'It looks so big, doesn't it?' said Luther Langbene, staring out at the Indian Ocean. His arm embraced the view. 'Heaven on a very big
stick, wouldn't you say?'
We were thirty floors up in the Presidential Suite of the Benton Hotel, on Cottesloe Beach, a few months prior to the Tilba Mine crisis. I'd been met at the hotel entrance by an assistant manager, a nervous Chinese who kept checking his watch and muttering like the White Rabbit. He seemed convinced I was late for my appointment but I knew I was dead on time. I'd been in a state of panic for a week - I wasn't going to be late.
The assistant manager escorted me into the lift, tutting with impatience at my dogged stride (I wasn't going to be early either). He kept turning the security key in the lift controls as if that would make the lift go faster, glowering all the while. It struck me he must have been terribly distracted to treat a visitor with such disdain. It didn't take a genius to work out why: the guest in the Presidential Suite was not only a war hero and heir to a mining empire, he was also the son of Frank Jarvis, the hotel's owner.
As soon as the lift doors opened at the thirtieth floor, the White Rabbit gestured for me to get out, saying 'Please, please, you must go to the end. Only one door. Only one. You must go, okay? Please? Okay?'
He immediately punched a button, the doors closed between us and he descended to his rabbit hole.
I wasn't alone in the corridor. Outside the door at the end stood a man in a grey suit. He had a number-one crew cut and hands the size of shovel ends. He chewed gum as he eyed me. I felt like a roo in a crosshair. I hadn't expected a bodyguard. 'Uh, hello, I'm -'
'Mister Gideon,' he said, cutting me off and opening the door. 'He's waiting for you.'
Waiting? I thought. Am I late?
The door was closed behind me with practised swiftness. After the dim light of the corridor I was blinded by the sunlight that erupted from the floor-to-ceiling windows lining the west wall of the suite. For an instant I had to rely on my other senses. A smell of leather mixed with the scent of new wool carpet - stepping into the room was like stepping into an enormous limousine. Music flowing from a sound system that must have been built into the walls. Opera. German, with lots of horns. A man singing in a rich baritone voice, a sad voice. More horns. Wagner?
The music stopped. My eyes began to adjust. Across the room, against the glass, I saw a man in a, white linen suit. Beyond him there was nothing but blue. You could almost believe the hotel was floating,in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Water, horizon and stark blue sky. Western Australia was a land of straight lines drawn by its own vastness.
Luther Langbene was speaking.
'...the only trouble is, without a bit of care, Michael, without a bit of protection, all this,' his arm swept across the view again, 'all this will vanish in a puff of wind. Too much foreign debt, too much waste, too much weakness. The Hardgear Push don't have the guts to sacrifice the next election to make sure the job gets done. They like their Commonwealth cars, their frequent-flyer points and their hands in the casino tills too much. Unless we do something now this nation is going to collapse into that lovely ocean within ten years. That,' he said with the air of absolute certainty I would come to know well, 'is a fact of economic science.'
