  for crossings. The Grey Street Bridge was opened on 30 March 1932,

  the bridge between Brisbane and Redcliffe on 4 October 1935, the

  Indooroopilly bridge on 14 February 1936.

  But this one, the big dream bridge, ‘the Kangaroo Point bridge’, had lingered.

  Enter the dreamer, persistent beyond all reasonable boundaries, the man Lawrence would stand before, beside – ultimately behind – John Job Crew Bradfield. The man Lawrence needs to know, the man Lawrence studied as they dined together at the Criterion Hotel in the first evenings, the man he still asks people about, collecting biographical detail like his hometown squirrels hoard nuts. The man whose bold history Lawrence has pieced together.

  Dr J.J.C. Bradfield is a Brisbane-boy made good. Born in bayside Sandgate, he moved with his family to Ipswich as the thirteenth son of a brickmaker, won a scholarship to Sydney University, studied engineering and joined the New South Wales Department of Public Works.

  But he is no ordinary engineer. Bradfield radiates intent.

  Not only was he Chief Engineer of construction for the Sydney Harbour Bridge during the long years of 1923 to 1932, but the design plans carried his name. ‘Ad gloriam Bradfieldii’ a member of Parliament exalted him from the floor of the New South Wales lower house, as it passed the Harbour Bridge Act on

  16 November 1922. Bradfield knows the need to influence politicians and, as far as Lawrence can make out, he is their darling.

  So, on 1 December 1931, with the Sydney bridge joined and the first train only a few weeks from making its inaugural harbour crossing, Bradfield had written to Arthur Moore, the conservative Queensland Premier, proposing a bridge across the Brisbane River: There is no difficulty in designing a bridge, aesthetic and satisfying all interests. He’d repeated it to whomever would listen, a mantra of certainty, there is no difficulty.

  But an election had intervened and it was 1933 before the new Labor premier, William Forgan-Smith, established his Bridge Board to devise a way across the river at Kangaroo Point. A Board of three: Kemp, the Main Roads Commissioner;

  Brigden, the Director of the Bureau of Industry; and Story, the Public Service Commissioner. These chosen three had appointed Bradfield as their consulting engineer. As if there was anyone else.

  Bradfield had set to work in January 1934, and by May he’d recommended a cantilever truss bridge for the site. Has to be a cantilever, Bradfield said, on account of the stratification of the schist, its vertical cracks. The pull or the thrust either from the anchorages of a suspension bridge, or from the skewbacks of an arch, could cause the rock mass to move. It has to be cantilevered. So the Bradfield designs were provided to the Board. Forgan-Smith had insisted on tendering for the bridgebuilders, but the process achieved the desired outcome anyway.

  There were only two tenders, both Australian. The Brisbane tender, a joint proposal from the steel fabrication company Evans Deakin & Co and the roadway construction firm of M.R. Hornibrook, was successful. Brisbane was a fiercely parochial town even then when the tender was approved on 29 April 1935.

  The clod-turning ceremony took place on 24 May 1935, when Lawrence was newly arrived. It was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the reign of the English king, George V, Lawrence’s head of state as much as Bradfield’s, and so the bridge acquired its working name: The Jubilee Bridge.

  A shovel broke the earth. Lawrence watched Bradfield step forward from beneath the shade of a fig tree, a small bespectacled man with neat three-piece suit, moustache, bulging forehead and ambitions yet unfilled:

  ‘The cantilever bridge with its bold towers and curved outline, sturdy shoulders, with graceful curves, will harmonise with the picturesque and rugged beauty of the Brisbane skyline.’

  These are the notes from Lawrence’s work-book of years before, an engineer’s doodles:

  Cantilever. Cant – a corner, an angle, a corner piece, a triangular piece. Lever – a bar resting on a pivot used to raise or dislodge a heavy fixed object. A cantilever bridge to span a wide, well-trafficked,

  flood-prone river. There can be no mid-river piers, nothing to interrupt

  the flow of water. Two giant, triangular cantilever arms each projecting

  out across the river from main piers on either bank of the river. The

  cantilever arms themselves linked to the earth by anchor spans. Each

  arm reaching out towards the other. The steelwork of the arms extending

  girder by girder without stagings, the steelwork being cantilevered

  across the river. The cantilever arms complete, the final span of the

  bridge – the central span – is suspended between the cantilevers. The

  final pieces dropped into position, secured, held in place by the cantilever

  arms. Neat, perf
ect, permanent.

