Free Ghost River by Tony Birch

you like to take a look?’
    He smiled again. Sonny was having none of his friendliness. He leaned back on the bike and crossed his arms.
    â€˜I’ll take a look,’ Ren said.
    â€˜Good. Hang on a second.’ The workman pulled a walkie-talkie from his belt, pressed a button and spoke into it. ‘Stan, give us an upright, mate.’ He put a hand on Ren’s shoulder. ‘Okay. You take a look through the level and you’ll see my mate holding an upright pole.’
    Ren bent forward and closed one eye. He could see numbers and lines, and in the distance another workman standing on a rise, dressed in the same uniform, holding a striped wooden pole.
    â€˜Can you see him?’
    Ren stood up. ‘What’s he doing?’
    The man pointed to the words on his chest pocket. ‘We’re from the RTA, and we’re doing the survey ahead of the excavation for the freeway coming through here. It’s our job to measure and peg the ground before the explosives team come in and begin their work. Once the powder monkeys have done their job it will be over to the bulldozers. We can’t lay a major new road without knowing exactly where it has to go. We don’t want to blow up the wrong hill.’
    He laughed out loud, as if he’d told a joke. But there was nothing funny about what he’d said as far as the boys were concerned.
    â€˜But there’s no roads down here,’ Ren said.
    â€˜Not yet. But there will be soon enough. Five lanes of freeway, each way, stretching from here to the eastern suburbs.’
    Ren couldn’t make sense of what the man was saying.
    â€˜Going where?’
    â€˜Exactly where you were looking through the level. We’re going to gouge out that hill and excavate through here, and …’ He turned and faced the other way. ‘See the marker ahead, through the trees there?’
    He was pointing towards another striped pole, pitched in the ground on a low hill above Deep Rock.
    â€˜The freeway will head in that direction.’
    â€˜How they gonna do that?’ Sonny interrupted. ‘You can’t put a road next to the old swimming pool. There’s no room for it.’
    The workman’s smile disappeared. ‘It’s a freeway, son, not a road. And it takes up a lot of land. Accordingly, the hill here will be dynamited, the ground will be bulldozed, and a stretch of the river will need to be realigned. The derelict swimming basin you’re referring to will be dynamited and demolished. As will most of the land you see here.’
    Sonny’s face expressed the bewilderment both he and Ren felt. ‘You can’t go and blow it up. Tell him, Ren.’
    â€˜It will be demolished,’ the workman interrupted. ‘And it’s a good thing too. You boys shouldn’t be swimming anywhere along this section of river. The water here is contaminated.’
    â€˜No, it’s not,’ Sonny protested. ‘We swim here all the time and we’ve never been contaminated.’
    The man packed up his gear and rested the tripod on his shoulder. ‘Oh, it is contaminated. Our scientists have tested the water along here. Whether you like it or not, you won’t be swimming here for much longer. All of this land, all that you can see, will be bulldozed and built over within the next three years.’
    He studied the boys a little closer, their muddy faces, scrawny hair and Sonny’s prehistoric bike. ‘I don’t know how it happened, but somehow the world has passed this place by. These old tracks and pathways don’t appear on any of our survey maps. This whole area has been a dumping ground for too long. The job has come to us to clean it up and prepare it for the future.’
    He turned his back on the boys and walked away, whistling as he went.
    Sonny leaned over the handlebars of his bike. ‘Can it be true, what he said?’
    â€˜Course not. Nobody can blow up the river.