There’s something glorious about a good Sunday lunch. I’ve just had one of the finest imaginable; one so fine that it was not just glorious but also heavenly, as though the whole ceremony was being cheered on by God and a choir of angels.
I was alone for my heavenly lunch, but not alone and sad like a king with a crooked crown and sagging jowls who has realised that for all his wealth and for all the pheasant and suckling pig before him he is still very poor, and not alone and pathetic like a kid in a coloured cone hat with a cake bearing many sparkling sparklers but no mates with whom to share the hilarity of trying to extinguish them – no not like that at all, but rather alone and peaceful like Wills after Burke kicked it or Burke after Wills kicked it or like Jacques Cousteau skin-diving on a pretty average reef as far as reefs go but without the burden of cameras filming him and having to make things seems more exciting than they really actually were. I was just alone and peaceful like that.
So there I was, alone in the sticks, and sitting atop what we in the business of describing landforms might call a spur off the side of a ridge, with spur meaning bit that sticks out as it does in just about any context I can think of the term being used, from riding boots to railway lines. Everywhere else I’d been this ridge had just been a ridge with no spurs but on this lucky day, this Sunday just gone, at precisely lunchtime or at least a time I deemed suitable for the taking of lunch, I lobbed upon a very nice westwards-going spur off the still nice but not quite as nice north-south ridge.
The geologist in me was quick to realise the reason for this spur’s existence, that being the fact that a series of milky quartz veins had burst through the rock in a nice regular pattern and hardened it up so that it was able to resist the blows of nature’s cold chisel while lesser rocks crumbled around it, but the romantic in me tried to push aside the geologist and think of the spur instead as a gift from God to a foot soldier, a loyal subject of His work, not in the sense that I read or follow the Bible at all, but in the sense that I spend my days unravelling the puzzles and vagaries that He created in the rocks on whatever day it was that He made the earth, and I suppose it was the first day when I think about it or else where would the animals have been placed?
It was a nice day in every way, that day. Sunny, Sunday, a sunny-sunny-Sunday I suppose, and just a little bit windy, just enough to rustle a few leaves here and there and provide the odd whoosh or two for excitement but not so windy that my geological maps and instruments were at risk of flight. I don’t know what the temperature was, what the number of degrees above zero degrees I should say it was and frankly I don’t care for the use of such a precise and rigid thing as a number to describe something of intangible beauty. It’s like when I used to ask my mate Clint how deep the water was when we were snorkelling and he’d say it was two Clints or three-and-a-half Clints deep, just to be ambiguous and cheeky – that’s how I feel like being, so let’s just say it was a nice temperature.
So I put my backpack down and got out my matches and shreds of fire-starting toilet paper and set about making a little fire to boil my billy, and was pleased to see that the Blessed Spur was rich with a type of tree I don’t know the name of but which has needles instead of leaves. The dead dry needles were thick on the ground and there’s nothing like a handful of them to get a fire cranking in its early stages so on went a few handfuls and up she went in no time. The good thing about a dry climate is you can get all the wood you need to boil a billy without even moving your feet from the fireside and so it went this day, but bear in mind that when I was in Chile the desert was so dry there was no wood at all and I had to have fruit boxes instead of tea, so there must be some tipping point of dryness where the wood situation starts to sour. The Eastern Goldfields must just be one of the world’s best fire-making joints, where there’s enough rain to grow a fair few trees but little enough that most die pretty quick smart before they get too big and proud.
This day I decided to experiment by placing the billy on a stone right next to the fire, with the stone sort of leaning into the fire a little bit to capture the heat but obviously not leaning so much that the billy might be at risk of toppling in and ruining the whole show. This experiment came about because I’ve been finding it a drag waiting for the billy-by-the-side method and am too risk averse to do the billy-on-the-sticks method which is good for a quick boil but has gone pear on me a good few times when the sticks have burned through and then there’s water in the fire and you have to start from scratch with the billy-by-the-side method and by the time the tea is ready you’re in a heavy rage and in no state to be enjoying tea.
To avoid having to raise the point again later I’ll tell you now that the billy-on-the-rock method didn’t work as well as I thought, maybe because the rock itself is cool and transfers heat slowly, but also maybe because my expectations were too high. Options for the future might be billy-on-the-rock but with the billy sort of overhanging off the rock into the fire, which I think would be an equal or greater risk of catastrophic failure than billy-on-the-sticks, or else billy-on-two-rocks-with-fire-underneath but that sounds like a lot of work for a plain old cup of tea.
I sat and ate my sandwiches once the fire was burning brightly and the stone and billy were correctly positioned downwind of the flames, and to tell you the truth the actual sandwiches of salami, cheese and lettuce on multi-grain bread were the low-point of the whole lunch, their only redeeming feature being the bits of red onion I’d dashed in there on top for something a little bit exotic and Spanish. I was still labouring through a mouthful of the second sandwich, which seemed somehow drier than the first, when the water came to the boil. This was a nice woody spot, as I think I mentioned, so with only a small swivel of my torso I was able to find a long, sturdy stick to lift the billy from the fire towards me without even getting up, and really it was these sorts of small graces that made this particular lunch so exceedingly pleasant and memorable.
I tore open two tea bags and threw in the leaves because that’s the way I like it, just leaves, and I don’t care what anyone says: you can definitely taste the paper and it’s not nice. I’m pretty certain that when Merrill J Fernando started Dilmah and named it after his sons Dilhan and Mahjong or something, he didn’t intend for his customers to be drinking tea and paper but tea only, and that he was forced into offering paper bags by a fickle and coarse Australian market he was determine to crack, and it’s unfortunate that the tea he’s really passionate about now sits in small packets called Premium Range as though drinking good tea is beyond the reach of the ordinary man. He compromised his values for cash, did Merrill J Fernando, and I’m sure he’d admit as much if he were here today and then he’d probably burst into big salty Sri Lankan tears and admit he’s been funding the Tamil Tigers too. Shame, Merrill, shame.
I thought all that about Dilmah while the tea brewed and I was just shaking my head and tut-tutting Merrill J Fernando when I realised that the tea was looking pretty dark and ready for drinking so I spooned in three or four sugars with the little teaspoon I stole from the mess and bent so it fit snugly inside the plastic sugar container I’ve got that fits inside my billy. That’s gonna get me onto The New Inventors, the all-in-one-billy, because you always forget something and this day I’d forgotten my cup and it’s ridiculous how hard it is to find a substitute for a cup in the bush without a damn good whittling blade and a few hours to spare so in the end I drank from the billy, once I’d wiped a section of the lip clean of soot.
Without really meaning to – another of these small graces – I found myself in a comfortable pose with my legs crossed and my back against a smooth tree, looking over the cradled billy, between the needle trees, and out onto the low red plain and salmon gums and blue-green cotton balls of saltbush. Then I entered this sort of rhythmic drinking of the tea where I kept it angled right up to my mouth and would first blow out a full breath into the fluttering tea, then I’d take in a big long breath and slurp the tea right at the end. Only as I savoured and swallowed the tea did I look out on the landscape – all the rest of the time I looked into the billy and admired the deep tannin juice and took care not to disturb the exhausted leaves resting at the bottom. I stared in the billy so long I noticed it was covered in stains and untensil scrapes from countless tea ceremonies and many packets of Mee Goreng noodles and tins of Tom Piper’s mince and vegetables, and I thought I could taste hints of the past in this tea and that maybe, like a good wok, it was benefiting from having never been properly washed.
I was disappointed when the tea ran out because the rhythmic drinking had caused me to become deeply thoughtful and now I had to fall back into regular thought, only I had nothing to worry about because things just got better. I found that by shuffling a bit to the side I could lie down without any bits of dolerite or milky quartz poking me in the back so I dragged my backpack over and put my jacket on top of it for a pillow and reclined back onto the thin cushion of needles, then I looked up at the sky through the needle trees. It was mostly clear but with a few clouds and that caused me to reflect on a book about clouds I read where the author raged against sayings like “blue sky” in a business sense because of the implication that clouds are bad news. On this day the cloud were certainly a welcome addition to the sky and had a pleasing symmetry with the puffs of saltbush on the ground.
It only took a few minutes reflecting on the clouds for the tea to begin pumping around my veins and muscles and vital organs, all of which seemed to expand with every heartbeat. The particular tea I used was Dilmah Extra Strong which I started to think was just plain old Dilmah Regular tea that Merrill J Fernando had cut with Afghani opium shavings to turn fickle customers into lifelong addicts and thereby strengthen the Tamils, because it really felt like champagne was fizzing through my veins and I mean that top-shelf champagne with tiny little bubbles that tickle your mouth. I think I really felt it go through me this time because I wasn’t distracted by the talking and shuffling of an ordinary tea party and it made me think how much more fun a tea party might be on your own, but then that wouldn’t be much of a party so maybe just together with friends but in total silence and with no visual stimuli.
