Oh Matilda: Who Bloody Killed Her? Chapter 17

Journalist and author Stan Grant knows what lies beneath the polite smiles of mysterious beauty Matilda Meadows.

 

This is ‘summer reading’ like nothing you’ve read before: a diverse field of writers collaborating on a novel that will captivate you through summer.

Each author had just three days to write their chapter, with complete freedom over story and style; it’s fast, fun and very funny. Today, journalist and author Stan Grant takes up the story.

Click here to read Chapter 1 or go to ohmatilda.com.au for the full story.

By Stan Grant

McCredden woke in a sweat.

‘Jesus where am I”

His eyes scanned the room. He was in his hut on the island.

That bloody dream. Matilda Meadows looked so alive … so real.

He shivered. Then shivered again as the memory of his limp performance with Maya Churchill came flooding back.

Maybe that’s what triggered his James Bond fantasy; a vain hope that a martini shaken not stirred might arrest his brewer’s droop.

What was with all that 007 stuff anyway? Only in a dream could he imagine he still had the body to play that role.

And body dummies and fake death! What a freaking nightmare. It was like Gilligan’s Island directed by Christopher Nolan.

He didn’t know what scared him more seeing that walking corpse Matilda or enduring her diversity lecture.

What was her problem? He had worked hard for his success, why couldn’t she? Now it was all about identity. All ticking boxes.

If anyone had a problem getting work these days it was old white blokes like him!

Meadows wasn’t even that black, he said to himself. Put him in the sun for an hour and he was as dark as her. What did his mate Ernie Dingo always say? “McCredden, go back through your family tree and I’m sure you’d find we were related.”

He’d always got on well with the blackfullas. Some of his best friends were black.

But that Matilda Meadows was a piece of work. Now she haunted him. He had to admit though, she was a stunner.

He remembered when he’d seen her; Fitzy and Lisa’s Australia Day barbecue at their grand house overlooking Sydney Harbour.

What a woke leftie love-in that was: journos, actors, writers, couple of ex-Wallabies (well it was the North Shore), a few washed up politicians, even a couple of Liberals (small l of course) and a former managing director of the ABC for good measure.

Everyone there voted yes for same sex marriage – the year before last they’d all tearily applauded their first gay married couple guests – they hated the Catholic Church, and had cried when Kevin Rudd said sorry.

Little did anyone know McCredden was a secret Tory. He could never admit to it of course, or he’d never get another acting gig.

This annual charade was always his most convincing acting performance of the year.

McCredden the old sleaze had one hungry eye on the bottom of a young female news reporter and the other on the food line (he always liked to bite off more than he could chew) when he caught Matilda catching him out and offered up a guilty smile. Any minute now he’d zero in on Matilda herself.

They had something in common, Matilda and McCredden; she felt like a fraud too.

Year after year she had the same thought: what the hell am I doing here? It’s true Matilda genuinely liked Fitzy and Lisa, her favourite white people. Every year they invited her so every year she turned up.

There were worse places to be, she figured. On any Sydney beach for one, surrounded by Aussie-flag-wearing white supremacists.

There was a time Matilda would have been out marching with the brothers and sisters carrying her “Change The Date” banner.

She gave up on that years ago. Why change the date and hide the crime? This was Australia, the perfect settlement, “greatest country on earth, mate” a glorious tribute to the White Australia policy.

Marking the national day on the date they stole the country from her ancestors said it all really.

Changing the date would only let them off the hook and anyway it was never going to happen. She was always told to “get over it”.

“OK then,” she said, “let bogans be bogans.”

So it was Fitzy and Lisa’s or hide out at home and wait for this annual celebration of colonisation to pass.

They adored Indigenous culture. There were dot paintings on the wall, a photo with their arms around Cathy Freeman at Sydney Olympic Stadium and a framed copy of Paul Keating’s Redfern Statement signed by the last great Australian Prime Minister himself.

This was as safe a space as she’d find. Things did get a bit weird though when Fitzy excitedly gave her a copy of his latest book, a biography of Captain Cook.

Apparently Cookie was actually not a bad bloke once you got past his order to open fire on the blacks at Botany Bay.

Nobody’s perfect.

This was the drill; Matilda was the acceptable Aborigine. An ambassador for her people, a role model even. Easiest role she ever played. She would smile and deliver the acknowledgment of country just before Fitzy’s toast to Australia.

She was black enough to be authentic but just light skinned enough not to be threatening. Doors were open to her that were still slammed shut to her darker cousins.

But she was an undercover sister getting behind enemy lines and then reporting back about what white people were really like.

She and Nakkiah Lui used to swap notes.

“It really is like a scene from Get Out,” she laughed.

Matilda got to be the font of all ancient wisdom; black expert du jour on tap to answer any well-intentioned insulting question. She could even hand out personal absolution for white people crippled with guilt like the time she was bailed up by the half-pissed radio jock who told her about his appalling uncle and the way he treated the “Abos”.

She didn’t mind him saying that did she? Of course not, she said. Rule number one: don’t embarrass white people and don’t get angry. No one likes an angry black.

Then there were those who were on a voyage of discovery.

Had she read Bruce Pascoe? (To be honest she had not read Dark Emu; why would she? It told her nothing she didn’t already know.) Did you know Aborigines were farmers, not wandering hunter gatherers but people who lived in houses and baked bread just like white people?

Bruce gives us so much healing and hope they’d say. And don’t white people love healing and hope.

Give them hope and they’d almost forget you were black. That hope shtick took Barack Obama to the White House. Didn’t hurt that his mama was white.

Matilda chuckled to herself when she recalled what the black writer Michael Eric Dyson once said: “White people get 43 presidents and we get half a brother!”

McCredden still had his eyes on her and he thought Matilda’s coy smile was for him.

“Sorry about that before, I’m an incorrigible old perve. Terribly unreconstructed of me but old habits die hard.” McCredden whispered as he sidled up beside her.

“Huh?” said Matilda.

“Before when you caught me out – you know.” And he motioned his eyes to the afore-ogled ingenue.

“Oh that. Well thank god it wasn’t my arse you were gawking at.”

Touché, Matilda. She let him off the hook and put him down at the same time.

“Bitch,” he said under his breath. He would have said it aloud before Me-bloody-Too.

“Oh is that Geoffrey Rush? Poor dear’s had a terrible time. Excuse me, would you Matilda?”

An air kiss and he was gone.

Matilda’s head snapped around as she heard the laughter. Karl Stefanovic in his budgie smugglers playing a tennis racket guitar gyrating towards the pool as Fitzy cranked up Skyhooks.

Ego is not a dirty word …

Don’t you believe all you’ve seen or you’ve heard.

They were simpler times. January 26, 2020; the last party before COVID. A month later they would all be in lockdown. By the end of the year Matilda Meadows would be dead and John McCredden would have killed her.

Join the story at ohmatilda.com.au or go straight to Caroline Overington’s hilarious Chapter 1 to start from the beginning.

Journalist and broadcaster Stan Grant, a Wiradjuri man, is the ABC’s international affairs analyst and a celebrated author.