Arms Race by Nic Low

turnover, shared among all veterans who can prove
an unbroken link to this hillock since seventeen eighty-eight. This will be about
six dollars each, and will rise even further once gold is found. We trust this generous
offer will be looked upon with gratitude.
    This time the bellow of anger from the crowd is a physical force. The police have
drawn their batons and fixed their visors. The light is beginning to fade, and shadows
pool in the shaft where the workers tunnel beneath the shrine. Up the front a TV
technician switches on a bank of halogens. Archie’s tense form is a sudden island
of light among the seething mass of protesters. He begins to wind up his speech.
    We look forward to working with the old soldiers of Victoria, contributing to the
wealth of the nation, and making a meaningful living for ourselves, like you’ve always
wanted. Thanks—and if you don’t mind me saying, go fuck yourselves.
    The crowd erupts. The noise is catastrophic. The police line stumbles back under
the onslaught. Two-dozen police horses thunder into action, charging the crowd from
either side. There are screams as pensioners go down beneath the hoofs.
    Toff moves to Archie’s side and it is just the two of them standing in the light,
the focus of the crowd’s rage.
    Shit, Toff says. We have to call this off. Look.
    To their right a mass of burly men with crew cuts shoulder-charge the police line.
They look like off-duty soldiers. Old-timers beat the police back with their crutches
and walking frames. A catheter bag slices the air above Toff’s head.
    Toff looks back, afraid for the work gang’s safety. They have emerged from the mouth
of the diggings in a tight high-vis huddle and are shouting to him. He can’t hear
them over the noise. They move slowly towards Toff and Archie and the brilliant halogen
lights.
    From the opposite direction the soldiers lead the charge, bellowing and pushing at
the cops. Somewhere in the back a furious martial drumming starts up. The police
line disintegrates. The crowd is upon them.
    They all reach the spotlight at the same instant. As the work gang enters the light,
the halogens’ fierce rays catch their vests as if catching a huge mirror ball, and
the enraged crowd rears back.
    Toff realises the workers are moving in a phalanx because they are carrying something
enormous. They lower the object carefully to the ground at Archie’s feet, then peel
away. There is a hot, sharp intake of breath: first from the old man, then the cops,
soldiers and pensioners, and those watching live on TV across the country.
    It is a gleaming slab of crystalline white quartz, prized from the earth beneath
the shrine. And running through it, like a bolt of lightning frozen into the rock,
is a seam of gold, as thick as Toff’s enormous thigh. Half a million bucks’ worth,
at least.
    For one brief moment the crowd stands in silent awe, and in that glittering pause,
a microsecond before the Melbourne Rush begins, each of them feels the ripe slink
of blood in their veins, and something else too, something huge and fierce, welling
up inside.

SCAR
    1
    FAR BELOW the plane, the valley’s one road twisted through the scrub, an umbilical
cord of raw red dirt. It was old gold-rush territory down there, broken and remade
by hand. From the Cessna’s tiny window I watched our shadow dip and loom across the
hills’ corrupted flanks. Then I saw it—the long dark slash of the mine. I’d studied
the surveyor’s drawings, but from the air it looked different. The line of the cut
was flanked on either side by three clearings, six in all. There was something familiar
to that symmetry. I rolled the sleeve of my shirt and turned my arm to expose the
veins.
    Look, I shouted over the engines.
    Christie lowered her pregnancy book. I pointed to the faded scar on the inside of
my elbow. It was a pale line flanked on either side by three small punctures, where
the doctor had fumbled