I closed my eyes and lay there for a few minutes and in my mind I wanted to sleep but then the fingers of my right hand started spreading and contracting like a five-tentacled octopus – or pentopus as they are called – which I took as I sign that my body wanted to get up and work, so suddenly I sprung to my feet and strapped all my gear on and lunch was over just like that. I had a smile on my face which was strange because the end of lunch is normally such a drawn out and morbid affair. Once I’d pissed out the fire and taken in the view one more time I strode down the Blessed Spur with purpose to see what rocks were like at the bottom and the whole way down I was singing ABC-123 without really even thinking about it, which I thought Michael Jackson would have appreciated as a greater tribute than anything Sunrise could whip up or any teary rambling I might have left on an online condolence book. I’m pretty sure he and God were looking down from up there, and seeing as neither had visited the Eastern Goldfields they would’ve been a bit perplexed by the speck of khaki staggering and singing down the slope all on his own, but they’d have known from my joyful dodging and weaving and the spring in my step that I was one happy fellow doing something far better than just resting on the day of rest and that’s for sure.
Tuesday, 14 July 2009
Friday, 22 May 2009
Finland and the Finns: A woefully shallow assessment
I’d like to preface this essay with the greatest example of subtle Finnish humour, direct from their own language.
Suomalainen: A Finnish person.
Suomaalainen: Inhabitant of a swampy land.
And now let’s begin, as they say, at the beginning...
During the last ice age, the best of the Finnish landmass was eroded away by glaciers and scattered throughout eastern Europe, leaving behind a mildly undulating landscape where every slight depression became a freezing cold lake of sub-noteworthy dimensions. Once-grand mountains were demolished, and cross-country skiing, arduous and pointless, became the sport du jour. And owing to the uniform climate and topography, conifers (and only conifers) thrived, growing just tall and thick enough to block one’s view but never so high as to earn one’s admiration.
I have to tell you these central facts because any half-arsed commentary on the Finnish people – or any people for that matter – must begin with a description of the environment in which they live. And I must say my initial observation was that Finland is flat, its trees are straight, and its people are flat and straight. Do I still think that? No.
I am looking out on a typical Finnish scene right now, from the lounge room of my third floor flat in Sodankylä, a small town in the northern state of Lapland. The apartment block is low and rectangular, all grey and white, with heavy double doors at the entry, faux-granite stairs, linoleum levels, and a dirty big boiler in the basement. The stairwell smells of stale cigarettes in the mornings and a mixture of fresh and stale cigarettes in the evenings, and when I trudge up it after work I always feel like Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, on a social mission to smash in the skull of some lecherous old pawnbroker woman on level six. Luckily there’s only three levels. I think this literary flashback is induced by the Russian sounding names on each beige apartment door: A1 - Tolvanen, A2 - Kosola, A3 - Vaara, A4 - Tervo, A5 - Oravala, A6 - Tolvanen, A7 - Liikala, A8 - Salmela. After Salmela, and last of all, comes A9 – (Unnamed Mining Company), and the apartment I share with Jon, my boss.
But for the occasional person or car passing over the bridge below, the scene through our window could be painted on. A gently snaking kind of river, a hundred metres wide, slithers away from me, southwards, between the conifers that go right to its banks, though there is one cleared spot on the far side, occupied by a red wooden house with white window frames and a dark green roof – the kind that I imagine might be home to a quietly methodical deer hunter with a woollen hat and a modest fire burning. If I lean back a little bit even the bridge drops below my eyeline, and then nothing is moving. Sodankylä is about a hundred kilometres inside the Arctic Circle, so at this time of year the sun’s sub-horizontal shimmy means there is little change even in light conditions. The apartment’s double windows and doors keep out the cold but also any noise, only adding further to my feeling that nothing at all is happening.
In our first few days though, big slabs of ice were still coming down the river and we stood out on the balcony wondering aloud what it would be like to surf one, or cheering them on as they headed for, but never once hit, the bridge pylons. Back then I was still thinking very much like an Australian. Five kilometres downstream, the same river, having merged with another, passes the building where we are working, and it was down there on the bank that I first thought like a Finn.
See, as far as I can tell, when a Finn sees a chunk of ice going by, he thinks of nothing at all. He just watches the chunk of ice go by. He doesn’t think about riding it or smashing it or altering its course. He just contemplates it, like some cave-ridden Buddha contemplates the passing of days and nights. And so it went that lunchtime around a week ago, when I moseyed out along the river and saw a lone piece of ice – one of the last stragglers - and was happy just to watch it cruise. In fact I became so entranced that, if I enjoyed smoking tobacco and had some Rizlas and Port Royal handy, I’d have crouched down and rolled up a dart, and smoked it real slow and methodical-like, savouring the different flavour of each individual puff. Yeah, I felt properly Finnish then.
Now, two things happen to people who watch ice drift by (if I may use that as a proxy for The Finnish Condition). One: they become thoughtful, modest and dry-humoured. Two: they embrace guns, binge drinking and death metal music. Anyone who knows a few Finns will rattle off these characteristics. In fact, a Norwegian lady working for Cathay Pacific in Perth openly tried to talk me out of going to Finland, warning that the people were “very wierd”. And my brother Andrew, who spent a few years in neighbouring Sweden, told me that Finns were quiet and strange, but added that “I think you’ll like them”, which I thought an odd thing to say.
That Andrew – he knows me too well. Like their landscapes, the beauty of the Finnish people is slowly resolved. If you stare at Finland long enough you realise that their country gently sways and twists, their sun is just a happy drunk, and every third conifer splits in two halfway up. If you observe the natives for long enough you see the smirks, hear the intonation, and detect the humour in the eyes that you long thought barren. So subtle are they, that in a room full of Finns I feel like an American; like everything I say or do is coarse and clumsy, and my jokes are painfully overwrought. I’ve got new perspective on those poor Yanks actually, though I’ve still never felt the need to tell these “crazy Finns” that they “crack me up”.
Unless something better happens between now and the 28th May, my enduring memory of Finland – and my best personal example of Finnish humour – will be of when I burst in on the senior geologist, Markku, with a question that had arisen during the morning drive to work. Who, we Australians had been wondering, was the most famous Finnish person, rally and Formula One drivers aside? As is customary in Finland, or Lapland at least, Markku looked at me for a full five seconds before saying “Well...”, then leaning back in his swivel chair and clasping his hands. To my increasingly blank face, he then reeled off three architects, two classical composers and the conductor of the New York Symphony Orchestra.
“Yeah, righty-o”, I said. “Anyone else?”
“Well,” he said, reclining back a smidgen further as the smallest of smiles appeared, “For you, I think maybe it will be Santa Claus.”
Burned, humbled, but also deeply amused.
Suomalainen: A Finnish person.
Suomaalainen: Inhabitant of a swampy land.
And now let’s begin, as they say, at the beginning...
During the last ice age, the best of the Finnish landmass was eroded away by glaciers and scattered throughout eastern Europe, leaving behind a mildly undulating landscape where every slight depression became a freezing cold lake of sub-noteworthy dimensions. Once-grand mountains were demolished, and cross-country skiing, arduous and pointless, became the sport du jour. And owing to the uniform climate and topography, conifers (and only conifers) thrived, growing just tall and thick enough to block one’s view but never so high as to earn one’s admiration.
I have to tell you these central facts because any half-arsed commentary on the Finnish people – or any people for that matter – must begin with a description of the environment in which they live. And I must say my initial observation was that Finland is flat, its trees are straight, and its people are flat and straight. Do I still think that? No.
I am looking out on a typical Finnish scene right now, from the lounge room of my third floor flat in Sodankylä, a small town in the northern state of Lapland. The apartment block is low and rectangular, all grey and white, with heavy double doors at the entry, faux-granite stairs, linoleum levels, and a dirty big boiler in the basement. The stairwell smells of stale cigarettes in the mornings and a mixture of fresh and stale cigarettes in the evenings, and when I trudge up it after work I always feel like Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, on a social mission to smash in the skull of some lecherous old pawnbroker woman on level six. Luckily there’s only three levels. I think this literary flashback is induced by the Russian sounding names on each beige apartment door: A1 - Tolvanen, A2 - Kosola, A3 - Vaara, A4 - Tervo, A5 - Oravala, A6 - Tolvanen, A7 - Liikala, A8 - Salmela. After Salmela, and last of all, comes A9 – (Unnamed Mining Company), and the apartment I share with Jon, my boss.
But for the occasional person or car passing over the bridge below, the scene through our window could be painted on. A gently snaking kind of river, a hundred metres wide, slithers away from me, southwards, between the conifers that go right to its banks, though there is one cleared spot on the far side, occupied by a red wooden house with white window frames and a dark green roof – the kind that I imagine might be home to a quietly methodical deer hunter with a woollen hat and a modest fire burning. If I lean back a little bit even the bridge drops below my eyeline, and then nothing is moving. Sodankylä is about a hundred kilometres inside the Arctic Circle, so at this time of year the sun’s sub-horizontal shimmy means there is little change even in light conditions. The apartment’s double windows and doors keep out the cold but also any noise, only adding further to my feeling that nothing at all is happening.
In our first few days though, big slabs of ice were still coming down the river and we stood out on the balcony wondering aloud what it would be like to surf one, or cheering them on as they headed for, but never once hit, the bridge pylons. Back then I was still thinking very much like an Australian. Five kilometres downstream, the same river, having merged with another, passes the building where we are working, and it was down there on the bank that I first thought like a Finn.