  Soon after the ceremonial earth was turned their great undertaking began. And the epithets appeared: ‘The largest steel cantilever bridge in Australia’. The Home-Grown Bridge. The Bridge made ‘by Queenslanders for Queenslanders, using only Queensland materials’. Lawrence listens to this glory-making quietly.

  He is surrounded, but untroubled by it. Bradfield the consulting engineer, a local. Colonel Evans the steel man, a local.

  M.R. Hornibrook the bridge man, a local. The tradesmen employed to construct the bridge – the boilermakers, the riveters, the pass-boys, the fitters and turners and the painters. Local men, all, or near enough.

  The materials too. The concrete was mixed from the Brisbane earth: the gravel dredged from the bed of the river itself, just upstream from where the bridge will cross it, and the sand from the Pine River to the north. The clay for the cement from nearby Darra, the lime from coral dredged at Mud Island in Moreton Bay. And though the iron ore was mined at Iron Knob in South Australia, and the steel manufactured at Newcastle and at Port Kembla, the steelwork was fabricated in Brisbane.

  Lawrence had set to work and the science of engineering took over. Workshops set up at sites on the southern and northern banks of the river. The steel fabrication workshop established at Rocklea six miles away – the girders and struts and beams cut there and transported to the bridge sites when needed.

  To build a bridge:

  Concrete towers – the piers – are erected at intervals leading up to both banks of the river. The piers are linked by steelwork, before the roadway decking is laid horizontally upon the steelwork from tower to tower until the bridge is complete.

  Their task in constructing this bridge was complicated by the different heights on either bank of the river, and the width to be spanned: the southern bank is at water level, the land a low finger of ground, while the northern bank is a cliff, the bridge hurtling off the escarpment into space.

  So first the concrete. There were the approaches to the bridge.

  The southern approach rising long and gradual from the flattipped peninsula so the land itself is lifted higher, and then sealed into place by reinforced concrete retaining walls. From the north the streets were reconstructed and redirected, the northern approach a roadway leading towards a cliff.

  Then follow the piers. Pair after pair sunk into the earth. Thick concrete towers marching two by two towards the river from the south. Then the anchor piers, one on either side of the river, massive and immovable, lynch-piers for the steelwork, later. Finally the two main piers sunk below the river, with the south main pier one hundred and thirty feet deep, the last thirty solid rock.

  How to excavate so far under water, how to pour concrete below the waterline? Watertight airlock chambers were ordered, and the men sealed off under water, under earth – sealed in caissons, the chambers open at the bottom, the water kept out by the air pressure. But the air pressure is always dangerous, deadly for those working in the underwater chambers, so the men had rotated in one-hour shifts below the riverbed, the slow return to the surface taking one and a half hours, for fear of the bends. And the constant noise of shovelling concrete then was deafening.

  These working chambers, the cylindrical caissons, had sunk day by day deeper into the earth below the riverbed. The walls of the concrete caissons are nearly ten feet thick, the cylinders thirty feet across. Eventually they become permanently embedded there, and metamorphose from excavation chambers, to the very foundations of the piers themselves. The men left and the chambers of air were filled with liquid concrete, which sets in time and place.

  Upon the foundations of these caissons now, the two main piers themselves rise. Like the smaller approach piers, the main piers are two tapered rectangular shafts, though tied together below the waterline, and braced again at the top in an elegant arch.

  After the concrete, the steel. ‘Man’s masterpiece,’ Bradfield likes to say to Lawrence.

  Chapter Four

  Stahl rests the flat of his palm against the girder in front of him at waist-height. First on the outside where the sun hits it and then the inside where it is in shadow, feeling the difference in temperature already.

  ‘Come on,’ says O’Hara, and he motions Stahl with a nudge of his head towards the ladder.

  Stahl backs towards the edge of the staging, finds the ladder’s top rung with his right boot, and steps down. As Stahl disappears O’Hara bends his knees and squats for a moment, feeling the muscles along his upper thighs stretch tight and burn. He rises again, straightens, and shakes his legs out before following Stahl down the ladder.

  They descend through the steelwork, picking a course down the webbing of girders. They drop through the sections of bridge-work they know so well, so differently. They know it physically, as their searching hands and uncertain feet and thumping hearts have learnt it. An extension of their own bodies.

  As if it is a part of themselves that has been growing.

  They also know the steelwork as the engineers have asked them to learn it: as a pattern of letters and numbers. Like a jigsaw, with each piece of the puzzle marked. AU4 – anchor span upper chord member number four. CL5 – cantilever span lower chord member number five. SM2 – suspended span middle member number two. A neat pattern of letters and digits.

