Free Heat and Light by Ellen van Neerven

where Aboriginal people can apply to live. In the application criteria they are required to show how they have been removed or disconnected from their country – priority given to those who don’t even know where they’ve come from. Queensland’s the first state to implement the policy, with other states to follow. The community will be effectively self-governed, like the Torres Strait.
    What I don’t think our President has covered on her list is loss of culture. Young people are growing up and not having a clue who they are or who they should be.
    Julie laughs at me, because I’ve just got this job in the re-forming industry. Yes, I know, I told Julie, they’re half our problems, and she can’t understand it – but it’s much better money than I was getting shooting pigeons for the local council. When the position for a ‘Cultural Liaison Officer’ came up I thought great, I’d love the chance to work with other Aboriginal people, because that’s another way of finding out about my culture and what I missed out on growing up.
    Well, the real reason Julie laughed at me when I got back to her after the interview was because I wasn’t actually going to be working with Aboriginal people in my Cultural Liaison Officer role.
    I’ll be working with what they call the ‘sandplants’. There’s a lot of talk about them in the media lately, all sensationalist crap, I reckon, like asylum seekers in the naughties. I don’t really know much about them to be honest. I don’t want to call them ‘sandplants’ – ‘sandpeople’ or ‘plantpeople’ seems more sensitive, but I don’t know which to use.
    On Monday, I head on foot to the Science Centre on the other side of the island. From my house, facing out, I’d seen three brightly coloured temporary buildings, oddly shaped. The Science Centre is the red temporary building. This is where I find our office, around the side, and meet my boss, Milligan. He seems alright, easy to talk to. He doesn’t look like what I pictured; he doesn’t have a beard or glasses.
    Milligan had explained already on the phone that it was really a ‘hands-on’ sort of job. I wasn’t going to be sitting down behind a desk sipping from an eco-cup nine-to-five like Julie did. I had to get out and talk to these plantpeople, and this required taking the company’s tinny out to the smaller desolate islands on the rough edges of Russell. Milligan had told me this so I could show up with the proper gear: jeans, boots, company polo and a bag they’d given me, horribly flimsy, like one you’d get from a conference.
    Milligan assures me that steering the boat is really easy, though I am glad to hear it when he says he’s taking me out the first time.
    Two or so weeks earlier, when I’d found out I got the job, Milligan sent me by email quite a bit of material to study beforehand. It included research papers on the plantpeople, newspaper clippings and official guvvie policy papers. I have to admit I only really started reading through it last night, but I feel I know a lot more about them now.
    These creatures, beings, I’m not yet comfortable on how to place them, were formed when they started experi menting here, mining the sea in preparation for the islandising. It was a young botanist (I know this, as he is a friend of Milligan’s) who first discovered them: he distinguished their green human-like heads lined up on the banks of Russell Island. A lot doesn’t make much sense to me yet. I have a feeling the documents don’t say everything.
    Right from the start, the government has been very protective of them, so they don’t become a public spectacle. You need permission from a government official to go near the population.
    Basically, they present a problem for the Project at this stage, as all the southern Moreton Bay islands are being evacuated. This means everyone has to leave their homes and businesses for an indeterminate amount of time while the engineers work on the