See, as far as I can tell, when a Finn sees a chunk of ice going by, he thinks of nothing at all. He just watches the chunk of ice go by. He doesn’t think about riding it or smashing it or altering its course. He just contemplates it, like some cave-ridden Buddha contemplates the passing of days and nights. And so it went that lunchtime around a week ago, when I moseyed out along the river and saw a lone piece of ice – one of the last stragglers - and was happy just to watch it cruise. In fact I became so entranced that, if I enjoyed smoking tobacco and had some Rizlas and Port Royal handy, I’d have crouched down and rolled up a dart, and smoked it real slow and methodical-like, savouring the different flavour of each individual puff. Yeah, I felt properly Finnish then.
Now, two things happen to people who watch ice drift by (if I may use that as a proxy for The Finnish Condition). One: they become thoughtful, modest and dry-humoured. Two: they embrace guns, binge drinking and death metal music. Anyone who knows a few Finns will rattle off these characteristics. In fact, a Norwegian lady working for Cathay Pacific in Perth openly tried to talk me out of going to Finland, warning that the people were “very wierd”. And my brother Andrew, who spent a few years in neighbouring Sweden, told me that Finns were quiet and strange, but added that “I think you’ll like them”, which I thought an odd thing to say.
That Andrew – he knows me too well. Like their landscapes, the beauty of the Finnish people is slowly resolved. If you stare at Finland long enough you realise that their country gently sways and twists, their sun is just a happy drunk, and every third conifer splits in two halfway up. If you observe the natives for long enough you see the smirks, hear the intonation, and detect the humour in the eyes that you long thought barren. So subtle are they, that in a room full of Finns I feel like an American; like everything I say or do is coarse and clumsy, and my jokes are painfully overwrought. I’ve got new perspective on those poor Yanks actually, though I’ve still never felt the need to tell these “crazy Finns” that they “crack me up”.
Unless something better happens between now and the 28th May, my enduring memory of Finland – and my best personal example of Finnish humour – will be of when I burst in on the senior geologist, Markku, with a question that had arisen during the morning drive to work. Who, we Australians had been wondering, was the most famous Finnish person, rally and Formula One drivers aside? As is customary in Finland, or Lapland at least, Markku looked at me for a full five seconds before saying “Well...”, then leaning back in his swivel chair and clasping his hands. To my increasingly blank face, he then reeled off three architects, two classical composers and the conductor of the New York Symphony Orchestra.
“Yeah, righty-o”, I said. “Anyone else?”
“Well,” he said, reclining back a smidgen further as the smallest of smiles appeared, “For you, I think maybe it will be Santa Claus.”
Burned, humbled, but also deeply amused.
Friday, 6 March 2009
Postcard from Cue
“What did the Chinese couple call their baby when it came out black?” asks the muffled Kiwi as the rod churns down.
“Dunno”, I shout, showing a pair of sieves to the fluffy sky.
“Sum Ting Wong.”
“Oh! Mmmm.”
There is relative silence. Another clay donkey-dick bucks through the sample hose and jams in the cyclone.
“I hate Asians”, he finally resolves, thoughtful.
“Yeah”, I say, ambiguous. I don’t hate Asians. I hate everybody.
The slower the drilling, the steadier the jokes – mostly lifted from Picture – begin to flow. These transported clays – a hundred or a hundred and twenty metres thick, vertical – are decaying us all. The less we do, the greater our lethargy. Lunch is earlier, rods are heavier, cable ties defeat my feeble hands. We are sweaty and restless.
And the flies. My Lord, the flies. I’d never worn a net before. One might as wear a tall pink cone, I’d thought, with ‘poofter’ painted on the vertical. P-O-O-F-T-E-R. Now, this fine mesh hood is my sanctuary and my prison. It keeps the flies out, or in, but denies me the ability to eat, drink, blow and spit with my usual abandon. Worse than that: together with the tinted safety glasses, it denies me pure light, that sensory pleasure so necessary for the serious geologist. And what of the earplugs, the broad brim, the hardhat, the sunscreen? A sensory holocaust! What chance of oneness with the environment, of melting into the earth and becoming the rock?
Enough! I declare. Enough of this half or three-quarter living! Could the unblunted reality be so devilish that, if naked, I’d wither before it? Surely not, or possibly so – I don’t care. A rod on the cranium instead of this filtered fog? Yes sir, topple one down! A hundred decibel blast of mist into my earhole? Line me up nice-and-proper! And for God’s sake man, give me a little light exfoliation from the sample hose while you’re up!
I retreat to an acacia, which sprays up, grey-green, as if from a puncture in the orange sand. There are two plant species in the Murchison: small acacias and slightly bigger acacias. Billions of bulbous fountains dispensing soul sedative, and not a decent gum to be seen. I collapse cross-legged under the shrub’s canopy and lazily drag all the protections from my head, casting them into the dirt. My forearms go to my knees and the hum of the rig sends me slumping forward to equilibrium.
At first, my focus jumps from fly to fly as they land or move or depart. The senior flies – the kings and queens – occupy the eyes, nostrils and ears, while the peasants work the beard and limbs. Soon, my mind can’t compute the movements of the fifty or a hundred or two hundred sets of legs and I enter a period of roaring, buzzing overload. I grimace and blink throughout, until ten minutes later, suddenly, I am Fly Buddha.
A million tiny masseurs and acupuncturists soften my overworked body. Then I am cool and drifting and tickled by sea-grass. My giggling grin is soon exploited. I am their greasy Gulliver, their crusty Kurtz. I am their temple of worship, with physical and spiritual sustenance leaking from every pore. Drink up, little sweat miners! The boom rolls on!
The driller taps me on the shoulder and thrusts a piece of rock at me. It’s bedrock. He shakes his head and walks away. I look past the chip in my hand and see a seething black crust over a cut on my calf. High-grade nutrient!
Sadly, I am no longer Fly Buddha. No sir. Now I am the Ass Phallanthropist! Yes, the Documenteur of Donkey Dicks! Fifty or eighty metre beds of pure schlongs, todgers, bell-ends, pork-swords and womb-brooms! Goodness me, what kind of mega-tooled fauna roamed this place in the Tertiary? What a menagerie of man-meat!
The rig rolls away, and I resolve to stop reading Picture. Burps and growls echo from the finished hole. I wander over and peer down into the darkness.
“Another one of them gold-eatin’ dragons”, I conclude, dropping the plastic cone in and jamming it down, nice and tight.
“Dunno”, I shout, showing a pair of sieves to the fluffy sky.
“Sum Ting Wong.”
“Oh! Mmmm.”
There is relative silence. Another clay donkey-dick bucks through the sample hose and jams in the cyclone.
“I hate Asians”, he finally resolves, thoughtful.
“Yeah”, I say, ambiguous. I don’t hate Asians. I hate everybody.
The slower the drilling, the steadier the jokes – mostly lifted from Picture – begin to flow. These transported clays – a hundred or a hundred and twenty metres thick, vertical – are decaying us all. The less we do, the greater our lethargy. Lunch is earlier, rods are heavier, cable ties defeat my feeble hands. We are sweaty and restless.
And the flies. My Lord, the flies. I’d never worn a net before. One might as wear a tall pink cone, I’d thought, with ‘poofter’ painted on the vertical. P-O-O-F-T-E-R. Now, this fine mesh hood is my sanctuary and my prison. It keeps the flies out, or in, but denies me the ability to eat, drink, blow and spit with my usual abandon. Worse than that: together with the tinted safety glasses, it denies me pure light, that sensory pleasure so necessary for the serious geologist. And what of the earplugs, the broad brim, the hardhat, the sunscreen? A sensory holocaust! What chance of oneness with the environment, of melting into the earth and becoming the rock?
Enough! I declare. Enough of this half or three-quarter living! Could the unblunted reality be so devilish that, if naked, I’d wither before it? Surely not, or possibly so – I don’t care. A rod on the cranium instead of this filtered fog? Yes sir, topple one down! A hundred decibel blast of mist into my earhole? Line me up nice-and-proper! And for God’s sake man, give me a little light exfoliation from the sample hose while you’re up!
I retreat to an acacia, which sprays up, grey-green, as if from a puncture in the orange sand. There are two plant species in the Murchison: small acacias and slightly bigger acacias. Billions of bulbous fountains dispensing soul sedative, and not a decent gum to be seen. I collapse cross-legged under the shrub’s canopy and lazily drag all the protections from my head, casting them into the dirt. My forearms go to my knees and the hum of the rig sends me slumping forward to equilibrium.
At first, my focus jumps from fly to fly as they land or move or depart. The senior flies – the kings and queens – occupy the eyes, nostrils and ears, while the peasants work the beard and limbs. Soon, my mind can’t compute the movements of the fifty or a hundred or two hundred sets of legs and I enter a period of roaring, buzzing overload. I grimace and blink throughout, until ten minutes later, suddenly, I am Fly Buddha.
A million tiny masseurs and acupuncturists soften my overworked body. Then I am cool and drifting and tickled by sea-grass. My giggling grin is soon exploited. I am their greasy Gulliver, their crusty Kurtz. I am their temple of worship, with physical and spiritual sustenance leaking from every pore. Drink up, little sweat miners! The boom rolls on!
The driller taps me on the shoulder and thrusts a piece of rock at me. It’s bedrock. He shakes his head and walks away. I look past the chip in my hand and see a seething black crust over a cut on my calf. High-grade nutrient!
