Listening to Mondrian Read Online Free PDF

back the pies are a bit burnt on top and there’s another scene. Liv takes the best two out to Gordo, who is washing the car. Puts the plate on the bonnet.
    ‘Mind the bloody duco! What, have these been through a bushfire or something!’
    Liv takes the worst two pies and sits on the milk crate behind the laundry. The hills that surround the town press in on her, trapping her, while the coal smoke hangs above like a lid. It is not that today is worse than any other Saturday, but that it is exactly the same. Liv often feels as if she is stuck in some sort of time warp, in which the same things happen, over and over again.
    The machine gives a thump to say that it is time to hang out the footy gear, bring in the first load of dry stuff.
    ‘Never mind, darl,’ Mum tells Liv’s long face. ‘It might never happen.’
    It has it has it already has. And it will it will it will.
    Liv gets out the ironing board.
    ‘I’ll do that, darl.’
    Mum looks dead weary after this morning’s session with Gramma. ‘It’s OK. You go and have a lie-down, read the paper.’
    Liv actually smiles as she starts on Gordo’s work shirts. Only half an hour and World of Sport will be on, and they’ll all sit there mesmerised, and Cinderella will escape.
    Arriving at the Tower, Liv bypassed the steps that led up to the broad archway of the front entrance and clambered up a mound of rubble to one of the two narrower arches at the eastern side. Her head spun for a moment: the floorboards of the old power house were completely missing and it was a long drop to the bottom of the machine pit. Down below was a mess of broken bricks, rusty pieces of tin, corroded piping, an old fridge, even a holly tree.
    ‘You’ll fall down one of them holes and that’ll be the finish of you!’ the witch’s curse rang in Liv’s head.
    That’s what you think!
    Facing inwards to the arch and clinging for balance, Liv stretched her right foot across the gap to the top of a brick pier, about two metres square, that had once provided the base for one of the engines. Took a deep breath, leaned all her weight onto this first foot, brought the left foot over to join it.
    Secure now on her platform, Liv danced to the music that was coming through her headphones. (‘This is Radio 2LT Lithgow,’ said the man. ‘Rock till you drop!’) and as her energy filled the space, the Tower itself seemed to remember the enormous power of its past.
    There’s a black and white photograph on Liv’s bedroom wall, that she cut out of the paper on the town’s last Heritage Day. It shows the tower as it once was, standing proudly with its roof on and its bricks all clean and fresh. To its left, there is a little building that looks like a church hall. To its right, the massive cylinder of the furnace itself looms above the heating stoves. Beyond this again, the great pillar of the steam hoist rises up in front of a chimney so tall that it disappears out of the top of the picture. Running between all these structures is a network of gigantic pipes. And crowded in front of all this there are the ant specks of hundreds of people.
    Underneath, the caption says:
    On 13th May 1907, Australia’s first blast furnace was blown in and tapped in the presence of the Premier and a train-load of dignitaries. Fortunately, the noise of the furnace was too great to allow for speechmaking .
    And now it is that day, and Liv pulls the switch inside the power house, and there is a piercing whistle and a belch of smoke and Liv feels the earth shudder as air pushes through the pipes and the metal flows red and molten and the great creature comes to life . . .
    When Liv woke, lying on the platform where she’d danced herself into exhaustion, there was an old woman sitting in the archway of the front entrance with a bunch of scarlet poppies in her lap. For a moment, Liv thought it was the witch come to worry her, and then she thought she was asleep still and dreaming the witch, and then she realised that