  Like numbered vertebrae making up a backbone. Each with a designated place, each with its fit.

  They descend the steel until, nearing the lateral bracing of the bridge deck, they realise they are not alone. It is still early, the city is still rising, but making his way along the deck on the other half of the bridge is the tall figure of the engineer, Lawrence.

  Immaculately dressed in coat, shirt and tie, he is striding along the southern half of the bridge towards where the work has paused, his cane feeling its way in front of him towards the chasm in the centre.

  On their half of the structure O’Hara and Stahl reach the decking, dropping with only the lightest of sounds from the vertical to the horizontal. O’Hara touches Stahl on the arm and they turn, moving towards the middle of the bridge, moving now towards the engineer. They step along the ten-foot timber boards laid as walkways over the deck’s steel framework. They pass beneath the travelling crane, quiet on its gantry like some giant slumbering insect. The two men duck under its hanging proboscis and the length of chain suspended from its tip. As they pass the machine O’Hara reaches up and pushes the chainlinks, casual, familiar. The chain sways and creaks behind them, slow and calm.

  The engineer has reached the end of the southern suspended span when O’Hara and Stahl reach the limit of the northern decking.

  ‘Morning,’ O’Hara calls out across the thirty feet of space between them. His voice is clear, but the gap in the bridge is a vortex that sucks words, language, into itself.

  ‘Good morning, gentlemen.’

  ‘Not today, Mr Lawrence?’ O’Hara enquires.

  ‘Not today, gentlemen,’ the engineer says. He is firm, final, though his decision was made only now, in this moment of speaking. By the time it reaches the two of them it is almost a whisper. Gentlemen. Quaint.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  O’Hara had intended the ‘sir’ to carry a light irony, a subtle pointedness in response to the engineer’s ‘gentlemen’. But it doesn’t. Irony is not something he yet knows how to control.

  Not over this space. Instead his words sound perfectly polite and O’Hara feels the small failure of his communication: that the engineer will not recognise in him anything more than yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir.

  Across the gap, the engineer turns his back and makes his way off the bridge.

  Chapter Five

  O’Hara and Stahl enter the Empire Hotel on Brunswick Street, deep in Fortitude Valley. It is breakfast time now, and there are already men inside leaning over plates with food letting off heat. The two of them locate Hodges at a table, dwarfing a plate with his shoulders. Hodges’ eating is a physical thing.

  His shirt sleeves ar
e already rolled above his elbows, his day’s work begun with this meal. His thickly haired forearms and the muscles beneath are taut with effort. Hodges’ ragged felt hat is still on his head, broad-brimmed, though pushed back so that the entirety of his blank forehead is visible. He doesn’t notice O’Hara and Stahl until they are on top of him.

  ‘You’re murdering that breakfast, Billy-boy,’ O’Hara greets him and takes a seat.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Take your time over it, Billy. String it out. We’re not going in today.’

  ‘What?’ Hodges looks from O’Hara to Stahl and then back to O’Hara.

  ‘Laid off until further notice,’ O’Hara says.

  ‘What!’ Hodges exclaims. ‘You’re not serious!’

  ‘Look at that face,’ O’Hara says, nodding towards Stahl whose chin is lowered into his hands, his elbows propped on the table, acting glum, ‘is that the face of a joker?’

  ‘Noooo,’ Hodges says, examining Stahl’s face. His dubiousness transforms into anger. ‘I don’t believe it. What happened?

  What . . . ?’

  ‘Just came from the site office. There’s a sign on the door of the changing shed. A health and safety problem.’

  ‘What’s it say?’

  ‘It says,’ O’Hara intones like a newsreel reader: ‘On Account of William Hodges’ Excessive Consumption of Baked Beans for Breakfast, this Site has Become a Health Hazard.’

  ‘Bastards,’ Hodges mutters as Stahl begins to laugh. ‘Bastards,’ he says again and shakes his head before returning to his beans and toast.

  O’Hara reaches over and slaps Hodges on the shoulder.

  ‘Come on, Billy-boy, you’ve got to admit that you do get a bit ripe about mid-morning.’

  ‘Piss off,’ Hodges growls.

  The waitress, a middle-aged woman with long dark hair pulled into a bun, calls out to them. ‘Ready to eat boys?’

  ‘Same as him, thanks, Betty,’ O’Hara calls back, motioning to Hodges’ plate and giving him a wink as he looks up.