Sadly, I am no longer Fly Buddha. No sir. Now I am the Ass Phallanthropist! Yes, the Documenteur of Donkey Dicks! Fifty or eighty metre beds of pure schlongs, todgers, bell-ends, pork-swords and womb-brooms! Goodness me, what kind of mega-tooled fauna roamed this place in the Tertiary? What a menagerie of man-meat!
The rig rolls away, and I resolve to stop reading Picture. Burps and growls echo from the finished hole. I wander over and peer down into the darkness.
“Another one of them gold-eatin’ dragons”, I conclude, dropping the plastic cone in and jamming it down, nice and tight.
Tuesday, 27 January 2009
The Downturn
I wrote this to MiningNews.net, in response to their call for the subscriber's perspectives on the industry downturn. And in response to the shrivelled-up, self-pitying rubbish they'd printed until that point in time. Of course, they didn't run with it. Humourless morons!
From where I am, out in the crucible of Cue, where the desk-bound fear to tread, there are no signs of a slowdown, nor of nervous speculation or self-pity. There are signs only of heavy summer rain, pock-marking the dust – the dust that holds dormant life, the dust that tingles when it lines my nostrils, the dust that tastes of anomalous gold when I lick it with fervour.
Show me your lousy balance sheet, Mr Managing Director! Show me your frayed suit and the tears diluting your coffee – yes, please do! And then I’ll show you rock, a great big boondy I smashed from an outcrop just this afternoon; a stone you can cradle while I lecture you on its formation and deformation and alteration and just what that rock means for you and your precious company. Resist me then, my good man. Say no to that last-chance drillhole then!
Far from crush me, the slowdown has cleansed my sinking spirit and honed my geological sword to a micron edge. Give me your project and I’ll carve the fat from it with a few choice strokes. If there’s any meat left I’ll hand it back to your overpaid secretary on a platter, the flesh still quivering lightly. If there’s no flesh remaining then all you’ll get back is a blood-spattered tray. And as your wife laments your soiling of her best pewter-ware, perhaps you should lament not hiring me before you paid top dollar for that miserable tenement.
But enough shouting now. I am the sanguine geologist. I am the camouflaged gecko. While many scatter from the swooping wedgie, I lie still. My heart beats slowly and my belly is warm against the dirt. If I am picked off, then so be it. At least I am out here, trying to find some gold – out here, where our kind belong.
From where I am, out in the crucible of Cue, where the desk-bound fear to tread, there are no signs of a slowdown, nor of nervous speculation or self-pity. There are signs only of heavy summer rain, pock-marking the dust – the dust that holds dormant life, the dust that tingles when it lines my nostrils, the dust that tastes of anomalous gold when I lick it with fervour.
Show me your lousy balance sheet, Mr Managing Director! Show me your frayed suit and the tears diluting your coffee – yes, please do! And then I’ll show you rock, a great big boondy I smashed from an outcrop just this afternoon; a stone you can cradle while I lecture you on its formation and deformation and alteration and just what that rock means for you and your precious company. Resist me then, my good man. Say no to that last-chance drillhole then!
Far from crush me, the slowdown has cleansed my sinking spirit and honed my geological sword to a micron edge. Give me your project and I’ll carve the fat from it with a few choice strokes. If there’s any meat left I’ll hand it back to your overpaid secretary on a platter, the flesh still quivering lightly. If there’s no flesh remaining then all you’ll get back is a blood-spattered tray. And as your wife laments your soiling of her best pewter-ware, perhaps you should lament not hiring me before you paid top dollar for that miserable tenement.
But enough shouting now. I am the sanguine geologist. I am the camouflaged gecko. While many scatter from the swooping wedgie, I lie still. My heart beats slowly and my belly is warm against the dirt. If I am picked off, then so be it. At least I am out here, trying to find some gold – out here, where our kind belong.
Wednesday, 26 November 2008
The Atacama Llama
My first crack at a short-story proper!
What a sorry sight he makes, this woebegone llama, down here in the lonely Atacama. Dessicating, evaporating, sublimating. His dusty white coat shuddering up and collapsing down with every breath, his tongue shivering and curling in-and-out, lapping at the sharp desert air. And that jellyscum around his sinking eyes, with its thickening crust. I wonder, can he see me still?
Every so often, a llama will come – and go – this way, winding down from the high Andes and through these desolate foothills, towards the promised coast. I can only guess at their motivations: love, hate, rejection, rebellion, bravado? Curiosity, fuelled by the idle speculation of elders? Dementia or youth, which are not so dissimilar?
I first spotted this one four days ago. How insignificant he’d seemed from the hilltop: a small white speck inching through the vast, dead river of red-brown stones. But out here, where nothing moves but the sky, it’s easy to spot a wayward llama, especially when you have eyes like... well, like a fox. He was moving at a decent pace then – still had that determined step – but when I visited the next day his legs were weakened, the heady fuel of adventure exhausted.
These bold young llamas will charge straight over the last running water they’ll ever see. And such is their enthusiasm for this new sparse environment and this romantic descent, that they’ll not notice the very last tinge of green as it races beneath their eager hooves. It’s subtle and wobbly and migratory, the limit of that hardy frontier growth, but so terribly sharp and absolute upon reflection. Only a few days past the boundary do they realise their mistake, but still they press on, guided by that natural optimism of the mountain-dwellers, straight out into my country.
I like it down here. I’ve spent time up high, in the trees and streams and the sparkling grass, but I always return to this desert, craving the dry air and space, and the discipline and patience it demands of me. There’s too many links in the food chain up there, too many backs to scratch and always someone picking at yours. Down here I keep lean and sharp and nimble, and worry only for myself. It’s no place for soft minds and bodies and morals.
This one wasn’t frightened when I first darted out – fresh from the mountains, they never are. They fail to grasp the new desert dynamic: size is a burden. The threats out here are small and simple, their urges primal and deadly. But they never run, these big, giddy llamas. Instead, they follow closely, driven by a thirst that has seized control. I am, after all, evidence of water.
On moonlit nights, I sit up on my peak and watch the thick mist come creeping in, advancing inland as moist air from the sea meets the sinking Andean chill. I watch it sweep and swirl through the latitudinal valleys and reach up over the saddlebacks, unfurling like the fingers of a silvery ghost. Its route and extent are temperamental, so I stay alert and take careful note of the gullies and overhangs it favours. Sometimes the cold mist slides right up with peculiar force and swallows me whole, and on those nights my sleep is filled with dreams of the dawn’s fine harvest.
That first morning, when this llama started to follow, I led him over to a black monolith that bubbles out from the fringe of the stony river, because there, in the rock’s permanent shade, grow eight fragile, leafless shrubs. Pathetic, dry plants they are, smaller than me and no good to eat, but their spindly branches collect enough tiny droplets of mist to slake a small thirst. I showed him what to do and he licked and licked, and I dashed away before he looked up.
It’s a futile thing I do, showing them those miserable droplets, and even a terrible thing, given that I don’t show them my best spots - they’re walking dead before I see them, and I don’t seek to delay their fate unnecessarily. But I’ve been up in their mountains and looked down on this and seen – I think – what they see, so I feel a host’s obligation to show them the desert way – the getting, almost, of water from stone.
He was happy to see me again yesterday morning, when I showed him some more dew-catchers and hidey-holes, but this morning he was drawn and vacant. The blade of looming death, which so hones my desert craft, had shredded through his fluffy soul.
All this long day, my tail brushed the ridgeback as I paced its length. My movements were rigid and ill-thought, and I cursed myself for the energy wasted. Eventually, late in the afternoon, he staggered and fell, right in the spot I like them to reach.
Now, his long white neck is arched back and, together, we take in the lower reaches of this long-dead river, which opens out toward the distant ocean and the sinking sun. His eyes still flicker lightly.
Long ago, torrents of glacial water carved out this landscape, moving and shaping the pebbles and cobbles and boulders that are now polished by the streaking, unhindered winds. Most stones lie flat and relaxed, hibernating through this infinite dry, but the rare ones stand tall and tortured, leaning down towards the coast and begging for a nudge. In this late afternoon sun their shadows are long, and the riverbed resembles a cemetery.
I think this is a good place for them. I like to imagine that the dusky light might deceive their wistful eyes; that the rocky hillsides bounding the valley might soften into grassy alpine slopes, and the piercing spires might capture the last intense sun and look for all the world like cool, snowy caps. Having been drawn down into these horrors by their rosy mountain focus, I like to leave them with a vision of home.
He shuts his gummy eyes to focus on every breath. My tail betrays me. When his chest stands still, and when the mist shrouds us both, I’ll go to work on him with no regrets.
THE END
What a sorry sight he makes, this woebegone llama, down here in the lonely Atacama. Dessicating, evaporating, sublimating. His dusty white coat shuddering up and collapsing down with every breath, his tongue shivering and curling in-and-out, lapping at the sharp desert air. And that jellyscum around his sinking eyes, with its thickening crust. I wonder, can he see me still?
Every so often, a llama will come – and go – this way, winding down from the high Andes and through these desolate foothills, towards the promised coast. I can only guess at their motivations: love, hate, rejection, rebellion, bravado? Curiosity, fuelled by the idle speculation of elders? Dementia or youth, which are not so dissimilar?
I first spotted this one four days ago. How insignificant he’d seemed from the hilltop: a small white speck inching through the vast, dead river of red-brown stones. But out here, where nothing moves but the sky, it’s easy to spot a wayward llama, especially when you have eyes like... well, like a fox. He was moving at a decent pace then – still had that determined step – but when I visited the next day his legs were weakened, the heady fuel of adventure exhausted.
These bold young llamas will charge straight over the last running water they’ll ever see. And such is their enthusiasm for this new sparse environment and this romantic descent, that they’ll not notice the very last tinge of green as it races beneath their eager hooves. It’s subtle and wobbly and migratory, the limit of that hardy frontier growth, but so terribly sharp and absolute upon reflection. Only a few days past the boundary do they realise their mistake, but still they press on, guided by that natural optimism of the mountain-dwellers, straight out into my country.
I like it down here. I’ve spent time up high, in the trees and streams and the sparkling grass, but I always return to this desert, craving the dry air and space, and the discipline and patience it demands of me. There’s too many links in the food chain up there, too many backs to scratch and always someone picking at yours. Down here I keep lean and sharp and nimble, and worry only for myself. It’s no place for soft minds and bodies and morals.
This one wasn’t frightened when I first darted out – fresh from the mountains, they never are. They fail to grasp the new desert dynamic: size is a burden. The threats out here are small and simple, their urges primal and deadly. But they never run, these big, giddy llamas. Instead, they follow closely, driven by a thirst that has seized control. I am, after all, evidence of water.
On moonlit nights, I sit up on my peak and watch the thick mist come creeping in, advancing inland as moist air from the sea meets the sinking Andean chill. I watch it sweep and swirl through the latitudinal valleys and reach up over the saddlebacks, unfurling like the fingers of a silvery ghost. Its route and extent are temperamental, so I stay alert and take careful note of the gullies and overhangs it favours. Sometimes the cold mist slides right up with peculiar force and swallows me whole, and on those nights my sleep is filled with dreams of the dawn’s fine harvest.
That first morning, when this llama started to follow, I led him over to a black monolith that bubbles out from the fringe of the stony river, because there, in the rock’s permanent shade, grow eight fragile, leafless shrubs. Pathetic, dry plants they are, smaller than me and no good to eat, but their spindly branches collect enough tiny droplets of mist to slake a small thirst. I showed him what to do and he licked and licked, and I dashed away before he looked up.
It’s a futile thing I do, showing them those miserable droplets, and even a terrible thing, given that I don’t show them my best spots - they’re walking dead before I see them, and I don’t seek to delay their fate unnecessarily. But I’ve been up in their mountains and looked down on this and seen – I think – what they see, so I feel a host’s obligation to show them the desert way – the getting, almost, of water from stone.
He was happy to see me again yesterday morning, when I showed him some more dew-catchers and hidey-holes, but this morning he was drawn and vacant. The blade of looming death, which so hones my desert craft, had shredded through his fluffy soul.
All this long day, my tail brushed the ridgeback as I paced its length. My movements were rigid and ill-thought, and I cursed myself for the energy wasted. Eventually, late in the afternoon, he staggered and fell, right in the spot I like them to reach.
Now, his long white neck is arched back and, together, we take in the lower reaches of this long-dead river, which opens out toward the distant ocean and the sinking sun. His eyes still flicker lightly.
Long ago, torrents of glacial water carved out this landscape, moving and shaping the pebbles and cobbles and boulders that are now polished by the streaking, unhindered winds. Most stones lie flat and relaxed, hibernating through this infinite dry, but the rare ones stand tall and tortured, leaning down towards the coast and begging for a nudge. In this late afternoon sun their shadows are long, and the riverbed resembles a cemetery.
I think this is a good place for them. I like to imagine that the dusky light might deceive their wistful eyes; that the rocky hillsides bounding the valley might soften into grassy alpine slopes, and the piercing spires might capture the last intense sun and look for all the world like cool, snowy caps. Having been drawn down into these horrors by their rosy mountain focus, I like to leave them with a vision of home.
He shuts his gummy eyes to focus on every breath. My tail betrays me. When his chest stands still, and when the mist shrouds us both, I’ll go to work on him with no regrets.
THE END
Friday, 10 October 2008
Commuting
I spin around the corner and see the bus-stop seat with its chunky concrete legs, its horizontal two-by-fours and its thick mission brown paintwork, and I feel my shoulders slump like the flimsy spines it is contoured for. It's made for four people but only ever used by two, of which I am now one.
My book rests back by the bedside so I prop my elbows on my knees and swing the laptop back and forth. Occasionally I look up for the punctual receptionist across the road - the unknowing harbinger of the 7-2-3 to the C-B-D. And there she is, out and dusting the mat and making it square with the door and standing back to nod in satisfaction. She's still nodding when I am flushed by a rude cloud of exhaust and the squealing bus wipes the scene.
A wiry little business lady jumps in first. It's a jungle dawn. I fumble for coins and when my turn comes I say "Just to the city please" as cheery as possible to endear myself to the driver. He plants it when I take the ticket and I am whirled down the aisle. No-one laughs at my slapstick entry, or even looks up. I'd be smirking at least.
I take the last seat, beside a skinny schoolboy, maybe a year seven or eight. He's reading a book so I read it too until he notices, then I look around the bus wide-eyed like it's all foreign and fascinating. But all I can see are dark-haired skulls and i-pods and briefcases, and those things gets me down and my weak, silly smile
starts to drop.
At the next stop, as the pilgrims push down the aisle next to me, I look out past the boy and see a cyclist struggling by, up the hill and out of the saddle, his gullet opened out and rhythmically stripping oxygen from the dull metropolitan air. The demands of his blood are met. His machine quality is enviably human. I am inspired to draw a deep breath - how long since my last? - but my blood is lazy. I imagine it is thick and dark.
I straighten up again and there is a middle-aged lady's arse next to my face. It is pleasant enough in form but such is its proximity that by the next stop I am beginning to resent its presence. Nevertheless, and in the absence of other options, I begin to study it more closely.
Ten minutes later, just as the arse is dissociating from its lady owner and taking on new absurdity as a free-standing entity, I feel a nudge from the schoolboy and he flicks his head to suggest that I move. He's getting out. I peer from him to the arse and back again. I flick my head towards it and raise my eyebrows in enquiry. The boy shakes his head quickly; I shake mine back, extra slow in mock disappointment.
I lift my hand and drift it towards the arse, gradually extending my index finger. I am looking at the boy, who is frozen with anticipation as I make to touch the cheek. But I change tack late and tap her on the jutting hip.
"Excuse me miss", I say, all business-like.
I get out too, though it's a stop before my usual. The boy and I share a shy laugh on the outside and I wish him a good day at school. He stamps off with his enormous backpack and I mosey away to work, sucking in the air.
God bless those tiny human moments - the eyes meeting like eyes - that make public transport bearable.
My book rests back by the bedside so I prop my elbows on my knees and swing the laptop back and forth. Occasionally I look up for the punctual receptionist across the road - the unknowing harbinger of the 7-2-3 to the C-B-D. And there she is, out and dusting the mat and making it square with the door and standing back to nod in satisfaction. She's still nodding when I am flushed by a rude cloud of exhaust and the squealing bus wipes the scene.
A wiry little business lady jumps in first. It's a jungle dawn. I fumble for coins and when my turn comes I say "Just to the city please" as cheery as possible to endear myself to the driver. He plants it when I take the ticket and I am whirled down the aisle. No-one laughs at my slapstick entry, or even looks up. I'd be smirking at least.
I take the last seat, beside a skinny schoolboy, maybe a year seven or eight. He's reading a book so I read it too until he notices, then I look around the bus wide-eyed like it's all foreign and fascinating. But all I can see are dark-haired skulls and i-pods and briefcases, and those things gets me down and my weak, silly smile
starts to drop.
At the next stop, as the pilgrims push down the aisle next to me, I look out past the boy and see a cyclist struggling by, up the hill and out of the saddle, his gullet opened out and rhythmically stripping oxygen from the dull metropolitan air. The demands of his blood are met. His machine quality is enviably human. I am inspired to draw a deep breath - how long since my last? - but my blood is lazy. I imagine it is thick and dark.
I straighten up again and there is a middle-aged lady's arse next to my face. It is pleasant enough in form but such is its proximity that by the next stop I am beginning to resent its presence. Nevertheless, and in the absence of other options, I begin to study it more closely.
Ten minutes later, just as the arse is dissociating from its lady owner and taking on new absurdity as a free-standing entity, I feel a nudge from the schoolboy and he flicks his head to suggest that I move. He's getting out. I peer from him to the arse and back again. I flick my head towards it and raise my eyebrows in enquiry. The boy shakes his head quickly; I shake mine back, extra slow in mock disappointment.
I lift my hand and drift it towards the arse, gradually extending my index finger. I am looking at the boy, who is frozen with anticipation as I make to touch the cheek. But I change tack late and tap her on the jutting hip.
"Excuse me miss", I say, all business-like.
I get out too, though it's a stop before my usual. The boy and I share a shy laugh on the outside and I wish him a good day at school. He stamps off with his enormous backpack and I mosey away to work, sucking in the air.
God bless those tiny human moments - the eyes meeting like eyes - that make public transport bearable.
Wednesday, 9 July 2008
Harvey's Odyssey III: The Blind Prophet
The pained caw of a grease-craving seagull tears through the cold, moonless Wednesday night at the Fishing Boat Harbour, laying an electric jolt over the softgurgling base line of lazy water. Three men are present: two bronze fishermen, rigid in pose, and the coach of the Fremantle Dockers, who leans against the wooden railing with locked arms and with legs intertwined, himself statuesque. Groans and clicks escape from the timber that supports him. What weight does this man bear? What density his flesh? Not that of an ordinary man.
Light blue-grey beams project from his eyes, illuminating still black ships and the wine-dark sea. A fluid tangle of baby squid bubbles up through the phosphorescence as it sweeps. Normally, such a sight would cause him – he who was, at least, absently amused by his ‘difference’ – to sniff and faintly smile. But not now. No, now his bottom lip slides further into his mouth, and his top incisors bite down on it ever harder.
He aggressively pushes away from the railing, sending it splintering into the sea. The resulting surge of water is matched, and now bettered, by a wave of sickly protest from the restless junkie gulls, who cry, it could be said, from under-the-bridge. He points his beams towards South Terrace and the juvenile squid sink down, the foolishness of their ecstasy realised.
Treading heavily through the deserted streets, the coach curses his newfound weight and the dull insistence of gravity. From a chain around his midriff he drags an immense, rusted-iron kinder egg – his personal egg – containing such ‘surprises’ as strands of hamstring and cruciate ligament, screwed-up newspaper articles, and a small Korean-Australian lawyer, all floating like shreds of clam in a thick purple chowder of expectation and Dockerliness. But is that enormous egg real, or is it imagined?
The main street is in darkness. But now Zeus, that unscrupulous sprayer of lightning, does his thing and a neon sign explodes to life: ‘The Clink’. An ominous stairwell beckons. Sighing heavily – the inevitability of Olympian incursions into his life is beginning to grate – the coach submits. Dragging himself over is a strain, but the descent is easy: now, slipping down towards the hot liquid core of the earth, the terrestrial Mecca of weightlessness, the only place where a heavy soul can be completely at ease – yes, now gravity is a splendid friend indeed.
Inside that warm black womb of the underworld, a malfunctioning Bundaberg Rum sign provides the only sound and light, buzzing to a crescendo, popping to life, and returning to dark silence. Its slow strobe reveals a single hooded figure at the bar, his orientation and inclination varying greatly between snapshots. Uncontrolled movement, and inebriation, are implicit.
“Haar-a-fee, harfeee”, calls a voice from the present dark. “Cumovareer”.
A curling finger and loose grin are revealed by the next yellow-white burst of the bear. The coach groans – those Gods! – and wanders over.
“What?”
“Umgonnagifyoosum... adfice.”
The coach’s eyes have just finished a secret exaggerated roll, when the bear suggests a round of rums and the hooded man’s face is exposed. Only, it’s not a man: it’s a boy. The child’s head is absurdly large and triangular, and fine tufts of regularly washed hair fan out from under the hood.
“Yep”, he hiccups from the dark, “Shoo need ta gerridda Paflisch. Heesh only goddanuvva shix sheashons innim.”
Who gave this boy a beer, wonders the coach. Look at him - all over the place, drunk for the first time, gibbering some nonsense.
The bear insists, and the face under the hood has dramatically changed. It’s now drawn and sullen, and lacking a chin of any note. None of these features are at all disguised by the small diversionary beard that covers them. Resident specks of drying vomit further rob the patchy mat of its intended nobility.
“Yagodda become more Fictorian Harfs,” the wise man gurgles through a mouthful of carrot, “and stand for Fremantle. And play Paflisch in the shenta, and up forward. And in defensch. And trade im.”
What’s hiding beneath those whiskers, the coach asks himself. In removing that hair, would one be exposing an absurd labradoodle? Peeling back the moss from a shallow (for they are never deep) bush grave? Scraping the fly-strike from some rotten, undersized flathead? His creeping nausea is heightened when the desperate bear calls lasts drinks, revealing a clean, bespectacled Greek beneath the hood. Before a word can escape those keen headmaster’s lips, the coach spins and marches away.
Every step back up is heavier than the last; the lure of sinking back strong, but not strong enough. The density of the coach’s flesh has, in recent months, passed that of iron, of lead, of gold, its exponential rise smashing through glass ceilings of physics like a streaming white tiger. But with greater density comes greater potential energy.
Stepping now onto the street, he is a rapidly collapsing purple giant. He will shrink and shrink, growing denser and harder. He will draw in and feed on the weak matter that surrounds him, until he is nothing but a tiny, shaking ball of Big Bang fury. He is Mr Fahrenheit. He is a collapsing, shooting star. He is an atom bomb. And he’s about to whoa-whoa-whoa explode.
Light blue-grey beams project from his eyes, illuminating still black ships and the wine-dark sea. A fluid tangle of baby squid bubbles up through the phosphorescence as it sweeps. Normally, such a sight would cause him – he who was, at least, absently amused by his ‘difference’ – to sniff and faintly smile. But not now. No, now his bottom lip slides further into his mouth, and his top incisors bite down on it ever harder.
He aggressively pushes away from the railing, sending it splintering into the sea. The resulting surge of water is matched, and now bettered, by a wave of sickly protest from the restless junkie gulls, who cry, it could be said, from under-the-bridge. He points his beams towards South Terrace and the juvenile squid sink down, the foolishness of their ecstasy realised.
Treading heavily through the deserted streets, the coach curses his newfound weight and the dull insistence of gravity. From a chain around his midriff he drags an immense, rusted-iron kinder egg – his personal egg – containing such ‘surprises’ as strands of hamstring and cruciate ligament, screwed-up newspaper articles, and a small Korean-Australian lawyer, all floating like shreds of clam in a thick purple chowder of expectation and Dockerliness. But is that enormous egg real, or is it imagined?
The main street is in darkness. But now Zeus, that unscrupulous sprayer of lightning, does his thing and a neon sign explodes to life: ‘The Clink’. An ominous stairwell beckons. Sighing heavily – the inevitability of Olympian incursions into his life is beginning to grate – the coach submits. Dragging himself over is a strain, but the descent is easy: now, slipping down towards the hot liquid core of the earth, the terrestrial Mecca of weightlessness, the only place where a heavy soul can be completely at ease – yes, now gravity is a splendid friend indeed.
Inside that warm black womb of the underworld, a malfunctioning Bundaberg Rum sign provides the only sound and light, buzzing to a crescendo, popping to life, and returning to dark silence. Its slow strobe reveals a single hooded figure at the bar, his orientation and inclination varying greatly between snapshots. Uncontrolled movement, and inebriation, are implicit.
“Haar-a-fee, harfeee”, calls a voice from the present dark. “Cumovareer”.
A curling finger and loose grin are revealed by the next yellow-white burst of the bear. The coach groans – those Gods! – and wanders over.
“What?”
“Umgonnagifyoosum... adfice.”
The coach’s eyes have just finished a secret exaggerated roll, when the bear suggests a round of rums and the hooded man’s face is exposed. Only, it’s not a man: it’s a boy. The child’s head is absurdly large and triangular, and fine tufts of regularly washed hair fan out from under the hood.
“Yep”, he hiccups from the dark, “Shoo need ta gerridda Paflisch. Heesh only goddanuvva shix sheashons innim.”
Who gave this boy a beer, wonders the coach. Look at him - all over the place, drunk for the first time, gibbering some nonsense.
The bear insists, and the face under the hood has dramatically changed. It’s now drawn and sullen, and lacking a chin of any note. None of these features are at all disguised by the small diversionary beard that covers them. Resident specks of drying vomit further rob the patchy mat of its intended nobility.
“Yagodda become more Fictorian Harfs,” the wise man gurgles through a mouthful of carrot, “and stand for Fremantle. And play Paflisch in the shenta, and up forward. And in defensch. And trade im.”
What’s hiding beneath those whiskers, the coach asks himself. In removing that hair, would one be exposing an absurd labradoodle? Peeling back the moss from a shallow (for they are never deep) bush grave? Scraping the fly-strike from some rotten, undersized flathead? His creeping nausea is heightened when the desperate bear calls lasts drinks, revealing a clean, bespectacled Greek beneath the hood. Before a word can escape those keen headmaster’s lips, the coach spins and marches away.
Every step back up is heavier than the last; the lure of sinking back strong, but not strong enough. The density of the coach’s flesh has, in recent months, passed that of iron, of lead, of gold, its exponential rise smashing through glass ceilings of physics like a streaming white tiger. But with greater density comes greater potential energy.
Stepping now onto the street, he is a rapidly collapsing purple giant. He will shrink and shrink, growing denser and harder. He will draw in and feed on the weak matter that surrounds him, until he is nothing but a tiny, shaking ball of Big Bang fury. He is Mr Fahrenheit. He is a collapsing, shooting star. He is an atom bomb. And he’s about to whoa-whoa-whoa explode.
Saturday, 26 April 2008
War, Art, Sport
I arrived in Subiaco obscenely early. It had been a long day - a dawn service, a big breakfast, a train trip to Mandurah for an Italian family lunch – and I was tired. I had waved goodbye to my girlfriend at Perth station: “I’ll sleep in the park for a few hours”.
An early, deserted football special delivered me at 4.00 pm. At the second-hand bookshop I searched the Australian section for something to read on the grass, or to at least serve as a rudimentary pillow. Right down the bottom of the shelf, an outward facing recent edition of Patrick White’s ‘Voss’ was prominent. Yeah maybe - I’d wanted to give him a go for a while - but what was behind it?
Not only spine out – for he of the supple neck and keen eye – but also covered by its shinier yet poorer clone, was a second edition hardback. ‘Voss’ – the only word on the disintegrating paper outer, scrawled in some crude freehand graffiti, and accompanied only by a wobbly line-drawing of the absurdly bespectacled, fictional German explorer of the Australian interior. The deal was done.
Inside the ground – I had foregone the sleep on the grass, too excited by the game and my $8.80 jewel – I searched for a common feature between me and the other early arrivals, at this stage numbering about three or four per block. They were young and old, grouped and alone, purple and plain and horizontally-striped.
Out on the ground there were cords and cameras, fingers pressed in ears and a bunch of misfits training. The Docker-for-a-day boy was ushered here and there by his smiling hostess. Every so often a player would wander out, still in his suit, for a chip kick and a cheap laugh. Mark Harvey appeared at the top of the race and stood alone and contemplative for a full five minutes. Shouldn’t he be doing something, I thought. Maybe he was.
I only got a few pages into Voss. There was too much fascinating build-up going on. But I think I already understood that, like any Australian masterpiece – of war, of art, of sport - it was going to end in tragedy. That German, he was gonna fry in the desert.
-----
On the way out of the ground, a Geelong supporter told his mate, quite without condescension, that Fremantle had played the better football. Never have I felt so deeply just how little that means. It means zero. I calculated to the 375th decimal place before giving up, and it was still all zeros.
The train home was dominated by quivering purse-lipped smiles. A lot of people seemed to have something lodged in their eyes. Barely a word was spoken: even the Geelong fans understood that any mention of the game would precipitate a volatile outburst of emotion, swinging wildly between tears and violence, or perhaps some comic-tragic fusion of the two.
When I got home I was locked out. I sat in the cold and dark, and the now-shredded cover of Voss flicked up in the wind like a viper. I was very close but oh-so-far from the television – the one thing that could, like a surgical laser, have numbed and killed the memory of Fremantle vs Geelong, ANZAC day 2008. I’d have peeled my skull back if I could’ve, and removed the offending three-by-one-by-one centimetre piece of brain-tube. And I’d have cast it out onto the footpath, beside the honeyeater chick that fell from its nest, and let the ants eat it alive. But, instead, I sat there and it spread.
That’s the problem with getting to the ground early: you invest too much. It’s far easier to turn up later and drunker. I took down my defences yesterday. I exposed myself. I stepped up, knowing fully but faintly what the outcome was going to be. And down I went, just shy of the oasis.
An early, deserted football special delivered me at 4.00 pm. At the second-hand bookshop I searched the Australian section for something to read on the grass, or to at least serve as a rudimentary pillow. Right down the bottom of the shelf, an outward facing recent edition of Patrick White’s ‘Voss’ was prominent. Yeah maybe - I’d wanted to give him a go for a while - but what was behind it?
Not only spine out – for he of the supple neck and keen eye – but also covered by its shinier yet poorer clone, was a second edition hardback. ‘Voss’ – the only word on the disintegrating paper outer, scrawled in some crude freehand graffiti, and accompanied only by a wobbly line-drawing of the absurdly bespectacled, fictional German explorer of the Australian interior. The deal was done.
Inside the ground – I had foregone the sleep on the grass, too excited by the game and my $8.80 jewel – I searched for a common feature between me and the other early arrivals, at this stage numbering about three or four per block. They were young and old, grouped and alone, purple and plain and horizontally-striped.
Out on the ground there were cords and cameras, fingers pressed in ears and a bunch of misfits training. The Docker-for-a-day boy was ushered here and there by his smiling hostess. Every so often a player would wander out, still in his suit, for a chip kick and a cheap laugh. Mark Harvey appeared at the top of the race and stood alone and contemplative for a full five minutes. Shouldn’t he be doing something, I thought. Maybe he was.
I only got a few pages into Voss. There was too much fascinating build-up going on. But I think I already understood that, like any Australian masterpiece – of war, of art, of sport - it was going to end in tragedy. That German, he was gonna fry in the desert.
-----
On the way out of the ground, a Geelong supporter told his mate, quite without condescension, that Fremantle had played the better football. Never have I felt so deeply just how little that means. It means zero. I calculated to the 375th decimal place before giving up, and it was still all zeros.
The train home was dominated by quivering purse-lipped smiles. A lot of people seemed to have something lodged in their eyes. Barely a word was spoken: even the Geelong fans understood that any mention of the game would precipitate a volatile outburst of emotion, swinging wildly between tears and violence, or perhaps some comic-tragic fusion of the two.
When I got home I was locked out. I sat in the cold and dark, and the now-shredded cover of Voss flicked up in the wind like a viper. I was very close but oh-so-far from the television – the one thing that could, like a surgical laser, have numbed and killed the memory of Fremantle vs Geelong, ANZAC day 2008. I’d have peeled my skull back if I could’ve, and removed the offending three-by-one-by-one centimetre piece of brain-tube. And I’d have cast it out onto the footpath, beside the honeyeater chick that fell from its nest, and let the ants eat it alive. But, instead, I sat there and it spread.
That’s the problem with getting to the ground early: you invest too much. It’s far easier to turn up later and drunker. I took down my defences yesterday. I exposed myself. I stepped up, knowing fully but faintly what the outcome was going to be. And down I went, just shy of the oasis.
Thursday, 27 March 2008
This (Rocky) Life
Written for the 'This Life' section of The Weekend Australian, which calls for contributors to write a 600 word first-person account of some aspect of their life.
‘Bloody geos,’ the driller yelled the other day, over the roar of his phallic machines. ‘Give a group of ‘em a rock and they’ll argue over it for hours.’ A common anecdote in the mineral exploration industry, but a false one.
Now, I sit on the polished rubble of a pathetic low outcrop, one of the few God has delivered me in this remote quarter of Western Australia’s goldfields. Somewhere under this silent landscape there lies an economic accumulation of gold. I have to believe that. The prospect of there being no needle in the haystack – of this physically and mentally and financially expensive effort being not just fruitless but hopeless from the outset – cannot be entertained.
I will sit here studying the landforms and vegetation and the scarce red-weathered bedrock until I know, until I feel, what was happening here 2.5 billion years ago. Where would the gold-bearing fluids have deposited their treasure? If, indeed, there was any gold-bearing fluid. I shudder, despite the heat.
Contemplation – ‘becoming the rock’ – is a geologist’s most effective weapon. A multinational I once worked for asked that employees code their work time by activity performed. There was no code for ‘thinking’. The exploration department revolted and was made exempt.
The geologist is slow, but the earth is patient. The earth, in fact, is tormenting, showing just enough to bewitch, just too little to embolden. In my mind the geology and prospectivity change with each dusty scrap of evidence I gather, but the reality is that, out here, nothing has changed in a very long time. The earth is dormant, the gold either there or not there. But where? Or not where?
There’s a name for this illness of mine: gold fever. No, it didn’t pass with the 19th century. The only difference is that we have Landcruisers and water. No-one is dying. The lust, the passion, the absence of reason; geologists dragged away from their pet prospects, pleading with the money-men for ‘one more drillhole’. I see it often.
It’s strange behaviour to an observer, because the company geologist doesn’t stand to gain financially. It won’t be his gold or nickel or copper: he is paid good money to find it or, as is more often the case, not find it. But the fever is not driven by greed.
I have no interest in the mining and the money. I just want, once, to defeat Mother Nature. Or, to put it better, to have Mother Nature applaud me as her equal. I just want to find that mother-lode and walk away, vindicated. Oh, for the high that would give me!
It’s a consuming profession. I see life through the framework of geology. I see people metamorphose under heat and pressure; erupt like Krakatoa; settle like silt in the Ganges delta. It’s also intensely individual: just me, alone, versus the 100 km2 or 1000 km2 I’ve been assigned, armed only with a hammer, a magnifying lens and my bare wits. Unless they’re going to sit in the dirt here with me, no-one else need be involved.
There’s no such thing as a group of geologists.
I wander over to the next subtle rise, breathing in the heat and the smells and the flies. There’s no sound but my own. Perfect. I kneel down and lick the dust from the rock.
I am in a deep ocean trench. Sediment pours in from the adjacent volcanic range, hot bombs fizz past from above. The earth cracks and grinds and I know that I am close. Think, Michael. Think.
‘Bloody geos,’ the driller yelled the other day, over the roar of his phallic machines. ‘Give a group of ‘em a rock and they’ll argue over it for hours.’ A common anecdote in the mineral exploration industry, but a false one.
Now, I sit on the polished rubble of a pathetic low outcrop, one of the few God has delivered me in this remote quarter of Western Australia’s goldfields. Somewhere under this silent landscape there lies an economic accumulation of gold. I have to believe that. The prospect of there being no needle in the haystack – of this physically and mentally and financially expensive effort being not just fruitless but hopeless from the outset – cannot be entertained.
I will sit here studying the landforms and vegetation and the scarce red-weathered bedrock until I know, until I feel, what was happening here 2.5 billion years ago. Where would the gold-bearing fluids have deposited their treasure? If, indeed, there was any gold-bearing fluid. I shudder, despite the heat.
Contemplation – ‘becoming the rock’ – is a geologist’s most effective weapon. A multinational I once worked for asked that employees code their work time by activity performed. There was no code for ‘thinking’. The exploration department revolted and was made exempt.
The geologist is slow, but the earth is patient. The earth, in fact, is tormenting, showing just enough to bewitch, just too little to embolden. In my mind the geology and prospectivity change with each dusty scrap of evidence I gather, but the reality is that, out here, nothing has changed in a very long time. The earth is dormant, the gold either there or not there. But where? Or not where?
There’s a name for this illness of mine: gold fever. No, it didn’t pass with the 19th century. The only difference is that we have Landcruisers and water. No-one is dying. The lust, the passion, the absence of reason; geologists dragged away from their pet prospects, pleading with the money-men for ‘one more drillhole’. I see it often.
It’s strange behaviour to an observer, because the company geologist doesn’t stand to gain financially. It won’t be his gold or nickel or copper: he is paid good money to find it or, as is more often the case, not find it. But the fever is not driven by greed.
I have no interest in the mining and the money. I just want, once, to defeat Mother Nature. Or, to put it better, to have Mother Nature applaud me as her equal. I just want to find that mother-lode and walk away, vindicated. Oh, for the high that would give me!
It’s a consuming profession. I see life through the framework of geology. I see people metamorphose under heat and pressure; erupt like Krakatoa; settle like silt in the Ganges delta. It’s also intensely individual: just me, alone, versus the 100 km2 or 1000 km2 I’ve been assigned, armed only with a hammer, a magnifying lens and my bare wits. Unless they’re going to sit in the dirt here with me, no-one else need be involved.
There’s no such thing as a group of geologists.
I wander over to the next subtle rise, breathing in the heat and the smells and the flies. There’s no sound but my own. Perfect. I kneel down and lick the dust from the rock.
I am in a deep ocean trench. Sediment pours in from the adjacent volcanic range, hot bombs fizz past from above. The earth cracks and grinds and I know that I am close. Think, Michael. Think.
Thursday, 20 March 2008
Letter to Kalgoorlie Miner
In response to:
As a resident of Kalgoorlie for the past 24 months, having come from Perth, I am becoming disillusioned by the current state and attitude by in the 'city of extremes'.
The majority of people here are (let's be honest) only here for the quick cash, and then bugger off somewhere else. I tend to find these types of people (usually identifiable by their apparent desire of material things like big 4x4 vehicles, several beer fridges, a 3 m wide LCD television, and basically a greedy nature without considering anyone else) they lack social skills when communicating with those of us who earn more modest incomes and live a more modest and real lifestyle.
Then on the other hand, you have people who won't lift a finger and find a job! They revel in dire conditions and choose to eat takeaway meals three times a day and wonder why they are obese!
Now before some whinge at me in defence, it is not jealousy or sour grapes, it's reality!
I mean, for a town that is probably one of the best known gold mining locations on earth, so little money is actually put back into developing a decent infrastructure for the benefit of residents! But then again the very roots of 'East Coolgardie' was greed and lust of the yellow metal. Instead we have wasted money on fleshy pursuits and crazy superficial projects that benefit only the wealthy.
What about under staffing at the local hospital, the terrible pot holes in the roads and the most embarassing thing I have ever seen for a supposedly 'rich' city, the third world-like road conditions when the heavy rains were here three weeks ago? I was driving through many a street and was absolutely shocked with the very poor drainage system. I thought I was in India, driving through the Ganges or some canal in Venice.
Sorry, but Kalgoorlie is a laughing stock when it comes to infrastructure and culture. I've lived in smaller towns that actually have a decent standard of living, where people show genuine kindness to each other, have a culture other than sex, beer and money, and where greed is not the be all and end all.
Kalgoorlie and Boulder need revolutionising. It's time many woke up and smelt the coffee! If the much expected worldwide economic crash happens, many will truly be in the poo.
P Walterman, Kalgoorlie
P Walterman, in his thesis (Letters 15th March) dividing Kalgoorlie-Boulder residents, all uncultured, into two further sub-classes – the greedy and materialistic, the fat and unemployed - begs us not to cry “jealousy or sour grapes” in response. Don’t worry friend, I won’t say either.
What I will say is that you are ignorant. What I will say is that you are hypocritical. What I will say is that you belong to that third and most unwelcome class of Kalgoorlie residents: the man who vainly elevates himself to the position of anthropologist upon his arrival in town; who forms his opinions on exteriors alone; who flaps about in the shallow fringes of the river, too weak and insecure to explore the depths.
What I’d really like to know, P Walterman, is what you look like. Honestly. What is it about your exterior image – your body shape, your clothing, your motor vehicle – that will catch my eye as I pass you in the street, and define you as a man of culture and intellect and integrity? Do you have a t-shirt that says “I’ve read Dickens”? Or perhaps it’s your “Free Tibet” bumper sticker?
You won’t know me, because I’ll be in a dirty orange shirt or a blue singlet or a pair of footy shorts or, from time to time, nothing at all. I’ll have a patchy beard. I’ll be driving a rusted out Valiant. And yeah, I’ll be eating Hungry Jacks.
You are the shallow and judgemental one. You are the one defining people by the money they have the good fortune to earn. But you are not only defining the people by their exteriors – you are doing the same for the town itself.
I urge you, P Walterman, to look for depth in Kalgoorlie-Boulder and in its people. It’s not hard. The only people I know who leave town bitter and untouched are those that refuse - they are not unable, they refuse – to look past the trucks and hookers and pubs and spoon-drains. Some are the greedy, some are the lazy, but many are the P Waltermans.
You need to stop observing town and become a part of it. Leap through that window behind which you sit and lament, my friend. It will only hurt for a bit. And Kal chicks dig scars.
As a resident of Kalgoorlie for the past 24 months, having come from Perth, I am becoming disillusioned by the current state and attitude by in the 'city of extremes'.
The majority of people here are (let's be honest) only here for the quick cash, and then bugger off somewhere else. I tend to find these types of people (usually identifiable by their apparent desire of material things like big 4x4 vehicles, several beer fridges, a 3 m wide LCD television, and basically a greedy nature without considering anyone else) they lack social skills when communicating with those of us who earn more modest incomes and live a more modest and real lifestyle.
Then on the other hand, you have people who won't lift a finger and find a job! They revel in dire conditions and choose to eat takeaway meals three times a day and wonder why they are obese!
Now before some whinge at me in defence, it is not jealousy or sour grapes, it's reality!
I mean, for a town that is probably one of the best known gold mining locations on earth, so little money is actually put back into developing a decent infrastructure for the benefit of residents! But then again the very roots of 'East Coolgardie' was greed and lust of the yellow metal. Instead we have wasted money on fleshy pursuits and crazy superficial projects that benefit only the wealthy.
What about under staffing at the local hospital, the terrible pot holes in the roads and the most embarassing thing I have ever seen for a supposedly 'rich' city, the third world-like road conditions when the heavy rains were here three weeks ago? I was driving through many a street and was absolutely shocked with the very poor drainage system. I thought I was in India, driving through the Ganges or some canal in Venice.
Sorry, but Kalgoorlie is a laughing stock when it comes to infrastructure and culture. I've lived in smaller towns that actually have a decent standard of living, where people show genuine kindness to each other, have a culture other than sex, beer and money, and where greed is not the be all and end all.
Kalgoorlie and Boulder need revolutionising. It's time many woke up and smelt the coffee! If the much expected worldwide economic crash happens, many will truly be in the poo.
P Walterman, Kalgoorlie
P Walterman, in his thesis (Letters 15th March) dividing Kalgoorlie-Boulder residents, all uncultured, into two further sub-classes – the greedy and materialistic, the fat and unemployed - begs us not to cry “jealousy or sour grapes” in response. Don’t worry friend, I won’t say either.
What I will say is that you are ignorant. What I will say is that you are hypocritical. What I will say is that you belong to that third and most unwelcome class of Kalgoorlie residents: the man who vainly elevates himself to the position of anthropologist upon his arrival in town; who forms his opinions on exteriors alone; who flaps about in the shallow fringes of the river, too weak and insecure to explore the depths.
What I’d really like to know, P Walterman, is what you look like. Honestly. What is it about your exterior image – your body shape, your clothing, your motor vehicle – that will catch my eye as I pass you in the street, and define you as a man of culture and intellect and integrity? Do you have a t-shirt that says “I’ve read Dickens”? Or perhaps it’s your “Free Tibet” bumper sticker?
You won’t know me, because I’ll be in a dirty orange shirt or a blue singlet or a pair of footy shorts or, from time to time, nothing at all. I’ll have a patchy beard. I’ll be driving a rusted out Valiant. And yeah, I’ll be eating Hungry Jacks.
You are the shallow and judgemental one. You are the one defining people by the money they have the good fortune to earn. But you are not only defining the people by their exteriors – you are doing the same for the town itself.
I urge you, P Walterman, to look for depth in Kalgoorlie-Boulder and in its people. It’s not hard. The only people I know who leave town bitter and untouched are those that refuse - they are not unable, they refuse – to look past the trucks and hookers and pubs and spoon-drains. Some are the greedy, some are the lazy, but many are the P Waltermans.
You need to stop observing town and become a part of it. Leap through that window behind which you sit and lament, my friend. It will only hurt for a bit. And Kal chicks dig scars.
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